User:Sherurcij/rant

A while ago I was in a discussion with one of "those" people who rants about the United States being some fascist Nazi power...when I asked, he was unable to define what Fascism even meant...and with my curiosity piqued, I was left to wonder how many Nazis he could've been able to name if I'd asked.

I made a point of asking several people who I considered a little more intelligent how many Nazis they could name, given that it was the most notorious group of people in the past hundred years. They all got Hitler, a couple got Himmler or Goebbels, and a single person got Hess - nobody got more than four.

When asked to name some of the 9/11 hijackers, a few people were able to name Mohamed Atta...but nobody could name a single other one.

This is a serious problem in the world, society and the media throw us a handful of information and say "Hate these people!" or "Atrocity!" and we never bother to actually investigate who these people were. How can some angst-ridden citizen claim that George W. Bush is a Nazi, when they have no idea who the Nazis actually were? How can we be informed about the world when we know so little of our (recent and past) history? Less than a year before I wrote this rant, the world was traumatized by the unfolding tragedy at Beslan - today I ask people if they know what the words Beslan, Ossetia, Shamil Basayev or Ingushetia mean to them and get blank stares...a year ago we could have spoken with minimal authority on each of them, today we are overwriting that information with the media hype about Karla Homolka or the The withdrawal from Gaza. A year from now, few will remember details about either, nor have a firm grasp of why they were noteworthy at the time.

Shortly afterwards, I pledged to go write Wikipedia articles on people that will otherwise be nameless persons - reduced to "That guy who hijacked a plane in the 70s" (Patrick Arguello) or "One of those monks who lit themselves on fire or something" (Thich Quang Duc) or "Some Nazi guy" (Georg Konrad Morgen) or "Weren't there some guys who stopped the My Lai massacre?" (Glenn Andreotta, Lawrence Colburn and Hugh Thompson, Jr.) There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest. If they just went straight they might go far; They are strong and brave and true; But they're always tired of the things that are, And they want the strange and new.
 * Robert Service