There's a famous quote, first written by George Santayana in 1905, that says: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This is often paraphrased as "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
This is exactly what's happening in western countries at this moment.
The extreme prejudice and hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany didn't happen out of the blue, organically. (There might have existed some amount of anti-semitism in the area before the Nazi regime, but it certainly was nowhere near as bad.) It was the result of a massive widespread prolonged propaganda campaign. You can still find photos of the fliers, posters and newspaper articles, and recordings of the speeches.
The message was all-too familiar: Jews control the highest position of financial power in the world. Jews are greedy and oppressive, and they take advantage of you, the common person. They exploit you, they oppress you, they take advantage of you, they extort you with their greedy capitalistic practices where they steal your hard-earned money. Jews are nothing but subhuman leeches, vermin and rats who infect society and harm you with their mere existence.
Likewise the Rwandan genocide didn't happen out of the blue. It was the result of a prolonged massive propaganda campaign by the Hutu leaders against the Tutsis. The message in this propaganda was also way too familiar: The Tutsis control too much, they are in too many positions of power, they are greedy and evil, they exploit you, they take your hard-earned money, and they are plotting to kill you. And if you try to defend them, you are one of them! (I'm not making that up. The Hutus even created their own radio station in order to broadcast anti-Tutsi propaganda: The Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines.)
Take pretty much any mass genocide in human history, and almost invariably you'll find that it was usually preceded by a massive propaganda campaign that maligned, vilified, demonized and dehumanized the soon-to-be massacred group of people.
Today, in many western countries, this exact thing is once again repeating. And we are doing absolutely nothing about it.
Once again major media outlets, especially in certain countries, are engaging in massive propaganda campaigns spreading hate against a particular demographic group: They are evil, all of them, they control all positions of power, they control all the money, they hate you, they exploit you, they take advantage of you, they oppress you, they discriminate against you, they want you dead. In fact, they are pretty much effectively a separate subhuman sub-species, which has this evil encoded in its very DNA. All of them, to the last one of them.
And if you protest, if you object and oppose this propaganda, you are one of them, you are evil! The propaganda must not be opposed, lest you be considered one of them!
And this hatred propaganda campaign is tolerated and allowed to be broadcast to millions of people. Major media networks are not shutting it down, organizations and institutions are not shutting it down, major human rights organizations are not criticizing or saying anything about it. (On the contrary, most human rights organizations are themselves engaged in the dissemination and production of this very propaganda.) It's considered acceptable, even desirable. Only a minority of people are protesting and warning against it, the majority of people just doesn't care, and sizeable chunk of the population is all for it.
There is one major difference compared to all the other past examples: I don't think that it has ever happened before that a very sizeable portion of the people who are the target of this hate propaganda actually accept and agree with the message of that propaganda. The Nazi propaganda machine didn't convince many (if any) Jews that their own people are evil and should be dealt with. The Hutu propaganda didn't convince any Tutsis to hate their own people and even themselves. Probably no propaganda campaign in the entire history of humanity has convinced the targets of that propaganda that they are evil, vile and guilty. No propaganda campaign has ever convinced a sizeable demographic group to hate themselves (in addition to making people not of that group to hate them as well). At least not in these numbers and proportions. This might be the first time in human history.
This is not going to end well. The west is forgetting its own past, and thus not learning from it, and thus doomed to repeat it.
My only hope is that the number of victims will not be counted in the millions.
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