Replying to LO22125 --
Ray E Harrell writes (in reply to Doc Holloway's condemnation of the idea of
Hitler as a leader):
> You know I have always admired your posts but this last one bears some
> adding to. I read this morning in the NYTimes how the Serbs had destroyed
> the bodies that they dug up in a mine and how the smell around the furnace
> and the acid vats was a pungent slightly sweet smell. The same smell that
> was noted by the ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft around the Army posts
> in the American west during the 19th century. It seems that Indian skulls
> were going for $600 (Franz Boas) per, all in the interest of science. A
> thought worthy of Mengele at the very least to we Native folks. The main
> difference was that as Goldhagen had to struggle to prove that the average
> German was culpable (because of the obvious hierarchy in the government)
> proving culpability in the murderous past in America is rather like trying
> to herd a flock of cats.
I think this is an important point to stress -- to paraphrase Pogo, "we
have met the evildoer, and he is us". A difficult, but crucial, part of
learning, is learning to accept the potential for violence and cruelty
that lives inside each of us (and in the societies, teams, organizations,
etc. that we create together). I suspect that before we, individually and
collectively, are truly able to move beyond outrages of this kind, we'll
have to acknowledge and respect "the beast within".
--Don Dwiggins "The truth will make you free, SEI Information Technology but first it will make you miserable" d.l.dwiggins@computer.org -- Tom DeMarco
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