Re: Here is the thread about racism I promised.
I seriously doubt there's a person on the planet whose family doesn't have a little blood on their hands. We're all guilty. Guilty of surviving when somebody else didn't down through history if nothing else. Absolute pacifists have a nasty tendency of not making it in the big, wide world.
Dammit.
Once when I was in the jungles of Nigeria, I got to unwillingly witness one tribe (Ijaws) bent on the genocide of another tribe (Itsekiris). I had met and trained many of the Itsekiris on how to use the (non-military) equipment that we'd provided. It was awful on the morning that the Ijaws attacked. The reason that they did it was because there was a Nigerian government office in the neighborhood (we're talking real jungle here, complete with Malaria) that originally was on Ijaw land. The government, for whatever reason, decided to redraw the boundary so that the office was now on Itsekiri land. The Ijaws insisted that the government restore the boundary because the office represented about the only way for anyone in the area to have representation with the government. Their reasoning was that since their tribe number about 12,000,000 and the Itsekiri only had about 250,000, what little governmental representation existed oughta' go to them being the much larger tribe. From their point of view, it made a kind of sense. When the government refused to comply, their "Plan B" was simple extermination.
So many varieties of this kind of thing exist in the world that the word "racism" can almost be taken at face value: groups racing each other for survival or wealth, take your pick. When things are so stinking good that everyone can survive with relative ease, nasty attitudes go to the back burner. And when things get bad... the old "it's us against them" attitudes start spilling out again.
