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The drive towards genocide
Sep. 22nd, 2007 01:19 pmToday I had a conversation with my Indian coworker, who is a fundamentally good person. This is the person who said that being gay is unnatural up until the point where I told him that animals are sometimes born gay too, at which point he changed his mind. He's also not religious at all, although nominally Hindu.
The conversation started, as it sometimes does, with him asking me for confirmation on a variation of the Elders of Zion myth that a friend told him, namely that the Jews were responsible for 9/11 and that the 'proof' is that not a single Jew died in the event. After I told him that it was complete and utter crap, he compared the hate between Muslims and Jews to the hate between India and Pakistan. He then went on to talk more about the hate between India and Pakistan and what Pakistan did to deserve India's hate and how they want to destroy eachother utterly. I then posed the following question: If you had a magic button that would cause Pakistan to vanish off the Earth and all the people in it to die, would you press it? He would. I then asked him about our Pakistani coworker, who he's great friends with. At first he was like "no no not him, he's all right". But then he said "but actually, on the matter of India and Pakistan he's not all right. I would give him a choice: either he gives up being Pakistani or he dies as well." Also apparently Pakistani's aren't really people. They're a kind of fake human, so it doesn't matter if you kill them.
I spent some time trying to talk him out of it; that killing everyone isn't necessarily the best idea. He responded with the analogy of a garden that you apply insecticide to - it kills all the bugs, not just the bad ones that are eating your food, but it's necessary if you want to protect the food. There may be better ways to get rid of them but while you're thinking about it the bugs are damaging your garden and there wont be much left to protect if you're not careful.
I found the whole conversation to be deeply depressing. Maybe he's right, and you need to utterly destroy things that are a present and future threat to you. But to hear someone not so different from you talk casually about the need to wipe entire populations off the map is extremely disturbing.
The conversation started, as it sometimes does, with him asking me for confirmation on a variation of the Elders of Zion myth that a friend told him, namely that the Jews were responsible for 9/11 and that the 'proof' is that not a single Jew died in the event. After I told him that it was complete and utter crap, he compared the hate between Muslims and Jews to the hate between India and Pakistan. He then went on to talk more about the hate between India and Pakistan and what Pakistan did to deserve India's hate and how they want to destroy eachother utterly. I then posed the following question: If you had a magic button that would cause Pakistan to vanish off the Earth and all the people in it to die, would you press it? He would. I then asked him about our Pakistani coworker, who he's great friends with. At first he was like "no no not him, he's all right". But then he said "but actually, on the matter of India and Pakistan he's not all right. I would give him a choice: either he gives up being Pakistani or he dies as well." Also apparently Pakistani's aren't really people. They're a kind of fake human, so it doesn't matter if you kill them.
I spent some time trying to talk him out of it; that killing everyone isn't necessarily the best idea. He responded with the analogy of a garden that you apply insecticide to - it kills all the bugs, not just the bad ones that are eating your food, but it's necessary if you want to protect the food. There may be better ways to get rid of them but while you're thinking about it the bugs are damaging your garden and there wont be much left to protect if you're not careful.
I found the whole conversation to be deeply depressing. Maybe he's right, and you need to utterly destroy things that are a present and future threat to you. But to hear someone not so different from you talk casually about the need to wipe entire populations off the map is extremely disturbing.
