Updated: 9/27/02; 1:22:07 AM.
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Thursday, June 13, 2002

I asked Phil, the sous chef, what his last name was. He said, "Henderson, an Aryan name." I asked him if his family was from Northern India. He said that I must have missed geography if I thought that. I wished I'd said some erudite, like "Who's geography, Himmler's? Or the non-Nazi version of world history?" But I didn't. I just went and got lemons out of the walk in cooler.

I can't help wondering these past few days if the power of the Web would have helped or hindered the rise of fascism and revisionist history. I don't know that people who have access to the Internet are any less susceptible to the power of lies and rumor. They may be more so, given the number of times the big lie can be told.

If Heinrich Himmler could build an entire body of reputed "scholarship" to support an off chance remark made by the fuhrer, comparing the blitzkreig to the Mongol hordes, an, up to that point, inferior race, in the days before television and radio, imagine what he could do today. The Nazis proved, and white supremecist "scholars" still contend that Chinese and Indian civilization was promulgated by white Europeans from central Russia or an area near Salsburg. That the Mongols were in fact from that lineage. That's just one of the many threads and lineages of the story itself.

What strikes me about Phil's comment, and the views of racial supremecists of any ilk, is the deep personal wounding and insecurity that breeds prejudice. Supremecists buy into the notion that somehow we have been wronged and maligned greatly, and taken that to a personal level, believing in a philosophy that makes them feel whole at the expense of others. But that wounding comes from somewhere. The irony, of course, being that the same anomie that sprouts poverty and oppression, physical, spiritual, intellectual among all of us in our dehumanizing world divides us rather than unites us.

I look at religion the same way. The values that bring people together into compassionate community create communities excluding, if not openly hostile to, outsiders. And those religions are based on unverifiable memes, similar to the seeds of fascism or any other ideology.

As an experiment, someone should start a religion using the communicative power of the Internet. As a parallel experiment, build in controls and tests by building an entire concurrent anti-thetical, or heretical, depending on how you view it, religion - adhering to the same core values as the first religion, but with absurd doctrinal differences. Build a rational campaign at the same time challenging and debunking both the original and the competing religion, but holding the core values true and valid - a secular humanist approach. See which movement comes to the fore.

 


12:36:27 AM    comment []


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