seeds wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 12:14 amYes, I understand your use of the word frustration, for that is indeed a fitting emotion.
However, if I was standing face-to-face with that little Palestinian girl as she expressed her anguish and tears over her hopeless situation, I personally would feel shame and guilt for being a member of one of the main imperialistic societies that not only helped to put her in that situation in the first place, but also helps to ensure that she stays there by supporting her oppressor with money and weaponry.
Indeed, it's the same sort of shame and guilt I feel to this very day for what my fellow countrymen did in Vietnam...
...in the My Lai massacre, for example.
The following is a story from a site called "Reading the Pictures" as it pertains to the above image...
In light of the above story, I'm afraid that the word "frustration" doesn't quite describe what Americans "should" be feeling with regards to that sickening event (among many others) that took place back then.Reading the Pictures wrote:
The My Lai Massacre captured public awareness largely due to the 1969 public release of graphic photographs taken by Army Photographer Ronald Haeberle...
...By reading the image closely, you can see that the teenager in the right background is buttoning up her blouse. It’s a curious action. Why would she be preoccupied with a button while the other people in the photograph were terrified of being killed? Why was the button undone to begin with?
Testimony from the 1969-1979 Peers Inquiry solves the mystery of the button: the image actually captures these women and children in the moments between a sexual assault and mass murder....
...According to testimony of Jay Roberts, the Army Journalist who had accompanied Haeberle that day, the soldiers were calling the teenager “V.C. Boom Boom”—the colloquial term for a Vietcong prostitute during Vietnam. Continuing, Roberts revealed that the older woman appears so anguished because she was trying to protect the girl from being assaulted by the soldiers...
...Once the soldiers noticed the photographer and journalist, they ceased the assault. Haeberle later recalled that after walking away, “I heard an M-60 [machine gun] go off, and when we turned back around, all of [the women] and the kids with them were dead.”
And the problem is, that the same cold-hearted evilness that prompted those soldiers to do what they did in Vietnam is still present in the way America conducts itself today in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world.
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That's a good suggestion, B.Belinda wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 9:28 am This is why education should include novels, theatre, pictures, poetry, and reliably true reportage. And , of course, the ability to read, and otherwise participate in those human arts.These are vicarious means of feeling what others feel. Without empathy and sympathy we are not properly educated as civilised men.
However, unless the type of education you are describing somehow prevents young people from joining or allowing themselves to be conscripted into military service,...
...then I'm afraid that the dehumanizing brainwashing* they will be subjected to will negate whatever it is you were hoping that a rounded education might achieve.
*(A brainwashing designed to turn them into compliant little automatons that see no moral problem with murdering [or even torturing] whomever some numbskull [equally brainwashed] authority figure points his finger at.)
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