I wonder if the Israelis murder Palestinians with a joy similar to that ascribed to the Nazis as they murdered Jews (and many, many others).  Or whether instead, when the Nazis did what they are credited with having done, they did so with remorse, considering it a necessary evil, as apparently some Israelis do today.  Just how different, really, are Benjamin Netanyahu and Adolf Hitler and Harry Truman and Winston Churchill and Joseph Biden and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, et. al.?  Interesting that they’re all political rather than military leaders.

It is horribly ironic that, as human beings, Nazis and Zionists share so many qualities and experiences, but terrible that they are not the only ones.  Terrible that their shared emotions, attitudes and actions flow throughout our history and prehistory as one group of humans finds it essential to destroy another.  As the Jews did millennia ago at Jericho and elsewhere.  As the United States did first with its indigenous population and then at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  As so many groups of humans coalesced into societies almost always seem to do. 

Obviously, despite the hypocritically noble proclamations by the victors of the second war to end all wars, like those by the noble victors of the first war to end all wars, and like those by the noble victors in so many armed conflicts before and since, the human capacity to rationalize evil has not changed at all.  It may be what defines us.  It’s who we’ve always been and seems as though it’s what we’ll always be.

We seemingly are what we are, and that has too little in it of the truly noble and perhaps none of the equitable or just.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.