Post by Harkovast on Jun 21, 2017 12:23:36 GMT
Nietzsche warned us that those who battle monsters, become monsters.
Smart man, that Nietzsche.
If you have seen some of the footage of black American men being killed by American police, you've no doubt felt outrage.
For me the image of a large man becoming upset, but not aggressive, with police officers and then being strangled and knelt on by officers till he died was a horrifying thing to watch. I was left thinking "holy shit, I just watched a man being murdered on youtube!"
But what is almost as horrifying, is when you hear some peoples responses to these cases.
Reactions like "well if you didn't want to get killed, you should obey the cops" or "well they were committing a crime so what did they expect?"
Last time I checked, selling loose cigarettes and traffic violations aren't capital offences!
One starts to wonder about this total lack of empathy.
How do people get there? How do you reach a point where you can see in justice and conclude it was probably for the best?
Well I've gained a new insight into how this happens.
No one sets out to be a monster. We all think are empathetic and morally decent. We would all like to believe we would call out injustice when we see it, right?
Humans are empathetic by nature, its a skill most people naturally develop, but it can also be lost.
Its not a sudden thing, you don't wake up one day and say "well fuck, I don't care about those different to myself anymore!", its a far more gradual, insidious process.
It's a way of thinking that cloaks itself in righteousness, so that the person doing it doesn't even see how twisted their thought have become. It lets the person engaging in it speak as if given a moral sermon while advocating that other humans legal rights are sometimes optional.
Presented with a clear cut situation, a simple hypothetical, almost all of us would say we would never act this way.
But we would, because we wouldn't even know we were doing it.
Progressive, left wing, socially aware types are generally the group most up in arms about this kind of violence committed by police against black people.
Now before you panic, I completely agree with them on this point! Some of the actions of American police are monstrous and its an issue that Americans should take very seriously indeed.
However, if we change up the dynamic a little bit, twisted the calculation, you will see a very different side to these same progressives.
Otto Warmbier was an American tourist who was arrested in North Korea.
The charge was for trying to steal a propaganda poster, presumably as a souvenir.
For this he was sentenced to 15 years hard labour.
Now the only confirmation we have of this crime is from the North Korean legal system, which is as corrupt and sinister as it is brutal and merciless.
But even if we take this crime at face value, it seems trivial in the extreme, a trifling matter, hardly deserving of a massive sentence under brutal North Korea hard labour conditions. I think most empathic humans would feel bad for Otto, weeping in court at being handed down this horrific punishment, and would see it as a sign of what a terrible regime North Korea exists under.
Huffington post responded with an article stating that "North Korea proves that your white male privilege is not universal."
Read it here.
In this, the author basically says Otto got what he deserved. He clearly thought his "white male privlege" would let him get away with anything, anywhere, and now he's suffered poetic justice for his arrogance.
The author even suggests that he now knows what being a black woman in America is like...which seems idiotic at best and highly offensive at worse. If anyone has any information on the forced labour camps black women are being shipping to in the US, please let me know.
But this was not an outlying opinion.
Salon posted their own article calling him "America's idiot fratboy". This article was recently taken down. I will discus why later.
The headline remains "This might be America’s biggest idiot frat boy: Meet the UVa student who thought he could pull a prank in North Korea" but the article itself is just a message stating it has been removed.
Nightly Show host Larry Wilmore, who used the show to discuss police brutality towards blacks a great deal (some would say to the detriment of the shows comedy content) responded by call Otto an ass and saying he couldn't have much sympathy for him and his "crocodile tears." He was yucking it up over footage of Otto crying in court, laughing at Otto's name.
Watch a clip here-
Other lesser outlets towed a similar line, obviously feeding off each others narrative with the smug confidence of those who are dangerously sure of their own moral superiority.
Some flat out said Otto deserved it because he was a white man, others left that more implied, just saying he was stupid to have done that and if you do the crime you have to do the time.
I've heard these arguments before.
"Why did he run from the cops? What did he expect?"
""Well if he wasn't breaking the law, he wouldn't have got killed."
"We shouldn't have sympathy for these criminals getting killed."
And there is a sinister grain of truth here. Yeah you shouldn't run from cops, and you shouldn't break the law and you shouldn't do dumb shit in North Korea...but this logic leads us to terrible conclusions, where trivial mistakes deserve life destroying punishments. There is a reason not all crimes get the same sentence! I don't want to live in a world where all infractions lead to death!
And yes, I did say death.
After 15 months in prison, Otto went into a coma and was sent back to America where he died.
A young America man was given a ridiculously harsh punishment for a trivial crime, resulting in his death.
On both sides of the isle, the level of sympathy on hearing that statement seems based on his skin colour.
Progressives, in their smug confidence, let themselves become the very things they claimed to want to fight against, just pointing their lack of empathy the other way. They weren't an opposite of their opponents any more, they were just a mirror of them.
Is it not possible to call all brutal injustice from governments evil?
Can I not be outraged that North Korea would murder a man and ALSO be outraged that another man was murdered by police on the streets of New York?
Sometimes one can get so caught up their own ideology and political affiliation that it can become all consuming and make us forget about our shared humanity and common decency towards each other.
It's so easy, so simple to slide into the type of thinking where we lose empathy for each other. It's like a soft bed we can just lay back and relax on, letting ourselves sink into it. Its comfortable, it feels good. Its a delicious poison that we all keep sipping.
I guess I want this to be an Aesop, kind of a cautionary tale.
We all think we are the good guy and would never fall into evil, but if we are not careful our best intentions can lead us to do or think terrible things.
Larry Wilmore let himself become the monster he was trying to fight.
We should all beware we don't make the same mistake.