Online reflection 3
I read a book (Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning) which my teacher in Leadership recommended when we were discussing group pressure . I think it’s a book that is of highly importance today. It’s about World War II and shows how ordinary men became murderers because of the simple fact that they wanted to belong to a group and needed a purpose in their lives. Only that the purpose were horrific. This group of men killed many thousands of Jews without hesitation or remorse. Perhaps we all need to read it to see how mankind so easily looses the ability to separate right from wrong.
Could this happen today? Have we learned from the past? I would say no to the second question and that it has happened again and again since the World War II. Today it is ISIS and before that it has been the Yugoslav War in the 90s and the Rwanda genocide and lots of other riots around the world.
How come that humans can be friends one day and the next day they hate each other fiercely? I guess the fear of loosing your place in the group you belong to makes you do all sorts of things, things you never thought you would be able to do. But do you really begin to hate your neighbour just like that? And what part do Religions play? Isn’t Good supposed to be kind and loving? And yet people kill in the name of Good.
How are we going to stop the young people of today joining groups like ISIS? And how to stop humans from denying all the gruesome things the Nazi’s did? It’s so hard to try to understand the horrors of war when we have peace here in Sweden, and even if people tell their stories I can't imagine the fear of missiles and worrying about family and if there will be enough food for the day. But how can I help? I can’t even, sometimes, grasp what they are fighting for.
They say love and hate are not far from each other and perhaps that is true. But how can people hate so much? I understand if some people have mental illness and do grisly things because of that, but otherwise? Videos that show how they, ISIS, line up men and shoot them and some men are even buried alive. When I see such things I can’t get it into my head, it is like I’m watching a movie made in a Hollywood studio. Only that it isn’t, it is real. I just wish that we all could live in peace and be happy. No wars, no starvation, no environmental disasters. One united mankind in a unified world with no ordinary men becoming murderers.
