Christof22 Jul 2003

I have some sympathy with Horus's point. It seems that the struggle in the Middle East at the moment is the result of the Jewish people having single-mindedly failed to learn from their own history of the last 50-60 years. Yes the Holocaust was an absolutely foul, vile, depraved event in history - and let's not imagine that the Germans were alone in their views, there were plenty of proto-Nazis in Britain, France, Italy, Spain (and the US - the KKK) who also had blood on their hands. However, I think the point of history is not to labour one event, one people's history, for the purpose of eliciting merely pity or horror (or, for that matter, Academy Awards). The point is to learn from it, to move on, to try to make the world progress in some way. Both Horus and Mr Pig have talked with some pride of their backgrounds, have distinguished different strains of identity, different ethnic groups. Everybody needs to know where they come from, but an obsessive attention to ethnic detail, to the rights and wrongs of past members of particular groups generations ago, is where all the trouble starts. What does it matter if your great-great-grandfather was a black Scotsman from Wales? It matters because it affects how you live now, how you understand the world; it should not be used as some kind of badge of honour. I think a person deserves special treatment not because of who their parents were, but because of what they do with their lives. Racial division is the biggest problem the human race faces, because it threatens to destroy us.

A small historical fact to add to the German/Jew argument - a lot of right-wing aggression towards the Jews was centred around a book called 'The Protocols of the Zionist Elders', which purported to have been produced by rabbis and leading Jews and which spoke of a conspiracy to take over the world. It was a forgery produced by European anti-Semites in the late 19th century. I don't think Hitler's rise to power is quite so easily explicable by the ambitions of the Jews. Anti-Semitism has a far longer and ignobler history than that, and you have to remember that Germany had been shafted in the Treay of Versailles by the very unJewish (and also fairly anti-Semitic in places) British, US and French governments.