Real people?

When I was a little boy my father and some uncles regaled me with tales of how they fought the “Huns” during the first World War. It was pretty much how the Huns did this, and the Huns did that, and what things were like in the trenches, and one of my uncles was a victim of poison gas and never fully recovered, along with the usual war stories men sometimes tell children. I was also made aware there were “savages,” and “uncivilized” creatures in remote parts of the world. Somewhere, too, I remember the “Reds had been said to have been fighting the “Whites.” In this context, I did not even find concepts like “the boogeyman” necessarily far-fetched. My enculturation provided me with a rather strange idea of the world and what kinds of creatures might be populating it.

Later, when I was a near teenager, we started fighting the Huns again, except now they were called “Krauts,” “Nazis,” and occasionally “Jerries.” They were also collectively known as “Fritz.” At the same time we were fighting elsewhere against “Japs,” “Nips,” and “Slant Eyes.” Some of the Slant Eyes were “Chinks.” They were on our side, at least for a while. Allies of the Krauts were the “Guineas,” or “Wops,” and “Dagos.” For a time “Ivan” was on our side, but later Ivan turned into “Russkies,” “Commies,” “Pinkos,” and “Fellow Travelers.” During this same time our allies were known as “Limeys,” or “Tommies,” along with “Frogs,” and “Diggers.”

Still later we fought “Gooks,” “Slant Eyes,” “Viet Congs,” and the “Yellow Peril.” Actually, we fought Gooks again later, along with Chinks.

Now we are fighting “Ragheads,” otherwise called “Towelheads,” as well as “Hajis.” Some may still be referred to as Gooks but I’m not sure about this latter. Krauts and Japs are now our allies against the Hajis (sort of), as are “Brits,” and even Frogs and Dagos. Most of our enemies are simply referred to as “Terrorists.” Things change.

As I recall, it took me a while to understand that Huns and Krauts were actually Germans, that is, real people. But I had less trouble later with Gooks, Wops, Commies, Frogs, and such, although it took me a while to realize that Gooks, Frogs, Towelheads, and Hajis were actually real people too, living breathing individuals just like me, with mothers, fathers, brother, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts, and such. I guess the closest anyone came to actually suggesting these were real people was in the cases of Ivan and Fritz, but even there these were generic terms, not individual specific ones. It was like an epiphany, suddenly realizing there were real people out there in the world, not just different groups of mysterious, perhaps not fully human creatures that I could not very well imagine. Of course, unlike the earliest explorers, I did not really think these strange creatures, Huns and Wops and Hajis and such, would have only one eye in the middle of the foreheads, or would have horns and tails or feet on backward, I confess I didn’t think much about their possible human attributes at all. They were merely “enemies” who needed to be destroyed (for reasons that were not always clear to me). Now that I am older and more experienced in the ways of men and women, I understand that to fight wars it is necessary to dehumanize your enemies as much as possible. However, now that I know the truth about such matters, that is no longer possible for me.

Having lived for various periods of time in several different parts of the world, including with so-called “savages,” as well as the highly “civilized,” I do not believe any people are intrinsically evil (although there certainly are some “bad apples” out there). But some are somewhat stupid, many more are just ignorant (which is not at all the same as stupid), and most are ethnocentric, somewhat greedy, short-sighted, and selfish (people without these characteristics exist but are in my experience, rare). If people were capable of overcoming their greed, short-sightedness, selfishness and ethnocentrism, perhaps there would be some hope for humankind, but don’t count on it.

LKBIQ:
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
John Kenneth Galbraith