ISSUES
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Revise and Hush. See no evil, hear no evil. E.g. when they came for the neighbor on my left, I did nothing. When they came for the neighbor on my right, I did nothing. When they came for me no one was left to help me. Recent news has seemed to really spotlight the danger of censoring the truly evil things that are being done or have been done throughout the world. To truly have any conviction about the evil we are fighting, we need to know what that kind of evil is all about. This is where the danger of both revisionist history and whitewashing of current events come in. We saw it (or rather didn’t see it) in Fallujah with the four American contractors burned and dragged through the streets and whose pieces were then hung from a bridge as the perpetrators celebrated in the morbid style of their cousins the so-called Palestinians.
According to a report by Fox News' Anita Vogel, Google was recently fingered for not removing an anti-Semitic link that wound up at the top of a list of search results for the word “Jew”. Google tried to explain it all with this:
"Google said it found "Jew Watch" offensive, but had no plans to remove it. Company executives said their search-result ranking system is based on complex mathematical formulas, and that results are never manipulated by Google."
Sounds like USAA, my auto insurance company (at least for now).
So we know that is a lot of manure that Google is feeding us on that point. Instead, they should have pointed out that this should be noted by all as a symptom of a troubling trend in our world today and that we had better wake up to it. Anti-Semitism is on the rise and we need to know it is or folks will wind up like they did the last time it was fashionable to put our heads in the sand.
Of course Google can't be blamed for their spinelessness; it is the mode du jour, after all. And then you have Microsoft at the other extreme which suddenly had an attack of sensitivity after all this time, wanting to remove a few fonts from our computers because it was found to contain offensive symbols and they wished to remove them in what really has become the first real instance of the PC police literally reaching into personal computers and altering files deemed by them too offensive for the average person to even have or look at (and as usual, they go after the symbolic). Forget the occasional content on their own MSN site which might offend large groups of people...or those people who used to work for all those small companies who had their intellectual property basically stolen by Microsoft as it gobbled them up like hapless worms. So Microsoft decided to get rid of the swastikas in one of their fonts residing on millions of their customers' computers. And for good measure (I suppose to not offend the Islamo-fascists) removed the Stars of David from that font as well. I must say I oppose actions such as the removal of those font-embedded characters (and any other symbols). For the same reason I would oppose any similarly symbolic (pardon the pun) deeds. Despite the beneficial side affect that it shows Microsoft and other PC-Tree hugging companies and individuals for the dolts they are, with regard to the NAZI symbols, the down side of removing every vestage of the evil we conqured throughout history is that these Swastikas are a part of that history we must not forget. Ever. What is it that the human race said after the horrors of NAZI Germany were exposed to the world? We all said, "Never again". Never forget the very face of evil, the feeling of that era, that time. If we forget, we will not see the warning signs next time, and we will become too proud to think it could ever happen again. For history to benefit anyone it must include both the heroes and the villains, otherwise why even discuss the heroes when the heroes look as if they were merely beating the air? It makes such a conflict when viewed though those goggles (or Google, if you wish)both senseless and stupid. When your child asks, "what is evil?" are you going to say, “it’s just bad, trust me” or are you going to point to them an example so it sinks in deep and they too come to the realization for another generation that evil is not a good thing to tolerate, ever.
I was recently at a famous Civil War museum in the South in which they obviously had spent quite a large bit of money with gorgeous murals, souvenirs and literature. There was only one problem. Nowhere in the literature (and scarcely found anywhere else) was there any indication that the battle to save the Union ever had an opponent. There was scarce representation of the word "Confederacy" or images of Confederate flags or even Confederate soldiers. Now, the North won the war and slaves were freed, which is a good thing. But tell me how it is good? If I am a 12 year old in this museum, I want you to show me. Or else I'm thinking it was some strange affair about soldiers in blue fighting other soldiers in blue with the exact same flag, leaving me at best confused- and since I feel like I can't find out what this is all about in a museum dedicated to the subject matter, forget about it, I didn't want to know in the first place. So any lesson to be learned about human value is out the window. I can hear the kid saying now, “So am I supposed to take your word for it? Why are you afraid to show me then?”
When we practice revisionist history to eliminate our foes retroactively, we deprive ourselves of what we learned from that chapter in our history. Because of this, much like the fool who burns his hands on hot coals and chooses to forget about the experience and then burns himself again, we are doomed ourselves to repeat the chapter. Those who believe we can hide from our history are the same who believe that history just happens and is not brought about and thus, they are a danger to us all.
While it goes without saying the "Jew Watch" links in Google are to a terrible and evil site, let us always count the blessing of being reminded in sufficient time just what it was we put down in World War II. Stories of NAZI Germany’s evils weren't just a bunch of unsupported propaganda assertions for our side about the character of the NAZI. We really had a reason to fight. The NAZIs were the personification of Evil, as the Anti-Semitic link reminds us. I do support having the link to the site blocked from younger eyes though, which can be actualized when you use Google's family-friendly "SafeSearch" search filter with the option set for “strict filtering”, because not all ages are ready to be exposed to this depth of depravity. When set, this setting does prevent the “Jew Watch” site from being listed. But otherwise I say let the link remain. It tells us there is yet work to be done and we’d better wake up to it.
-Blogbat
ISSUES
- Blogbat
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