Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikeuk
Originally Posted by The Bear
I understand the parallel you’re trying to establish, but you couldn’t be more wrong. I’ve never experienced a “Road to Damascus Conversion”, what I am I always have been as regards race and racists.
If that is the case you mast have had a pretty lonely time in the days when what is now called racism was regarded as the norm (except on the far left).
More likely you kept your mouth shut about it.
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Not at all. There were racists aplenty around but there were also people like myself who could see through the unthinking prejudice that was so often based on fear or a misplaced idea of class differences that placed foreigners as Untermenschen by the very fact that they were foreigners.
Perhaps it’s a question of upbringing. I was fortunate in mine having been within a family with parents both of whom were academics and who had a circle of friends of similar backgrounds.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikeuk
Quote by The Bear
Look, quite apart from a strange belief that there is something wonderful about an absence of melamin in a persons skin, or the form of music they enjoy, or the diet they are accustomed to, the thing that matters is not the word black, brown, yellow, African, Oriental, whatever that precedes the word man, the important word is man.
Sanctimonious eyewash. Were not Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin all men? Everything we know about evil (or whatever you want to call it) comes purely from men.
Of the men who make any impact on history a very large number are murderers and tyrants, and as for at least 95% of the humans who have ever existed, the world would be no worse off had they never existed at all.
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But what has that got to do with the colour of a mans skin or his diet or preference in music all of which YOU brought in as factors?
Remember?
You wrote
“ However as far as I'm aware none of my ancestors were in the habit of doing a turn on the bongo drums or making a curry with a flatulence coefficient of Hiroshima proportions.”
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikeuk
I don't need enlightenment about the 'Merchant of Venice'. I performed in it at school. It was highly approved by the authorities in Nazi Germany and if you think that Shakespeare is an anti-racist you have clearly never read the entire play. He's purely fleshing out the character, just as the director of a gangster movie makes his villain go dewy-eyed over puppies or toddlers.
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I made no mention of the anti-Semitism or otherwise of Shakespeare. What I DID do was use his words to illustrate clearly that what matters is not the colour of race of a man, but that he is a man.
In any case if your understanding of Shylocks speech is no more than thinking that it is fleshing out the character, just as the director of a gangster movie makes his villain go dewy-eyed over puppies or toddlers, then irrespective of having performed in a school play
you learned little from it and understood even less.