Racism, ethnicism, and nationalism have caused suffering on a massive scale, affecting hundreds of millions, and have led to extreme cruelty, including torture and other atrocities. They are forms of intense group loyalty based on race, ethnicity, or nationality that result in the oppression of those with different identities.
Some examples of atrocities caused by this kind of exacerbated sense of belonging to a collective are the following:
These atrocities continue today, as is happening against various ethnic groups in Darfur (up to 500,000), against the Acholi in Uganda (hundreds of thousands), or the Rohingya in Myanmar. However, the death toll is only the tip of the iceberg of the suffering caused, since one must add the much larger numbers of people tortured, raped, traumatized, orphaned, parents who have lost their children and other types of victims. In other words, toxic gregariousness has shown time and again to be almost as lethal to humans as insecticide is to flies.
2. ETHNIC CLEANSING that causes, in addition to massacres, mass displacement such as that of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II (more than 14 million), Indians and Pakistanis after the partition of India (14 million), Serbs, Kosovars and other ethnic groups from the former Yugoslavia in the wars of the 1990s (about 4 million), Palestinians and Jews, ethnic groups in South Sudan, etc. This means losing practically everything and having to start life from scratch.
3. WARS of nationalist origin, such as World War I (20 million dead), World War II (75–80 million dead), the Japanese invasions of the 1930s, etc. To these figures one must add many millions more victims of amputations, wounds, rape, grief over the death of loved ones, loss of homes and property, painful psychological after-effects, hunger, etc. In other words, ultranationalism is a true weapon of mass destruction whose button we press from time to time.
4. SLAVERY. Read more…
5. APARTHEID, segregation, and subjugation systems such as those in South Africa, Rhodesia and elsewhere. It also includes internment in concentration camps, as is happening in China with almost 2 million Uyghurs and Kazakhs, who are tortured, exploited and otherwise abused there.
6. LAND GRABS between ethnic groups.
7. DISCRIMINATORY LAWS against certain races (as in both North and South America against black, Indigenous, mixed-race people, etc.) or ethnic groups (such as against Jews in many European and Muslim countries).
LET’S LIVE WITHOUT HARM! Let’s be equal in rights and treatment
8. EXPLOITATION, PRIVILEGES and patronage systems, as occurs in some African countries, where dominant ethnic groups monopolize resources and positions in public administration, excluding other ethnic groups. Read more…
9. THEFT AND DISHONESTY toward other groups, a practice especially common in the Neolithic between neighboring villages and tribes and that today quite a few Romani carry out against non-Romani.
10. CONFLICTS and tensions of different intensities.
Abuse between races, ethnic groups, and nations has been very common since the Neolithic on different continents, such as the Spartans with the Perioeci or the Romans with the “barbarians” (everyone except the Greeks). Also the Vikings with Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Celts, the Franks with Saxons, and the descendants of the latter were very racist toward other peoples from other continents.
Likewise, in general, Christian Europeans behaved this way toward pagan Slavs, Jews, Moors, and later toward all non-white people. On other continents, the Aztecs did it to other Mesoamerican ethnic groups, Muslim northern Sudanese to the Christian and animist peoples of the south, and so on throughout history. Probably no people are spared from this congenital disease.
All of them share this type of thinking as a common denominator: I abuse you because it benefits me and you belong to a group different from mine. They take chalk to draw several subsets on a blackboard full of individuals, label each one, and mark those who can be exploited and mistreated.
HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT HARMING? Let’s avoid labels that are carte blanche to cause harm
The ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and their materialization in the French Revolution and other liberal revolutions of the 19th century represented an important brake on that harmful tribalism, such as the abolition of Black slavery, the fight against the transatlantic trade in Africans, or the granting of equal rights to Jews in Europe.
However, that same century saw the emergence of another phenomenon that would end up being a major step backward: nationalism, linked to Romanticism, which would ultimately give rise in the following century to the horrors of World Wars I and II, Nazism, fascism, the devastating Japanese imperialism, etc.
Let’s be aware of this and of the fact that it can happen again if we do not go to the root of the problem and avoid ultra-gregariousness.
FOR A WORLD WITHOUT HARM: Let’s avoid harmful herd mentality
THE ART OF LIVING WITHOUT HARM: Let’s be open
What can we do to prevent so much harm?
1. Share so that others also become aware.
2. Sign here.
3. Avoid nationalist indoctrination; educate in benign values… read more therapies to avoid this evil!…
Thank you for doing something about it,
Xavier Paya
Live Without Harming initiative
LET’S NOT HARM ANYONE, except in legitimate self-defense against an aggressor.
With the Live Without Harming initiative, we strive to prevent any kind of suffering or harm from being caused to you, your loved ones, and others.
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