Peter Rowan wrote: Violence can operate on a personal and collective level, covert as well as overt"For instance, genocide is preceded by racial stereotyping, ridicule, misrepresentation and physical segregation. Nationalist 'histories' are written to nurture an uncritical loyalty to our national or ethnic group, a scapegoating of others... for whatever misery experienced... a mythical recreation of a golden age... and a depiction of the other as either inferior human beings or not human at all... Not only does this create a climate for violence, but is an act of violence in itself - violence against children (brainwashing) and also against the other, the 'alien'."(Peskett & Ramachandra)
Comments
As I see it, one important intellectual advance made in our century is the steady decline of interest in the quarrel between Plato and Nietzsche. There is a growing willingness to neglect the question 'What is our nature?' and to substitute the question 'What can we make of ourselves?'… We are coming to think of ourselves as the flexible, protean, self-shaping animal rather than as the rational animal or the cruel animal.
One of the shapes we have recently assumed is that of a human rights culture… We should stop trying to get behind or beneath this fact, stop trying to detect and defend its so-called 'philosophical presuppositions'… Philosophers like myself… see our task as a matter of making our own culture - the human rights culture - more self-conscious and more powerful, rather than of demonstrating its superiority to other cultures by an appeal to something trans-cultural.
Richard Rorty, Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality