In a conversation about Native Americans, my friend Ibu Minda made the following statement, which I just couldn’t help arguing with:
I did and do learn a lot, Jonthon. Come on. No worry about the history Jonthon. LAst week I went to Holocaust Museum, it even worse than that. Hwvr, like what I always emphasize in literature classes, bad guys will always be punished at the end. That’s what we learn from religion too, be kind now and you’llbe happy the days after.
With all due respect, Minda, I simply must argue with your statement that the holocaust was worse than the extermination of the Native Americans. I also reject your statement that “bad guys will always be punished in the end.”
First, it would be impossible to compare the holocaust and the extermination of Native American Indians because there are just so many metrics. If we were to talk about the numbers killed as a percentage of population, certainly many more Native Americans were killed. Observing the relative positions of these two groups in the world also proves telling: Jewish culture has survived, and this is a testament to the intelligence and savvy of its people. They have taken up positions of prominence in American and other societies, most notably in the banking and legal sectors. American Indians have, at least stereotypically, been relegated to running casinos. While Native Americans have much to be proud of, the level of misunderstanding about their cultural plight is by and large still omitted from history books; most Americans still adhere to dreamy notions of pilgrims and Indians working, eating and living together, as opposed to the reality of frontiersman killing buffalo to starve them out, giving them blankets infected with smallpox, and using bogus legal maneuvers to usurp their land. (I could write another whole paragraph about land, but feel it unnecessary.) Compare this to a pretty well-understood and commonly-held spite for the Nazis and their ways, and your suggestion that the holocaust was worse becomes very difficult to defend.
The idea that evil always losing is the theme of fairy tales, but not the reality we live in. Let’s analyze this statement just in the context of the two horrible wrongs mentioned before: Did the bad guy immigrants that came to America and stole land and cultural treasures meet with a terrible fate? No – their children would proceed to populate the vast expanses of America. Righting this wrong would now mean ceding control of the land and moving away, and that’s just not even a possibility. In the context of the holocaust, the Nazi party did indeed fall, but corporations like BMW that pushed it forward exist and are incredible profitable to this day. In fact, the activities of corporations in our globalized society are one of the most sterling examples of the fallacy of the premise. Multinational corporations, being attendant to profit alone, now trump nations and, being unable to monetize human rights, just trample them whenever and wherever profits are to be made doing so. Are they punished? No. In fact, our entire world economic system is set up specifically to enable this; organizations like the IMF and World Bank frequently fund projects that lead to the displacement of peoples and destruction of culture in the name of “development,” where development means the creation of business opportunities that benefit MNCs and a select few foreign nationals that currently serve as heads of state. Suharto’s dealings with these organizations serve as sterling examples of my point; I would also reference the work of PT Freeport and the Canadian mining group’s human rights abuses in Papua, recently documented and reported by reputable journalistic institutions like Amnesty International. Far from being punished, instead Indonesia’s police forces have allied with them to displace more people and simply block journalistic access to the area. If these bad guys are ever going to “lose,” it will only be because Papua runs out of mine-able ores. The concept that bad guys pay in the end is well-established in religious texts, but then, a lot of the people that are involved in these actions are quite religious and give money readily to religious organizations. The Vatican faces huge fissures in Catholicism around the world due to this; Islamic organizations often split on issues of homosexuality, the use of facebook, and the availability of controlled substances where “bad guy-ism” is contestable and evil is difficult to assign.
In closing, I think most literature has a happy ending because people like happy endings – not because it is an accurate representation of what transpires outside dogeared pages of classics. I would note that books like 1984 and The Fugitive (~Pramoedya Ananta Toer) have managed to gather much critical acclaim without bowing down to the feel-good, instant-gratification culture that presides in much of the world today.
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