Slogans won’t help to solve these ills In the 30 years immediately after 1945, for those of my generation, racism and anti-Semitism were topics that were difficult to study, write or even talk about. Sharpeville and Apartheid tended to cloud one debate and the Holocaust the other.
Forty years on, not only students, but all of us, face different dilemmas.
The consequences of the failures of domestic and international politics have now come to live next door. We can see them daily in HD TV, or on our i-phone.
How do you explain the events in post colonial Africa? And the policies of the Israeli state? The civil wars which have increasingly engulfed North Africa and the Middle East have added to the difficulties of any discussions.
Any possible critique of any of these has, it seems, degenerated into ‘sloganism’.
The proliferation of accusations of: racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia etc. in these debates simply reduces what should be serious debate, requiring long term resolutions, to pub banter.
I have never seen any evidence that there is more than one race on planet Earth. To accept this might be a good start. The Nazis were not anti-Semitic, (which has no real meaning in any case) they were anti-Jewish.
Until we stop resorting to shorthand sloganism, any real debate will be impossible.
Malcolm Glover Lindsey Avenue York
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