RE: Merc Guild - Not Really

John Atkinson wrote:

>Let's just say that no matter how "secular" the Turks
>get, they will still wage genocidal campaigns of
>extermination against non-Turks whenever they can get
>away with it.	Just ask the Kurds.

Relations between the Turks and the Kurds have actually improved
recently.  
Turkey, like most modern states, does have skeletons in it's closet. 
But it 
can be hoped that thingsa are changing.

(Or Hungarians, or
>Bulgarians, or Serbs, or Croats, or Montenegrins, or
>Greeks, or . . . )  If people are massacred in the
>name of secular Turkish nationalism, it doesn't make
>it an better than if they are massacred in the name of
>religious Islamic intolerance.

Again, true, but the same could be said of any other time in history
when 
one group encounters another, and one of the two suffers.  But how
ardently 
do we cling to judgement based on the past, and how much credit do we
give 
for improvements made in the present/future?  If we judge everyone on
the 
past, we can justify punishing any group that has in thew past been the 
oppressor, and we become just as oppressive ourselves.

Brian B2

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