I continue to think about the XXX. A doomed people. Defenseless, without any modern organizational experience and confronting an ideological enemy who treats them as sub-human.
Who are the XXX? It could be the Rom people (Gypsies to the unPC), it could be the European Jews, the Tibetans or even some of the native American tribes in the 19th Century. The XXX I’m thinking about are the modern day Balinese. Their enemies are the Indonesian Islamic Wahabis. The Balinese have nowhere to go and probably won’t survive.
When I think like this I am forced to consider the one group of people who ended their role as defenseless victims. It happened in my lifetime, I watched it, I experienced it.
I went from living with anti-Semitism as I grew up to living without it when I reached my early twenties was accepted as a banker and went on to become the youngest and the first Jew to become the Vice President of a major American bank. Then I returned to living with anti-Semitism again in 2000. Since 2000 I haven’t tolerate it.
What created the changes in my life? The creation of Israel was the change. Jews in Israel were forced to create a modern society starting in 1947 as the surrounding Arab enemies proceeded to murder them. By 1957 the Jews had become Israelis and the Israelis were strong enough to defeat the much larger better equipped Egyptian military in the Sinai. The role of Jews as military heroes (they were really Israelis) is what changed anti-Semitism for me in America. Jews were no longer greedy, sniveling weaklings … by the 1960s they had become brave military victors. Over the next fifteen years, and two wars, the David beating Goliath reputation was more enhanced. Anti-Semitism in American virtually disappeared.
Then came the slaughter of hundreds of Israeli citizens on buses and in cafes by Palestinians and Jews again faced anti-Semitism. I found anti-Semitism nearly everywhere I turned in San Francisco and I still do. Israel is now treated as the brutal tyrant, the Palestinians are the innocent victims. The same anti-Semitism, reborn, is rampant in Europe, worst in England and France.
So you can’t win. A defenseless people will be killed and subjugated. When they are strong enough to protect themselves they will be hated and their enemies will get boundless international support.
The Balinese will probably die and the survivors will be assimilated in their native land as most native American tribes were. The Rom people will continue to suffer scattered in their Diaspora and the Tibetans will probably be assimilated.