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LETTER: Racist ideas are passed on generation to generation

‘Immense mass inhumanity towards civilians in wartime gets particularly nightmarish’
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Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day, anti-semitism and racism.

Anti-semitic, racist and/or xenophobic sentiment is typically handed down generation to generation. If it’s deliberate, it amounts to a formidable form of child abuse: To rear one’s impressionably very young children in an environment of overt bigotry – especially against other ethnicities and races.

Not only does it fail to prepare children for the practical reality of an increasingly diverse and populous society and workplace, it also makes it so much less likely those children will be emotionally content or (preferably) harmonious with their multicultural and multi-ethnic/-racial surroundings.

Meanwhile, human beings can actually be consciously or subconsciously perceived and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations.

Immense mass inhumanity towards civilians in wartime gets particularly nightmarish. The most profound example I watched via historical footage is the Nazi concentration-camp bulldozer scooping/pushing naked emaciated bodies for disposal, literally treated like garbage.

Frank Sterle Jr.

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