I... accidentally... read the comments section of a Yahoo! article on Iran. I know: silly me. I realise that I should not be surprised that an overwhelming majority of their comments are illegible, illogical trash, but I am still surprised that people, post-Iraq still don't get it. How short are our memories that we have forgotten what happened a mere decade ago? Do we so easily ignore the terror wrought by Joseph McCarthy half a century ago for its convenience, or do we truly not know?
I wonder if people were always this unabashedly blood-thirsty and (ostensibly) stupid, and we simply never had the telescope of the internet to show us just how prevalent this problem is and was, or this is a product of the internet. More and more, for all the havok coming out of this browser, I believe the internet is nothing more than a tool to show us our true selves, no more a corrupting influence than the printing press, and no less than the technology that will inevitably supersede it.
My favourite bit from the comments section: a reader said that Muslims and Jews were once cousins and needed to find peace again, and was roundly excoriated by his peers.
Dan Carlin is fond of quoting Mark Twain, who (allegedly) said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
As the U.S. exits one Middle Eastern country whose name starts with an "I" and prepares for the next one, we will do well to remember those words, lest the coming propaganda fail to remind us that we've been here before.
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