Tuesday 9 April 2002

Pic of the day: Differences between peoples need not last forever. (Screenshot from The Sims.)

Forgetting past evils

I admit, I did not take much time to listen to radio or read the papers today. Pretty hectic at work, and then I came home and you know this is where all the fun stuff happens. Still, I notice that I heard no mention of April 9, 1940. When I was a kid, the semi-official German bashing day was very much alive. People would go to the monuments and remember the evil German invasion of our peaceful little country. Back then we still had comic books about World War II. And this was in the 1960es, and perhaps a bit longer.

April 9 was our September 11. It was a national rape complex which did not die before the men who had been there, and had been old enough to defend their country. Or rather, to fail to defend their country. Our nation was taken asleep, unprepared.

Ours was not really a macho culture, even back then. But still, it must have rankled to see foreign soldiers just march in. There were some episodes of resistance, but not much. It was all a total surprise. The resistance became better organized later, and the "boys in the woods" were glorified to superhero status for quite a while afterwards. But due to the circumstances, there was actually not a whole lot they coUld do. It was probably a good thing they blew up the heavy water production, or the Germans might have accidentally continued their nuclear program. But notes indicate that German theorists did not really believe it possible to make a nuclear bomb.

This was not due to any Norwegian resistance, though, but the stupidity of killing or scaring away their best scientists, who were often Jews. And even those who were not, tended to dislike mad dictators. Most of them.

***

Envy is heavier than sand and stone, says a proverb. Perhaps we will never know why so many Jews were among the leading scientists and thinkers of recent history. But it was probably this, along with the many Jewish capitalists, that fuelled the wild unreasoning hate against them. In retrospect, it seems insane when nazists claimed that the Jews were "Untermenschen", less than human. For any casual observer, it would seem the other way around.

For some reason, this lead seems to have narrowed during my lifetime. Perhaps the rest of us are catching up, starting to use our potential. If so, this is both an encouraging sign and a discouraging one. Encouraging, because it means that the ethnic groups that are lagging intellectually today may not do so tomorrow. But discouraging, because it means we may be reaching a plateau where it is no longer easy to raise intelligence by 10 points per generation. I would not mind if we could continue to do so for a long long time, because there is certainly enough stupidity left in the world.

On a related note, the radio news just told me that the street to Israel's embassy in Norway was closed off by the police. Whatever you may think about the current conflict in that country, it is sad that such measures should be called for.

On the other and much brighter side, the cordial relations now enjoyed between Norway and Germany bodes well for the possiblity that sometime in the future, even the current conflicts will be forgotten by most except historians.

(Now if something could be done about the Germans' disgusting lack of humor ... some interbreeding with the Dutch would do them good.)