Subverting the Majority

Often I can't help thinking that to be a member of a minority, especially an ethnic one, carries moral advantages that are not easily available to members of the majority. The reason is simple arithmetic. The human species is constructed in such a way that the majority within a nation must necessarily contain a certain percentage of people, a minority of the majority, whose members can only be distinguished from the others by their bad ideas, and if that baleful segment gets active enough, it can unduly influence those others in the majority who would otherwise confine themselves to more charitable and less harmful ideas and principles. That larger part of the majority can then fail to notice the wrong direction that it has been induced to take, out of its desire to humor those with the evil notions because of feelings of kinship, however distant. Meanwhile that minority of the majority with the evil notions, like any other stupid people, don't realize that they're stupid and that they're acting stupidly, and instead they think they're behaving "as God intended," and with that group being heard and heeded, matters consequently go to pot quite quickly.

That can be seen happening today in the attempts of conservatives to use mob behavior to prevent all reasonable discussion of the features of various plans to reform the U.S. health care system, which that heartless minority of the majority does not so much out of disdain for those reforms, however much they might claim that to be so, and instead their extreme rage arises mainly out of their complete inability to accept the pigmentation of the current U.S. President.

This dragging down of a majority into disaster by its dark side has happened many times. As with so much else, the clearest example was the regime that is so often mentioned during these health care disruptions, and that is the Germany of the 1930's.

But suppose that, rather than the main body of Germans as propelled by its jack-booted segment, it had instead been the Jews, or the Gypsies, or the Jehovah's Witnesses, or the intellectuals and artists, or any other of the minorities, ethnic or otherwise, that the SS consigned to labor and death camps or otherwise shot to death with such joyful abandon, and suppose also that, rather than the general run of Japanese, it had been the Ainu and the Okinawans and the captive Koreans and other minorities who lived in Japan who instead had been the ones to get their ideas of things into the prevailing ideology, in place of the majority's acceptance of notions of their superiority to all others ? This would've meant that there wouldn't have been all that wholesale destruction in Europe, Asia, and other places, and tens of millions of people would have been allowed to go on living while contributing to civilization or at least leaving things in place for more localized and not those general, wide-ranging outrages that in their aftermaths still threaten the well-being of much of the planet.