Playing with Fire

Playing with fire

It's interesting to see how humans learn from the time they are babies. We have a way of learning things that is set for us to never forget the lesson. One example is that when you are a baby you touch something hot such as fire and you get burned. The lesson we learn is that we will never try to touch something hot again. Sometimes we will have to get burned more times to learn the lesson, but in this case we had plenty of times to learn the lesson and we still don't get it.

When it comes to genocide and wars we have had since prehistory to learn but, we have done it so many times and we haven't learned from it. I think that the problem is in recognizing our mistake and thinking about how we will prevent it next time , but instead we cover it, we denied, we distort the data to convince everyone and ourselves that we haven't done anything wrong.

It doesn't matter which way you see it, we will always have the same problems through history because "Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it".

And for a long time we have become "those".

One huge example is that we have been fighting over land since prehistory.

We always had an excuse for it, it could be the resources or something else, but it doesn't matter we always create an excuse for war.

"Any excuse will serve a tyrant". By Aesop

Around 3000 BC Mesopotamia was starting to grow and rise in the power of the Sumerians. The Sumerians were constantly at war with each other and other people. Why? Because of a valuable resource called water; a lot of people died because of the war, but as a result of the war the Sumerians started to become more powerful and they extended their territory.

One observation that I have realized through the year, the base of a powerful country, city civilization is its army. If you have a good army: you conquer, everything resumes to that, the strong survive. But is that how our human nature works? Stepping over the others?

Because the Sumerians stepped over others civilizations and even stepped over each other, and eventually someone else stepped over the Sumerians , The group to do this were the Akkadians.

Fast forward in time we were still fighting over land, in 146 BC, during the last Punic war (Rome and Carthage) we developed something call genocide. At this point genocide wasn't defined yet, but a simple way of explaining genocide is: the mass killing of a group of people.

Rome destroyed Carthage and as a result Carthaginian population was reduced from 500,000 to 55,000. The remaining survivors were used by Rome as slaves and the majority of them died of starvation, But, why did all this happened? Rome was scared of losing Sicily. As usual ,we give more importance to the power than the lives of people.

Today genocide has a legal definition. Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.

After the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis, the United Nations passed the Holocaust Genocide Convention in 1948, supposedly with the intention that "never again" genocide be allowed by the nations of the world. Still after this convention genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Kurdistan, and the Sudan, have been allowed. There are a lot more examples of how this convention had broken