I suppose one could draw various moral lessons from reading children's fiction, or from watching idealized absolute good vs. absolute evil movies.
Harry Potter never appealed to me though, and I refuse to support the filth coming out of Hollywood.
There might be more realistic and objective approaches to weighing actions and consequences, and looking for the terminus/endpoints of any given course of action.
Here
Are
A
Few
Examples
Of
Real
World
Consequences.
The world is nasty and cruel beyond all reason. That merely is what it is; it is not "evil", it is just cold, hard, relentless nature. Nature does not care one whit for the individual, for "rights", for abstract concepts.
Children's books do not reflect this in a meaningful and realistic manner.
The "bad guys" win. A lot. Then...they become the "good guys", as it turns out, as they write history, the bad guys didn't win, after all...
Completely pure, absolute good vs. absolute evil struggles do not exist in this world.
They just don't.
The next time you're tempted to consider a fictional movie or a fictional tale as a moral compass, stop.
Instead, consider the lessons that can be learned from the ignoble and horrifying deaths of solitary soldiers, buried alive in the mud, blown to pieces at random, or suffocated by poison gas in a war that was completely avoidable and utterly inevitable.
Consider the lessons to be learned by the deaths of thousands, if not millions, of families whose worst crime happened to be being peasants in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Consider the lessons to be gleaned from people going about their work in colonial America, who were tarred and feathered by their neighbors and townspeople for attempting to collect taxes for their duly established government.
Consider the lessons to be learned from slaveholding, black marketeering, smuggling, insurrectionist racists who established a new government by force of arms and bloodshed, and banned non-european immigration after they violently rebelled against their government.
There are a lot of real-life moral lessons out there for the learning. None of them are easy or pretty.
Most of the worthwhile ones were written in innocent blood. Most of the worthwhile ones involve normal, "good" people who lived their lives well up until the point where they were killed for no good reason other than because of where they lived or where they happened to be at a given time.
I'm not blasting fiction here; it serves a purpose to be sure. I'm just saying that Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings hold little sway over me as opposed to Verdun, the lives of Beria and Kolchak, and the Holodomor, among other things.
Your children would enjoy the Henty series which we use as part of our homeschool.
ReplyDeleteRobinson Curriculum & G.A. Henty Collection
Adventure, Character, History, and Vocabulary In Books that Children Love to Read
http://www.henty.com/
Hard Bound, Soft Bound, and CD-ROM editions. All 99 of G. A. Henty's books are now available in print and digital formats. The CDs also includes 53 short stories by Henty and 216 short stories by his contemporaries. Written during the latter part of the 19th Century, G. A. Henty's books were very popular and widely used in the schools of Britain and the United States during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
While many children's adventure books that emphasize the traits of courage, high moral character, diligence, perseverance and other valuable personal virtues were written during this period, G. A. Henty's books are unique. Each adventure takes place within the setting of some important period in human history. From the fall of Jerusalem to the American Civil War, Henty's heroes live their adventures within exciting historical events. The reader learns much detailed history while he is being entertained and taught by exemplary heroes.
Moreover, through his personal experiences and careful scholarship, Henty provides very detailed and accurate accounts of history. While one might read a section of a history book concerning, for example, the conquering of Mexico by Spain, most such accounts are dry and shallow in comparison with Henty's tale of the primary happenings and of the way of life of the people caught up in those events.
From the French Revolution to the Great Plague of London, from the Crusades to the American Civil War, Henty readers learn in-depth history, superior vocabulary and literary techniques, and the advantages of high personal character - while they are being entertained by a master storyteller.
The Robinson Books Henty Collection is outstanding reading for any person - young or old, regardless of educational background.
AP,
ReplyDeleteI have as I get older and I hope wiser,do not watch movies from Hellywood, they just don't hold my interest. And I hate disney movies, pure propaganda. I see the same old tired liberal themes in movies. (I am a joy at Christmas) when the family gathers and watches the supposed classics.
Good books, the Bible and hobbies occupy my leisure time. When you have perverts making and producing movies that is what you are watching... perversion.
Cederq
Kevin Cederquist
You know what makes for interesting reading? The history of the Russians and Ukrainians who hated Stalin so much - particularly after he deliberately starved millions of them - when the Wehrmacht offered them the opportunity to fight against him, they took the Germans up on it. Then lost. Then, the British and Americans, having captured them along with other Axis forces, decided "They're Russians, they should go home" and handed them all right over to Stalin.
ReplyDeleteWho, of course, had them all shot in the head.
There's every reason to think the Allied officers making that decision were capable of foreseeing that result.
handed them all right over to Stalin.
ReplyDeleteThat's f-----.
@ Brock, There is your paradoxical dilema my friend, what to do with (permanent solution) all those undesireables(really, they were undesireables, thousands of them), house them, feed them, send them to Germany where they have no home or language...they made their choices, why not give them back to their homeland? It was the only solution don't you see?
ReplyDeleteWhat would you have expected, annex some part of some country and give it to them, call it maxnixinstein?
Brock -
ReplyDeleteI find most fiction based on hystory to be annoying as the auther usualy have their characters act with a sence of to days morality. In stead of have their characters act with the understanings of the morality if the day in question.
So I guess it depends on what your goal is. If it's to teach what it would of been like to live in those time most adult fiction and histories don't even do a good job of that.
If it is just to teach the morality of to day... I guess then It all depends on what morality you want to pass on if the stories are any good.
Just bought the Essential Works of G.A. Henty for kindle $0.99; so well see how he aproached this subject.
:-)
Brock -
ReplyDeleteWhat do we care they are other.
Josh:
ReplyDeleteI virtually never read fiction, but did enjoy Traveller, as it stuck to the actual events much like the Henty series.
"What do we care they are other."
ReplyDeleteIf you don't mind sharing, who isn't?
How do you do the classifying?
Jim -
ReplyDeleteBasicly wheather or not I like. A sliding scale between what I think of your character and ability.
Family, actual family, is given a little slack, but not much.
"Let me give you an order of importance to the responsibilities in your life: your first responsibility is to your self; then family, friends, acquaintances, local community and the world at large."
http://the-tao-of-josh.blogspot.com/2010/11/personal-responsibility.html
How you determine who goes where is up to you. I choose character and ability. Well that's what I tell myself anyways.
Hmmm...
Correction:
ReplyDelete"Basicly wheather or not I like [you or not.]"
Also, Jim, my statment was just meant to show how someone could make that decission. Not as a statment of agreement.
ReplyDeleteI believe most of the truly evil things that have hapend over fight one arbitrary group dynamic.
I believe treat everyone equaly, but not that they are equal. Some will have a greater ability in somethings than others.
"I believe most of the truly evil things that have hapend over fight one arbitrary group dynamic."
ReplyDeleteI think that's right, if I understand it correctly. That's why I asked about "the other," since I believe such thinking leads to exactly the "group dynamic" to which you refer.
The point isn't that we're islands. The point is that we're each acting on our own behalf and wish to interact with others who are likewise acting. Talk of "the other" on any basis other than that, IMO leads precisely to the evil group dynamic that we agree is wrong.
Further, I think an understanding of this is a critically missing element of the "freedom movement" as it's currently manifesting. But then, I tend to be a one-trick pony on that point.
[Us vs Them] vs Them ain't gonna cut it.
"I believe most of the truly evil things that have hapend over fight one arbitrary group dynamic."
ReplyDeleteMan thats a crappy sentence.
I believe most of the truly evil (as I define evil) things that have happened, happened because of fighting over one arbitrary group dynamic or another.
If you are the one doing the othering; you, probable, don't see anything wrong with what your doing.
We, for a lack of a better term I'll call our-side, are always talking about the state and how its enslaving us and the like. How we need to band together and fight it and such.
A state is just a group larger than most. So we will band together into ever larger groups to fight the state, instituting our own rules and regs to promote group stability. If we are not careful we will morph into what we are fighting against.
And, in the process we will other our enemy, so we can fight them.
And that can leads us to; "What do we care, they are other."
"If we are not careful we will morph into what we are fighting against."
ReplyDeleteWell said. As I see the situation currently, it won't take a whole lot of morphing.
AP, an insightful use of Wikipedia to drive home your points. Although as a source, it seems to “soft-pedal,“ through reliance on figures and statistics and footnotes, the true horror that your post is conveying. A quote attributed to Stalin goes, "When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics." That is the cold hard truth.
ReplyDeleteAnother of Stalin’s utterances that seems to be the natural inclination of all “progressives” and OpFor (Oppressor Forces) leaders is, “[i]deas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
For a good visual of the consequences of the Morgenthau Plan (or what happens to Uppity Europeans when Zionists control their fate) watch this: Peace for Germany (about the book "Other Losses"): http://youtu.be/4Lz3Cv2v6ZQ
If we end up the losers this time, I believe our Treasonous Elites and their Zionist handlers will be even more vindictive than they were after the last big “win.“ Sadly, history and morality seems to have been going against FreFor for a long time.
Brock & Rollory, you are both referring to the Russian Liberation Army under Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov - captured after his 2nd Shock Army was abandon on Stalin‘s orders during the Defense of Leningrad in 1942. His army of “traitorous and treasonous” Russians fought with the Germans against the Bolsheviks. These Anit-Communist were armed and equipped by the Wehrmacht. The ROA was composed of Russian prisoners of war who saw for themselves that the “Evil Fascists” were not quite as evil as their Communist leaders had led them to believe. See this YT Video for a good primer: http://youtu.be/gsob9QS_OJ8
Dhanna59 , there were alternatives to turning the Russian Liberation Army members back over to the Bolsheviks (after all, the Brits had taken in thousand of Anit-Communist Poles who fled when Stalin invaded their country from the East while Hitler invaded from the west), but the ROA’s fate was sealed at Yalta. The Allies “knew” what would happen to these freedom fighters once they were “repatriated,” as the Communists made their own newsreels in 1944 of the public hanging of several hundred ROA volunteers who were captured during the fighting retreat through Czechoslovakia. Again, like AP points out, some of us just may be in the wrong place at the wrong time and might not live to see which side wins. For historical reference, see the aptly named, Operation Keelhaul - a Disgraceful Chapter in American History: http://youtu.be/EgWoetZnJUE
One last glimpse into the "evil" OpFor (Oppressor Force) elitists' mindset that I hope we eradicate in our lifetime: “God is on your side? Is He a Conservative? The Devil's on my side, he's a good Communist.” Stalin to Winston Churchill in Tehran, November 1943. Spoken like a “True Believer.”
I agree about Wikipedia, Jake. It's a good starting point, and a quick way to give (some sort of) context to a discussion.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't consider it authoritative, or even mostly correct or objective, but it is a good, easy starting point.
Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov
ReplyDeleteVery informative and posted.
Jake said...
ReplyDelete"One last glimpse into the "evil" OpFor (Oppressor Force) elitists' mindset that I hope we eradicate in our lifetime: “God is on your side? Is He a Conservative? The Devil's on my side, he's a good Communist.” Stalin to Winston Churchill in Tehran, November 1943. Spoken like a “True Believer.”"
".... that I hope we eradicate in our life time...." It's statments like this one that leads to genocide. (There 's a video interview of the FBI agent that infeltatrated the Weather Underground let's see if we can see any deference in the rhetoric?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRg9il_V328&feature=youtube_gdata_player
So, what is that gives us the right to force our beliefs on the world, but not the other-side?
ReplyDeleteThere are two sides to every conflict and both sides believe the other is at fault.
"He thought he had a sure thing. I thought I had a sure thing. It was a fair wager," Tom said.
ReplyDeleteI looked at Harold helplessly.
"The prosecution has overlooked a detail," Harold said. "The witness BELIEVED he had a sure thing. The defendant KNEW he had a sure thing."
Boy, that Harold was sharp!
(paraphrased from memory, not exact quotes, from _The Great Brain Reforms_, 1973)
Some of my favorites growing up.
ReplyDeleteThe Mad Scientists' Club
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Scientists%27_Club
A Wrinkle in Time
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrinkle_in_Time
Louis L'Amour
"...spent much of his free time at the local library reading, particularly G. A. Henty, a British author of historical boys' novels during the late nineteenth century. L'Amour once said, "[Henty's works] enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics."" - Hmmm... Things you learn from Wiki.
;-)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_L%27Amour