Justice Stevens on ‘Invidious Prejudice’

[groovedaddy]

A great deal of what public figures have said about the proposed Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan has been aimed at playing off fear and intolerance for political gain. Former Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court, on the other hand, delivered one of the sanest and most instructive arguments for tolerance that we have heard in a long time.

Justice Stevens, who retired at the end of the court’s last term, served for two and a half years as an intelligence officer in Pearl Harbor during World War II. In a speech on Thursday in Washington, he confessed his initial negative reaction decades later at seeing dozens of Japanese tourists visiting the U.S.S. Arizona memorial.

“Those people don’t really belong here,” he recalled thinking about the Japanese tourists. “We won the war. They lost it. We shouldn’t allow them to celebrate their attack on Pearl Harbor even if it was one of their greatest victories.”

But then Justice Stevens said that he recognized his mistake in “drawing inferences” about the group of tourists that might not apply to any of them. “The Japanese tourists were not responsible for what some of their countrymen did decades ago,” he said, just as “the Muslims planning to build the mosque are not responsible for what an entirely different group of Muslims did on 9/11.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/opinion/10wed4.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a210

[RandomThoughts]

1. It is part of social entities.

In ancient Persia there was a soldier group named the immortals, since every time a soldier died they were replaced.

In Braveheart, the concept was to pass on title and land to your offspring.

In Generational sin the concept is that people are punished for the sins of others, or they are talking about larger social entity like a family line.

In a corporation, the existence of the corporation is before any of its employees, and it defends itself in that way, making the people subservient to the corporation. Same with ideas like profit motive, and a few others.

In any system, like government, the system starts to self perpetuate replacing people generationally, making any system like an entity.






His comment is recognition that people are individuals with dignity, not part of some larger 'system'. As he tries to see them as individuals, not just extensions of systems that interact with them, like a cultural heritage, or a social ideas. If a Japanese tourist was proud of the victory, and they were never there, they would be doing the exact same thing he was trying not to do.



However larger systems can work through many people, and there are a few of them from observation. Cultures, Social, Organizational systems like commerce, then their is spiritual systems, and spiritual beliefs, and many other things. The fact that people become cogs in machines, makes to explain why group think can create the effect, to some extent, of communal thought within any system. Then their is real spiritual stuff also.