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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

> Your best bet is to use diversity and multiculturalism to teach tolerance to the point that tolerance is institutionalized in your society.

How well did it work for Jugoslavia, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and Syria?

It is not a "best bet". It is a long shot and it misses most of the time. The best bet is to stay homogenous.

"otherizing Christians living across the border" might sound bad, but it won't lead to genocide because they have their own country with their military and police and you can't just walk in and kill them (they can neither).

You can have wars but those rarely result in genocide. Civil wars had much worse outlook on that.

However when there are Christians (or Muslim) in your country, it's pretty real that suddently the regime wants to kill them with their military and police and they have no force to stand up for them.

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You really need to read more history. a lot more history. Maybe try some scholarly works on a culture you are not familiar with so that you're less inclined to rely on your default assumptions.

I put it to you that many conflicts are not so much the result of inevitable animus between diverse social groups, but the willingness of some people to opportunistically exploit a power vacuum for their own advantage by convincing members of one population to scapegoat another one. Rene girard has written extensively on this topic and argues that it may be a fundamental tendency.

You keep appealing to homogeneity, but show me a homogenous group and I'll find some fault-lines in it. If that proves difficult, I'll just create some. Once I have two groups who believe their interests to be divergent I can set them against each other and exploit the resulting instability for my own ends. It's really easy to play people off against each other if that's your overarching objective.

> You can have wars but those rarely result in genocide. Civil wars had much worse outlook on that.

WWII and Nazi Germany

> However when there are Christians (or Muslim) in your country, it's pretty real that suddently the regime wants to kill them with their military and police and they have no force to stand up for them.

Yes, that's why you need strong institutions. The US has admirable (though not perfect) institutions that incorporate these concepts. In the examples you're citing, the institutions were fundamentally weak.

As I mentioned earlier, humans will _always_ find reasons to fight. You can get as white and Christian as you want, but soon some types of white Christians will start fighting other types of white Christians. Medieval Europe and its interminable wars was a great example of this.

> that's why you need strong institutions

I do but I understand clearly that I'm not getting them where I live, any time soon.

What's my backup plan?

"Fighting other types" is one thing, genocide is another thing. Two different words for a reason.

With enough power and political will, fighting other types leads to genocide. I am truly sorry you live in a difficult place. Your best bets would be to immigrate to a place that does have institutions (US, Germany), or to work hard to build them in your country. You can be the place where change starts. I wish you the best.

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