Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

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"Why isn't this mentality seen in Bangladesh"

Go ask anyone from, say, Myanmar (especially Arakan state) what they think of Bangladeshi people. You might find that opinion of "They're some of the kindest, most welcoming people I've been around in the face of a poverty that China no longer knows" to not be so widely held.

Maybe you should ask Bangladeshi's what they think of the Rohingya people. It turns out that Myanmar is not the only country oppressing them and refusing to give them citizenship!

The tendency to want to group an entire race/people with opinions based on hundreds of experiences with them, let alone dozens or a few, is the same tendency in us that spawns racism and prejudice. Your experiences have no influence on the reality of "the goodness of a people".

I'm married to a Bangladeshi, so yes I'm very aware of the treatment of the Rohingya at a state and societal level. I have close Bangladeshi friends that have done humanitarian aide work with their communities in Cox's Bazaar. It's a horrible crises.

My comment was responding to the author's argument that compassion only arises when material needs are accounted for, that compassion is some middle class thing. They were arguing that Chinese culture doesn't emphasize it because of their history of war, famine, and poverty. I think that's a horrible misunderstanding of both compassion and Chinese culture, and was merely countering it with an example of a people that have also experienced a famine that had a similar mortality rate who display perfectly normal human levels of compassion and kindness despite that history. I then went on to conclude that the original writer is likely completely off on how they view Chinese culture, that compassion is fundamental to being human and has nothing to do with bourgeois material comfort.

We tend to want to think in binaries -- people are compassionate or not. People are welcoming or not. That's not how reality works though, it's more nuanced. I was in no way arguing that an entire community of people aren't capable of mistreatment of others. Of course they are. But can a people that have experienced a massive amount of trauma and poverty and loss capable of displaying compassion? Of course they are. Because compassion is a fundamental aspect of being human.

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