Heroes Not Zombies

The Other, by Ryszard Kapuciski (ISBN 978-1844674169) is a beautiful, thought provoking little book.

Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite.

[Herodotus] understood that to know ourselves we have to know others, who act as the mirror in which we see ourselves reflected; he knew that to understand ourselves better we have to understand others, to compare ourselves with them, to measure ourselves against them.

Xenophobia, Herodotus implied, is a sickness of people who are scared suffering an inferiority complex terrified at the prospect of seeing themselves in the mirror of the culture of others.

Conquer, colonise, master, make dependent – this reaction to others recurs constantly throughout the history of the world. The idea of equality with the other only occurs to the human mind very late on, many thousands of years after man first left traces of his presence on Earth.

All this seems increasingly relevant in the growing xenophobia around the world. Yesterday I read Rachida Dati’s impassioned plea, in Le Monde, to stop setting French people against each other.

Cessons donc d’opposer les Français les uns aux autres, au profit d’un meilleur vivre ensemble !

Today, I read in the Guardian, Mya Guarnieri’s piece about islamophobia, where she talks about her feelings and memories aroused by the newspiece about a pastor from her hometown of Gainsesville, Florida, who is intending to burn copies of the Qur’an to commemorate September 9th.

When I was a child, some of my evangelical Christian classmates urged me to convert. Because I was Jewish and didn’t accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and saviour, they told me, I was going to hell…….In the past, there was antisemitism, roiling just below the surface. Now, there is Islamophobia. If Terry Jones burns copies of the Qur’an in Gainesville, he’ll leave a shameful scorch on us all.

We definitely need a more positive attitude to the Other – to whoever is different from us.