As I mentioned earlier, in some cultures the answer could very well be “yes” if the person who threw the punch was a late relative or an ancestor of yours.

Perception is paramount in cases like this, and perceptions vary widely from culture to culture.

As an aside, have you ever pondered the degree of difficulty we’d face in relating to an alien civilisation given the trouble that we – as a species – have in understanding other cultures on our own world? 😎

Which is what further complicates the situation.;)

As for Aliens, well in reality we probably an not even comprehend the physical form of any non earth intelligent species and would likely have difficulty with any idelogy or culture it may have to exactly the same extent!

So surprised nobody has mentioned the Red Indian “Ethnic cleansing” carried out in USA.

Why? What is the obsession on this forum of bringing the United States into every single thread in the pursuit of a b**ching exercise? If one really wants to drag other countries into this then I am sure we could easily fill the bandwidth of this forum with endless descriptions of the brutality of the European empires.

For the record I (as people seem to associate me with their stereotype of my avatar and not my words here…..maybe that is a form of racism or xenophobia?) regard manifest destiny as a heinous crime, but one of history.

There is a very distinct problem here. A government may be an institution of continual existence but as an institution it is made up of individuals. The result is that whilst (for example) it was the British government that supported an tolerated the slave trade for so long that government is now completely removed from that time and space. The individuals who make it up have no involvement or even support for such past acts, so why should they apologise? In the case of Australia some members of the institution of state who engaged in the crime may well still be in place however the vast majority will have had nothing to do with the period. As such any apology is actually completely neutered by the fact that the people making it did not commit any of the acts for which they are apologising and likely have as great disdain for those acts as the victims do. If you want such an apology to meaningful it needs to come from the people who perpetrated the acts and not from people who have no attachment to them. Otherwise an apology such as this is an empty emotional crutch and nothing more.

In simple terms, if a man you have never met punched another man in the face in a time before you were aware or even alive do you go to the man who was punched in the face, or to his children, and apologise?

Damn me we aggree again !

What i would say though is that if we forget the past and ignore episodes of history that we are uncomfortable with then we might, just might, allow the same thing to happen again .

We are perfectly capable of repeating the mistakes of history even whilst they stare us in the face. WW1-WW2, Holocaust-Rwanda, Western intervention policy from the end of empire to 2007, etc etc etc. Human beings are by their very nature flawed and doomed to error, to mask ourselves from this by indulging in our past is more likely to rekindle long suppressed hostile emotions than deter us from repetition.

These three had planned to kill someone. Planned. Not attempted, not succeeded. Maybe the plans would have been carried out maybe not. But it seems from the report that they were in the planning stages. The Danish Police decided to stop it before they even considered an attempt. they obviously acted within the constraints of Danish Law, whereas America sees fit to act outside even their own laws by imprisoning terrorist suspects without charge and without trial for indeterminate periods.

Regards,

kev35

Thats completely irrelevant. Why use this thread to criticise the US? Some sort of complex maybe?:rolleyes:

I never mentioned the US in relation to this but you just seem to have gotten upset by the sight of my avatar.:mad:

No, I’m absolutely sure that someone of your intellect can figure it out. Even without an M16 in your hand.

Regards,

kev35

What a surprise, you are only capable of coming and making random and vague statements with weak references to stereotypes but have absolutely no substance.:mad: :rolleyes:

And therein lies the problem. That viewpoint makes you part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Regards,

kev35

Care to explain?:rolleyes:

There isn’t enough evidence to put them on trial. I don’t call that “So close as to make no difference”.

Well I do.