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Ever since history has been recorded, men have told the story of their conflicts with other men. These conflicts come out of motivations that are at variance with those of a neighbor, tribe, or nation. The causes of these variations are numerous. Generally speaking, they are of two kinds. There are those that pertain to self-protection and those that lead to self-aggrandizement. In a sense, the need for self-protection arises largely because of self-aggrandizing tendencies. The latter develop, to a large extent, at the cost of other people's energies.
Thus, the history of man is also the history of man's exploitation of man in the worst sense. The Exodus, a struggle we are all indebted to for the example it set, represents an epic statement of man's outrage at this exploitation. The Jews are hated precisely because, in my opinion, they represent the reality of freedom - the heart of the democratic process.
Ten thousand or so years ago, when life was lived perilously close to the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest and man presumably had not the leisure to contemplate other alternatives, we can understand that might made right - the right of an inexorable necessity. Necessity in those times had no gaps in it. Sheer physical power carried the day. As man evolved toward leisure, a new power came into being, the power of the mind and its capacity to bend lesser minds to its way, for better or worse. With that evolution begins the history of the struggle for the control of men's minds.
The nature of that struggle has changed very little through the years. Only the props are different. The scenario is the same, painfully the same. In the United States, we harbor a belief that we are different, more evolved, more civilized. In my less cynical moments, I am sometimes inclined to concur, until I am brought back to the facts of