I forgot who that posting was from,but:there is no need to go as far as Abyssinia to track italian racisim.Personally,I just had to step out of my doorstep in my native town.African people are caught in the night and beaten from neo-fascist groups,chinese people have fights with shopkeepers in the streets,southern accent is something to be ashamed of(quite ridicoulous,given that southern Italy has such an amazing cultural-human heritage....and I'm glad I had a chance to get in touch with it,despite the racist shit my central Italy city is filled of),ALL OF THIS DESPITE the fact that all children are educated to abhor the Holocaust.And of course it's fair that they are taught to know that that is the worst possible crime(there is an amazing poem fron an italian/jewish writer,which describes people in a concentration camp,repeating:is this a man?Is this a woman?!Well,meditate that this has happened,and tell to everyone,think about it,or may your children turn away from you,may you...I don't remember the various curses,but if any italian Mudcatter here can help me finding the words of Levi's"Se questo e' un uomo",ve ne sarei ben grata),but the children are not able to confront theirselves with the thing:they think is a thing from the past.they think it's horrible,but they don't connect to the horrible things they say to people they don't tolerate.They may cry reading Anna Frank's diary but they'll tell to their coloured schoolmate"you're black because you fell in the shit"(as they used to say to a kid I knew years ago...Now he's grown up and he's a stunning beautiful young man,and none would dare saying that again...) without feeling wrong about it.That's what I was meaning in my first post.There is a danger that is called intolerance in it's in us everyday,and all we can do against it is to learn from past horrors,not to relegate,isolate those horrors to merely historical/personal memory.It scares me to think'it could have happened to me'when I think about jews in a concentration camp...but it scares me beyond any limit the fact that,if I was born german,raised in aa average family,brainwashed from Hitler...well,I could have even ended on the other side,like thousands of many did in that crowd madness.Because they were human beings as well,and they thought they were right.Now,if I put things this way I can 1)despise myself as a human being because I'm accountable to go against another human being; 2)or I can learn from it,and never stop watching out from intolerance inside myself.End of the speech.