A friend of mine is an Orthodox Jew and a professional. When she was in graduate school, she was assigned various anti-Jewish writings for a week. A few days into the ordeal, she found she had started to think of Jews as evil. She empathized more with the critics of Jews than with her own people. She started to look at the world through the prism of these enemies of the Jews. All it took was a few hours of reading.
I think most people are this suggestible. Feed them enough images and memes and ideas and movies and TV and writings and you can shape how they view any group, including their own.
There was a famous Holocaust survivor in Israel who was haunted nightly by his memories until he went to Holland and was treated with LSD and saw that in different circumstances, he would have been the guards and other people the inmates.
That’s how the world works. Change the circumstance, and you would be the persecutor. In another circumstance, you would be the persecuted.
Nothing in life is personal.
