But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "victims."

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

If genocide where to be a person,his right hand would have been called racism.

And in "Elbow Room" the cast sings the glories of westward expansion in the United States, which involved the murder of native peoples and the violent conquest of half of Mexico. Among the lines in the song is one that intones, "There were plenty of fights / To win land right / But the West was meant to be / It was our Manifest Destiny?" Let it suffice to say that happily belting out a tune in which one merrily praises genocide is always easier for those whose ancestors weren't on the receiving end of the deal.