[gerbal]

> The rumors are the spark that I mentioned. The long-existing anti-semitism is the wood pile that is ready to be set ablaze.

Which arrives at the question, how does anti-semitism propagate through societies? It doesn't spring from nothing. What are the mechanisms that keeps the idea alive? Are all societies susceptible? Someone must be doing the work of keeping that wood pile dry and ready to catch light.

[luckylion]

That's what I meant with regards to "speech" becoming very vague and stretching over long periods of time, making the individual expression rather insignificant and the concept very fuzzy and hard to tell apart from culture, tradition and history. Like a rain drop in a storm where all those drops combined are causing the flood, but to pin it on an individual rain drop and say "this one is responsible" is hard.

> Are all societies susceptible?

Given that we've seen some level of exterminatory warfare all over the place in history (I'm sure there's huge amounts that we don't know about because the victims have been annihilated), and it's not unheard of among other mammals as well, my money is on yes.

That some small nations did not wage war against their much larger and much stronger neighbors is not a counter example: the fact that chickens don't hunt wolves doesn't mean they're not predators, they'll happily eat worms, and will eat a mouse if they can catch it.

[gerbal]

With those assumptions, it seems fair to state that, given enough time, any sufficiently large group of humans will commit an atrocity against an internal or external minority.

Shouldn't then societies try to structure themselves against this tendency?

[luckylion]

I don't know how you'd structure a society against hate. We can't seem to even come together over political ideas within cultures, where everything else is very similar, so I don't have a lot of hope for situations where the similarities are few and far between.

We haven't tried adding empathogens to the water supply, maybe that's a good way to do it.