whose blood runs reddest?

In The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare's plays, and a piece of literature that totured me through GCSE English Literature, Portia, a beautiful woman whose fate is decided by her suitors opening different boxes, meets a moroccan gentleman who tries to wed her in accordance with this little game - a shakesperian Deal or No Deal if you were. She does not take a huge liking to the fellow, remarking at the end, after he goes home empty handed, that she hopes nobody of his "complexion" should come to her again - despite his attempts beforehand to make straight that albeit he has a different skin colour, his blood is just as red as hers.

On a recent trip to Germany, I visited Buchenwald, a former concentration camp during world war II. Having not really studied WWII in great depth before, I learnt a few things, the ignorant person that I am - it was not just Jews who were persecuted, but Homosexuals, political opponents, gypsies, and biblical scholars, to name but a few of the categories of people at the camp. The Nazi regime was about the cold, efficient method of "cleaning" the world of this so called "scum", because these people were inferior - did not uphold the ideals in Hitler's world, and had no place in mankind. One thing I noticed at the place was the memorial, a metal plate with the countries of all the people known to have died at the camp. The artist who installed it built in a special feature - the metal plate is heated to 37 degrees centigrade - Body Temperature. The idea was to unite every single nation on earth and say that we all have something in common - the Nazi Regime was purely about segregation, seperation, classification of everyone. Therefore, in stark contrast, the artist has united all those people whom the Nazis seperated and classified under our one thing. We are all Human.

Have we learnt from this? I don't think we have at all.

Under the Bush Jr Administration, for fear of terrorism, people were racially profiled because of their skin colour, and detained in guantanamo bay without trial, submitted to various methods of humiliation and torture.
We have had, in the last couple of decades, several regimes in which either white or black people were driven out of the country - in some areas of South Africa, which was liberated from the Apartheid movement, whites now cannot go because of fear of racial hatred.
In the Middle East, a war has been waging for centuries, in a "king of the hill" style battle, where two sets of forces both lay claim to one city as their "holy land". Each nation oppresses the other.
A big debate opening up in the UK is whether or not we should pull British troops out of Afghanistan, which on closer examination, is a debate as to whether or not we should save british troops but not Afghan citizens, who would fall to the taliban regime, which has already enforced the brutal elements of Sharia Law in the provinces that it controls - a law which puts women to a lower state in society, and carries brutal punishments, including death, for people who convert out of Islam, or practice homosexuality.

There is a fine line between patriotism and racism. Whose blood runs reddest in this world? Nobody's. We should not pull out of a country because we are losing one soldier per day. In both world wars, we kept on going through both of them, whilst losing thousands each day, and eventually we crushed the enemy - in WWII, we eventually crushed an enemy of the world - a powerful dictatorship to which the phrase "human rights" never even existed in their vocabularies.

I think we are all guilty. I will admit that if I see someone wearing a turban, I find it a little strange. If I see a woman wearing a full face covering, I find it a little off-ish, simply because it is out of the norm.

A Man stood up and said "I have a dream" - It is one of the most powerful and well known speeches in American History, in fact, throughout the world - Where Martin Luther King Jr stood up and gave a speech condemning racism in the USA, and stating that he wanted to see a country where white folk and black folk could talk to each other. Where white kids and black kids could play with each other without fear of retribution. He had a dream about desegregation of the races.

I have a dream, too. I have a dream that one day, our cities will not be made up of ghettos where "the black people live" or "the asian people live". I have a dream that one day, should we get caught up in battle, the safety of our troops will not take precedence over the safety of the citizen's whose rights we are fighting for. I have a dream that that is all that we will fight for. I have a dream, that one day, nation will stop rising up against nation over battles of wills, territory, religion or politics. I have a dream, that I will be able to walk down the street and not find it strange to see someone wearing a turban, because it will be normal to see someone, such is the integration that we would have produced. I have a dream that we do not need to worry about absurd political correctness, because we are educated enough to know what can be said and what can't. I have a dream that this does not stretch to racism, but also to homophobia, sexism, ageism, persecution against someone's religion, disability, or physical appearance. I have a dream, that one day, the world would be one.