Wars and ConflictsΒ permalink
Ethnic Cleansing
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Message 1.Β
Posted by vesturiiis (U13688567) on Sunday, 13th June 2010
This seems to be the root of many military conflicts.
How and why does it occur? After WW2 all Germans ( anti-Facist or not) were hustled out of many European countries. Of course eye for an eye etc... but even areas that had a small minority were "cleansed"
Probably a lot to do with North America saying the Europeans can sort out their own mess.
It really has not happened here I would venture but it seems to me that this is a very insidious mess we have to address.
What about those of us who bloodlines so convoluted we could be mistaken for"unclassified"
or better still just too damn mixed-up!!! -
Message 2
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Sunday, 13th June 2010
I have a Polish friend with a German surname and a German friend with a Polish surname: both have their origins in Silesia which was subjected to a form of ethnic cleansing following its inclusion into a redefined Poland following the Allied victory in 1945.
The trouble with ethnic cleansing as a strategy is that it implies a racial difference to what is more than anything a cultural difference which may be quite superficial. So it is really all about who do you think you are.
Many years ago I set out to try and find out my ethnic origin. An Indian friend of mine really started it off by asking me where I came from: very much as a joke as in those days everyone used to ask him where he came from.
Now I knew that my background was predominantly Highland Scots but because we were also Cockneys of more than a hundred years standing we had picked up a number of other connections as well. Since I look like a Caledonian I describe myself as the foreign Gael or gal-Gaidheal: a description used by the medieval Irish to define Gaelic speakers who were not Irish. It went on then, didn't it? Even before the Reformation!
Amusingly I found two lots of Irish hiding behind the Scots: not that surprising really given the relatively low status of Irish immigrants in England in the early nineteenth century. On the contrary the Caledonian Scots were very welcome as Queen Victoria made Highland servants very fashionable due to their supposed loyalty (Good old John Brown!). Also Scottish outdoor servants, that is gamekeepers and gardeners were much treasured at that time. Quite ludicrous but true!
I have also found some Germans hidden behind some south country Baptists. I suspect they were actually Roma as they had disguised their surname among other things.
It took me a while to find the English but then a large chunk of them turned out to be Welsh and some are French.
So much for ethnicity!
The idea that a political leader can postulate that certain groups are of a different ethnic stock so they can be excluded is quite absurd. It is nothing more than scape-goating. Humanity moves around a great deal in the course of making a living. Whilst I have found ancestors living and working within twenty miles of where I live, this is just an accident of history. In the recent Yugoslavian civil wars this could have made all the difference between life or death, inclusion of exclusion.
Ethnicity is an absurd concept! What is more important is what you contribute as an individual to the wider society.
Mind you the recent discovery that there is about 2% Neanderthal DNA in people whose origins are north of the Sahara puts a whole new spin on racial purity! What a laugh! -
Message 3
Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Wednesday, 16th June 2010
Stanilic, your views on ethnicity and racial purity are quite naif and simply the other end of the even more naif theories on ethnicity and racial purity. The fact that within any given population that goes back in time tracing its ancestors a growing number of people will find what is perceived as "foreign" ancestors does not mean that the notion of ethnicity does not exist. The term racial purity exists too but should be actually viewed as the extention of endogamy.
The real notion of nation has nothing to do with what most people think of nation today. Natio is used for a population of same ancestry. It cannot literally taken as having every single member of say 1 million people having the same ancestry (that thing has existed only for extremely isolated, extremely small groups of people and contrary to belief even isolated countries like Japan did have extensive intermarriage with radically different groups like the mysterious "european-like" Ainous that lived before them on the islands etc. What nation means is that there is a certain consensus on the basic origins of the population and that the population is aware of that and that in that sense there is a common link among members. If the link exists but the common belief does nto exist, then we make more talk of related tribes and on a more global level of anthropologic tribes. In fact most European nations are actually variations of the mixture of 4-5 basic anthropologic tribes: the Mediterraneans (exemplified by Greeks), the Alpics (exemplified by Gauls), the Nordics (exemplified by north Germans and Danish), the Slavs (exemplified by western Russians) etc which are tribes that were actually not really so closely related between them to justify the pseudotheory of a european white race or the indoeuropean theory or anything like that.
The way tribes and nations (in the real sense) are formed is nothign exceptionally strange. Up to recently people followed the geography (land & sea routes) and ressources (cultivation plains, animals etc.), installed in several places giving infinite variations. In fact, technically speaking even if a population of 1 million people intermarried for 5,000 years all by itself, though it would remain relatively close, it would end up in something somehow different than the initial population due to the results of "natural selection".
The nation is the extention of the word tribe. Tribe is the extenion of the family. And as such the tribe and the nation have always a contact with the notion of common ancestry. That does not mean that people of mixed ancestry are not parts of a nation but that does not mean that if people of mixed ancestry (the more recent the more pronounced) rise up to a large extend (say at 40-50%) the nation will remain as it is, the reality is that it will be replaced by something else. That also does not mean that there can't be a nation having 2 or more different ancestries, as said, that is common case actually for most modern nations, but it has to be homogeneous. Brazil is not a nation yet but its earlier mix of Portuguese and black people, the large percentage of half-caste people (mostly Portuguese and Africans from the region where Angola is today) and the modern relative high mix, mean that it will become given that it does not receive a huge wave of 1 particular type of population that strives to retain autonomy (a theoretical example is having 40 million Chinese moving there and mixing at a very slow rate while retaining most of their cultures...).
Multicultural societies do not imply the end of nations, in fact they imply the return to something not really modern but quite ancient, the caste-system. USA despite its mix has developed into a caste system where all shorts of white people largely mix among themselves, Latinos mix among themselves, black people mix among themselves with the later 2, lower in hierarchy trying (sometimes even unconsciously) to marry women from the first to raise their status while the men of the first may develop short-lived relationships occasionally but rarely consciously and rarely marry them, which is actually the best proof of the caste system. In that sense US can never be a nation and there is no forseeable time that this country will become a nation. It is not at all accidental that in the US foreign policy there is a standard approach to downplay other people's nations and national characters while for their country they use more and more the word "nation" and everything that has to do with "national".
Europeans too did it all in the inverse. Till recently they were at the stage of tribes ruled arbitrarily by monarchs, i.e. random illiterate villagers killing enough people to take power of the maximum of lands they could and ordained by some half-illiterate priests in a complex system of politics. By arbitrarily joining quite different tribes (as the Saxons, Celtics & Normands in England, the Mediterraneans, the Occitans, the Basques, the Gauls, the Franks and the Bretons and othes in France, the German, Danish and Slavic tribes in Germany) and so on, monarchs under the continuously concentrated power created modern nations. But if they would not had done so, nations would still exist but in completely different forms.
There is no need to battle on the above. The notion of nation might seem artificial but it is simply the extension of the notion of tribe and family and this something as real as life itself. It is not just humans that have tribes but actually many other living forms from wolfs and lions down to ants and bees. You need not open speeches about how vain is this, how it gives birth to racism and such, you just have to go to school and at the end of the day try to convince 2 mothers to take back home each other's kid, for a change. Racism begins as soon as you are born and you learn it from the very best example of the love of your own mother. -
Message 4
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Friday, 18th June 2010
Re: Message 2.
Stanilic,
thank you very much for your opinion with which I fully agree because it is logical and makes common sense.
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul. -
Message 5
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Friday, 18th June 2010
Re: Message 3.
Nikolaos,
there you are again on your cherised hobby horse. I read it completely to the painful end. Now, if I recall it well, I read already for some six years the same from you on these boards.
Nikolaos, although you are my friend, it will not change my opinions on the matter in the sense of Priscilla's last week's thread. And I will not start again the whole counter argumentation as I have no time for it.
Kind regards,
Paul. -
Message 6
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Friday, 18th June 2010
The difficulty that I have with your argument Nik is that you seem to assert that the collective has always been family, clan, tribal and national based.
Unfortunately this is only one aspect of the human activity. The primary human activity to my mind is economic, or more simplistically the next meal.
Now your argument would be that the tribe/clan would protect their hunting grounds, farms, fisheries against outsiders. But how does this tie in with traditions of welcoming and giving hospitality to outsiders entering those tribal areas to trade, visit or even settle? Society would not evolve without that. Fashions would not change. Technology would not spread. History would be dead.
My view is that when there was plenty people shared and moved around. When there was scarcity people also went elsewhere in the hope of finding sustenance somewhere: hence cattle raids and warfare. In the latter instance there was a need to find someway of defining `them' and `us'; hence the concepts of the tribe and the nation, always location specific accompanied with heroic tales of conquest to emphasise legitimacy.
Now I appreciate human history moves in ebbs and flows inconsistently across the planet. Different values apply to the same people but at different times. We change and our behaviour changes. We are inconsistent and often trivial.
To my mind ideas of the nation are ghosts of a terrible past. Who can I trust? Who can I rely on? It is a fear which can be easily manipulated into making men march in threes and make comradely salutes at each other. What drives this fear is economic scarcity.
Resolve the reality and the sense of scarcity then what price the nation? We need peace more than conflict, friendship more than hostility, trade more than war. This makes us open up to become better humans rather than shut down to count the pennies. -
Message 7
Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Monday, 28th June 2010
Hi Paul and Stanilic, critiscism well accepted (if we all agreed we would not make the effort to add anything!).
"""The difficulty that I have with your argument Nik is that you seem to assert that the collective has always been family, clan, tribal and national based... the primary human activity to my mind is economic, or more simplistically the next meal."""
No. Above I argued about the reality of the existence of nations (in the original sense of the term, i.e. ethnic groups). The notion of ethnic group has little to do with the state and it is only the link of the notion of state to the original notion of nation which more often than not followed the inverse path, i.e. monarchs pushing for creating a nation out of the ethnic groups they ruled (mostly the case in western Europe with biggest example France) rather than ethnic groups seeking having their indepedent rulers (which was mostly the case in the Balkans where the notion of ethnicity & culture is totally divided to the notion of state) and it is this what blurred reality.
There is nothing more in the above really. You are 100% correct to pinpoint that from there one what moves humanity is - as Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔr said - its stomach! No argument on that. Above I only commented on the existence of nations in the sense of ethnic groups without implying anyting else. Note that I come from a nation that more often than not was fully divided and each party's worst enemy was a fellow compatriot party rather than any foreigner. But that means nothing in terms of ethnicity. It is another thing the ethnicity and another thing the party's financial or strategic interests.
"""Now your argument would be that the tribe/clan would protect their hunting grounds, farms, fisheries against outsiders. But how does this tie in with traditions of welcoming and giving hospitality to outsiders entering those tribal areas to trade, visit or even settle?"""
It all depends. Do we talk of hospitality or forced tolerance in the inability of reaction? Know that in human interpersonal relations there might be cases of relative equality, but in group relations (whatever is the basis of the group, ethnic, religious, cultural, other etc.) that thingie simply does not exist. There can be a combination of interests but that is driven usually mostly from 1 of the 2 parties and serves mostly its interests rather than the interests of the other party.
"""Society would not evolve without that. Fashions would not change. Technology would not spread. History would be dead."""
What you describe is constant immobility - anyway something that never existed. In fact, the notion of nation historically worked against it. It was more often than not populations with developed national consciousness that moved history. The only example that I can think of the opposite is Mongols & Turks, 2 groups with complete lack of national consciousness (Mongols had some in the beginning but were always losing it fastly) but afterall these non-national groups had been the most regressive and most catastrophic having frozen all social & technological developments in the areas the passed.
"""Now I appreciate human history moves in ebbs and flows inconsistently across the planet. Different values apply to the same people but at different times. We change and our behaviour changes. We are inconsistent and often trivial."""
I would say, the biggest change is in the means. People can travel in 1 day from diametrically opposed points on our round planet (something which in the past required 1 to 2 years of travel and involved 70%-80% mortality rate)
"""To my mind ideas of the nation are ghosts of a terrible past. Who can I trust? Who can I rely on? It is a fear which can be easily manipulated into making men march in threes and make comradely salutes at each other. What drives this fear is economic scarcity."""
What is ghost of the past is obviously the need to call the state nation. And the nation state. From there on nations are more strong than ever with societies taking consciously a turn towards the caste systems. And caste societies (ancient India, ancient Rome) are a thing of the past, by no means any modernity.
"""Resolve the reality and the sense of scarcity then what price the nation? We need peace more than conflict, friendship more than hostility, trade more than war. This makes us open up to become better humans rather than shut down to count the pennies."""
Be careful: friendship and hostility exist even more easily outside the notion of nationhood. In fact the worst wars and human catastrophes ever had little to do with the notion of nation:
1) Napoleonic expendition to Egypt & Russia => Imperialist, nothign to do with the national aspirations of French, back then still not a fully conscious nation.
2) Krimean war => a capitalist war of British to protect their traderoutes, or rather the closing of the Russian traderoutes. Absolutely nothing to do with the notion of nationhood of the English or British in general
3) Indian genocide => 20 million Indians died of hunger because British companies thought it a good idea to retain foodstock in a difficult year to sell it to Europe for more money
4) Stalin's purges => Stalin killed 50 million of his citizens out of whom the largest majority (around 35-40 million, had been of the prevailing ethnic group, Russians). All in the name of anti-national communism.
hence out of all these massive wars & crimes... one can spot only Nazi Germany but then even Hitler's phenomenal nationalism if seen in depth had really little to do with the essence of the German nation : one has to view Hitler's propaganda and symbolism (completely unrelated to German culture - biggest example, the swastika an ancient Greek/Persian/Indian holy symbol) to get to the point.
So even if we take into account Germans, the vast majority of the worst wars and crimes were very un-national in their character and more related.
Typical wars and crimes related to national aspirations are the complete (and only successful ever) genocide perpetrated by muslim-Turks of 7 million christians, the 40% of the then population (4 million slaughtered on spot, 3 million expulsed violently) in Minor Asia, the slaughter of Nanking, or the genocide of Toutsis by Houtous. But in the course of history they are rather the exception than the rule.
I repeat again my basic line. The existence of nations in the sense of ethnic groups is as alive as the notion of family and has to be seen in relative distinction from the notion of state, leadership or warfare. The fact that due to globalisation we have already moved into multi-cultural entities does not mean the end of nations but rather the forming of castes in societies. If anything it won't contribute to peace, that is for certain. More current wars are done for the control of international traderoutes than any other regional national interests. Even if we take into account the notion of national interests & aspirations being usurped by international interests on traderoutes, one cannot be blind that it is not just ethnicity but also religion that can be equally - if not more - used in that aspect while at the end of the day, the most militarily aggressive state in the world is US, an un-national caste-based state. -
Message 8
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Sunday, 4th July 2010
Nik
Rather than get into a lengthy debate I will go part of the way with you in that there is a belief that ethnicity and nationality are consistent. I just don't happen to agree with that argument.
If you look at history from the top down, as it were, you get a different view as to when you look at it from the bottom up.
I am not a top down man: I love the detail because it has a subversive character. Too often history is written by those in charge to legitimise their position.
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