[78-L] OT: Racialism. (nationalism re: to Alexandre's post)

[yves francois]

Alexandre
very thoughtful post. Being of a very mixed parentage (for the most part a French/Italian Pied-Noir family on my mother's side, various Slavic and Semite on my father's), I find it incredible that we think the Churchill designed nations of the early century 20th would work. They worked only for colonial purposes, so that the battles within each ethnic group would keep them from rebelling to the colonist. In the cases of Algeria, Nigeria, the small states of the Caucuses (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and several others like Dagestan and Abkhazia who did not get statehood) and Iraq (and we should also add the late Yugoslavia, a rag tag of ethnicity's put together from the Kingdom of Serbia, the Austro Hungarian provinces of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosna i Herzegovina  and other small Turkish controlled lands like Macedonmia) we can see where it led us. The tribal mentality of nationhood was (and still is) stronger to people in these lands than the fictitious
 "nation" that was imposed by the world powers. If as western of people like the Checks and Slovaks could not agree to stay as one nation, how can we expect Tadjiks and Pushtuns to? The powers that be in Continental Europe have learned this (to varying degrees) in a long century, I only hope the USA will do so as well, a vote every few years does not constitute a democracy

Yves Francois Smierciak
   


--- On Sat, 1/24/09, Alexandre Benoit <pathe90rpm at yahoo.fr> wrote:

> From: Alexandre Benoit <pathe90rpm at yahoo.fr>
> Subject: Re: [78-L] OT: Racialism.
> To: 78-L at 78online.com
> Date: Saturday, January 24, 2009, 8:13 AM
> Shouldn't we be glad that we all are not alike? 
> Shouldn't we be proud of our differences? 
>  
> Here in Europe we all know that Poles are not like the
> Swiss, or Norwegians not like Italians. 
> But many of you US-Americans want to put it all into one
> stew. What an illusion ! 
> A dangerous illusion. We've seen where that leads to. 
>  
> Some office holding US-Americans have never understood the
> differences beween Pushtuns, Uzbeks, Kizilbashi, Tadjiks,
> Hazara, Beludji, Aimaki, Turkmen and Nooristani. 
> They only see ''Afghanis''. And want to
> bring modern democracy to a archaic tribal society, where
> you are 100% committed to your tribe. How naive! 
>  
> Amazing that it's socially acceptable to say, 'the
> Swiss are meticulously precise in their 
> work', or 'Italians have an excellent feeling for
> design and fashion'. But don't you ever say 
> anything, err.... doubtful...  about an ethnic group!  
>  
> Alex 
> 
> 
>       
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