![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThis posting was drawn from the blogosphere; specifically, it was a long comment of mine made in response to this comment by Nelson Ascher on the Europundits blog. I thought I'd post it here so it wouldn't be cut up. Comments are welcome!
It's the Arabs themselves who claim to be a nation artificially divided by colonialism and imperialism. They have been seeking unity sometimes: the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria),
Which collapsed, incidentally, in 1960, and fell permanently apart when Egypt made its separate accomodation with Israel in the late 1970s.
And that was probably the single most coherent effort at achieving some kind of Arab unity, and that failed. There's the Gulf Cooperation Council, but that isn't really working; likewise, there is the Union of the Arab Maghreb in North Africa.
Indeed. Note, now, that Greater Syria doesn't include Egypt, it doesn't include Iraq--briefly put, it doesn't extended beyond the Levant, and the lands that in the late 19th century that were grouped together as an area vaguely defined as "Syria." Pan-Arab rhetoric is being used by the Syrian government to justify a round of territorial expansion in its immediate hinterland that would make the people in power even more powerful; compare Prussia in mid-19th century Germany.
Gretaer Iraq (with Kuwait, Arabistan etc.).
And it's important to note that Greater Iraq never got off the ground. In the Iran-Iraq War, it turned out that the ethnic Arabs living on the Iranian side of the frontier didn't think of themselves as Iraqis or even as Arabs in the political sense; the Gulf states that bankrolled Iraq did so only because they feared revolutionary Iran. And when Iraq tried to annex Kuwait, it managed to unite the Arab world against it.
No Brazilian thinks of himself as a Mexican, but if he did, fine.
But that isn't the question. We're talking about supranational categories above and beyond relatively parochial national (Egyptian, Palestinian, Algerian) and regional (Maghrebin, Levantine, et cetera) identities. There's no reason for a Brazilian to think of himself as Mexican; but would the Brazilian and the Mexican think of themselves as Latin Americans?
If Germans and the French can be "Europeans", why not the Arabs.
Who ever said such couldn't be the case?
Mr. Ascher, you seem to be assuming that people can't possess multiple identities and use them as they wish. Inside a large nation-state, for example, people from different regions and classes when dealing with others from their nation identify themselves in those regional and class terms--I'm a Prince Edward Islander from the middle classes of the Island, and when I'm with Canadians who aren't Islanders and aren't middle class I think of myself in terms of being an Islander. Place us Canadians against someone else, and we consolidate ourselves. Me against my brother, we against our cousin, that old story.
Human rights? I didn't know that Israel, like more than one European country, has been sponsoring genocide (the real, not the metaphoric one) in faraway lands like, say, Iraq (remember the Kurds being exterminated with Mirages and German chemicals?)
And on the theme of First World states supporting Third World genocides, let's not forget the United States re: Guatemala?
Let's be serious. Saddam wasn't killing Kurds in Anfal because French or Germans were paying him, no more than Guatemalan military dictators were happily massacring Maya peasants because the United States wanted them too. Both genocides happened because people in Iraq and Guatemala wanted to kill their unfortunate ethnic minorities.
or Rwanda, and What about the Dutch in Srebrenica? I love the Euros and their lack of hypocrisy.
You do know, right, that there were only a hundred lightly-armed Dutch soldiers in Srebrenica as against thousands of heavily-armed Serb fighters. At best, the Dutch could have gotten themselves massacred alongside those civilians. And that the aftereffects of the Srebrenica massacre included the collapse of the Dutch government? And, again, that the massacre wouldn't have happened but for the desire of Serbs to kill Muslims, and that the First World wasn't complicit.
Here's a fisking of a Ralph Peters article touching upon these themes I did a while back. Thoughts?
Well, there would not be a war over Kosovo because the Euros are not fond (with the Habsburg and German exception) of exterminating Serbs:they leave it to the Croats and Turks. But Jews? The Europeans hate the Arabs, not only their own. Then why do they back them? Because they can perform lowly jobs like sweeping the streets, burning synagogues and killing Jews.
Um, do you really believe this? Do you believe that the situation of Arab immigrants in Europe is any different from Hispanic immigrants in the United States? Do you really believe that Arab/Jewish tensions (well, mainly conducted by Arabs) in European urban ghettoes are different from black/Asian relations (again, mainly conducted by blacks) in American urban ghettoes in anything but scale and the addition of Islamic fundamentalism?
Come on. Nobody has any real sympathy for the Palestinians; not the other Arabs (Black September? Lebanon? Kuwait 1991? Egypt?), not the rest of the world, not even the Palestinians themselves, otherwise they wouldn't be shooting their own backs for over a century. But, if everybody hates the Pals, why are they backed? Because everybody hates the Jews even more.
Or, maybe it's because the Israeli state is doing things that are as nasty in their own way.
That's the bad thing about minorities being emancipated: Their members can be just as evil as members of any majority population once they're liberated. At the benign of the spectrum, Québécois can legislate against the use of English; at the malign end, former Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire can be just as skilled at massacring their Muslim neighbours as, more than a century ago, those neighbours were at massacring them.
People, as Depeche Mode said, are people; we're all capable of evil once we're free to do so, particularly if we can justify it.
Look: the whole problem in the Middle East was created by the Euros and their nice anti-Semitic feelings.
Including, presumably, the Britain that in the mid-19th century elected Disraeli (a man though Christian who was very proud of his Jewish roots) and the France that in the 1930s elected Leon Blum prime minister?
Then, why don't they adopt the Paleos they pity so much? Give them Bavaria or Provence or Carinthia or even Belgium.
1. People already live in Bavaria, Provence, Carinthia, Belgium, and anywhere else you can think of. Even the Sami homeland far in northern Scandinavia is populated. There are no more empty frontiers in Europe, if there ever were.
2. The Palestinians already have a homeland, cut up as it is, in the West Bank and Gaza. True, only a minority of Palestinians live in those areas; but then, only a minority of Jews live in Israel, only a minority of Armenians live in Armenia, only a minority of Overseas Chinese live in Singapore, et cetera. It's as suitable a homeland as any.
3. The 21st century is supposed to be an era in which democratic states don't engage in ethnic cleansing. If Israel was to "assist" Palestinians into leaving their homeland so that Israel could have larger boundaries and fewer Arabs within those boundaries, that would count as ethnic cleansing. Civilized states don't--or at least, shouldn't--aid in ethnic cleansing beyond the resettlement of permanently displaced refugees.
We agree about the importance of Uruguay, in historical and geographical terms, to Brazil, right? How would Brazilians nowadays react if, say, Palestinians were given all of Uruguay as their new homeland without giving the Uruguayans any say in the matter? Would armed hostililities with Palestine-in-Uruguay and its sponsors be a possibility? How about bloody native-Uruguayan terrorism?
Brazil is, as the US, a collection of lands and territories stolen first from the native-Americans and then from our Spanish neighbours.
The Spanish neighbours were somewhat less important, though; the territories taken from Brazil's Spanish and post-Spanish neighbours were mainly frontier areas, even now (save for Rio Grande do Sul and neighbouring areas in putative Geralia) largely underdeveloped. The modern core of Brazil--Sao Paulo, Rio de Janerio, Minas Gerais--was taken from Native Americans, as was the old sugar-growing-era core of Brazil.
It is not an European nation-state and it is neither a federation like the US.
But Brazilians and Brazil do share an identity, right? And they'd be generally hostile to shedding even a relatively marginal area to a foreign power, right?
Let's go into alternate history and say that Portuguese America broke up after independence like the Spanish Americas. Would Geralians or Paulistas really no0t care at all what happened to Bahians?
Actually, by the way, as a kind of melting pot, Brazil accepted millions of immigrants: some 12 million Christian Arabs, over a million Japanese etc. For most of the 20th century Sao Paulo had been an almost Italian city.
There's a wonderful overview of Sao Paulo's history as a melting pothere and one on its modern-day role as such here.
It happens that, unlike in the Middle East, immigrants were welcome, given rights and nobody tried to murder or expell them.
Hmm. Which Middle East are you talking about, here? In the 19th century Egypt of Mehmet Ali, for instance, immigrants--Europeans, mainly--were quite welcome, given their importance to Egypt's (alas-aborted) programs of modernization.
In the specific case of Israel/Palestine, it's sadly not surprising that there was violence, since the Jewish immigrants intended to use the weight of numbers and foreign support to establish their own polity, a Jewish nation-state. Leaving aside the justice in this goal, is it really surprising that Palestinian Arabs (a broad category, yes) eventually ended up being just as hostile to Jewish immigrants as Europeans would be in the hypothetical future scenario of Arab immigrants trying to get foreign support to make large swathes of Europe an Islamic Arab republic?
Thus they could integrate in the country and did not have to create their own government and army to protect themselves. If the French began to slaughter the Maghrebins or the Germans tried to do the same to their Turks and these reacted declaring the administrative authonomy of certain regions in France and Germany and forming their oun army, I would back them.
Which is fair.
Yes, I know about the Guatemalan massacres, probably the worst in Latin America, but tell me, please, why weren't the Guatemalans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Mexicans or Vietnamese or even the Japanese the authors of 911?
My guess is that there wasn't an apocalyptic ideology/theology that was widespread enough to get Guatemalans or Vietnamese to pilot planes into skyscrapers.
(I mentioned the Mirages because the Palestinians keep talking about the Appache Helicopters supplied by the US)
Again, which is fair. Saying that Europeans are distinctly more immoral than Americans, when everyone's supplying their Third World génocidaire clients weapons systems of one form or another, strikes me as inconsistent.
</lj-cut
It's the Arabs themselves who claim to be a nation artificially divided by colonialism and imperialism. They have been seeking unity sometimes: the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria),
Which collapsed, incidentally, in 1960, and fell permanently apart when Egypt made its separate accomodation with Israel in the late 1970s.
And that was probably the single most coherent effort at achieving some kind of Arab unity, and that failed. There's the Gulf Cooperation Council, but that isn't really working; likewise, there is the Union of the Arab Maghreb in North Africa.
Indeed. Note, now, that Greater Syria doesn't include Egypt, it doesn't include Iraq--briefly put, it doesn't extended beyond the Levant, and the lands that in the late 19th century that were grouped together as an area vaguely defined as "Syria." Pan-Arab rhetoric is being used by the Syrian government to justify a round of territorial expansion in its immediate hinterland that would make the people in power even more powerful; compare Prussia in mid-19th century Germany.
Gretaer Iraq (with Kuwait, Arabistan etc.).
And it's important to note that Greater Iraq never got off the ground. In the Iran-Iraq War, it turned out that the ethnic Arabs living on the Iranian side of the frontier didn't think of themselves as Iraqis or even as Arabs in the political sense; the Gulf states that bankrolled Iraq did so only because they feared revolutionary Iran. And when Iraq tried to annex Kuwait, it managed to unite the Arab world against it.
No Brazilian thinks of himself as a Mexican, but if he did, fine.
But that isn't the question. We're talking about supranational categories above and beyond relatively parochial national (Egyptian, Palestinian, Algerian) and regional (Maghrebin, Levantine, et cetera) identities. There's no reason for a Brazilian to think of himself as Mexican; but would the Brazilian and the Mexican think of themselves as Latin Americans?
If Germans and the French can be "Europeans", why not the Arabs.
Who ever said such couldn't be the case?
Mr. Ascher, you seem to be assuming that people can't possess multiple identities and use them as they wish. Inside a large nation-state, for example, people from different regions and classes when dealing with others from their nation identify themselves in those regional and class terms--I'm a Prince Edward Islander from the middle classes of the Island, and when I'm with Canadians who aren't Islanders and aren't middle class I think of myself in terms of being an Islander. Place us Canadians against someone else, and we consolidate ourselves. Me against my brother, we against our cousin, that old story.
Human rights? I didn't know that Israel, like more than one European country, has been sponsoring genocide (the real, not the metaphoric one) in faraway lands like, say, Iraq (remember the Kurds being exterminated with Mirages and German chemicals?)
And on the theme of First World states supporting Third World genocides, let's not forget the United States re: Guatemala?
Let's be serious. Saddam wasn't killing Kurds in Anfal because French or Germans were paying him, no more than Guatemalan military dictators were happily massacring Maya peasants because the United States wanted them too. Both genocides happened because people in Iraq and Guatemala wanted to kill their unfortunate ethnic minorities.
or Rwanda, and What about the Dutch in Srebrenica? I love the Euros and their lack of hypocrisy.
You do know, right, that there were only a hundred lightly-armed Dutch soldiers in Srebrenica as against thousands of heavily-armed Serb fighters. At best, the Dutch could have gotten themselves massacred alongside those civilians. And that the aftereffects of the Srebrenica massacre included the collapse of the Dutch government? And, again, that the massacre wouldn't have happened but for the desire of Serbs to kill Muslims, and that the First World wasn't complicit.
Here's a fisking of a Ralph Peters article touching upon these themes I did a while back. Thoughts?
Well, there would not be a war over Kosovo because the Euros are not fond (with the Habsburg and German exception) of exterminating Serbs:they leave it to the Croats and Turks. But Jews? The Europeans hate the Arabs, not only their own. Then why do they back them? Because they can perform lowly jobs like sweeping the streets, burning synagogues and killing Jews.
Um, do you really believe this? Do you believe that the situation of Arab immigrants in Europe is any different from Hispanic immigrants in the United States? Do you really believe that Arab/Jewish tensions (well, mainly conducted by Arabs) in European urban ghettoes are different from black/Asian relations (again, mainly conducted by blacks) in American urban ghettoes in anything but scale and the addition of Islamic fundamentalism?
Come on. Nobody has any real sympathy for the Palestinians; not the other Arabs (Black September? Lebanon? Kuwait 1991? Egypt?), not the rest of the world, not even the Palestinians themselves, otherwise they wouldn't be shooting their own backs for over a century. But, if everybody hates the Pals, why are they backed? Because everybody hates the Jews even more.
Or, maybe it's because the Israeli state is doing things that are as nasty in their own way.
That's the bad thing about minorities being emancipated: Their members can be just as evil as members of any majority population once they're liberated. At the benign of the spectrum, Québécois can legislate against the use of English; at the malign end, former Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire can be just as skilled at massacring their Muslim neighbours as, more than a century ago, those neighbours were at massacring them.
People, as Depeche Mode said, are people; we're all capable of evil once we're free to do so, particularly if we can justify it.
Look: the whole problem in the Middle East was created by the Euros and their nice anti-Semitic feelings.
Including, presumably, the Britain that in the mid-19th century elected Disraeli (a man though Christian who was very proud of his Jewish roots) and the France that in the 1930s elected Leon Blum prime minister?
Then, why don't they adopt the Paleos they pity so much? Give them Bavaria or Provence or Carinthia or even Belgium.
1. People already live in Bavaria, Provence, Carinthia, Belgium, and anywhere else you can think of. Even the Sami homeland far in northern Scandinavia is populated. There are no more empty frontiers in Europe, if there ever were.
2. The Palestinians already have a homeland, cut up as it is, in the West Bank and Gaza. True, only a minority of Palestinians live in those areas; but then, only a minority of Jews live in Israel, only a minority of Armenians live in Armenia, only a minority of Overseas Chinese live in Singapore, et cetera. It's as suitable a homeland as any.
3. The 21st century is supposed to be an era in which democratic states don't engage in ethnic cleansing. If Israel was to "assist" Palestinians into leaving their homeland so that Israel could have larger boundaries and fewer Arabs within those boundaries, that would count as ethnic cleansing. Civilized states don't--or at least, shouldn't--aid in ethnic cleansing beyond the resettlement of permanently displaced refugees.
We agree about the importance of Uruguay, in historical and geographical terms, to Brazil, right? How would Brazilians nowadays react if, say, Palestinians were given all of Uruguay as their new homeland without giving the Uruguayans any say in the matter? Would armed hostililities with Palestine-in-Uruguay and its sponsors be a possibility? How about bloody native-Uruguayan terrorism?
Brazil is, as the US, a collection of lands and territories stolen first from the native-Americans and then from our Spanish neighbours.
The Spanish neighbours were somewhat less important, though; the territories taken from Brazil's Spanish and post-Spanish neighbours were mainly frontier areas, even now (save for Rio Grande do Sul and neighbouring areas in putative Geralia) largely underdeveloped. The modern core of Brazil--Sao Paulo, Rio de Janerio, Minas Gerais--was taken from Native Americans, as was the old sugar-growing-era core of Brazil.
It is not an European nation-state and it is neither a federation like the US.
But Brazilians and Brazil do share an identity, right? And they'd be generally hostile to shedding even a relatively marginal area to a foreign power, right?
Let's go into alternate history and say that Portuguese America broke up after independence like the Spanish Americas. Would Geralians or Paulistas really no0t care at all what happened to Bahians?
Actually, by the way, as a kind of melting pot, Brazil accepted millions of immigrants: some 12 million Christian Arabs, over a million Japanese etc. For most of the 20th century Sao Paulo had been an almost Italian city.
There's a wonderful overview of Sao Paulo's history as a melting pothere and one on its modern-day role as such here.
It happens that, unlike in the Middle East, immigrants were welcome, given rights and nobody tried to murder or expell them.
Hmm. Which Middle East are you talking about, here? In the 19th century Egypt of Mehmet Ali, for instance, immigrants--Europeans, mainly--were quite welcome, given their importance to Egypt's (alas-aborted) programs of modernization.
In the specific case of Israel/Palestine, it's sadly not surprising that there was violence, since the Jewish immigrants intended to use the weight of numbers and foreign support to establish their own polity, a Jewish nation-state. Leaving aside the justice in this goal, is it really surprising that Palestinian Arabs (a broad category, yes) eventually ended up being just as hostile to Jewish immigrants as Europeans would be in the hypothetical future scenario of Arab immigrants trying to get foreign support to make large swathes of Europe an Islamic Arab republic?
Thus they could integrate in the country and did not have to create their own government and army to protect themselves. If the French began to slaughter the Maghrebins or the Germans tried to do the same to their Turks and these reacted declaring the administrative authonomy of certain regions in France and Germany and forming their oun army, I would back them.
Which is fair.
Yes, I know about the Guatemalan massacres, probably the worst in Latin America, but tell me, please, why weren't the Guatemalans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Mexicans or Vietnamese or even the Japanese the authors of 911?
My guess is that there wasn't an apocalyptic ideology/theology that was widespread enough to get Guatemalans or Vietnamese to pilot planes into skyscrapers.
(I mentioned the Mirages because the Palestinians keep talking about the Appache Helicopters supplied by the US)
Again, which is fair. Saying that Europeans are distinctly more immoral than Americans, when everyone's supplying their Third World génocidaire clients weapons systems of one form or another, strikes me as inconsistent.
</lj-cut
