The Culture Wars- Post One

It has taken a number of things to bring us to this point.

The rail and the airplane eased travel for persons of all economic classes.

The decline in racism and colonialism gave people around the world hope for ruling their own destiny.

The gentrification of the "first-world" and corresponding needs for labor and retirement support.

All have played their part in forcing the confrontation which, I believe will form one the the primary issues of domestic policy for the entire first world.

I speak of the so called culture wars: conflicts played out in the United States by concerns over Blacks and Hispanics and in Europe by Muslims of varying ethnic backgrounds.

All are based on an old misunderstanding which we are just now beginning to unravel.

Many have been led to believe that nations are founded on and inseparable from their cultures.

This is a tragic error in reasoning.

Nations are primarily a function of geography though historical conflicts also play a part. By nature they are political constructs formed when a group seeks to exercise control over a region.

Often, in a particular region a culture will spring up and indeed cultures are often tied to the land.

But a land may be host to many different cultures, often in the same nation and no contradiction is inherent in this.

The recognition of a multicultural nation disturbs many. Too often the politics of nationhood gets tangled in ethnicity when a majority group seeks to claim dominion over an entire nation despite the presence of minorities.

The Han Chinese are a good example. China was once (and in some ways still is) an ethnically diverse territory.

The Yao. The Manchus. The Uighur. The Zhuang. Dozens of different peoples populated this corner of the world. However during imperial time the Han Chinese did what ethnic groups often did until the age of colonialism finally died.

Expansion and Assimilation once went hand in hand.

Today expansion is dying. The United Nations charter was first and foremost a rebuke of expansionism and empire building.

Assimilation, another holdover from that more primitive time continues to pose a threat to liberty.

The west has a choice to make now as to what is more important, our values or the ethnic nature of our countries...
more later.

Swiss Minaret Ban

We often fail to consider the importance of Western philosophy to our daily lives. For those of us that live in countries where we are free to say, do, and vote as we please it forms the essential fabric of our daily lives. Human rights are the single greatest achievement of Western thought, but implementing is a hard battle that is far from over.

The chief enemies have been power struggles and intolerance. Both are well represented in this latest story.

Members of the right-wing Swiss People's Party, currently the largest party in the Swiss parliament, have launched a campaign to have the building of minarets banned.

They claim the minaret is not necessary for worship, but is rather a symbol of Islamic law, and as such incompatible with Switzerland's legal system.

Link

Now this is a clear violation of the Freedom of Religion as described in the European Convention on Human Rights, but after France got away with its headscarf ban, and it the crossfire caught yarmulkes and turbans as well it stands to reason that the neutered court in Strasbourg may actually let this continue.

I for one am rather tired of seeing xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry destroy our most important values, all so a few politicians can score brownie points.

Some feel we should simply wink at this is the face of greater atrocities occurring in the Islamic world, but no amount of wrongdoing on their part will excuse trashing our own civilization.

I'll be back with more on some of the route causes of this type of behavior.