The Hot Seat

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. - Winston Churchill

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

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.

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1 Comments:

  • hey, thanks for mentioning the Uighurs. I lived in the Uighur Autonomous (not really autonomous) region of China for over a year and speak Uighur. It's such an unusual thing to find a brother with the social awareness (especially in America) to know anything about the Uighur people. I live only a few miles from the Chinese border now and even here when I mention Mandarin nobody understands unless I say Chinese. As if there were only one language spoken in China! So thanks for highlighting the cultural diversity of this complicated country.

    By Blogger gulkiz, at 11:22 AM  

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