Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/12/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I suspect we are confusing several different -- and horrid! -- developments. First, there is ethnic integration enforced by a dominant culture on a subservient culture. (My forebears had to carry, as young kids, sticks tied to their belts. Whenever an adult heard them speaking of the Gaelic, the adult notched the stick, and the child received that number of whacks from his father in the evening, and so "the Gaelic was beaten out of them", to the gratification of English factory owners hungry for cheap Irish labor.) Such integration generally does not involve death or even political pressures, just some occasionally brutal compulsions to adopt the mores of the dominant culture. Second, there is cultural alienation. "Negroes and Blacks Need Not Apply" or "Soldiers and Dogs Stay Off The Grass" or the latent anti-Semitism which marks European and American culture or the growing anti-Hispanic and anti-Oriental bias of the modern US ethos are such. Third, there is political exploitation. The Normans set themselves up as masters first of Normandy and then of England. They gradually came to be integrated into the political ethos of the local culture but, in the interim, there was much blood and horror cast about. The goal here, though, was political conquest and not elimination of another people or its culture. And such has been the Israeli experience with Palestinians, as was the Spanish experience with Mayan or Inca and the USian experience with the Indian. ("The only good Indian is a dead Indian" is a VERY late statement: more common was the effort to encourage the Indians to live on backwater reservations and to simply leave the Europeans to the exploitation of available resources.) In general, the horrorific exterminations of the Communists in the Soviet Union, China, Korea, and Cambodia fall into this category. Fourth, there is "ethnic cleansing", the effort to remove another people completely from the board. Hutu and WaTusi, Non-Jew and Jew, and so forth are repellant to our minds because the solution chosen is, well, "final": the perpetrators are not saying, "I disagree with your values": they ARE saying, "I so very much disagree with your culture that I want you and yours and all of your works to be eradicated, root and branch, from our lives." The divergence can be cultural (Hutu and WaTusi) or religious (Catholic Croat and Orthodox Serb and Muslim Bosnian or Kosovan) or ethnic (German and Jew), but the effect is terrifying. (Novel, indeed, was the Serbian solution to the long-term Bosnian situation: mass rape of young Bosnian girls to engender children of mixed heritage but, as this was a religious war, I doubt that the ultimate effect would have been of more than passing interest to historians, as these children will be raised by the Bosnian community as Muslims.) In other words, trying to force any cultural tyranny into one single mold is deceitful and misleading. None of these are acceptable methods but, certainly, the British effort to turn the Irish into a subset of their own culture was far more benign than is the Serbian effort to kill off the Croats and Bosnians in toto. But all are troubling. I am a USian Episcopalian of mixed Scots/Irish/German/Hugeneot descent, mired with all of the religious and racial intolerances of my generation and culture. (But, hey, I used to cadge invites to my friends' Bar Mitzvahs to scarf up all of that wonderful food -- my, er, adiposity derives in large measure from a love of gefilte fish and the like. Make my day!) Are ANY of us clean of these intolerances? I hope so, but I can only speak for myself, and I certainly am not. (For one thing, I DO suffer the average Celt's mixture of respect and detestation of the English, and that was passed on to me vividly by my father, who probably was unaware of this bias of his.) It is a troubling issue. I have Jewish friends who collect Zeiss Ikon but who will not purchase anything manufactured after 30 JAN 33 -- and I have other Jewish friends who drive Volkswagens, Audis, BMWs, or Mercedes/Chryslers. Intolerance and bias and disdain are human universals, complex and, well, yes, troubling. I'd be a LOT more comfortable discussing the thread used by Carl Zeiss Jena on their Mikrotars, which seems to be of the same size, but a different pitch, from that used by Leitz Wetzlar on their vaunter Micro-Summars ... Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!