>>I try to understand many things in the world. Them folks, I failed.<<
One of the great themes of history is "us" against "them" - the real people against the inferior races. Plays out, as you know, on all sorts of different sublevels depending on where you stand and who you are.
"Us" vs. "them" is most bizarre when the differentiation is most trivial - Catholic vs. Protestant, Sunni vs. Shia. Defoe described it best in "Gulliver's Travels" - he described two groups that were killing each other over whether one ate one's breakfast egg round end first or pointed end first.
From a European perspective, people living in the Middle East invented the alphabet, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, surgery - although perhaps the mathematics came from the Greeks and the rest from India - or the Chinese, maybe?
giant.net.au
At any rate, the Arabs were civilized when my ancestors were still painting themselves blue. Everything we have we built on what the Arabs taught us in Spain, when it was under the Califate - we threw the Arabs out of Spain but the Ottoman Turks managed to extend their empire all the way to Hungary, setting the stage for never-ending wrangling in the Balkans between Christian and Muslim.
It is a tenet of the Islamic religion that non-believers should be - not sure what the exact word is, vanquished? Eradicated? Their religion has a lot of rules about behaviour that affect not only private life but public life, and living in harmony with those who have different beliefs is not one of the tenets of their faith.
In fairness, evangelical Christians also strive to convert "unbelievers", historically at swordpoint or at gunpoint, acting as pointmen in Europe for the unspeakable aspects of empire building and in the rest of the world for the unspeakable aspects of colonialism. The brutality and hypocrisy of such so-called "Christians" is well known, even today, but they never seem to see themselves as others see them. Maybe they just can't bear to look at themselves.
But we aren't alone in the use of transparant self-delusion in justification of the unspeakable. Apparently the Chinese justify their own brutal colonialism in Tibet by claiming that the Tibetan people have been liberated from feudalism.;^)
In my opinion, the real wild card in geopolitics in Asia is the Turkic people of central Asia. You guys haven't been nice to them, the Russians haven't been nice to them. The Uighurs want independence. I suppose since they are mostly Islamic, they will side with the other nations of Islam. Speaking of "us" vs. "them" - the way the Uighurs are being treated isn't very smart in the long run. No, arrogance and delusional self-justification are not limited to Christians and Muslims.:) |
