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To: John Lacelle who wrote (15868)	1/28/2000 6:17:00 AM
From: MNI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

that Germany and Japan still maintain their ethnic purity, right or wrong. Wrong, as far as Germany is concerned. Also, I dislike your misuse of the word 'pure' in your reasoning. A neutral expression would be 'monoethnic'. And I would request you to use this neutral expression if you don't really want to associate the notion of 'purity' with mono-ethnicity. Most important: Germany never was monoethnic in the first place. It is a myth of the 19th century. It has nearly totally been replaced by other myths, and looms only in some dark places of the public mind. I doubt the multi-culturality of Yugoslavia and the Soviet union so much that I would request of you again, like I did in April and June, not to use the word so incorrectly for those states. I would rather say they were monocultural with a totalitarian strain for enforcing this mono-culture, and a propaganda that pretended this culture to be the workers culture. A German example: I never understood why Rostock wharf workers should use the same pretended Saxon dialect ('State Saxon', a creation of the socialist unity party SED) like Leipzig steel-workers. However they did as long as the GDR existed, and they would not enter the media if they didn't. All of a sudden there was Mecklenburgish again in 1990 ... strange to call such countries mono-ethnic. Do you also claim multi-culturality for Ciaocescu's Romania, which was full of ethnic repression, sometimes enforced brutally? And do you also claim that Ciacescu's regime declined for their being a government with a sensitive handling of their 'multi-cutural society'? I think the opposite is nearer to the truth, and you should accept that - or you will live on in the errors of the past. MNI.

To: John Lacelle who wrote (15868)	1/28/2000 9:13:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Re: By your reasoning, this should not have happened. -John And by your reasoning, the US shouldn't be today the world's leader economically, culturally, and geopolitically.... According to your obsolete equation--the highest your ethnic purity = the highest your overall performance-- today, the US should be merely a crumbling banana republic lagging Russia in technology, lagging Japan in financial clout, and lagging Europe in cultural influence.... Remember my answer to French Statesman Georges Clemenceau who quipped: "The U.S. is the only country that went from barbarity to decadence, without the detour through culture!" Well, since Clemenceau died before the outbreak of WWII and even before Nazism could display its full-fledged toxicity, I can all the more easily retort that Europe was the only region that went from decadence (the Roaring 1920s) to barbarity (WWII) with the detour through culture (Einstein, Freud, Picasso, Heidegger, Maurice Ravel,...) As regards Germany's ethnic purity in the post-WWII years, suffice it to say that over two millions Gastarbeiters were called in from Turkey... As to the allegedly "miraculous" recovery of both Germany and Japan, it was not as much related to their ethnic stock as it was to the self-serving US strategy. Putting the two losers of WWII back on track was a prerequisite to a viable American hegemony vis-a-vis the USSR and the PRC. Besides, Western Europe was the largest outlet for the US's Fordist mass-produced outputs. This last condition, BTW, is no longer true: today, Asia represents the biggest potential for the US. Just look at what happened with Coca-Cola: over 6,000 jobs are scheduled to be trimmed over the next year. Half of them concern the Atlanta HQ and half of them concern Europe --and no restructuring is planned for the Asian market. As we put it in French: C'est un signe qui ne trompe pas. Gus.