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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (86849)	10/30/2000 11:08:42 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Daniel, I'd already read the Kaplan article when I saw your post, and would like to share my impressions of it with you. I have really enjoyed some of Kaplan's work; he is a consummate stylist. But he is essentially a travel-writer: there is hardly a spot on the globe he has not travelled through and then written about. Don't get me wrong: I am a devotee of good travel writing. It provides a perspective that only a fresh, observant eye can give. Problem is, Kaplan appears to think of himself as an analyst/expert, which is more than a little arrogant, when you consider he regards the whole world as his bailiwick. His technique of interviewing Georgians (and Georgians alone) about the situation there fails him. For example, he buys the Georgian line, hook line and sinker, about the "persecution" of the Georgians at the hands of their ethnic minorities, the Abkhaz and the Ossetians. Georgian refugees? Well, we humans tend to copy bad examples: the Georgians sent troops into Abkhazia, created thousands of ethnic Abkhaz refugees; and when the Abkhaz gained the upper hand, they retaliated in kind. But NO Georgian will EVER mention the Abkhaz or Ossetian refugees; the emphasis is ENTIRELY on what THEY have suffered. (This is the country that Sakharov once called a mini-empire, after all.) Kaplan's failure to look at both sides of the picture wouldn't be so bad if he didn't start off by tut-tutting about Westerners' lack of understanding of ethnic conflict. And to have written all that about Gamsakhurdia without once mentioning the core tenet of his nationalism, i.e.: Georgia for the Georgians. Ah, well. Let Kaplan claim the whole world as his province. What do I care? <mutter, mutter, mutter> :-) Joan