Post

Zionism and Other Cases of Nation-Building (Luciano Dondero, Italy, 09/04/16 7:07 am)

Commenting on my post of 2 September, John Eipper wrote that he does not "see a clear parallel between Zionism and 'Germanism' or 'Italianism.' With some notable exceptions, the birth of modern Germany and Italy had to do with politically uniting the people who were already there."

I apologise for my inability to express myself clearly.

The point about the fictional "Germanism" or "Italianism" has to do with facts on the ground.
Italy and Germany exist, so does Israel. Nobody sees fit to invoke "anti-Germanism" or "anti-Italianism" because, unlike anti-Semitism, they did not really exist in the real world.
But it may be useful to explore that avenue.

I will list a few democracies--the US, Russia, Turkey, Australia, Canada and New Zealand--and then ask a simple question: which of these were built by "politically uniting the people who were already there"?

The correct answer is: "None."

But, again, nobody, even those who would like to undo some of the nation-building undertaken by these countries (I'm in favor of carving out some of Turkey in favor of the Kurds, for instance), does so in the name of an "anti-this" or "anti-that" ideology. Usually, no such ideologies even exist, whereas there is a spurious "anti-Zionism," which is only a cover for something else: a crime that does not dare to speak its name, so to say.

Let me say a few words about Australia and New Zealand--probably there is nobody from those countries in WAIS, so I can't be suspected of being Australasian-phobic.

Both nations came into being as a result of British expansionism in the 1700s, but in somewhat different ways. Australia was such an inhospitable and faraway place that they sent the scum of the earth there: all sorts of delinquents of both sexes. They were tough cookies and proceeded to build a real place, in the process almost entirely wiping out the local fauna, animal and human beings alike. If you think that I am being politically incorrect, Aborigenes were hunted as animals until not so long ago, and generally regarded and treated as beasts by our fellow Europeans settling there.

Little did they know that the local population is actually one of the best specimen of pure Homo Sapiens, because they reached Australia on foot and sail some 40 thousand years ago, after a trek that started somewhere in Southern Africa several tens of thousands of years before. Unlike us Europeans, the Aborigenes have no trace of Neanderthal blood in their DNA.

In New Zealand, the British met a quite different population, the Maoris, a fierce people not unlike those Africans who managed to defeat the Italians and the British themselves on a battlefield in the late 1800s.

Like the Zulus, the Maoris were not the original inhabitants of their stretch of land, they came to NZ sometime around 800/1000 CE, and they did the wiping out of those people who lived there.

As a result of their fierceness, today the Maoris represent a real minority in NZ (some percent) while the Aborigenes are basically non-existent. Of course there may not have been very many of them to begin with.

The Aborigenes were hunter-gatherers in one of the harshest places on earth, the Australian outback, and yet had managed to survive there for an incredibly long time, by having an almost invisible presence. Today, in one of the final twists and turns of liberal racism disguised as political correctness, "their ancestry is protected," meaning it becomes impossible to conduct a serious scientific inquiry into their past, because somehow "it would go against their religious beliefs."  At first it was ok to kill them, now they are regarded not as one key piece of mankind, but as a separate (but equal?) chunk.

We have many things to learn about our own past, and Australia is a special place where we could study it.

JE comments:  I was speaking specifically of German and Italian nation-building, but touché to Luciano Dondero in the cases of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US.  (Russia is a democracy?  We'll leave that for a later discussion.)  Among Australian WAISers, we have Martin Storey in Perth.  Our Kiwi colleague Paul Davis has been silent for many years.  Are you still out there, Paul?

On the Maoris, this 2000 RH post deserves a replay:

http://waisworld.org/go.jsp?id=02a&objectType=post&o=62464&objectTypeId=56714&topicId=4985

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