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Re: Is the Issue Integration?
by Melvyl
This WAS my thread. Now it's yours and welcome to it.

You don't know what integration meant to teh civil rights movement in America, and you don't want to know because, like most Chinese chauvinists, you don't particularly care about any culture other than your own. You threw a list, cut and pasted from heaven knows where, wikipedia most likely, of languages and dialects spoken in France at one point or another. You failed to grasp that some of those languages (Flemish, German, Catalan, Basque) are spoken and taught in schools as national languages, or at least the languages (in the case of the Basques) of recognized autonomous ethnic regions.

Besides, the people who are REALLY excluded and treated like shit in France are the children and grandchildren of Algerian arabs who came to France to work, but were never allowed to become French, or remain Arab, and so occupy a kind of limbo of ethnic nonexistence -- what you have in mind for the Tibetans and Uighers, who won't be Han but won't be allowed to be non-Han either.

I'm cognizant that China has a big national chip on its shoulder, and this whole Tibet kerfuffle in the middle of what was supposed to be a harmless explosion of nationalist sentiment is terribly unwelcome. There's a lovely story in today's papers about a student at Duke who wasn't quite fast enough to support the party line on Tibet and has received death threats, while her family was forced into hiding. Apparently, not that much has changed since the Cultural Revolution.

You have apparently chosen Nazi Germany as your model for a national unification program based partly on sports and other rituals of mass entertainment and strenuous joy. You should rent a copy of Leni Riefenstahl's _Berlin Olympiad_, which appears to reflect the sort of "strong, cohesive national culture_ based on sports and kitsch you seem to have in mind.
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