Re: Is the Issue still Integration?
by
Melvyl
04/18/2008, 8:01 AM
"Injected?" No, in the terms of your argument, fascism was already present. All I had to do was give it a name, and you have to admit, the name is pretty obvious, given the circumstances.
France's citizens of african origin are having trouble integrating? Is it really up to them to "integrate?" At what point will they be properly "integrated?" When they're no longer black or arab? When they have blue eyes?
Look, Bunky, NATIONALISM, which you seem to think is a great thing to which China is somehow entitled and which makes people stronger and less decorative in your estimation, is poison. While it is toxic even in small doses and small countries it is worse than that when the countries are large, and China is large enough that it's reasonable to say it isn't a country at all, but rather an empire, as the Soviet Union was under Stalin.
We have idiot politicians, like the lamentable Bush, who think putting on flag lapel pins and mixing militarism and nationalism is a great way to get popular and be some kind of hero. And yes, when they do that, it reminds me of the Nazis, and this isn't just some stupid internet game. This is real life. Hu and the other evil old men are working up to something. They're looking for justification in advance for what they do, and the simpering twit in charge of our government seems unable to grasp that. Tibetans are not just faced with "Sinofication," but with genocide. You can tell me I'm wrong, and you can pretend nothing's going to happen, and this is just about your stupid sports festival and an exile community that's gotten tired of being ignored. Have fun pretending, but this isn't just some rhetorical dodge of last resort.
Integration doesn't mean the loss of identity for minority populations, especially if there isn't such a thing as a national identity which they are supposed to take on in return. The nation state, with its fantastic common-cultural identity, is a bad dream of the European past. I pointed to the Nazis, because that bad dream was responsible for two world wars. China, which was on the business end of Japanese fascism, has ample reason to remember what that's like. And since China's rulers have toyed with fascism since then, most notably during the Cultural Revolution, I don't see how anyone who's Chinese can have forgotten that.
The end of the road you're advocating for China is fascism. For some reason you don't see that, and you think it's just something I grasped as a convenient insult in order to win a cheap argument. The stakes, for America, during the Civil Rights Movement, were always higher than whether or not kids in Selma got to use the common water fountain. The issue was not whether people of color would be "allowed to integrate." because they/we were already integrated; we were already here. The question was what kind of country we would ALL have.
The country itself had to change, and to give it credit, it somewhat has. If you genuinely want the regional minorities of the Chinese empire to integrate into a national culture that does not, as yet, exist, then China will have to change; will have to integrate as well, because it's a two-way street. Otherwise, what you're talking about here isn't integration: it's assimilation, and for ethnic minorities, as the jews of Germany, the arabs of France and Koreans living in Japan have discovered, assimilation has limited success and limited rewards, especially in a country that's going fascist.