The big difference between Dr. King and the "identity" politicians who followed after him is that he believed in racial integration as the hope of America, and they believed in black power -- the message of Malcolm X. I don't see assholes like Hitchins carrying on about how Obama is no Malcolm X, because the differences there are immediately visible, and besides, they have nothing to GAIN from saying that.

But actually, now that Hitch mentions it. Obama has a lot in common with MLK, specifically having to do with integration, and there lies much of the difference between him and earlier "identity" leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Obama is not only a believer in integration, but he is a product and emblem of it. He is the visible representation of our hopes for a better life in which we are better people.

It's been a long time since racial integration was a cause in which some pride could be taken. Since then we've had to back down and hope for less, accepting a new and improved version of the Separate But Equal that was found by the Warren Court to be a guaranatee of permanent inequality -- which is precisely what it has turned out to be. We were told that affirmative action was unfair, and then that even diversity programs are not acceptable to White America. Now, as a heroic irony, we are told that integration,m represented by Dr.King, is what White America REALLY wanted all along. Excuse me, but I'm a little older than Hitchins, and I remember that integration was precisely NOT what those of you who identify as White wanted then, nor what you really want now.

What we all want, being Americans, is mostly the crap we've seen advertised. We're sure that if we only have enough of it, we'll be happy. Some of us want politicians who will cater to that desire structure. Some of us are willing to accept that we can do better than that, but only in wartime.

What we got from MLK, and get now from Obama, is the challenge to do better than that. Hitchins and his little pack of dittoheads here don't seem to want to rise to that challenge. Why am I not surprised? But I remain optimistic that most Americans will, when faced with the choice between hope and despair, choose hope,and the responsibilities that go with it.

So real, existing nations must die so a fictional, possible nation could have some future existence and why?

All hail identity politics!

You conflate two issues that have nothing to do with each other.

You think everything that's various and local about the world should be ground down and ploughed under in the name of progress. You think that's the same thing as opposing racism.

Intellectual vanity like yours is wasted on fools like you.

With respect to the USA you seem to say this: (a) integration of different ethnic groups is good; and (b) those who preach ethnic nationalism or separatism are bad.

With respect to the PRC you seem to say this: (a) integration of different ethnic groups is bad; and (b) those who preach ethnic nationalism or separatism are good.

Gosh, trapped me in the toils of my contradictions, haven't you?

Except that with respect to the USA I HAVE said that the social and cultural integration of different "racial groups" is good, particularly because race, as it's understood in this country, is mostly a fiction.

I haven't said that those who preach or preached separatism are bad, only that in this country they were not realistic, and the best they could hope for would be the false autonomy of the gated community, or the open-air prison of a Bantustan.

I don't claim to offer a universal social template with those views. They are as relative to the American situation as the movements and nationalisms to which I was responding.

With respect to the PRC what i said was that the wholesale destruction of non-Han cultures, larely for economic reasons, is bad. Destroying people's cultures so they can be made into subaltern participants in the culture of the imperial center is not integration -- properly speaking, it's imperialism.

Apparently you agree with the popular lie in the PRC that the Dalai Lama is a "splittist" who preaches separatism. Do you really believe that, or are you just another cynical parrot of your military owners; the evil old men who truly own and run China, incorporated? Logically, you have to be one or the other.

“Except that with respect to the USA I HAVE said that the social and cultural integration of different "racial groups" is good, particularly because race, as it's understood in this country, is mostly a fiction.”

Okay, so race is a fiction in the US. Then what you are really talking about is ethnicity. And you believe our ethnic groups should integrate into one mainstream society. That is what the “evil old men” in Beijing want too.

“Destroying people's cultures so they can be made into subaltern participants in the culture of the imperial center is not integration -- properly speaking, it's imperialism.”

Compare the records of the PRC and USA with regard to cultural imperialism and the destruction of indigenous cultures and/or bodies. The US comes in second.

Integration does not mean the exercise of ethnic hegemony, though that seems to be the current PRC definition of the term.

And defending current PRC practice by comparing it to past crimes of other countries is not a workable strategy. There isn't anybody out there pretending the US hasn't destroyed an indigenous culture or two, or more. We built a rather large museum across the street from the Capital Building, in which most of the displays make frequent reference to the crimes of the Imperial USA, and the nobility of its victims. The day the PRC does the same, I will be among the first to commend its newfound maturity and conscience.

Considering the number of fronts on which China is currently waging rather one-sided wars of cultural imperialism, I'd say it's a little early to declare a winner in this contest.

What inspires all this ranting and phony logic from you is the failure of the "charm offensive" with which the PRC launched its show-window Olympic Games. Clearly, those evil old men aren't used to audiences that aren't risking prison and worse by failing to applaud. You've already awarded yourself a gold medal for logical argument here. It's bogus, but let the band play on regardless. Enjoy.

“Integration does not mean the exercise of ethnic hegemony”

Really? What do people integrate into then? I think they integrate into a mainstream culture. If you want to define that as “ethnic hegemony” then go ahead. Better to have a mainstream society then be another Pakistan.

“The day the PRC does the same, I will be among the first to commend its newfound maturity and conscience.”

If the PRC builds that museum for the same reason we did it will be because they’ve exterminated their indigenous people. But China’s indigenous people constitute 8.5% of the PRC’s population, while in the US that number is around 1%. So you may have to wait awhile before bestowing your commendations on China.

“Considering the number of fronts on which China is currently waging rather one-sided wars of cultural imperialism”

Specify what you mean by this statement and we’ll debate it.

“What inspires all this ranting and phony logic from you”

Specify what you mean by phony logic. I think that countries need to assimilate their populations to a certain extent in order to avoid becoming dysfunctional. The US, UK, France and many other countries have done this. Most countries that fail to do this become like Pakistan, Afghanistan or Lebanon—weak, dysfunctional and sometimes dangerous. You seem to want the Chinese to stay weak and divided and ornamental. They want to build a strong, cohesive country. I say they should be able to do it as long as they don’t commit genocide. Ethnic minorities in China will have to learn to be ethnic in the same way that Bretons, Basques, Catalans, Alsatians, Flemings and Occitanese have learned to be ethnic and French at the same time. Seems logical to me—and to our American and Western European forebears.

Thanks for the medal.

1.) People don't have to integrate "into" anything. I already put this clearly enough: integration and a "melting pot" absorbtion into a dominant culture are not the same thing.

It's good to have a common language, but it isn't necessary for one language or one ethnotype to dominate the others. Switzerland, for instance, has been a stable, multilingual country for quite a long time.

2.) You say that developing countries "need" to become ethnic tyrants. Why? You never say. Britain didn't need to hold on to its colony in Ireland, and finally gave it up. Both countries are better off for it, though Britain made the mistake of holding on to Ulster, to its considerable regret.


3.) China is not weak or divided or ornamental, now. Why, then, does it need to erase the ethnic distinctiveness of its internal colonies? It's not like Tibet had distinct security or development advantages -- the vast majority of it is a nearly empty upland plateau with a tiny migrant population.

4.) You list a bunch of ethnic and national terms of identity that have damned little for the most part to do with France. France is a good example, though: despite the most nationally uniform educational system on earth, and despite a central academy that militantly excludes all usages that aren't properly French, local dialects continue to be spoken in Provence and Gascony, and there are still plenty of Alsatian "frenchmen" who still speak German at home.

What China is doing in Tibet and to the north and west in its Muslim possessions, has little to do with building a strong and cohesive country. That's one of those euphamism programs, like the french "civilizing mission" or our own advancement of "freedom and democracy."

I don't wish to debate this topic with you, partly because it has damned little to do with the top post, and partly because you seem to think you can continue to change the topic and redefine its terms as you please. You probably think you're being really smart, doing that. I find responding to this tiresome and boring.

“People don't have to integrate "into" anything.”

Who says? People have to adhere to certain rules or norms and what they are expected to do changes depending on what country you are considering.

“It's good to have a common language, but it isn't necessary for one language or one ethnotype to dominate the others. Switzerland, for instance, has been a stable, multilingual country for quite a long time.”

Switzerland shares a common culture and the majority of its citizens are conversant in both German and French.

“You say that developing countries "need" to become ethnic tyrants. “

I never said “ethnic tyrants,” those are your words. I say that countries should have control of their internal policies and should be able to use policy to create national cultures. They shouldn’t violate international law, but national cultures can be created without violating these laws.

Britain homogenized and Anglicized its regions to a certain extent and is a stronger country because of it. Having said that, there is also a great deal of regionalism within Britain, and even within England. Accordingly, a certain amount of integration doesn’t mean the utter destruction of regional variation either.

China needs to integrate its west for the same reason the US integrated its west and for the same reason Russia integrated its east and the same reason Turkey is jumpy about its east.

All the ethnic groups I listed are or were in France. You say France is a good example and I agreed. The French have a national French culture as well as regional cultures. The point is that Brittany isn’t so isolated culturally from Paris that it seeks to secede.

“I don't wish to debate this topic with you, partly because it has damned little to do with the top post, and partly because you seem to think you can continue to change the topic and redefine its terms as you please. You probably think you're being really smart, doing that. I find responding to this tiresome and boring.”

China is trying to build a strong cohesive country with a national culture. All these issues are related to that. If you’re bored then stop responding.

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.

Blacks in the US before the Civil Rights movement were not allowed to integrate and assimilate into the mainstream. Same thing in Nazi Germany. France's Maghreb population is also having problems integrating.

China is not blocking minorities from integrating. China has been assimilating groups for centuries. They aren't trying to completely eradicate peripheral cultures or languages either. But they are pursuing policies that will result in some Sinofication of minority groups. Like France with its traditional minority groups, which is why I mentioned France.

In that respect China is more like the US, France and the UK than Nazi Germany, which wouldn't let minorities integrate or Stalinist USSR that kept minorities in autonomous regions to better control them.

So you finally injected the Nazis into the thread. Congratulations for holding out as long as you did. When you run out of arguments the Nazis are always good to fall back on.

"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.

“"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.”

How so? Has the PRC invaded any of its neighbors lately, is it exterminating ethnic minorities, euthanizing the mentally ill, is it a totalitarian state? No, no, no and no.

Here are my thoughts on fascism and the PRC.

We are both discussing nationalism. You seem to be pro autonomy for ethnic minorities. I am saying that countries have the right to pass policies that create melting pots and can do so within violating international law. For example, the UK and France did it with national education acts in the 19th century. They stood in contrast to the relatively unstable countries in Eastern Europe.

All the big countries in the world are empires: Russia, China, the US, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Australia, Canada, the UK, France, etc. They all have national cultures surrounded by minority cultures. This is why I say that all minority cultures need to learn to survive in countries that are becoming more and more integrated as they become more modern.

You haven’t produced any proof that Hu and Co. are planning genocide and the PRC’s progress over the last 30 years suggests otherwise.

“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. “

Look at the whole world and you will see otherwise: the world is becoming more homogenous.

"Authoritarian Capitalism" is the big-business fantasy version of fascism. It's what Krupp and IG Farben thlght they were buying with their support of Hitler (there's that name again). It's also what Royakl Dutch Shell thought when they did the same thing. Mjultinationals are empires too, and their ideology begins with Corporate Syndicalism and moves to the right from there.

Australia isn't an empire. It's a serious stretch of any definition to say it's one. The UK and France were imperial states, but are now settled happily into neo-colonialism, which is where people go once they've realized that authoritarian capitalism requires a lot of expenses that a smarter country or empire can avoid. china will get there in a while, but in teh mean time a lot of ugly destructive bullshit will happen, because China's relationship with the PLA is similar to the relationship which the european empires had with their parasitic military aristocracies. Ireland was a money pit for Great Britain, but some rich, powerful landowning families did quite well there.

I have no proof that Hu is planning military action against Tibet or against the Tibetan exile community, but I'm pretty sure it's a lively alternative, and we won't know until after the olympics. In Mexico, student radicals (a democracy movement was "radical" at that time) forced a stalemate with the government prior to the Olympics in 1968. Then after the games, the government moved in hard, massacred the students at a rally in Tlatelolco square. Thousands died or disappeared into black-bag jails. Every once in a while, caches of their bodies will be found in basements all over the DF.

That's what I'm imagining as possible, even likely later this year. I want you, as an informed and intelligent observer, to pay attention to what happens and not think it's all the inevitable homogenizing of a resistant population. Liquidating is more like it. Wait and see.