On Tuesday, March 29, 2016 at 11:22:13 AM UTC-6, Peter Trei wrote:
> But I can do it anyway: While this kind of resegregation has been attempted
> many times, Liberia, SA Bantustans, the partition of India, Stalin's relocation
> of ethnic groups, all of these have one thing in common: they failed, at great
> cost in life and misery.
> One of the pop psych definitions of insanity is 'repeats the same actions,
> expecting a different result'. How many failed attempts at unscrambling have
> to occur before you realize that its a no-go?
You raise an important and serious objection to what I propose.
However, I do have a reply.
For one thing, if one wants to talk about trying the same thing over again
which failed before, surely trying to persuade people to give up animosities
and love one another has been tried and has failed a lot.
In terms of specific examples, I think Stalin's relocations and South Africa's
Bantustans can be rejected out of hand as being actual attempts to try anything
remotely close to what I'm suggesting.
I don't know enough about Liberia to comment on its history. At present, the
descendants of those who came from the U.S. are apparently the dominant group
in that country, causing problems for its original inhabitants.
But I will review the partition of India.
Based on one popular account of that partition which I have read - and this may
not be a balanced account, as it made the hero of the piece a British official
whose family happened to supply the writer with the information he worked from
- the story seems to be the following:
Under British rule, Hindus and Muslims lived together uneasily. Due to serious
differences in their beliefs and customs, they disliked one another. But this
did not lead to a great deal of open violence.
Along came Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose campaign for the equality and human
dignity of the people of India in particular, and people of color in general,
caused great embarrassment to Britain, leading it finally to agree to make
India independent on the schedule he set.
This led to panic among many in the Muslim community of British India, because
they were a minority, and they felt that without continued British rule, they
would be helpless in the face of a Hindu majority.
This was understandable. What was not understandable was that the Muslim
Brotherhood resorted to terrorism to press their demand that India be
partitioned prior to independence.
Since Britain was under enormous pressure to make India independent, it had to
partition it in haste, leading to some places being on the wrong side of the
border, and that led to massacres after partition.
Now, from this, I don't draw the lesson that partition _caused_ bloodshed. Not
partitioning India, and making it independent, could have had much worse
consequences - like a full-scale civil war between Hindus and Muslims.
Instead, to my mind, the proximate cause of the bloodshed was not doing things
in a slow and deliberate fashion. First you carry out partition over a span of
years with both sides still being under British rule, guaranteeing fair
treatment for both groups, and making border adjustments possible.
Then each homogenous nation can become independent without there being
minorities within them that would fear what would come after independence.
But Britain did not have the moral courage to say "No" to Mahatma Gandhi - to
explain that independence would take time in order to avoid bloodshed. Of
course people will tell you that Britain should have obeyed Gandhi completely,
and also not partitioned India, because Hindus are nice civilized people, and
are just as capable of not committing genocide against their Muslim minority as
Americans have managed not to commit genocide against their African-American
minority.
But just because they will say that doesn't make it... not misleading.
I say "not misleading" instead of "not true", because the _basis_ of that
argument is valid - India's Hindus are not genetically inferior to white
people, and they're not uncivilized savages either. But that's not really the
point; other forces make ethnic politics more likely to be deadly in the Third
World, as we've seen time and again.
John Savard