18 ways to hate your neighbor

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Oct 29 10:46:50 PST 2002


Doug:
> Of course it was a cheap shot. It was from the eXile, and it was
> satire. But really, Woj, you're not denying that Europe has an
> incredibly bloody history based on all kinds of national and ethnic
> conflicts. And Europe now is obsessed with its own internal purity -
> keeping out refugees and immigrants.

Incredibly bloody is a history of humankind - so why Europe or any other natios should be thought to be different? What really matters is not what one's ancestors did (for they all have blood on their hands, they only difference is the amount of it, which in turn is solely determined by opportunity) - but what mechanisms are in place now to prevent bloodshed. And you have to admit that Euroipe has pretty strong social-institutional meachnism in place that prevent violence, both individual and collective. It does not mean they always have them or that they always will - but at the moment they score far better than the US, not to mention developing countries where violence seems rampant.

This whole Euro-bashing thing (quite popular among US right wingers lately) reminds me of the old Brezhnev era joke. The US Bureau of the Census was compliling comparative cross-national statistics on the standards of living, but they had no data on the USSR. So they send a query to the Soviet Central Statistical Office to provide them with the data on the housing square footage per person, energy consumption, availability of consumer items etc. A few weeks later they got a letter with a response. It had only a single sentence that read" "Well, and you discriminate against the Negroes."

Wojtek



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list