[lbo-talk] Re: Re: Alex Cockburn (Jonathan Ruby)

[Chris Doss]

This brings me to something I've been wondering about lately. As the Russian 
Empire expanded, unlike its British and later American counterparts, it did 
not attempt (as far as I know) to uproot peoples, displace them, wipe them 
out or, before the Stalin era, really try to assimilate them. (I guess this 
facet of its expansion was similar to that of the Roman Empire, which 
exacted tribute from conquered groups but didn't generally try to wipe them 
out.) As a result, Russia, which is a land mass the size of an ocean, is a 
crazy-quilt of ethnicities and cultures that have by and large preserved 
their own identities, as opposed to living on squalid reservations as the 
native peoples often do elsewhere.

Anybody know of any, I don't know, comparative imperiology that might 
address this issue? A typology of empires of sorts?

"The Russians are coming!" should really have been "The Russians (and the 
Ukrainians, and the Ingush, and the Chuvash, and the Evers, and the 
Moldovans, and the Uzbeks, and the Avars, hell, all 89 of the nationalities 
are coming!"


>From: Thiago Oppermann <thiago_oppermann at bigpond.com>
>
>When asked to identify their ancestry, a very large number of Brazilians
>with my kind of family tree tend to overplay the Jewish, African and
>Amerindian roots (mine are extremely remote). That's interesting. There is 
>a
>similar effect in New Zealand regarding Maori roots. An increasing number 
>of
>Australians identify some remote and often unverifiable aboriginal 
>ancestry.
>I think this shows we are dealing with our nasty pasts in one of the 
>classic
>modalities of human conflict-resolution: altering kinship. But how many
>Japanese fake Korean roots? How many Israelis acknowledge (let alone fake)
>Arab roots?

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