> I think that it is a mistake to confuse racism with ethnic hatred; race is
a _biological_ category. A group is > being singled out because of their
physical appearance, not their religion, worldview, clan membership, or >
because they live on the other side of the Big Valley and compete with my
group for food and are
> therefore bad.
Hmmm, well, the Hutus and Tutsis lived among each other. I''ve heard people describe the Holocaust as "tribal" too --- and there was definitely an element of primitive accumulation about it. I'm also sure the notion of "scarcity" was buried -- or even overt --- in the minds of many Nazis. Joseph Wanzala has already covered this I think, but Rwanda in 1994 was not a pre-modern society. There were clearly major differences between it and 1930s Germany, e.g. the Tutsis appear to have attracted animosity as a formerly legally-privileged ethnicity. But as in Germany, ethnic ideology supported the political aims of new elites within the Hutus; and in order to be genocidal, a group needs big, widely-accepted lies about Jews, Tutsis, whatever, being uniformly untrustworthy, weak, parasites, etc.
> Neither do ethnic conflicts in modern Russia. "Race" is not part of
people's system of concepts. I would
> hazard a guess that this is true of most places outside the Western world.
Russian civilization has very
> little to do with European civilization, in fact. Russia is closer to
China.
I don't buy the idea that Russia is especially racist either. But we have to work with the semantic tools that we have, even though "racism" -- as a concept -- is a pretty blunt instrument; unfortunately there are no such words as "culturism" or "ethnicism", which may be more accurate in some cases.
regards,
Grant.