[lbo-talk] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89

Wojtek Sokolowski swsokolowski at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 5 12:31:09 PDT 2008


--- On Tue, 8/5/08, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> Anyway, I will make a few comments about Diaspora Disease,
> sometimes known as Plastic Paddy syndrome -- be it Irish,
> Ukrainian, White Russian, Jewish or what-have-you. It is
> very marked, and the reason why emigree
> Irish/Ukrainians/etc. are usually much more nationalistic
> than people who actually live in the country. What you have
> here is a case of people descended from people who left
> location X at some particularly personally traumatic point
> in time, raised on stories of their grandparents who lived
> through the trauma. This is usually coupled with little or
> no actual knowledge of the language in the original country,
> and few or no contacts there. Thus, the image fixed in the
> Diaspora's mind is a reified image of the place of
> origin as seen through the eyes of their grandparents. So,
> descendents of White Russian emigrees are still battling the
> Reds in their minds. Irish diaspora members think Ireland is
> covered with idyllic pastoral villages ruled over
> by cruel British oppressors, and oh the Famine was
> deliberately organized by Britain to kill the Irish, when
> everybody in Ireland knows it was blight. For Ukrainians,
> there is a Famine going on in Ukraine. For Jews, there are
> evil pogromshiki everywhere ready to be unleashed at any
> moment.
>

[WS:] I think you hit the nail exactly on the head, Chris. I've had a chance of seeing these attitudes first hand.

I would also like to add that prejudice or stereotypy of different groups of people is universal, it is a part of human nature or perhaps human perception. All people have stereotypes of doctors, engineers, Blacks, Whites, Russians, Poles, Jews, Germans, Christians, Muslims, Asians, yuppies, blue collar workers, mountain people, lowland people, boat people, athletes, artists, New Yorkers, Europeans, Americans, gays, lesbians, Southerners, yankees - you name it. It is widespread and it is perfectly normal way our minds operate - nothing unusual or outrageous about it. The problem begins only when such stereotypy forms the basis of government policy, but that is a different discussion.

However, things look differently to a nationalist (or perhaps ethnocentric) mindset or cognitive framework. Such a mind set or framework may take different forms, e.g. "were are Number One, all other countries are little girls" (to quote Borat,) "poor us, everyone hates us" or "our nation has been suffering for the humanity" (aka "messianism"). One of the key features of the nationalistic/ ethnocentric mindset is a very selective view of human and international relations - stories that are consistent with this mind set feature prominently in that mindset, while stories that are inconsistent with or irrelevant to that mind set are igored.

Thus, a US-centric mindset focuses on facts that show US as an exceptional country - eiher exceptionally good or exceptionally bad (depending on the variant of this mindset) and ignores all facts that contradict US exceptionalism or are irrelevant to it. A Semitic-centric mind set, focuses on exampls of Jews being exceptional - again either excerptionally bad, or exceptionally good, or perhaps exceptionally persecuted (depending on the variant of this mind set) while all other facts are ignored as irrelevant. Likewise, an anti-communist, anti-Castro etc. mind set focuses on all bad things in communist countries and attribues them to the effects of communism, and ignores all other facts that are inconsistent with that cognitive framework. In the same way, anti-islamic mindset focuses only on bad things associated with Islam, and ignores the fact that similar things may be present in non-Islamic cultures. And so on, so on.

As Lakoff convincingly argued, cognitive framework determines the course of rational thought, but itself is non-rational or perhaps pre-rational, and thus immune to rational argument or empirical refutation. You can point all the good things that happened in Russia and Eastern Europe between 1917 and 1990 to a person with anti-communist mindset, and he will simply ignore them and will keep focusing only on the bad things that happened theree. Likewise, you can show all the bad things that happened in Eastern Europe and Russia to a stalinist mindset, and he will simply ignore them and focus only on thegood things. And so on.

It is not possible to argue with such attitudes rationally - you either accept that particular cognitve framework and the perception of the world it entails, or you do not - in which case your only choice is to stop the conversation and walk away. That is why I avoid all discussions pertianing to ethnicity on this list (and elsewhere) - because (to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) facts are irrelevant for such discussions, or rather selectively relevant - they can only enforce the perceptions entailed by a particular nationalistic or ethnocentric mindset, but never contradict it.

Wojtek



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