Posted by Tiglath from 155.b.006.mel.iprimus.net.au (210.50.45.155) on Saturday, January 04, 2003 at 4:51AM :
Nationalism 101
India
50 years ago Mahatma Gandhi was gunned down by an assassin who opposed his attempts to bring peace to the warring Islamic and Hindu communities in the Indian subcontinent. The struggle for
independence had been a victory for Gandhi's campaign of non-violence, but the end of British rule was marred by extreme ethnic violence.
The British of course in an attempt to maintain their control of their former colony excacerbated the conflict in an attempt to destablisie the legitimate Indian government and hold onto India.
With the introduction of Nationalism, the people of the Indian subcontinent misunderstood the non-secular definition of Nationalism and adopted a religiously based Nationality. This is effect led to people who are ethnically the same people forming their own nations. The ethnic Muslim-Indians formed the nation that we today call Pakistan. Meanwhile the majority Hindu-Indians maintaoined their continent's name and called their country India.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir. There has been sporadic fighting over the cease-fire line for years. Millions of ethnic Indians from both modern-day India and Pakistan have died or been displaced due to this religious dispiute between these two nuclear armed powers.
Yugoslavia
Bosnia has the most complex mix of religious traditions among the former Yugoslav republics: 44% Bosniaks (Muslims), 31% Bosnian Serb (Eastern Orthodox), and 17% Bosnian Croat (Roman Catholics). Bosnia¯s Muslims are Slavs who converted to Islam in the 14th and 15th centuries after the Ottoman Empire conquered the region. From World War I until the end of the Cold War, Bosnia was part of the newly created country of Yugoslavia. Bosnia declared independence in March 1992.
Having lived side-by-side for years the ethnically identical Yugoslavians adopted a religiously based identity after the fall of Communism and set about creating their own religously-based nations of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia.
Supported and armed by the U.S., Europeans and Arab countires all sides fought and committed war crimes against each other adding a new word to the dictionary, Ethnic Cleansing.
Only problem was that they weren't ethnically cleansing the other side as the media claimed becuase all sides were ethnically the same. In fact there was no ethnic cleansing. It was nothing but religous and sectarian cleansing.
Palestine
In 587 BCE, Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar's army captured Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and exiled the Jews to Babylon (modern day Iraq). From this year onwards, the region was ruled or controlled by a succession of superpower empires of the time in the following order: Babylonian, Persian, Greek Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Empires, Islamic and Christian crusaders, Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire.
Throughout this period a portion of the Jewish people found their way home to Israel. In Palestine the majority of the Jews converted to Christianity and then Islam, adopting an Arab identity, as these successive religions swept over the Middle East.
Meanwhile many other Jews migrated to Europe and intermarried mainly with non-Jews who were willing to adopt the Jewish religion. Realising that they were brethren the descendants of the Jews, now considering themselves Arabs (Palestinians) lived in peace with the Jews.
Many of the descendants of the Jews still living in the Middle East who had converted to Islam, intermarried with the surrounding peoples and adopted an Arab identity until their independence, when they called their nation Palestine.
After WW2 and the Holocaust the Jews of Europe needed a homeland. They returned to Palestine and founded the state of Israel.
These same Jews were displaced by the European Jews that fled Europe after WW2's Holocaust. This initiated the 1948 War of Independence and another 3 Arab-Israeli Wars which have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and injured on both sides.
In all the war and bloodshed none have realised that both combatants are ethnically the same people who have become religiously estranged over time.
The U.S. knows of course but continues to support a policy that will leave the region destablised because it can millitarily dominate the region and receives an economic benefit in doing so.
Iraq
Afer the fall of Nineveh the ancient Assyrians first converted to Christianity and adopted Jewish culture before the majority accepted Islam and adopted Arab culture.
Meanwhile the Christian minority that had lived primarily in the mountains of North Iraq maintained Christianity and adopted the Assyrian identity after the discovery of the ancient Assyrian ruins by Henry Layard.
Problem was that the identity was a religously based idenitty and in their understanding of Nationalism the Assyrians considered the Muslim-Assyrians Arabs and they adopted the new identity of Iraq.
The Simele massacre was fueled by the British and it worked to extend the British mandate and increase oil profits by creating the conditions that caused the Muslim Assyrians to fight with the Christian Assyrian minority.
Since then the Christian Assyrians have maintained the religiously based identity and many have migrated to the West thinking that their lands have been overrun by foreign invaders.
-- Tiglath
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