Friday, July 08, 2016

Prison of abstraction

Buckminster Fuller once stated: "I seem to be a verb". Indeed, human existence seems more like a process than anything static. Reducing anyone to a label doesn't do justice to the many aspects of actions, expressions and interactions happening on a daily basis. While extremely popular in our attention deficient time, I consider it an extremely bad habit.

One class of labels linked to this detrimental habit describe races. So far, talking about races contributed a lot to division, hatred and interspecies violence. From a biological point of view only one human race exists. While genetics indicate certain heritages, our common genetic similarity doesn't allow meaningful statements about 'race'.

Something banal and rather unimportant, the colour of skin, is traditionally used to distinguish races, but just like phrenology, it looks like a pretty useless attempt in understanding human diversity. On a social level, however, arbitrarily defining races has proven to maintain systems of domination and oppression easily.

Since a determined group of pink-skinned people started conquering the world new shades of skin colour emerged. Nevertheless, there's still many millions of pink humans around. No other group of non pink skinned people was so successful in destroying other ethnicities, and to assume positions of power around the globe. The sun never set in the former British Empire, not too long ago we had a largely 'white' planet.

In Australia, the disdain for the non-pink skinned part of the human species went so far to define the indigenous population as part of the native flora and fauna. During most parts of the 20th century the 'White Australia' policy took care that non pink skinned wouldn't come here, and crimes against the original population were dealt with as property damage, if it all.

So basically Australia could serve as perfect example for a 'white' culture, as she had the longest exposure to a systematic approach to maintain 'whiteness'. As I grew up in Europe, I have a bias towards cultural snobism, and often smiled at the idea of fledgling nations like US or Australia of having an original culture at all.

We always soak up the culture we grow up in, a natural survival mechanism for any social being. Rules, values and norms of our culture seem natural, those of other cultures often bizarre, absurd and threatening. Media and travel allow for easier exposure to different cultural standards than our own, but usually don't offer insights useful for someone migrating into a different culture as adults.

I spend my formative years of cultural programming in a german culture. We have quite a history of 'whiteness' and racial discrimination, and this idea became again popular in my early 20s. Neonazis defined themselves by hating everyone not adapting to their idea of 'german culture', and spend a lot of time inventing stories about groups of people they most likely had little to no personal experience with.

The main quarrel neonazis had with foreigners was their lack of adapting/assimilating to being german. Yet they couldn't really explain what this 'being german' entails. If their behaviour indicated what they expected to assimilate to, I didn't want to have any of it. Germany itself has quite a variety of distinct cultural regions itself, diverging to a degree of speaking so different dialects of the same language that communication could be cumbersome.

Nazis usually claim that their national culture represents 'white' culture, no matter whether they are British, Ukrainian, German or Australian. Only tiny remnants of indigenous Europe have survived the imperial and colonial ambitions of the past. While parts of it may have become part of the national culture which replaced indigenous culture, European cultures seem imposed opposed to mutually evolved.

The same applies actually for 'black cultures' or 'asian cultures'. In Australia, the more than 500 cultures which existed prior to the British invasion, share some bits while differing drastically in others. Luckily, a live and let live attitude seems a commonality among most cultures, which allows for a constructive exchange of useful ideas across abstract cultural borders, and prevent them from violently enforcing their way of life unto others.

Every living thing changes, on an individual as well as on a collective level. 'Cultural stability' exists only as concept, the speed and amount of change determine how obvious this process becomes. People oblivious to the essential fact of life in this universe tend to take the short-cut in defining their own culture mainly as 'not them', instead of finding a positive definition.

Yet especially the cultures of pink skinned people encompass the meme of being 'better' more than others, the British Empire, Nazi Germany and the US empire serve as relatively recent examples. The global reach of these imperial ambition might have easily infected other cultures. Interspecies violence happens rarely on this planet, the human race certainly excels in it.

The genocide of the original people of Australia, for example, affected not one culture, but hundreds. The utter lack of empathy and respect for human life becomes apparent by the simple fact that the 'white' culture as perpetrators didn't even bother much to distinguish between the many cultures being destroyed.

Of course, with the intention to take over the land of others, enslave, rape or kill them comes no obligation to take exact records of your victims or their culture. It sounds less horrifying if one people was subjected to genocide, if it's hundreds the evil spirit of the invasion becomes blatantly apparent. The same applies for the take over of the North American continent, which in nationalistic view of history created the myth of preemptive warfare.

In a way, while many different people in the North America or Australia were subjected to genocide, it wasn't a genocide towards "native Americans" or "Aborigines". What happened in the Americas, in Africa, large parts of Asia and Australia was a multigenocide. English people happily summarised a variety of divergent culture into an umbrella term like "Aboriginal" to disguise their mass killings of many, many cultures.

Empires want to dominate - that's what the Romans did, what the Ottomans, what the English did and currently the Americans do. Empires violently unite formerly different culture under the imperial umbrella, and lose count of the cultures eradicated and assimilated. It doesn't matter how many culture existed on a territory, once the empire claims it, it dictates its history.

While it's easy for an empire to incite the local population to do their bidding to commit genocide by hijacking mass media to spread their poisonous ideas, it's hard if not impossible to find a successful grass root movement wanting to kill their neighbours and former friends. The majority of people I know have never killed anyone, out of thousands of people I met there's probably less than a handful which actually took another human's life. It's just not in our nature to be an in-species killer. How many people do you personally know which took another human's life?

So it takes someone/something to unite a specific culture behind the idea to get rid of a specific group of people (like the Israeli government promoting the Palestinian genocide), and to kill them. The good old times, when empires could declare entire continents like America, Africa and Australia free for the taking are over by now.

The 30 or so European nations have already quenched most semblance of the hundreds of cultures which existed on the European continent a millennium or two ago. The 'white cultures' in Australia or in the North America have never been indigenous. There's neither a singular 'white culture' existing right now (although Disney worked hard to create this illusion), nor any 'non-white' empire with the might to take on all the countries pink-skinned people have taken command of.

While the idea of 'white genocide' isn't the biggest bullshit I ever witnessed, it's pretty close to the Flat Earth meme. It just makes only little sense if you want to connect observable facts in a coherent manner. There's no unified 'white culture' around on this planet, there's no empire militarily empire capable of taking on all pale-skinned people living, especially in their European homelands.

In the meantime, I'd rather take side with Chechnyans, Kurdish, Palestinian, Papuan people, with indigenous people in North America, Australia, Africa and Asia currently endangered of being wiped out. There are some 'white' cultures endangered, Roma, Sinti and Sami represent some ancient 'white' cultures on the brink of genocide in their homelands.

I appreciate cultural diversity, especially as I haven't encountered any culture yet which insisted in harming me for visiting it. Even those identifying with other cultural backgrounds than my own have treated me respectfully (besides maybe those wearing uniforms belonging to the British/US empire, and the small of amount of dickheads existing among the human race). I totally accept that some people with different cultural background and skin colour might put me in the box of 'white male', yet I totally fail to identify as potential victim of 'white genocide'.

Despite the fact that our genetic heritage unites us as human race, I'm more than happy to discuss the meme of 'white genocide' with anyone who considers this rant as much bullshit as I consider this meme. I consider myself human in first place, feel free to convince me that my skin colour is more important.

No comments: