Re: [Leica] Homicide and photography

[Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net>]

I suspect we are confusing several different -- and horrid! -- developments.

First, there is ethnic integration enforced by a dominant culture on a
subservient culture.  (My forebears had to carry, as young kids, sticks
tied to their belts.  Whenever an adult heard them speaking of the Gaelic,
the adult notched the stick, and the child received that number of whacks
from his father in the evening, and so "the Gaelic was beaten out of them",
to the gratification of English factory owners hungry for cheap Irish
labor.)  Such integration generally does not involve death or even
political pressures, just some occasionally brutal compulsions to adopt the
mores of the dominant culture.

Second, there is cultural alienation.  "Negroes and Blacks Need Not Apply"
or "Soldiers and Dogs Stay Off The Grass" or the latent anti-Semitism which
marks European and American culture or the growing anti-Hispanic and
anti-Oriental bias of the modern US ethos are such.

Third, there is political exploitation.  The Normans set themselves up as
masters first of Normandy and then of England.  They gradually came to be
integrated into the political ethos of the local culture but, in the
interim, there was much blood and horror cast about.  The goal here,
though, was political conquest and not elimination of another people or its
culture.  And such has been the Israeli experience with Palestinians, as
was the Spanish experience with Mayan or Inca and the USian experience with
the Indian.  ("The only good Indian is a dead Indian" is a VERY late
statement:  more common was the effort to encourage the Indians to live on
backwater reservations and to simply leave the Europeans to the
exploitation of available resources.)  In general, the horrorific
exterminations of the Communists in the Soviet Union, China, Korea, and
Cambodia fall into this category.

Fourth, there is "ethnic cleansing", the effort to remove another people
completely from the board.  Hutu and WaTusi, Non-Jew and Jew, and so forth
are repellant to our minds because the solution chosen is, well, "final":
the perpetrators are not saying, "I disagree with your values":  they ARE
saying, "I so very much disagree with your culture that I want you and
yours and all of your works to be eradicated, root and branch, from our
lives."  The divergence can be cultural (Hutu and WaTusi) or religious
(Catholic Croat and Orthodox Serb and Muslim Bosnian or Kosovan) or ethnic
(German and Jew), but the effect is terrifying.  (Novel, indeed, was the
Serbian solution to the long-term Bosnian situation:  mass rape of young
Bosnian girls to engender children of mixed heritage but, as this was a
religious war, I doubt that the ultimate effect would have been of more
than passing interest to historians, as these children will be raised by
the Bosnian community as Muslims.)

In other words, trying to force any cultural tyranny into one single mold
is deceitful and misleading.  None of these are acceptable methods but,
certainly, the British effort to turn the Irish into a subset of their own
culture was far more benign than is the Serbian effort to kill off the
Croats and Bosnians in toto.  But all are troubling.

I am a USian Episcopalian of mixed Scots/Irish/German/Hugeneot descent,
mired with all of the religious and racial intolerances of my generation
and culture.  (But, hey, I used to cadge invites to my friends' Bar
Mitzvahs to scarf up all of that wonderful food -- my, er, adiposity
derives in large measure from a love of gefilte fish and the like.  Make my
day!)

Are ANY of us clean of these intolerances?  I hope so, but I can only speak
for myself, and I certainly am not.  (For one thing, I DO suffer the
average Celt's mixture of respect and detestation of the English, and that
was passed on to me vividly by my father, who probably was unaware of this
bias of his.)

It is a troubling issue.  I have Jewish friends who collect Zeiss Ikon but
who will not purchase anything manufactured after 30 JAN 33 -- and I have
other Jewish friends who drive Volkswagens, Audis, BMWs, or
Mercedes/Chryslers.  Intolerance and bias and disdain are human universals,
complex and, well, yes, troubling.  I'd be a LOT more comfortable
discussing the thread used by Carl Zeiss Jena on their Mikrotars, which
seems to be of the same size, but a different pitch, from that used by
Leitz Wetzlar on their vaunter Micro-Summars ... 

Marc

msmall@roanoke.infi.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!