[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
[quote]groo wrote:
Even if you disagree with his conclusions on the origin and nature of genocide an interesting read. Not short though.[/quote]
Yeah, not interested. Why? Genocide is a certain kind of narrow violence - narrow in its sense of mission. We’re not defining “violence” so narrowly, so it’s irrelevant.
Doesn’t matter - we aren’t talking strictly about genocide.
[quote]I would nitpick the Reign of Terror as a lot of how it was defined lies within the western way of thought.
History is largely somewhat fictional so saying someone doesn’t know their history is often something akin to saying ones view doesn’t hold constant with my own cherished illusions.[/quote]
Translation: I have no idea what I am talking about, but since I fear that an empirical review would undermine my cherished ideological ax to grind that “religion is the driver of violence, secularism rules!”, I will try and buffalo my way out of it with some abstract horseshit criticism of history.
I assure you, there is nothing fictional about the gulag or the killing fields.[/quote]
You miss the point. Here would be a concrete bit of text from the work I referenced. Disputing how the Western world views history that is largely in opposition to the facts. Genocide isn’t that narrow of a term. Certainly fitting to discuss violence between groups. I will say you do nothing but give a few personal jibes and give no sources other than naming a couple specific events in history. If you aren’t going to back your thesis up with anything at all fine its your opinion and everyone has one of those.
In the latter 1990s, Ann Curthoys and I were fortunate to attend
a speech given by the central Australian Aboriginal leader,
Galarrwuy Yunupingu, to the National Press Club in Canberra
(on 13 February 1997). Yunupingu said he was continually
astonished by the way the European colonists of Aboriginal
lands always referred to themselves as the settlers while designating
his people by contrast as nomads. Such a characterization,
he observed, was historically preposterous. The European
colonists and migrants, he pointed out, were the inveterate
wanderers on the face of the earth, they were the ones who had
THE ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE
[ 34 ]
travelled to distant places, across oceans and far from their own
homes, and now constantly roamed within the Australian continent.
European politicians in the Northern Territory, where his
people lived, constantly boasted that they were the settlers and
belonged to the Territory. Yet, he noted with irony, those same
white politicians some years later could be observed living elsewhere
in Australia. Meanwhile the Aboriginal peoples, who stay
on their own lands as far as they are permitted by the colonizers
to do so, to look after their country and because they belong to
it, are always referred to as nomads!
We discussed Yunupinguâ??s speech many times afterwards, for
it changed much of our thinking about colonization, migration and
world history, in particular his highlighting of such pervasive colonizer
and migrant reverse narratives. Ann explored Yunupinguâ??s
insight in relation to the persistent ways settler colonists in
Australia always see themselves as victims and so incapable of
being the victimizers of others.46 In Is History Fiction? (2005) we
related Yunupinguâ??s thinking to Herodotusâ??s Histories in our
discussion of the hubris of colonizers from agricultural societies in
regarding themselves as the settlers wherever they restlessly roam,
concluding that it is the supposedly settled and urbanized peoples
who are the nomads of world history.47