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| 12/24 |
| 2005/12/4-6 [Politics/Domestic/Immigration, Politics/Foreign/Europe] UID:40840 Activity:high |
12/3 Immigrant families in Germany murdering their daughters for
... behaving like Germans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04berlin.html
\_ Good article. --darin
\_ "Honor killings" have been taking place in countries all over
Europe--it's disgusting and has gotten people to re-think how
tolerant they want to be of immigrants who don't assimilate. -John
\_ Europeans (at least Germans) also need to re-think how their
own culture erects barriers for immigrants who want to
acculturate. That, unfortunately, has not been happening.
\_ Most Europeans never were particularly comfortable with
the mass-immigration concept. That's not part of their
recent history except a bit of inter-European movement.
So now this is forced on them... why do they have to change
their culture? And what barriers exactly are you talking
about? Punishing honor killings? -foo
\_ No, I think he's talking about the fact that, despite
most European countries having large-ish immigrant
populations, it is actually pretty difficult in a lot of
places to assimilate, even for second-generation kids.
The "barriers" aren't really conscious, but there have
been a lot of studies recently about job discrimination
against people with non-European names. This in no way
excuses the honor killings and shit like that, but there
was a good E'ist letter to the editor recently by a guy
who'd taught in Italy--a group of ethnic Japanese students
was referred to only as "the Japanese" by other students,
even though they'd all been born in Italy. True or not,
this is pretty typical and explains some of the failure
to integrate. Given that, there's also a _lot_ of un-
willingness on the part of a lot of Balkan and Arab/Muslim
immigrants to integrate. -John
\_ Well I think it's a pretty natural situation. How would
those Italians fare in Japan? Not that Japan would even
let large colonies of immigrants set up their own
cultural islands the way immigrants do in Europe.
Other countries don't work the way America does and
that's ok. Japanese in Italy will always stand out
until so many immigrants eventually change the face
of Europe (already happening). I don't think they
should be forced to be perfectly accepting of
immigrants. I guess it comes down to the idea of
people having a homeland attached to their ethnicity.
This traditional notion is simply incompatible with
"integration". To me it's common sense. I would not
expect to feel like a native Chinese if I moved to
some random Chinese town, or if I was one of 3 white
kids in a Chinese school, and first generation kids
aren't gonna suddenly be Chinese either when they don't
have Chinese parents and cultural tradition. I think
immigrating is a choice and some of the negative aspects
are to be expected. Obviously they should be protected
law and tolerance should be taught. You can't force it
though without trampling somewhat on the native people's
lives. I guess it's also a chicken-and-egg thing... the
immigrants would only become "acculturized" after
several generations; but natives don't really want to
deal with non-acculturized immigrants.
\_ The Japanese thing was just an example. We are
talking about substantial groups, like Turks in
Germany, Algerians in France, Moroccans in Holland.
I think you're imagining large European cities as
more ethnically homogenous than they really are. For
example, while it still registers when I see an Asian
guy in a Swiss army uniform, it's a common sight and
people tend not to notice. Your points about the
cultural islands holds though--although such homo-
genous enclaves are perfectly natural, a lot of
countries (especially Germany, Holland and France)
have been _very_ reluctant to confront the fact that
these people are of different cultural backgrounds,
parts of which are simply not OK here. They've now
started to face this. We'll see. -John
\_ Immigrants families in US become mass murderers.
http://tinyurl.com/au5x8 |
| 12/24 |
|
| www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04berlin.html Help The New Berlin Wall By PETER SCHNEIDER Published: December 4, 2005 Has multicultural tolerance helped create a parallel society in the heart of Europe? Breaking news and award winning multimedia New York Times newspaper articles Arts & Dining reviews Online Classifieds It's free and it only takes a minute! |
| tinyurl.com/au5x8 -> www.iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1997/native-americans.html Native American Genocide Still Haunts United States By Leah Trabich Cold Spring Harbor High School New York, USA In the past, the main thrust of the Holocaust/Genocide Project's magazine , An End To Intolerance, has been the genocides that occurred in history and outside of the United States. Still, what we mustn't forget is that mass killing of Native Americans occurred in our own country. As a resu lt, bigotry and racial discrimination still exist. For Native Americans, the world after 1492 would n ever be the same. This date marked the beginning of the long road of per secution and genocide of Native Americans, our indigenous people. Genoci de was an important cause of the decline for many tribes. "By conservative estimates, the population of the United states prior to European contact was greater than 12 million. Four centuries later, the count was reduced by 95% to 237 thousand. In 1493, when Columbus returned to the Hispaniola, he quickly implemented policies of slavery and mass extermination of the Taino population of t he Caribbean. Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of many accounts of the horrors that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous populat ion: hanging them en mass, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed, and other horrid cruelties. The works of Las Casas are oft en omitted from popular American history books and courses because Colum bus is considered a hero by many, even today. Mass killing did not cease, however, after Columbus departed. Expansion o f the European colonies led to similar genocides. "Indian Removal" polic y was put into action to clear the land for white settlers. Methods for the removal included slaughter of villages by the military and also biol ogical warfare. High death rates resulted from forced marches to relocat e the Indians. The Removal Act of 1830 set into motion a series of events which led to t he "Trail of Tears" in 1838, a forced march of the Cherokees, resulting in the destruction of most of the Cherokee population." The concentratio n of American Indians in small geographic areas, and the scattering of t hem from their homelands, caused increased death, primarily because of a ssociated military actions, disease, starvation, extremely harsh conditi ons during the moves, and the resulting destruction of ways of life. During American expansion into the western frontier, one primary effort t o destroy the Indian way of life was the attempts of the US government to make farmers and cattle ranchers of the Indians. In addition, one of the most substantial methods was the premeditated destructions of flora and fauna which the American Indians used for food and a variety of oth er purposes. We now also know that the Indians were intentionally expose d to smallpox by Europeans. The discovery of gold in California, early i n 1848, prompted American migration and expansion into the west. The gre ed of Americans for money and land was rejuvenated with the Homestead Ac t of 1862. In California and Texas there was blatant genocide of Indians by non-Indians during certain historic periods. In California, the decr ease from about a quarter of a million to less than 20,000 is primarily due to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated by the miners a nd early settlers. Indian education began with forts erected by Jesuits, in which indigenous youths were incarcerated, indoctrinated with non-in digenous Christian values, and forced into manual labor. These children were forcibly removed from their parents by soldiers and many times neve r saw their families until later in their adulthood. This was after thei r value systems and knowledge had been supplanted with colonial thinking . One of the foundations of the US imperialist strategy was to replace traditional leadership of the various indigenous nations with indoctrin ated "graduates" of white "schools," in order to expedite compliance wit h US goals and expansion. Probably one of the most ruinous acts to the Indians was the disappearanc e of the buffalo. For the Indians who lived on the Plains, life depended on the buffalo. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were an estimated forty million buffalo, but between 1830 and 1888 there was a rapid, systematic extermination culminating in the sudden slaughter of the only two remaining Plain herds. By around 1895, the formerly vast b uffalo populations were practically extinct. The slaughter occurred beca use of the economic value of buffalo hides to Americans and because the animals were in the way of the rapidly westward expanding population. Th e end result was widescale starvation and the social and cultural disint egration of many Plains tribes. Genocide entered international law for the first time in 1948; the intern ational community took notice when Europeans (Jews, Poles, and other vic tims of Nazi Germany) faced cultural extinction. The "Holocaust" of Worl d War II came to be the model of genocide. We, as the human race, must r ealize, however, that other genocides have occurred. Genocide against ma ny particular groups is still widely happening today. The discrimination of the Native American population is only one example of this ruthless destruction. Credits: Sharon Johnston, The Genocide of Native Americans: A Sociologica l View, 1996. |