generalspeaking

Human Relations

It's as old as human history itself, the propensity for groups of people to consider themselves exceptional, superior, special in ways that other groups are not. A residual tendency deep within the human psyche born of the need, in primeval times, to survive a harsh environment where living was hard and food was scarce. Looking to advantage themselves to the detriment of others; claiming territory (territorial imperative) that would provide food and water.

When advanced nations set out to conquer less-advantaged societies in far-off geographies and found indigenous people already on the land they considered them no better than animals, with no rights. This was true in Central and South America when conquistadors spread the world of the Holy Catholic Church and looted the societies they found there to enrich Spain and Portugal, and left rivers of blood behind as they carried off the riches.

When Europeans settled North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Micronesia the aboriginals were thought of as quaint, savage and worthless. The land they inhabited was there for the adventurous-spirited explorers to discover and to claim for their own. Aboriginals soon enough discovered their non-existent place within their ancestral homes.

Latterly, that exclusionary clause in the human psyche was altered only slightly; people of like backgrounds consider themselves special, an improved version of others not of their clan or tribe; more entitled and worthy. In many instances the territorial imperative was still in full gear, but taking on other dimensions. National pride in homogeneity is one expression.

Xenophobia another. If a nation closed its borders to the unwanted incursions of others, foreign elements with whom it wished no interplay, then continued racial purity could be enjoyed. Even though it is a delusion, since over millennia of existence humans have always interacted, sometimes openly, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes violently, and genes were exchanged.

Countries like China and Japan were traditionally closed to the idea of permitting foreigners to invade their space, even for trade purposes. That they had good reason in part for this kind of stand-offishness was beside the point, given the eagerness of many militarized nations to mount missions of conquest against others less given to arms.

However, once countries opened themselves to trade and commerce (themselves traditions of antiquity) they invariably became a little more open to civil interaction as well. Still, traditions persist, and in Japan when a Japanese lives elsewhere then returns to his mother country he is never viewed in the same way again.

Repressive, totalitarian countries like Burma, North Korea and China are not amenable to infiltration by foreign elements, and they're absolutely (China now far less so) resolutely determined to deter anything remotely resembling miscegenation (that quaintly repugnant old epithet) from occurring to mar the quality of offspring and society.

People living in such repressed, xenophobic societies for whom mixed marriage is abhorrent are taught at an early age to despise foreigners. An institutionalized campaign that becomes part and parcel of the social contract is undertaken to depict people of foreign origin as deplorable in their physical being and their values.

When a nation has intention to cleanse itself of the putrefying effects of a demographic element comprised of people of another 'racial' or ethnic group, traditions or religion, a slow and steady campaign is mounted to delegitimize those targeted people as sub-human, worthless, a leach on the mainstream society.

Jews were always handy targets for exclusionary laws and human rights violations throughout the ages and into the modern age, in relentless campaigns to portray them as ripe for planned extinction. That practise continues in an attenuated manner rising to a familiar crescendo to the present day.

Africans whose misfortune it was to be selected as inferior beings by superior whites (and Arabs) whose clear function was to service the needs of whites (and Arabs) were famously torn from their homeland and taken across the seas in fetters to die en route or survive the dreadful journey as human cargo destined for the slaving auction block.

In some religions and traditions it is central to the belief of that religion that some elements of society are destined by virtue of their low-caste birth to live out their lives in poverty and indenture-ship to those of superior social rank. They traditionally have few legal or social rights and submit to their heritage of poverty and humiliation. Such traditions are difficult to eradicate.

To this very day human life is seen as trifling by some societies, where children are abducted and taught to serve their masters through hard physical labour, or taught to become ruthless killers, and women are kidnapped and held in bondage as sex slaves.

Humankind, victim to its dreadful lapses in humanity.

Labels: Human Rights, Particularities/Peculiarities, Traditions

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, February 02, 2010