On the Internment of American Prisoners: V

Give them a little and they'll take a lot. Once you allow the construct "terror/terrorists/terrorism," the floodgates open. And we live in a period when certain linguistic distortions seem conveniently to serve the ends of nation states across a wide spectrum. There is no counterbalancing force to keep a given big power honest when all of the existing big powers are implicated to one degree or another. China has Tibet and its Uighur population to fret over, Russia has Chechnya, India has Pakistan, many of the larger European powers their Muslim minorities. Since with the exception of Tibetan Buddhists, the fact that most of the recalcitrant groups mentioned happen to be Muslim only makes it easier for the truth to be obscured. In order to truly understand what is happening, one has to have a sense of history rare among the citizenry of powers large and small. A glancing dip into the pages of twentieth century history will reveal a certain level of truth. To this end, the breakup of Yugoslavia will serve as exemplary. The world looked on in horror at what happened to Yugoslavia, first, after the death of Tito, and then following the breakup of the USSR. Ethnic cleansing, mass graves, neighbors killing neighbors with whom they had managed to coexist for over fifty year. Croat Catholics, Kosovan Muslims, Serbian Orthodox had lived together after the end of WWII without so much as a ripple on the political waters. What happened? The usual answer, of course, is that so long as police state repression could be maintained, old blood feuds had to be postponed. Once the police apparatus loosened its hold, the merriment could begin. Although Tito's regime provides a good example of one way of dealing with diverse populations that can't stand one another and that can not forgive or forget the violence done them in the past, Stalin may offer us an even better example. Great leaders are often provided with academic credentials. When certain political elements in the U.S. were grooming General Eisenhower for the presidency, they slipped him into the role of university president for a while, giving him the prestigious post at Columbian University in New York. Stalin's claim to intellectual status was "the nationalities question." Now, even casual students of left wing history know that socialism and communism claim to recognize no borders. (The theme song is the Internationale, right?) Ties to a nation are seen as a petit-bourgeois aberration akin to religious affiliations. The end result of Stalin's ratiocinations on the question of nationality was that he decided that they just didn't matter to all the good communists across the eleven time zones and countless nationalities and cultures that lay therein. Hundreds of diverse peoples living in perfect harmony. This fabrication is still to be seen in China, with its 57 ethnic minorities, again, supposedly all equal, all living in blissful harmony and equality. That this is clearly not the case is indirectly acknowledged by the Chinese government itself in many ways. Uighurs, for example, a Turkic, non-Han race living in the largest (though least populous) Xinjiang Province are allowed to have more than one child, a waiver on the one birth policy still in effect for most Chinese. In the year 2000, it is said that 1,000 Uighurs were killed during anti-government demonstrations, and, in the aftermath of 9/11 travel to Xinjiang was restricted. Some may be thinking, well, what about us? Only the youngest U.S. citizens may fail to see the parallels to our own history when in the living memory of many of us there still lingers the scent of smoke from the burning of our inner cities during the civil rights movement. We fought a civil war at least in part over the enslavement of a racial minority within our own borders. We took a large part of Mexico and absorbed it without truly absorbing its population, as any Chicano can tell you, and the story of the treatment of the western hemisphere's original peoples will bear comparison for its tragedy with the mistreatment of any group on the planet.