POLITICIANS FEED ANCIENT SQAUBBLES
Tibor Machan

Portales News-Tribune
ent_17136___article.html/feed_isn.html
April 17 2009

If it isn’t the Croats versus the Serbs, the Irish versus the British,
the Hungarians versus the Russians, the Indians versus the Pakistanis,
and so on and so forth endlessly, ethnic, national or other groups
carping about each other based on ancient misconduct, ill feelings,
and awful memories that have virtually nothing to do with people
alive today, then it is their diplomatic allies that are being urged
to keep the flames of the acrimony burning. Why? Because there are
many political theorists who insist that "people belong to their
communities" — their nations, ethnic groups, or tribes instead of
each individual’s life belonging to him or her, independently of the
ghosts of their ancestors.

I have brought this up before — the Hungarians had their truly
gruesome conflicts with the Turks many, many moons ago. And for reasons
that have made absolutely no sense to me some of them still hold a
grudge, as if they had been victims or aggressors despite not being
alive anywhere near the time of these conflicts. No matter. For some
these feelings of hostility — or friendship — must be kept alive.

Why? Well, I can only guess that it has to do with the ancient idea
of tribal loyalty, as if those Hungarians and Turks — or substitute
some other warring collectives many moons ago — imposed obligations
on today’s members to keep up the anger at each other.

I blame for all of this the widespread anti-individualism that has
been promoted not only by politicians and others who feed off such
warped loyalties but by numerous prominent political theorist —
usually called communitarians in our day — who insist that everyone
primarily amounts to some kind of eternal team member. That one’s
identity consists of being a member of some such collective. And, of
course, the membership is completely accidental — I certainly didn’t
volunteer to be born in Hungary and might well have been born in Turkey
instead! Or again, substitute some other relentlessly hostile groups.

This is why I consider identity politics such a curse. Who one is
has very little to do with the group into which one was born. Sure,
it has some meaning for most of us where we got our start in life,
who were those near and dear to us back in those formative years. But
it should amount to nothing of great significance, given that none
of us had a choice in the matter.

Once this group membership is not just accepted as merely a trivial
feature of our lives but made a great deal of by leaders and political
thinkers, consider how impossible it is to get rid of it. It isn’t even
like one’s religion, which if one were to learn that it’s insidious,
one can abandon. No one can change the fact that he or she was born
in Israel rather than in Palestine, in Ireland rather than in Britain,
in Mexico rather than in California. These are incontrovertible facts
and if one attaches to them obligations of loyalty and fealty, one
is eternally stuck. No argument, no enlightenment can make a dent in
these alignments. We are simply members of the groups and must bear the
burden of their histories, be they nice or naughty or some combination.

President Obama swore during the recent presidential campaign that
he would not let the Turks forget about what their ancestors did
to Armenians and when he failed to bring up the issue during his
recent visit to Turkey, a number of commentators, such as the erudite
wordsmith Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair magazine, called him
out on his breach of his campaign promise.

Well, I say that Obama should never have entered into this messy
controversy about a widely contested genocide back in the early 1900s,
never mind the emotions of unfortunately too many Turkish and Armenian
Americans. Whatever bad deeds were committed were done by people
long dead, so I say drop all this already. What matters, especially
in America, is the kind of human individual you are, what you have
chosen to believe and do in your life, not what your parents and
grandparents, et al., believed and did. That is what justice requires.

Tibor Machan advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this
newspaper.