Posts Tagged ‘ethnicity’
Ethnic and national complexities, tragedies and so on
Who would want to be born Jewish in Europe in the 1920s or 1930s, given what we know now? It’s a stupid question, as nobody could have such fore-knowledge, but my recent reading and viewing has brought home to me the terrible luck so many people have suffered from, by being born into particular ethnicities at particular times in particular places. And of course the terrible cruelty humans have inflicted upon each other due simply to conceptions of otherness – as savages, infidels, ragheads, kikes, coons and so on.
I’ve been reading Anna Reid’s fascinating but complex (and painful) book Borderland, which again highlights for me the evanescent and often questionable nature of nationhood, especially in relation to culture. Who are or were the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Swabians, the Galicians, the Assyrians, to name a few? But I should name more – the Romany, the Rohingya, the Kurds, the Uyghurs, the Hazaras, the Basques, the Acadians, the Ainu, truly the list goes on, and on. And they were/are all humans and you and I could’ve been one of them.
Nations seem to me much less real than ethnicities, which give us our language, our rituals, even our expectations. For me it has been easy, born into arguably (or unarguably?) the world’s most dominant language group, at the far western end of Europe, at a time of relative peace and prosperity, in the 1950s. And in fact that peace and prosperity has extended well into the 2020s, both in Britain and Australia, to which I was taken as a child. A prolonged peace and stability that’s been unparalleled throughout human history. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky.
So to Ukraine, and my reading so far has taken me ‘only’ to the horrors of Stalin’s famine of the late 20s and early 30s. It’s hard to read this stuff. A few years ago I was reading a biography of Mao Zedong, but I had to give up on getting to the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and its insane man-made horrors. Have we learned effectively? Will we ever do this, or allow this to be done, again? Is it possible that our much more effective surveillance techniques and our greater international communications have spelt the end of such deliberate inhumanity?
All very grand questions, but my principal purpose in reading this book was to understand more about modern Ukraine, its various ethnicities, its levels of Russification and/or Europeanisation, from the starting perspective of a more or less complete ignoramus. I have of course views on the repulsive Russian dictator and the uselessness of the USA’s ‘position’, if it can be called that, and of the determination of the majority of Ukrainians to be fully independent, but these are simply the general views of a very distant observer.
Ukrainians were more than between a rock and a hard place, in the mid-20th century. The brutalities of the Soviets and the Nazis, really not so long ago, were totalising, and involved millions, young and old, slaughtered for nothing but their supposed otherness. Ukraine and Poland were essentially at the epicentre of this manufactured zealotry and hatred. Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar, in Ukrainian, was a massacre I’d heard tell of, but I’d never thought to locate it in space. It took place in a ravine in Kiev, in late September 1941, a machine-gun slaughter of over 33,000 Jews, told to assemble nearby for resettlement. In the aftermath up to 150,000 Jews, Soviets, Roma people and other ‘undesirables’ were murdered.
There are so many other stories. Crimea has long been a contested, messed-up region. My first knowledge of it was likely typical for those of my background – Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, doing her best to save the lives of the victims of – what war, or battle exactly?
The Crimean war of the 1850s was fought between Russia under Tzar Nicholas I, and later his son, Alexander II, and the Ottoman Empire and its allies, including Britain. And what was the point of this war? Well, there were the usual broad issues re the East-West balance of power, with the Ottomans in decline, and Russians’ seemingly interminable desire to extend their borders and influence westwards. But what of the inhabitants of Crimea? This odd-shaped peninsula hangs down from the south of Ukraine into the Black Sea, and was once a Tatar stronghold. Its biggest town is Sevastopol in the south. When Ukraine gained independence in 1991, rather unexpectedly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Crimean population, overwhelmingly Russian, were somewhat nonplussed, it seems. Much has happened since then, of course, including the supposed annexation of the region by Russia under Putin in 2014. Its current position is undecided, pending the outcome of the war.
But let me return to the Tatars – for it seems to me that, for most people, their ethnicity is more important than their nationality – though sometimes these are the same. Who were they? That’s a very long story. Wikipedia begins with this:
Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: qırımtatarlar, къырымтатарлар), or simply Crimeans (qırımlılar, къырымлылар), are an Eastern European Turkic ethnic group and nation indigenous to Crimea.[9] Their ethnogenesis lasted thousands of years in Crimea and the northern regions along the coast of the Black Sea, uniting Mediterranean populations with those of the Eurasian Steppe.
I’ve removed the many links for ease of reading. So clearly they’re ancient inhabitants of the region, predating any notion of Ukraine or even Russia. They were the predominant culture, in fact, for millennia, along the northern coast of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and beyond, until the 20th century.
All of this makes me think of ‘real countries’ versus ‘real ethnicities’. It seems evident enough, at least to me, that countries are a human invention – they’re not real in the sense that cultures are real. We could say, of course, that cultures are human inventions, but nobody ever set out to invent a culture. They are a shared set of practices that people grow up within, just like bonobo culture. Nations, though, are political entities, and the best of them accept that many cultures reside within their borders – borders often born of warfare, colonisation, imperialism and the like. This is important, as cultures are more ‘real’ than nations, and more ancient. Think of Australian Aboriginal culture, or cultures. So, to me, nations – these new-fangled phenomena – need to be aware of and respectful of their history, and the cultures that form them. In Australia’s case it’s not just the ancient Aboriginal culture but the much later ones – British, of course, and then western European, and then south-east Asian, and now, African, Asian, Middle Eastern and so on.
But Australia is unique (as of course are all nations) – we’ve never been a conquering nation – at least not since we took the best land from the earlier inhabitants. And for all sorts of reasons we’re a lucky country – reading about the sad history and the present sufferings of Ukrainians really brings this home to me. Since we became this invented entity called a nation (a very short time ago) we’ve never been invaded, though Japanese air-raids on Darwin in 1942 killed over 200 people. Nowadays I have the occasional Japanese student, and we certainly don’t have to worry about avoiding ‘the war’.
Not sure where I’m going with all this except to note that we didn’t get to choose our culture, heavy or light, ancient or recent, dominant or persecuted. Ukraine is faction-ridden, as are most nations, and there has long been something of an east-west divide, but it’s clearly moving towards the west, for obvious reasons. Putin can’t last much longer, which doesn’t of course mean that things will improve (in Russia) with his absence, and with Trump the USA has sunk further, surely, than it could ever sink again. But the embattled Ukrainians have become global heroes through the course of this invasion, and may need to tough it out until the demise of these dodderers, and then some. I can only wish them well.
References
Anna Reid, Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War