being that the basque ETA organization has announced its permanent cease fire and end to its terrorist nuisance activities i am given a reason to think about something that i have thought about before...
modern nations... its sort of not a normal thing.. and its something that we mostly take for granted and we assume that nations have always existed in this same way throughout history.. but they havent... and when i was in europe i was intrigued to see all the nations within nations that persist to this day.. some of them have military liberation fronts (ETA) and some have been in political struggles to maintain ther culture against federal powers mandating assymilation (bretons)...
the basques are a people who live in the pyrenees of france and spain on the atlantic coast... they have names with a lot of x's in them... and they speak their own language... the bretons are celtic peoples living in the britanny peninsula of france.. they have their own language as well and are quite nationalistic... they wear kilts and play bagpipes but they dont drink green beer on st patty's day nor do they reminisce about larry bird and kevin mc hale... both of these ethnic minorities have varying degrees of aspirations to be autonomous but they do both have "national" flags that are seen proudly waving at sporting events and they both have pro cycling teams.. euskatel-euskadi and bretagne jean floch'...
there is also in the south of france near marseille an ethnic minority that has its own language and even its own nightly news broadcast...
i am interested to find a map that shows all the little kingdoms that predated the nations of europe that we currently know...
here in the states i always has this idea that homogeny was the normal way of a nation.. but after seeing nations in europe that arent so homogeneous as you might think it made me think more than ever that its ok to have a lot of different people and different languages... never mind the question of immigration... then you take a place like switzerland with 4 official languages...
i'll think about this some more.. and i am gonna watch also that movie about TV...
7 comments:
We are Citizens of the Outside. We have rejected the simplistic,
boring, regimented, bureaucratic moral and ethical scriptures by
which the people live. In their place, we have substituted our own
far superior ones. We may move physically among them, but we are
not of them. In order to accomplish our aims we must operate
outside their barriers and well outside their rules.The movie comes out next month.. PARKE.. Does this sound like him..
what he hell are you talking about?
Slover,
Huh?
erik, when are you going to talk about BIKE racing?
only place i see folks drink green beer is USA - they don't drink it in ireland either - also being irish the first time i ate corn beef and cabbage was when i came to the states.
you lot got it all wrong you know
gulluh...or something like that...
its like an english creole language...
i think of that a few times a year.. and then i think of the so called "ebonics"...
language is like a living thing in that it evolves and changes... it is subject to genetic drifts and bottlenecks and selections... a lot of the time it is dictated by social circumstances that make its difficult to discuss with any rationality... in the case of ebonics or gulluh or spanglish or something like that... you look at the history of black language in the US and its really sad... it would be really nice if the slave dialects had persisted to this day in a large way... but that could never have been allowed obviously... with language comes a certain amount of respect and pride i think... i always like that my guada boys had their own language between them as well as french... in the carribean and belize these types of hybrid languages exist still though...
Gullah... I have some family in the Gullah area near Greenbeau.
During the Vietnam era my Aunt used to teach English as a second language to the gullah community so these 18 year old kids could ship off and learn how to shoot a gun.
Another example of a marginalised community getting shit upon twice by the man.
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