What constitutes "us/our people" v. "them"? Lithuania's Holocaust-revision.

[xandrames]

Occasionally even CNN has intellectually interesting articles. Paul Frysh's "The Holocaust in Lithuania: One man's crusade to bring justice" (http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/06/03/lithuania.nazi.prosecutions/index.html) discusses Efraim Zuroff's efforts to bring to trial those non-Jewish Lithuanians associated with the mass killings of Lithuanian Jews (up to 95% of the Jews in the country) and the current Lithuanian government's counter-efforts to (allegedly) stall the trials.

At one point, Jews constituted 7% of the entire population of Lithuania and up to 30% in some cities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_Jews). Now there are too few for even the modern Lithuanians to notice. As one Lithuanian mentions (in Frysh's article), "we have to learn our own history, before we learn their [the Jews] history." So to this person, his neighbors, by virtue of following some "other" religion, do not qualify as fellow countrymen.

Two weeks ago, I was in a laundromat. There I witnessed an old woman insulting ("you people need to go back to your own country; we don't want any Muslims here") a family, who were presumably from India.

In these cases and more, I wonder what constitutes "our own history," "we/us/our-ness," etc. Common religion? Common lineage? Common current residence? Or what?

When "we" have examined what "we" even means, we should examine what "they" means in the following sentence I recently heard as a justification for the war in Afghanistan: "They came to our country and attacked us, so we need to go to their country and destroy them." I suppose the speaker was referring to 9/11/2001.

[pvenkat]

xandrames,
An interesting post. One thing I think important to consider is the nature of ideas like "we" and "them" to begin with. By this I mean that they are constructed. E. E. Schattschneider offers an analysis of conflict that I think could prove useful in our discussion here. The idea of an "us" and a "them" is caused, primarily, by a rift in a previously whole entity. It is a conflict, Schattschnedier says, that creates this rift and causes two formerly united groups to consider themselves different from each other. In your example of the Holocaust, it seems safe to say that prior to WW2, the distinction between Jews and non-Jewish Lithuanians was hardly an issue worth talking about. However, the concern of elements of their society being united with the Communists was enough to create an artificial separation between the two groups. From my own reading of history, these separations have been made with political or economic interests as their basis. To use your example of the woman at the laundromat, an[unnecessary as I see it] enmity has been recently constructed between the U.S. and "the Muslim world," merely as a pretext for waging a war in the Middle East. Does this war have at its foundations an interest in oil? Perhaps a desire for stability and influence in a region of the world slowly being dominated by Russia and China?

It also seems prudent to note that this sort of conflict is always subject to change. Who "we" are and who "they" are are by products of heavily influential interests that dominate mainstream thought. For example, in WW2 the Soviet Union was seen as a friend to the United States (indeed they were crucial to stemming Hitler's advancement in Eastern Europe). However, post-war their growth was seen as threatening to the dominance of the U.S. and they were ultimately cast in a negative light (this could be seen as a foreshadow to the Cold War). "We" cast away the Soviet Union into "them" because of a conflict of interest, precisely the type Schattschneider describes.

These ideas underscore a deeper issue. "We" and "they" are ideas that serve only to create false enemies. At the dawn of the Iraq War, many people conveniently forgot that the U.S. had supplied arms to the Taliban during the Cold War to stymie their advancement into Afghanistan. Our reverence of Nelson Mandela casts a shadow on the US's dark involvement in apartheid. While we are busy hurling bombs at those next to us, those who create Schattschneider-esque fault lines in the social continuum reap the benefits.

Thoughts?