Partial Readings: Growing Minorities and the Nation-State
Partial Readings: Growing Minorities and the Nation-State
Partial Readings: Growing Minorities and the Nation-State
Populations, Actual and Imagined
In an interview with Dissent editorial board member Alan Johnson, Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer comments on the persistence of majorities and minorities:
[O]ne of the most extraordinary features of American political history is that the Anglo-Americans, the English settlers here, who certainly thought they were creating an English nation-state, allowed themselves, with some resistance and resentment, to become a minority in what they thought was their own country. This is one of the uncelebrated but most distinctive features of American history. But it?s not going to happen anywhere else. It could only happen in an immigrant society that wasn?t a homeland. It?s not going to happen in France. The French are not going to allow themselves to become a minority in France, or the Danes in Denmark. It?s not going to happen. And if their majority status is ever threatened, they will respond with measures that will be illiberal. Unless you want to abolish the nation-state, you have to live with majorities and minorities and work hard to ensure that political equality, and I would add economic equality, are features of these societies.
In the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding shows that these issues are alive in Europe today:
[T]he objection to immigration, as globalisation moves ahead, requires even more strenuous entry restrictions than Europe has in place already. So the question is whether pressure from migrants who overstay their visas or come in undetected will lead to the kind of policies ? on border control, detention and deportation ? that will turn Europe into a federation of police states. The analogy would be a low-level military conflict going on at a remove from most people?s lives, at Europe?s frontiers, with captives piling up in holding centres, round-the-clock ?removals? and raids on workplaces. Will Europe after multiculturalism look like Europe at bay?
The Internet, and Ron Paul
Facebook filed for a public stock offering last week and is expected to be valued at $75 to $100 billion. Facebook is a free service; that huge valuation is a result of Facebook’s personal data collection for advertisers on its site. Nicholas Thompson found a highlight in the IPO prospectus:
There?s a cute story on the eighty-fifth page…It appears in a section called ?business,? in which Facebook tells potential investors what it does. ?CM Photographics, a wedding photography business based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, used Facebook ads to reach the users it cared most about: women aged 24 to 30 living near Minneapolis who shared their relationship status on Facebook as ?engaged.?? The story encapsulates a great deal about the company. For starters, it?s a bit creepy. Get engaged, get hit by ads. But it?s also brilliant. Of course, the newly engaged will want wedding photographers. Facebook knows who?s getting engaged, and also who?s listening to pop music right now, and who read the Washington Post this morning.
Some people (lots of people) are on the Internet to use Facebook. Others, the National Review suggests, are there to play a grand prank by sending Ron Paul?s presidential campaign digital love. ?Ron Paul?s poll ratings should be completely ignored because his popularity surges in the evening. This is obviously because the only people who would support Ron Paul during these off-hours are Internet trolls and not real voters.?
But those are only some of Paul?s supporters. The others, apparently, spend less time online than off the grid:
?There are many libertarians out there, and many of them came from urban areas and sought relative isolation. And they found it,? said Robert List, a former Nevada governor and the state?s Republican national committeeman, referring to Nye County. ?They don?t come to Las Vegas unless they have to.?
The Cold War: It?s Never Over
Chernobyl survivors in the city of Slavutych reminisce about their lives in the destroyed city of Pripyat, Ukraine in this short film by Maisie Crow, released in conjunction with the Virgnia Quarterly Review. Haunting shots of Pripyat punctuate their accounts as they grapple with the physical and mental repercussions of the disaster (and the Soviet government?s response). Ukraine now provides ample resources for illicit trading in radioactive materials from the former Soviet Union. ?If there was ever a place where any halfwitted, would-be mass-murderer could get his hands on radioactive material, that place is Ukraine.?
Not all of the fallout from the Cold War was quite so toxic. In the Believer, Aaaron Bobrow-Strain reports on how government scientists and bakers in McCarthy-era America, after years of careful calculation and analysis, created ?the perfect loaf of white bread?a model for all industrial white bread to come.? The project was grand in scope:
Armed with this confident and urgent vision of good food, Americans didn’t just buy a lot of white bread; they also set out to transform the world’s bread. Nowhere was this stranger than in occupied Japan, where U.S. officials believed that getting the Japanese to switch from rice to industrial white bread would build the conquered people’s “democratic spirit” and prevent the spread of communism.
Art by Kazvisuals, via Wikimedia Commons
