living, thinking and writing
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| PRACTICE living, thinking and writing |
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Wednesday, April 16, 2003 Tribal hatred of modern days Right after 9/11, I asked my UB101 students (first-year undergraduate), why those terrorists would do such horrible thing to US. A usually quiet girl raised her hand and said:" They envy us because we have democracy and freedom". Other students nod at her. Well, maybe I could not agree with the object of envying of she suggested, and there are thousands of other more complicated reasons for the attack, but "envying" seems to be a incentive for violations, sometimes it is called "revenge" for a better justification. Amy Chua¡¯s article on interplay of market, democracy and ethnic-hatred suggested that Market-dominance is an often neglected cause of tribal hatred in a global scenario. Wealth discrepancy is a fuse to violence in many societies: like hatred to rich Chinese people in Philippine or Indonesia, or Jews in a lot of countries, or Croats and Slovenes with Serbs. Once the hatred is manipulated by purposeful politicians, there are where the revolution goes. Amy Chua believed the economic gap is to large extent ethnic based, and it is a major cause of genocide. And in most of case, the economic power ethic is minority but the numerically powerful are impoverished majority. I am thinking about how Chairman Mao took over China by provoking peasants' hatred to their landowners in the country and then to vulnerable bourgeois in city-there is even no ethnic conflict involved. Market-dominance minority is easy to be the object of hatred, and unfortunately, it is still true when extending to international scenario. When Americans become the world¡¯s market-dominance minority, what can they do to keep down the anti-Americanism? Can democracy alleviate the hatred? Amy Chua believed that the association of market and democracy with privileged group only makes democracy more vulnerable target for backlash. So what's the remedy? She writes: "those who call for increases in U.S. aid to the world¡¯s poor do seem to have wisdom on their side.United States now devotes only 0.1 percent of its gross domestic product to foreign aid, a smaller share than any other advanced country. Rightly or wrongly, for millions around the world the World Trade Center symbolized greed, exploitation, indifference, and cultural humiliation." It seems my 18-year-old student with innocent eyes was not totally wrong. However, on the other side of the coin, Amy Chua says: "Retreating into isolationism or glorifying American chauvinism holds no long-term promise. It is difficult to see, in any event, how a little generosity and humility could possibly hurt." posted by lmeimei @7:48 PM| permanent link| | |
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