Why is it that I’m always on the side of the oppressed, the persecuted, the underdogs and other minorities that governments want erased from the surface of the earth, like Amazon Indians, Bretons, Basques, Ainus, Andaman natives… the list is long. ?
I would get so many more satisfactions in life if I were on the side of the powerful, the winners.
And you Question would Generally be what exactly?
Because it is easy to sit in your overstuffed chair and congratulate yourself that you are not like the evil incumbents. Empathizing with the downtrodden is a way to stroke your own ego and convince yourself that you are a good person without going through the efforts of actually learning about other peoples or encountering one of them.
I don’t think it is an ego stroking exercise to empathise with those less fortunate than oneself. It is common decency.
You are on the side of the winners. After all, are you suffering like the people you empathise with? I doubt it. You’re heart may be with them, but your ass is sitting comfortably in Winnersville.
(Of course, you may actually be posting from the depths of the Amazon where you are now running a field hospital/technical school/commune, in which case, I apologize).
The Basques are neither oppressed nor persecuted nor does the Spanish or French government seek to erase them from the surface of the earth. Neither are the Bretons. Last I heard, India was trying pretty hard to protect the Andaman natives. And I doubt anyone in modern Japan are harshly oppressed or persecuted or that the Japanese government is trying actively to erase the Ainus from the surface of the earth.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Though it’s just plain intellectual laziness to knee jerk side with the underdog. Sometimes the underdog is the one which is wrong. Anyway, clearly Gymnopithys must side with the conservatives on SDMB - them being a persecuted minority and all.
Spain’s pretty tolerant of minority groups. But how much effort do the French make to provide for any of France’s minorities? Perhaps they’ve finally made it legal to communicate in France’s minority languages, but if so, it’s a recent phenomenon. In both countries, minority groups were heavily oppressed very recently (witness the status of minorities during Franco’s regime in Spain, for instance. I mean, perhaps you don’t consider the bombing of Guernica to be repressive.)
In Japan? Are you kidding me? How are Koreans treated in Japan? How about the Burakumin? Do those groups get treated well? It’s easy to treat the Ainu well, since most remaining members of the group are descendents of people forced to hide their origins for so long that they are no longer aware of their status.
In a lot of places, past efforts at oppression have marginalized communities so thoroughly that it is no longer necessary to do so. That doesn’t mean these people are successful nowadays - in many cases, they’re gone.
Don’t get me wrong - the OP’s a self-congratulatory moron. But you don’t know much about the world if you don’t think these groups are being oppressed.
Everybody has a history of repression if you go far enough back. I was of the opinion that the OP was addressing the here and now. Today neither Spain nor France or Japan are oppressing or persecuting any minority group to the extend of trying to erase them from the surface of the earth.
This link has an intelligent discourse on your question. Excalibre, this ain’t the Pit, so I won’t call you a moron back, but c’mon.
I assume the link wasn’t meant for me, correct?
Sorry about using the word moron. I’ve been in the Pit too much lately. I’ll try not to let my feelings for self-satisfied folks like the OP show.
I am sitting comfortably and I don’t really suffer to the point of being depressive. However I live in a region where we used to speak a Gallo-Romance dialect, and my parents were strictly forbidden to speak our dialect in school.
Franco tried to subdue the Catalans by settling Andalusians in Catalunya just like the Chinese are doing now in Tibet. Until recently the French governement has done all it could to forbid the Breton language, and it is not doing much to conserve the Basque language. See **Excalibre’s ** post. By the way, there seems to be quite a few people nowadays empathizing with the Tibetans ?
InvidiousCourgette you make me feel good !
You guessed right: I am sitting comfortably. However I am a good person and I don’t have to convince myself. As to suspecting that I am not doing any effort about learning about other people, what do you know ? I have belonged to a minority, though today we have been completely submerged by the “winners”.
So have you learned your ancestral language from your parents? (Gallo-Romance Dialect? Which one? Where are you from?)
And yes, there’s a lot of folks sympathizing with the Tibetans nowadays, as any cause that can drum up a cute telegenic Buddhist will be popular with the college crowd in the U.S. Tibet ain’t a great situation, of course, but it always struck me as pretty odd that this is the cause Merkins get riled up about, given how comparatively well-off Tibetans are compared to a lot of oppressed groups.
I believe they call that “liberal guilt”.
No general, factually answerable question here.
Over to IMHO.
samclem GQ moderator
So does that mean you yourself are/have been a member of a minority group, or that your grandparents or great-grandparents or whatever were a member of a minority group? Not exactly the same thing.
Look, since the dawn of humanity, one clan or tribe or ethnic group or another has been running around trying to enslave their neighbors in the other clan or tribe, or make them pay tribute or something. It’s built into human nature. That doesn’t make it alright, of course, but it’s been going on forever.
Peaceful, goddess-worshipping groups were few and far between, if they ever existed at all. Empathizing with the Ainu, who basically don’t even exist anymore, doesn’t do anyone any good. It’s sort of like getting all worked up about the fact (as my grandparents were wont to do) that the English suppressed the Irish language a few hundred years ago. Well, yes, they did. We’ve all moved on, mostly to America, where now we’re sitting at the top of the heap.
We can learn history. We can see where we (humanity in general) went terribly wrong. We can do our best to make sure that we don’t do it again. But indulging in liberal guilt, or whatever you want to call it, is indeed self-indulgent.
I believe that is correct. We all know people like that - young folks who grew up in relative comfort and affluence. They hear about groups around the world being oppressed and they associate their wealthy parents and their peers with the oppressors. This, of course, leads to various feelings of guilt and self-doubt as they try to reconcile their comfort and convienience with the suffering of people who have absolutely nothing to do with them.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t help people. We should all strive to live moral, generous lives.
I’ve often wondered at my own perverse need to root for the underdog. It comes from growing up a Cleveland fan, but I notice it in other arenas than sport.