Modern society seems to idealize the underdog. However, a corrolary to that is that we now tend to get very very nervious when there is an underdog we don’t agree with, because our own cultural rules seems to state that it is always the underdog that turns out to have been right all along.
For your knowledge of languages and sound opinions in this and other forums:
canton of Valais, Switzerland. I’m sure you know the dialects from this area belong to Franco-Provençal.
I spoke some dialect as a child but I didn’t really learn it. My adolescence saw the end of our dialects. Some older people still speak it in some mountain villages, probably the last in the whole Franco-Provençal region. However plenty of residual vocabulary has remained in our local French; chalet is one that became widely known.
I’m just in between. I’ve witnessed the disparition of this region’s dialect.
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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.
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What is to be deplored is the loss of diversity (Looks like I’m answering here my own OP question!)
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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.
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I also feel like that since I’m now sitting comfortably among the winners.
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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.
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Cold but sound jugments. Cannot but agree.
Exactly. We define those who are the losers in a struggle between cultures as victims, and we believe that victim status confers some sort of moral authority on the losers. But it doesn’t.
The Spanish pretty much wiped out the Aztec culture in the new world. But the Aztecs (along with their cousins, the Mayans, who pretty much collapsed under their own weight before the Spanish showed up) were a pretty nasty lot, who practiced slavery and human sacrifice on a grand scale. That doesn’t justify Spanish colonial practice, of course, but we can only define them as “victims” if we restrict that definition to the struggle between the Spanish and the Aztecs. Other than that, by any rational standard, the Aztecs and the Mayans were a brutish bunch. They were also artists and mathematicians and empire builders (just like the Spanish).
The struggle between cultures goes on forever. Sometimes it’s peaceful and a natural process. Languages sometimes die a natural death, because it’s more useful and produces more opportunity for a culture to accept the dominant language. Sometimes the process is less peaceful. Again, we ought to learn from this, and understand what is lost when this happens. But the flip side of the coin is that good things come of the process.
I’ve always sided with the underdogs. Mainly because I’ve always thought of myself as an outsider. Being a member of a minority sect in a country where people take their religion very seriously doesn’t help; neither does having a very different cultural background from most of my peers.
I guess when you feel discriminated against (not that I’ve ever experienced that), you feel for people in other parts of the world who are victimized becasue they’re different.
i would go with the opinion that regardless of how we ourselves are living it is never a bad thing to show empathy and compassion for those who are opressed, abused and basically living a s*** (i dont know the rules on swearing) life, and if you actually do something to help, then all the better.