Re: condemning geographical categories

|Maybe I am dense, but the point you are making here (is there a point?)
|eludes me.
|
|Andrew Austin
|Knoxville, TN

It would be an exaggeration to say that I am *happy* to oblige, but ok, 
let's
do this with more words. This will involve something called textual 
analysis.
This is not for the faint-hearted among those who think that "text" and
"culture" are bunk, epiphenomenal, or otherwise bad for your health. If that
is how you feel about them, please, do hit <delete> now.
__________________________________________________________________________

Here is the prose poem we are reading today:


|In Eastern Europe (for example in Latvia), as soon as Nazi disabled the
|local police, citizens began beating Jews to death with sticks and their
|bare hands.

Let's see the world according to this statement. 

First of all, there is this place called Eastern Europe. Capitalized, for it
is an *entity*. It is more than an eastern Europe, a shorthand name of a
geographical location, like "south-eastern Louisiana" (only referring to the
right-hand side of the map of Europe). No. It is *a place*, a single place. 
A
name with an implied meaning (=not so good) regarding its content. Kind of
like "South Central" in L.A.

Notice that this is not occurring in a vacuum. This conceptualization has
been a rather central feature of western thought regarding the eastern
half of the European continent at least since the Enlightenment. (About
that, see, e.g., an excellent book by Larry Wolff. 1994. _Inventing
Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment._
Stanford: Stanford University Press.)

        This view consists of two basic simplifications (my summary):

        1 "Eastern Europe" is real: it exists, it is separate and unequal. 
It
is inferior (to the sometimes explicit, mainly implicit point of every 
comparison since the colonial world: the "west"). "Eastern Europe"'s
inferiority is quantitative (it is of the same substance as the "west" only
sadly less so). This makes the disparaging judgement coded in this view
different from the Orientalism described famously by Edward Said (which
operates on the assumption of a qualitative difference). (Edward Said:
Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.)

        2 This "Eastern Europe" is one and indivisible. In other words, it 
is
internally homogeneous. (In this sense this view is similar to Orientalism's
image of  the "East".) Therefore we can take any example, freely shop, so to
say, for examples, and make it stand for the whole (synecdoche, or
"pars-pro-toto" representation, i.e., where the part stands for the whole)
and not worry about how the example /part/ relates to what is supposed to
signify /the whole, if there is a whole/ or, for that matter, all or some 
other parts of  the whole. (That's why we don't examine the question of
whether Latvia is typical of "Eastern Europe" and we compare Latvia to
Denmark, not to neighboring Estonia, etc.)

For illustration of the second thought, observe the use of the notion of the
technique of invoking the arbitrary example:

|                       (for example in Latvia)

This is a very fine specimen indeed: notice the elegance with which any
objection of the sort saying that what you call 'Eastern Europe' is a very
large area with a highly complex history of ethnic relations is swept aside.
The fact that, depending on how you play with the definition and where you
put the European part of the former USSR, "Eastern Europe" is home to 
probably cca. 200 million people, speaking around 50-100 languages is thus
occluded completely. Sofia as well as St Petersburg; Prague as well as 
Tbilisi. This is imperial thinking, if I ever encountered one.

But let's go on. 

|                                       as soon as Nazi disabled

Interesting. Were those Nazi from the inside or the outside? We won't know 
it, because it is not interesting, it does not matter. Why? Because we
are really talking about "Eastern Europe", right?

What did (the) Nazi do? They "disabled the local police". In other words,
there was no other, additional quality of any sort to the activities of the 
Nazis, other than disabling, that is relevant for the issue of antisemitic
violence, whatsoever. (The) Nazis created a law enforcement clean slate by
"disabling" the local police, that's what they did.

So, what happened, when the clean slate was created?

|               citizens began beating Jews to death with sticks and their
|bare hands.

*Who* began beating "the Jews"? "Citizens" did. Not "some citizens," "the
mob", the "antisemitic morons", the "militarized extremists", "those with an
axe to grind", "what appeared to be the minority / majority of the 
population", etc. No. "Citizens" did. An unspecified number of them,
representing the whole; implying, inevitably, all of them. Notice the 
obverse
of the pars-pro-toto: here the whole stands for the part. Again, the
relationship between the part and the whole is left unspecified, implying a
conclusion that is directly relevant to the disparaging judgement.

Oh, and of course "the Jews" were not included among the
"citizens"--otherwise we have a logical problem with the sentence.

Who was beaten up: "the Jews". An unproblematic summary category itself,
right? We know of no complication there. We have never heard of 
assimilation,
intermarriage, complex, multiple and shifting identities, the violence done
to people's lives by the Czarist/Nazi/common-antisemite talk that abused 
this
category, and the struggles over all of the above, etc.

No, we have not heard about any of this. We live with Hollywood-esque 
binary 
categories (good guys / bad guys slapped on entire societies and
half-continents), ignore history, despise and reject complexity, denounce 
the
requirement of making an effort of knowing complexity and trying to express
it by way of precise language. We watch CNN, make ourselves happy with easy
judgements, and moralize instead of understanding and learning.



Jozsef