Re: the word 'racism'
Not-That-Bright said:
Wow, sounds to me much like Australia...
We have states, local government.....different rules, but all united by common agreements. The only difference I guess is there was no federal structure, however I hardly see how this means they were not a nation, or at least a grouping of small nations :/
Let's see. If you ask most Australian citizens 'In which nation do you not only reside, but belong', I'm sure they'd say 'Australia'.
At the very most, you could claim that there were Aboriginal nation
s. Then again, the evidence to support sedentary occupation by Aborigines has been hotly disputed (and generally regarded as an attempt to forward Aboriginal rights). I'm not sure about everyone else, but I don't think you can be part of any nation unless you participate within it.
Say if I kept my South African passport but moved here right after birth. I was born in South Africa, why can't I be south african? Because I don't have any sort of link with the geography or the culture.
Then again, I'm saying that I wouldn't be south african, and that is a clear identity. What is the 'Aboringal Nation'? I say that it doesn't exist because the only link between the various Aboriginal groups was ETHNICITY. Nothing more. There has been linguistic studies showing that many Aboriginal languages weren't even comparable (not to mention the ones that didn't have a language...). Language, as most historians know, is the first step towards a unified group of people. Without a unified group of people, you don't have a nation.
'Palestine simply exists because people want it to exist; regardless of borders.' That kind of hippy crap is so superficial and naive, and goes so well with 'A church is not a building, but a group of people'.
It's historically impossible to have such a diverse group of people at such an early age, yet call them part of the same nation. Someone give me one other example where 1000s of incommunicable, segmented, warring, and pre-agrarian cultures identified with each other. Not to mention the fact that Australia is a group of Islands -- where was 'Australia' for them? What about the northern New Guinea islanders, of which some were CLOSER in similarity than other fellow 'Aboriginal Nationals'? Well, I guess NG was ALSO part of the Aboriginal Nation, then?
Oh wait. There were calcolithic people ALL OVER AFRICA which were COMPARABLE to the Aboriginal people of Australia. I bet I could find a group of calco Africans that were more similar to Aboriginal group X than Aboriginal group X was to Aboriginal group Y.
So lets see.
They didn't have any sense of land ownership other than their current, present location (ie, they didn't need to farm). They didn't have any similarities. Their 'nation' was borderless. Yet they still seemed to form a nation. Not only that, they had no sense of non-Aboriginal. How can you form a nation unless you can say 'nope, he's not part of it.'
That's a pretty good effort of defining 'nation', if you ask me... Pre-Unification Egyptians had more sense of the Egyptian nation than these people did.
And that guy above, please don't patronise me with ideas about prehistoric history and archaeology, it's what I study.
Also, can some people here please fucking learn how to read and write, and learn the difference between 'Aboriginal' and 'Aborigine', please?