Torsten, who is certainly not to be refered to as "Tor" due to
unforgivable confusion with other Scandinavian personnages named
Tor who are not yet connected to our list, said:
>If a Dakota kills a Crow or a Frenchman kills a German, as far as
>I can see, they are doing the same thing: killing a foreigner. If you want
>to use different terminology to describe the belief systems, convictions
>and emotions in the two cases, fine with me. But I can't follow you there.
Look, Sten, erh... you mind if I call you Sten? Oh wonderful...
Now, I can see you're a little confused about ethnology. Speaking
specifically on the state of things a hundred and fifty years ago,
a Frenchman lives in a "country" called "France" with well-defined
borders. He identifies himself as "French", that is, someone from
the country of France, in which live _millions_ of strangers
speaking the same language.
A Dakota has no country. He doesn't know of defined political
borders. The land is open and free. He belongs to his tribe or
band. He identifies himself within his tiny little group of
perhaps _twenty to hundred_ people - Definitely not an
inconceiveable number such as millions. See the difference here?
Let's look at this a different way. Imagine three IndoEuropean tribes
neighbouring each other. One tribe thinks that all IndoEuropean
speaking peoples around them are their brothers and sisters. Another
tribe thinks that their tribe is the only family and that the tribes
around them are strangers. Another tribe thinks that some IE tribes
are on the outside and others not. Get my point? IndoEuropeans could
never had a unified notion of "nation" because the ideas about who
are Us and who are Them were individual to each social unit (in this
case, the social unit being only a "tribe" or "band"). Our own
social units are more involved, larger and more multilayered than
in our mesolithic past.
The End.
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