Word: peoplehood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...peoplehood (am) of the Jews is a congenital condition I accept, along with a share in their fate. At the same time, I refuse to be burdened by such supernatural anachronisms as God, the Covenant. Divine Revelation, the Chosen People, the Messiah (what a mischievous and tragic notion!), etc.-although I know and respect the ethical content of the Jewish view of these ideas. It is enough that I am and my people are. To the orthodox, metadox and paradox Jews, the polydox are a welcome new strain...
...Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, democracy has contracted a bad case of "distemper." So many demands are made of the all too vulnerable system that it is in danger of breaking down. Or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, writes: "Even our sense of peoplehood grows uncertain as ethnic assertions take their implacable toll on the civic assumption of unity." Like monarchy in the 19th century, adds Moynihan, liberal democracy "is where the world was, not where it is going...
Over there, in 19th century Europe, new nations arose as different peoples asserted their right to speak in (and be governed in) their ancestral tongue. Language (the "mother tongue"), as Nietzsche observed, became the common test of peoplehood, of nationality-and of the legitimate range of government. Impassioned nationalists, like the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, demanded that the Austrian Empire and other motley empires be dismembered. People were thought to be like different species of plants, each of which could grow properly only in its own ancestral habitat...
...facets of "human nature" that will accommodate the coercive states of the future. One is a willingness to accept authority and a capacity for national identity. "Survival," says Heilbroner "must reckon with the need for--perhaps the ultimate reliance on--welcomed heirarchies of power and strongly felt bonds of peoplehood." This argument is difficult to swallow; its basis is rooted in child psychology and I don't think one can draw such grandiose extensions into politics. One certainly can't claim that it is "more courageous and less pietistic," as Heilbroner does, to advocate the following...
...Arabs, but our link of Palestine transcends our Arabism. Our attachment to the land of Palestine has been continuous?until the state of Israel was created. The Jews sought identity in linking their peoplehood to the land, and now the Arabs of the new diaspora are doing the same thing." Even the Palestinians in Beirut or Riyadh consider themselves, in their final analysis, refugees, and many cling to their United Nations refugee card as a symbolic sign of their nationality. Palestinians everywhere contribute generously to the Palestinian cause, including many donations to the fedayeen...