Word: tribalized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...though it sailed as close as Havana with its 1,128 refugees fleeing Hitler. The American military in 1944 declined to bomb the death camps or the rail lines leading to them. These decisions (documented in the museum) have a contemporary resonance: bureaucratic cowardice and fecklessness, indifference, appeasement, denial, tribal intolerance and fanaticism, racial hatred. This is the way these things happen. The Holocaust is a densely compacted drama of warning that needs to be remembered repeatedly. In the world at the end of the 20th century, geography matters less; borders are porous, ideas go at the speed of light...
...explored the European side of the issue in his single work of nonfiction, The European Tribe (1987), out of print until a reissue this year. Six years ago some labeled the book outlandish for contending that Europeans maintain tribal ethnic identities. Today, these essays seem prophetic of the bloody conflicts and surging nationalism there...
...black brew. Slivovitz, plum brandy, taken in great quantities, starting at breakfast time, is another; alcohol numbs the conscience and lubricates the trigger finger. The sacrament of slivovitz -- though some get there without it -- helps keep Serbs, both fighters and sideline supporters -- in that fourth dimension of tribal passion where heroic patriotism and great atrocity become equally possible. This is the dimension of tribal memory, drifting in time, across centuries. Grievances float through the dimension like ghosts, crying out for justice -- for the Serbs whom the Croats massacred during the Hitler years, say, or for those Serbs who died...
Mobs have an evil dynamic. An ethnic tribe, at its worst, is a supermob. A sense of narcissistic self-pity that is merely contemptible in an individual is transformed to heroism in the tribal context: a fierce, virtuous assertion of the group. That is why ethnic grievance -- a rising force in so much of the world -- is so dangerous. When the subjective goes tribal, the self-indulgence of one man or woman comes frighteningly alive, collective, suddenly legitimized, glorious even. What would be individual shame now blossoms into shamelessness. The weak and vicious transfer their worst defects to the larger...
...riot at the tribe's Window Rock, Arizona, headquarters, where two of his supporters were killed. MacDonald, 64, will serve the term concurrently with previous sentences: five years from a 1992 federal racketeering case and seven years from a 1990 case in which he was convicted by a tribal court of accepting kickbacks and bribes...