We are all foreigners

...inflection is, all by itself, enough to make me understand something that animates the bombers, without approving it...

...I didn't understand the grievances, he said: I needed to understand, and as a naive American never could, how they justified everything that was happening now...

...We must remember that we are not to accept any of the identities urged on us by culture and, too frequently, by religious habit...

...There is a history of injustice and oppressive violence that is as real as any geological formation, but looking at it too long turns the heart to stone...

...they are both, and have not been forced to identify with one side of the family to the exclusion of the other...

...There have been nations forever in human history, but the belief that a nation has a right to a spe"Don't misunderstand: I'm not putting down the Swiss...

...Race has become this, for us...

...It deserved to die because it was so stupid...

...Race, for her, was us (everyone who was not black) as distinct from them (everyone who was...

...I said approximately the same thing to both: we had no quarrel as long as they admitted that being Serbian, or Irish, was finally much more important to them than trying to be a follower of Christ...

...Religion is a matter of choice...

...A certain sort of Brit accent or "oh, really...

...I was accused, both times, of idealism...

...An argument could be made that Lord Byron's Hellenism and Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia are not all that far apart, ideologically...

...Our lives are hidden in Christ," and we must wear any other identity pretty lightly, no matter how important the culture tells us it is to see ourselves as having some worth based on the mere fact of being Irish, Serbian, straight, gay, white, black, or American...

...In a recent, very good Harper's article on Malcolm X, Gerald Early writes of black students who are the offspring of mixed marriages—and it occurred to me that my children have never been forced to think of themselves primarily as Asian or IrishAmerican...

...America has had an ideological commitment, violated at almost every turn, to a vision of society which is classless, not racist, and egalitarian...

...8: 18 December 1992 Commonweal Obviously these are three very different things...

...Filipinos are white...

...It is antiblack racism that forces people to think of themselves primarily as black, or white...

...cific territory simply by virtue of being a nation, a territory defined not only by a common story and language but by mappable borders, a common currency, and a central government, first became virulent only as late as the nineteenth century when, undergirded by romanticism, it spread throughout Europe and began to infect the rest of the world...

...It is dealt with as if it had ontological weight: to be black is to be essentially different, a belief shared by some black writers and entertainers with white racists...

...But I do know how horrible the Croats often were, and Serbs and Croats often now are...

...I have to understand in myself here the beginning movement of those small indulged angers that can lead to still small, merely verbal and mental violences that at first seem harmless, and somewhere down the line mean blood on a sidewalk...

...I can read...

...Now, as an Irish-American who has studied a bit of our history I am far from being an Anglophile...

...It was a happy, naive, and shallow vision...

...Black pride is at one level a healthy reaction to racism, but (like Serbian pride, Irish pride, or white pride) it can be as ugly as what it opposes...

...Patriarch Pavle of the Orthodox church and Roman Catholic Cardinal Franjo Kuharic of Zagreb, at a meeting in Geneva in September, called for the suspension of all violence, the end of the destruction of Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim places of worship, the release of all hostages and prisoners of war, the closure of all prison camps, the end of "the inhuman practice of ethnic cleansing, on whatever side it began...

...Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land...

...It's just that, compared with some other groups, they don't strike me asbeing very ethnic...

...Race is not, in most cases, but even that, as we will see, is not so clear...

...There were no grounds for argument, if they said as much...

...all involve collective, if slippery, memories...

...All claim ancient sanctions of a sort...

...We would evolve towards an accommodation with Communist nations which would give all the societies involved the best of all the forms of government swarming toward this great reconciliation: capitalist societies would learn the communal virtues of socialism: Communist societies would loosen up and grant more individual freedom...

...It existed as a weird flowering for a century or a little less, was deep-frozen by World War I and the Russian Revolution, and with the death of communism has only now thawed and is showing itself in what was Yugoslavia, in the former Soviet Union, and in the resurgence of a Nazi hatred of the other (now the other seems more commonly to be Turkish than Jewish) in reunited Germany...

...In some cases (the English in Ireland, any European nation in Africa) it is clearly a matter of colonialism: the only claim is that one power was able to coerce the other, with no right other than the right of plunder...

...When we pointed out to her, as gently as we could, that what she was saying was offensive to us, she said, "I'm not talking about you...

...OF SEVERAL WIMPS John Gciryey WE ARE ALL FOREIGNERS RELIGION, NATION & RACE ' hen I was in college, a couple of years before Bill Clinton didn't inhale, it was assumed among progressive people (I aspired then to be one) that nationalism was dead, and that racial and religious divisions were on their way to the ash-heaps of history...

...Race, of course, continues to haunt us...

...It was a firm, moving, unequivocal rejection of forces that have animated Serbs and Croats who claim to be Christians, and it was, of course, ignored, for the same reason that Christianity has always been ignored: it is easier to use a religion than to listen to it, and something similar applies to nation and to race...

...I spoke not too long ago with a Serb who was clearly in favor of the bloodshed...

...The Serb (like the Irishman) claimed to be a Christian...

...They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners...

...Still, he reminded me too much of someone closer to home, of an Irish-American man I had talked to in a bar a few years before, who was trying to convince me that the IRA bombing campaigns in England, and all of their behavior in Ireland, were all right...

...it isn't a matter of essential differences...

...Commonweal 18 December 1992:9...

...I was accused by him of what I can only call insufficient Irish-ism, a lack of the right kind of passion...

...In either case the identification with something collective (being a Serb, being Irish, being Palestinian, being a Jew) becomes so important that—for too many people who make a certain leap—any indecency is excused, because of all the horrible things that were done to us...

...Where Christians confront any of these things they must remember the ancient letter to Diognetus, in which it is said that Christians "live in their own countries, but only as aliens...

...Of course it is true, and it is unjustifiable...

...I didn't appreciate how the Serbs had suffered at the hands of the evil Croats during World War II...

...My wife is Asian, and we once met someone who told us that she didn't believe in interracial marriage...

...Nationhood is even trickier...

...But our situation has been artificially created...

...In other competing arguments (Jews and Arabs in the Middle East) the claims become more complex...

...This has been obvious in a dreadful way in what was Yugoslavia...

...What isn't seen often enough, beyond the claim of nationhood, is how recent the idea of the nation-state is...