How Cultures Can Unite without Domination

Part of the message of the Christmas season is “Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men.” But is this even remotely imaginable?

Yes, it is.

As shown in a video [https://youtube.com/shorts/D4GB35JCuzE?] I have just posted, war raged between what is now France and what is now Germany for millennia until 1945, when Nazi Germany was defeated. Today, no two countries are as closely allied with one another as are France and Germany. Today, war between them is unthinkable (as well as illegal). How did this happen?

First, the country (Germany) that wanted to conquer and assimilate the other (France) had to be humiliated into abject surrender. Second, the two countries had to make the deliberate decision to cooperate, and to resolve any and all tensions through constructive negotiation rather than war. And that is what France and Germany have done. Not only them, but all of the other couple of dozen nations that make up the European Union, which is a unique accomplishment of the work of peace in human history.

The result of the European Union has not been assimilation. Neither France nor Germany assimilated the other. The French still have their own language and culture, and the same is true of Germany. As shown by the statues in the video, France and Germany are saying the same thing (“I give, you give, we live”) in their own languages. They have the same objectives, each in their own cultures.

As I also explain in the video, this has not been the case in the United States, with regard to the Native American nations. The white culture of the United States has conquered the Native nations and imposed its culture and language on them. There is no mutually respectful meeting of cultures. Many tribes, such as the Cherokee tribe of which I am a member, maintain cultural identity, but it has little practical meaning in governance or the economy.

Two cultures can mutually benefit one another if they cooperate and share objectives, while maintaining their distinction. This happened with the European countries, but not with white and Native America.

Donald Trump has declared that Europe is weak, Putin is strong, and that it is stupid for America to help Ukraine remain independent. Putin represents all the worst in assimilation; he wants to obliterate Ukrainian culture and identity, and make Ukraine into a colony that provides cheap goods and labor to Russia. And, according to Trump, it is stupid for us to help Ukraine to resist this. Putin wants to do (as Russia did under the communists) to Ukraine what white America has done to the Native nations. But it is Europe that is strong, because a Union of proud nations has come together to defend its common interests.

Taking the Extremists Seriously

Back in 1975, I was a new student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I wandered through the library, enthralled by the huge number of books. Guided by my interest in Japan, I ended up in the World War Two history section. I found a book by Otto D. Tolischus, Through Japanese Eyes. Written during the war, the book used the words of the leaders of the Japanese Empire to show that they were every bit as bad as the Nazis and deserved no better treatment from us after their inevitable defeat.

But I also found a book entitled, Are Germans Human? I am quite sure I saw this book, though I can find no online record of it. The author answered his own question: “Are Germans human? Probably not.” His reasoning was that Nazi leaders could spend the day committing mass killings, then go home at night and speak lovingly to their caged birds. Could a single human contain such different feelings at the same time?

The frightening thing is that, yes, people can be good at one time and bad another. Germans today are very peaceful and polite, and even during Nazi times most Germans were not true, converted Nazis. But enough of them were that they produced the greatest evil in history. Moreover, the same individual human being can be loving at one moment and bloodthirsty the next.

The brief conclusion I want to draw, following on the last two entries, is that we should not assume that extreme right-wing people are, despite what they say, actually very nice people and could not possibly rise up and damage or destroy society. Paul Harvey would not have been violent, nor would James Miller. But today, thousands of right-wingers openly display threats of violence. We see them wear camouflage, mask their faces, and bring their weapons to protests. We think they could not possibly turn their guns against the rest of us. While this may be true, we must remember that the slightest perceived insult might cause otherwise nice rednecks to take the actions that they say they are ready to take. Even if only, say, ten percent of right-wing extremists become violent, America might be so severely disrupted that it cannot survive in a hostile world.

My point is simple. We should not dismiss the extremists by saying, “Oh, they wouldn’t actually use those weapons.”

An Incredibly Beautiful Peace

France, Part 3.

I ended the last essay by describing my beautiful experience in Strasbourg at seeing to what extent the horrors of past war and oppression have been swept away from Europe since the end of World War 2. I grew up hearing horror stories of the German war from my uncle. To people of his generation, the peace that has lasted in Europe since 1945 was unthinkable. But my generation has seen it. A large part of the credit belongs to the European Union, which richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize it received in 2012. And while some countries such as England have questioned the workability of complete economic integration, nobody wants to go back to the days of antagonism, certainly not of war.

I thought about these things in Strasbourg, France, on July 18 and 19. On July 18, I walked from the Wacken tram stop over to the European Union Parliament building. The main building is in Bruxelles (Brussels), but this secondary building is still very big and busy. The flags of the Union and of France were still at half staff in memory of the July 14 terrorist attack in Nice.

Nearby was the Court of Human Rights. In America, we are used to thinking of human rights as something that we choose and impose on the rest of the world. Many other nations, such as Russia and China, believe the same thing about their right to impose their values on the world. But in the European Union, the member countries deliberate together about what is right and wrong. I felt humble as I stood before the court, which also had the French and European flags at half staff, realizing that I represented a country which would never let any other country tell us, or even suggest to us, what to do.

The next day, July 20, we went with our French family across the Rhine River bridge into Germany. No checkpoint for passports. The European authorities have restricted traffic flow, presumably to monitor vehicles that might carry out terrorist attacks like those not a week earlier in Nice. But they have no plans to block the free flow of humans across the Rhine; in fact, they are constructing a new tram line over the river.

We walked through the beautiful German city of Kehl to a park along the Rhine. Of course, France was visible just a short distance away, across the river. This was the frontier of war for a millennium. But today it is just a peaceful park. Best of all, there is a pedestrian footbridge, away from the traffic of the vehicle bridge, which spans the river. We walked across and back. There wasn’t much to see or do; it was the significance of the act itself that will stay forever in my memory. In the middle of the bridge, right on the border, French-German couples have placed padlocks in the chain link, indicating that for them the new peace between France and Germany is not merely an international agreement but the most intense form of love.

The new stage of altruism that awaits the social evolution of our species is international trust and, where possible, love. I felt no hostility as I entered France, or walked between France and Germany. The only hostility I felt was in returning to the United States, where federal officials grilled me with trick questions to make sure that I, an American citizen, was not posing a threat to my own country. In Europe, there is a lot of altruism between nations; in America, especially in this political season, we have very little altruism within our country.

Our species evolved to be altruistic within our group and ferocious to everyone outside of our group. The European Union represents perhaps the best example of large-scale outside-the-group altruism that the world has ever seen, and its greatest success is the lasting peace, and the unthinkability of war, between France and Germany.