Dumb Blah Blah:
Are you sure you want me here? I feel a bit out of place. I have not your education, don't know your culture. I am not here to contribute content, just some spontaneous thoughts I have, reading and learning from your stories and comments. Just to let you know that I really don't feel comfortable writing OTs. I wonder why I am here, but I think you know it, I am. looking for a home perhaps.

Side Note: So, I am playing with font size and color html. I can't make the font size smaller nor do I know why the color code is just for one paragraph and not for the whole section. I wanted this to appear in a very small font size. Sorry.

Personal Blah Blah:
At the moment I like to be here, feel at home and like to chat with you. Nobody tells me here when you think I am "not seeing things right". Though it would be helpful to me, especially if people can do so without putting me down. Tell me when you want me outta here. Promise? And be honest.

I can't deal with people not telling me the truth. I am a very bad liar, or if you will, I really almost never lie, at least not consciously and not that I remember. The most lying I am involved in are the rare occasions when I do stay silent and say nothing. By God, it doesn't happen often enough online.

I grew up with a father, for whom lying was a huge important thing. He would NEVER accept it, no matter what, he was a bad liar. I was not aware of how much that had influenced me. My mother's loyalty to my father was based on that trust. She knew he was not a liar. So they made it through life together from age sixteen til they died. November 8th this year would have been their 76th wedding anniversary. But they lived together just to their 58th anniversary. A trust quote I found:

Love is giving someone the ability to destroy you — but trusting them not to. ~Author unknown"

My mother loved and trusted and my father didn't destroy her.

As so much is dependent on trust I remembered the two books I always had in mind to read. And as my mind wanders around finding a home, the books also concern the feelings of belonging. And because trust seems to be a crucial issue in politics, it might be all coming together:

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else. ~Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism

and

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear. ~William E. Gladstone, 1866

So, I pulled these books out of my box and started reading them a bit. I am way not finished. So this will be only a couple of first thoughts and quotes out of them:

The Books Out Of My Box:
Blood Lines - Ethnic Pride - Ethnic Terrorism (1997) and
Blind Trust - Large Groups and Their Leaders in Time of Crisis and Terror (2004)

Who is Vamik Volkan?

This is Vamik Volkan in uniform, obviously highly decorated. Nowhere in the biographical data in the links above, did I find anything about a possible association with the military. So, there is something in me that wants to know about THAT. Can I trust that there isn't something important NOT told about him? Oh, well, trusting is killing me.

While googling around for Vladik Volkan's books, I found more titles that trigger my interest. So, may be I will talk about those too, one day. For now I can only announce which books I am going to read. It would be nice to only write about them, when I finished them. Next time.

Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts - April 1, 2006
Third Reich in the Unconscious 1st Edition
Life After Loss: The Lessons of Grief Hardcover – April, 1993"

Blood Lines - From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism:

In the preview Volkan summarizes in how far ethnic violence arises from "deadly distinctions". He is seeing the world as an "amalgam of many pieces, a substantial number of individual nations and ethnic groups with histories and heritages all their own".
As Norman Itskowitz explains, Volkan quotes him as follows:

Nationalism is based on the assumption that the basic cleavage in society is a vertical one that divides people into ethnonational groups. Marxism, on the other hand says that the basic cleavage in society is the horizontal one of class division, which cuts across national lines.

.

When empires disintegrate (like the Soviet Union) many large groups redefined themselves and their "distinctions" under their newly found "freedom", he says. He describes in many examples of how the ethnonationalistic sentiments were evolving, being inflamed by accompanying fears over the anticipated collapse of the empire's economy.

As an example he describes the reactions of the Armenians after the 1988 earthquake in Soviet Armenia. The Soviets collected blood for the Armenian victims. Blood was also collected from Armenia's neighbors, the Azerbaijanis, but the Armenians refused to accept it, even when the number of victims were more than 25 thousands.

Under the Soviet empire long-standing animosities between Armenians and Azerbaijanis had been suppressed. After Glasnost and Perestroika fighting erupted between the two ethnic groups in the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of the size of 4400 square kilometers and a population of 188 000 thousand of whom 88 percent were Armenian.

But Armenians would rather suffer and even die than accept Azerbaijani's blood. Receiving Azerbaijani's blood was a symbolic contamination of the Armenian identity.

The Soviets were stunned that despite the "brotherly love of communism" was not enough to keep Armenians and Azerbaijanis together. "Why couldn't they share blood? What did the blood represent? Was there a psychological explanation for the Armenians' refusal of life-giving blood? And if so, were psychological issues involved in the ethnic conflicts as well?"

As one Soviet historian said on a meeting of US and Soviet psychologists and historians, psychoanalysts, former diplomats said:

If the Soviets did not quickly fathom the power of psychologized forces that lay behind ethnic and nationalistic movements, the gigantic power that was the Soviet Union could crumble as easily as a cookie.

That turned out to be right. The Armenian-Azerbaijanis conflict had escalated to the point where 17 000 Soviet troops were deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh and along the Aermenia and Azerbaijan border.

Ethnic conflicts were erupting in Moldova with 65 percent Moldovans, 14 percent Ukrainians and 13 percent Russians and a small number of Gaugases (Christians, but turkish). Baltic states had declared their independence. The tartars wanted a stake at the Crimea, refuting claims by Ukrainians and Russians, and in the Republic of Georgia tried to downplay ethnic differences between Abkahzians and South Ossetians, who stressed their identity as separate groups - all separate blood lines that deserved sovereign status.

Under the Soviet Empire confidence in the ideology and the brotherhood of peoples in the Soviet Union was so strongly believed in that they didn't seem to see any harm to still put in their internal passports of Soviet Citizens a person's ethnicity or nationality, required for traveling with the Soviet Union. Soviet first, but still classified as for example Latvian, Uzbek, Chechen etc.

These distincitions came to haunt them. (As it happens in all countries that put ethnicity into their ID cards, including the US. Once classified by ethnicity - ethnicity is institutionalized and ready to be profiled and discriminated upon). Ethnic identities became issues of "group identities". The question of "Who are we now?" boiled over during the transformation and collapse of the Soviet Union to the point that in 1993 the International Red Cross characterized the Armenian-Azerbaijani war as follows:

There has been a complete lack of the knowledge of international humanitarian law among the combatants. The conflict has included violations of the law of war or the most gruesome kind. These have included mass killings of unarmed civilians, hostage-taking, and bargaining in dead bodies, attacks on populated areas where there are no military targets, orders to execute captured prisoners, de facto "ethnic cleansing" and restrictions imposed on the civilian population's freedom of movement to preclude any loss of ground, to name but a few".

Turmoils of ethnic conflicts spilled over to Eastern Europe and he describes the division of Czchoslovakia into Czech Republic and Slovakia and the splitting up of Yugoslavia into several groups, the Servian-Croatian war and the Bosnian war. All these wars I have never really understood, nor followed in the news, and I still have difficulties to put a geographical area to each of these new countries and catch up on all the reporting done during that time.

He goes on to talk about the "tribalism, a concept popularized by colonial anthropologists", with which to explain turmoils in Africa. Too much to go into here. Later.

Volkan continues asking:

Ethnic conflicts are becoming ever more dangerous and given their pervasiveness of ethnic, religious and cultural conflict, there is an urgent need to understand, why, beyond their individualized motivations, people kill for the sake of protecting and maintaining their large-group identities. Why are they compelled to take revenge for the wrongs inflicted on their ancestors or others belonging to their bloodline? What happens to the a groups "we-ness", its distinction from others, to become so deadly?

Such questions are the subject of this book.

And that's what I want answered. Because the same conflicts and questions can be asked all over the world for so many ethnic groups that there must be a common psychoanalytical explanation for the resurgence of ethnic and related large group conflicts. To understand those will have influence on traditional practices of diplomacy. "Diplomats have seen that these conflicts can not be addressed by methods of "Realpolitik", nor can they negotiated, because many ethnic conflicts and hostilities are not between sovereign states, but within them", Volkan says.

Volkan quotes Richard T. Arndt as saying:

Many of the world's cultures, for years crushed and all but invisible beneath foreign domination, have only recently risen to surface of international consciousness, as they initiate their search, sometimes through violent means, for political and social identity.

Political scientiest Donald Horowitz notes:

that the amount of passion expressed in ethnic conflicts "calls out for an explanation that does justice to the realm of feelings" and that "a bloody phenomenon cannot be explained by a bloodless theory".

Ok, that's only the preface of the book. But I guess it's clear why I want to dig into it. Group identity issues, ethnic conflicts are the reasons why a place like dailykos was a difficult place to deal with for me. It involved lots of passions and emotions and lots of war-like discussions over group identity issues of the ethnic kind. Oh well.

Volkan summarizes:

The book "Bloodlines" wants to fill the gap in the literature of diplomacy by using the principles of psychoanalysis to search for the meaning of cultural identity, ethnic attachment, and the passions related to such relationships.

There are "deadly distinctions" all aound us and they are to me a dead serious issue. So, I will continue to just tell you what I read. If that is acceptable to you. I have nothing to offer than what I am going to read and learn in the future. I can not draw from my past experiences and educational upbringing for you. Please share music and news as you like them. I would enjoy them a lot.

Well, the Armenia conflict are in the press today:
Nagorno-Karabakh profile - BBC overview

Armenia appreciates Russia’s efforts to resolve Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

Nagorno Karabakh, security key issues for voters

A survey from respected American polling firm Arthur Finkelstein showed that Armenia’s occupation of Nagorno Karabakh and security are the key issues for voters.

George Birnbaum, Executive Director of Arthur Finkelstein, reportedly said that Nagorno Karabakh has been named as the overwhelming issue facing the nation. “It remains a highly emotive issue that pervades all aspects of politics and government in ways many observers in the West simply don’t understand.”

“It is easy to conclude from our poll that voters want more of the same,” Birnbaum said. “They want political and economy stability; they want to be kept safe from terror; and they want their elected representatives to keep fighting for the return of Nagorno Karabakh.”

For decades, the West’s approach has been to hope the whole matter goes away on its own with the passage of time, despite innumerable resolutions and demands for Armenia to end its aggression by international bodies from the United Nations down.

The issue has not receded from Azerbaijan’s collective consciousness any more than an open wound on a human body would. Next month, Azerbaijan votes; and its heart and head will be in a storied province, stolen but not yet lost.

British MEP Sajjad Karim said Azerbaijan is frustrated with the lack of progress over Nagorno-Karabakh. “It feels that, far too often, the international community disregards the challenges it has had to face in the aftermath of this war in terms of refugees and internally displaced persons.

Bloodlines are persistent it seems. I can't comment much on this, but I hope you know more and will.
Thank You.