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RE: INFOWAR: ethnic discrimination is everywhere?
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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 98
INFOWAR. information.macht.krieg
Linz, Austria, september 07 - 12
http://www.aec.at/infowar
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Josepha H wrote:
>>Some one, presumably qualified, was refused a job in Amsterdam for not
belonging to the European Union? What IS happening?
Misunderstanding?
Or is this parallel to not being able to get a job in the US (including
Berkeley) without a "green card", a work-permit for immigrant non-citizens
but not usually available to students or'visitors'??
Does anyone know?<<
Not that I would dare claim to be an authority on the matter, but here is a possible explanation at least about the EU vs. the non-EU. It is and it is not completely similar to the "green card" problem, although they remind of each other. But the phenomen
a itself is not new in any ways, so it is continuing to happen, just the governing centre has been placed somewhere else - it has moved from the Soviet apparatus into the EU-regulations.
An East European surgeon in his prime with tons of discoveries, his own experimental operating rooms, piles of publications and patents world-wide is asked to take the Western exams in order to prevent him from killing his patients because of the lack of
professionalism.
A well-known philologist of the Indo-European (Germanic) languages from the East is asked during classes of a local national language (also belonging to the Germanic group) if she really understands terms like "plusqvamperfectum" and "compound predicate",
and is advised to use some geometrical symbols instead of these terms since it would make her understand the local language better.
An individual with a completed postgraduate degree of 10 compulsory semesters in a humanitarian discipline gets that degree equivalated to barely 2 semesters.
An elderly lady with a grandchild in the early morning in a dining room of a hotel belonging to a Western air company pointing at some non-Slavic speaking Europeans says to the kid, "Look, Soviets. Let's move to another table and finish breakfast there."
And what's about those beautifully antagonistic looks some clerk in an EU-Embassy gives to an European holding a non-EU passport - every time it breaks my heart to see the indescribable disappointment in that Western face when the non-EU European places a
ll the demanded papers in front of him, thus, taking away from the clerk the satisfaction and triumph of issuing the negative reply together with a long moralising explanation about the institutional debilism of the Easterner.
Misunderstandings?! (These are not imagined cases - they, and a bunch of others that I know of, have taken place in different EU countries, there are very real people behind them. I can bore everyone to death only by naming tens of others.) All these thin
gs are done nicely, politely, whilst smiling - "It's good, but it's different" (the real meaning - "We don't need this different, we don't know it, and we don't need to know it, so get out".) So the case quoted before is one of many many others taking pla
ce all the time all over the EU.
Why is it going on about ten years after the fall of Berlin Wall? The West needs to sustain its own belief about being the good whilst the East being the evil. Yes, the West had to suddenly make a very unexpected discovery - the East Europe has always kno
wn it was a part of Europe. Is it not just devastating? Does this not mean that as fellow Europeans they might not be that bad and marazmatic?! What?! They have really been their and participated in the Western history since the earliest times?! No, no, n
o, Bulgaria is an area in the Siberia, the Lithuanian language is identical to Russian and/or Polish, etc. And does this also mean that the West need to admit its own willingness of not knowing, not doubting their own ideologies? Spooky, isn't it? But the
n again - it was only the physical architectural construction that was removed whilst the conceptual is alive and so very kicking.
It's simple - to quote Stefan Weber's posting: it's >>about the "hierarchisation" of differences<<. The difference between an Italian and a Swede is much better than the difference between a Hungarian and a Spaniard. In the European context, i.e. around
the West-East axis, the war is continuing in a silent manner. In this conflict the owners of information are obvious. The object of desire, on the other hand, is fairly obscure. Possibly the very possibility of converting information into knowledge is tha
t object. The entire EU-project is no less utopistic - even if sometimes really beautiful - than the Bolshevik undertaking - initially it was also beautiful - in the beginning of the century. Can there be any winners in a/the Utopia then? Or is it just th
e Western thinking incapable of functioning without the methodology of oppositions - the principle as the main carrier of a conflict?
Best,
Nomeda
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