Nations today live far from their native homelands

In what is typical of his many eccentricities, Muammar Gaddafi is demanding that the Helvetic Republic be disbanded and the several Nations which compose it “returned” to their original “homelands.”

To most East Africans, it must be a perplexing statement.

They have never even heard of such a country.

But “Helvetic Republic” is the official name of the tiny but influential central European state known as Switzerland.

And, concerning at least one point, the outspoken Libyan Leader is correct. The Swiss State is made up of very many Nations.

That is probably the problem bothering the ever busy mind of the Gomhouriya’s Leader (Gomhouriya being one of the plethora of renditions of the Arabic word which the Omani and Yemenites once brought to us — Kiswahili speakers – as Jamhuri, meaning “republic”).

Once again, however, this talk of a State being composed of several “Nations” may perplex many people.

Yet it is simple. The words “State” and “Nation” do not mean the same thing.

State is a subjective legal or political category which can be created overnight.

Nation, on the other hand, is an objective ethnic or cultural or linguistic category which originates and develops by itself without anybody willing it into existence.

The Indian State was not created till 1948, whereas the Nations within it have existed since anybody can remember.

These Nations include the Gujerati, Panjabi, Bihari, Tamil and Bangla (“Bengali’).

Like the Swiss, they show that very many Nations can agree or be forced to exist within a single State.

The British State is composed of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish Nations.

The Nigerian State, created only in 1960, is composed of the Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani and other Nations, each with separate roots that lie much deeper in history.

Similarly, the Kenyan State, existing only since 1963, contains such Nations as the Kamba, Luhya, Kalenjin, Kikuyu, Taita and Luo.

On the other hand, a Nation can be so large or so situated as to spill over into very many States.

The Arab Nation lives in more than 20 states, the Somali Nation in five States, the Maasai Nation in two States.

This is the case of Italy, France and Germany, Nations which spill over into what used to be called Yugoslavia (the Italians), into Belgium (the French), into Austria and Lichtenstein (the Germans) and into Switzerland (all three).

But Switzerland is probably the country which best expresses the difference between a State and a Nation.

The Swiss State contains three main Nations (or culturo-linguistic group) — Italians, French and Germans.

But how can they be called so whereas Nations nearby are known by those same names -- the Italians of Italy, French of France and Germans of Germany?

The answer is that Switzerland was artificially created by joining together a piece each of what used to be Italy, France and Germany.

But even these original homes of theirs are best called Nations because, when Switzerland was being carved out, Germany and Italy did not exist as States.

Only in 1870 did Otto von Bismarck and Giuseppe Garibaldi, respectively, unite them into States out of scores of principalities.

Thus, according to London’s Daily Mail recently, Col Gaddafi has launched a campaign to urge the UN to begin “the task” of sending “back home” the Swiss confederation’s ethnic Germans to Germany, ethnic Italians to Italy and ethnic French to France.

It is a case — as the English say — of those living in glass houses forming the habit of throwing stones.

The overwhelming majority of today’s Libyans are Arabs.

Therefore, if we began speaking the language of their present leader, we would have to say that the majority of Libyans are foreigners.

Their semitic ancestors arrived in Africa as conquerors from the Asian side of the Red Sea.

Armed with heavy weapons and extraordinary religious and political zeal, they poured profuse blood in battle after battle to conquer what Arabic still calls the Maghreb (“the West”).

Composed on the African side of Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, (northern) Sudan, Tunisia and Libya itself — all of which were originally Negro lands — the Arab Maghreb empire once also included such European countries as Iberia (Spain), Lusitania (Portugal), southern Gaul (France), Malta and large parts of Italy.

Libya itself is not a Semitic term. It was named after the creator Goddess of the local Negroes.

Though these locals have since been systematically swallowed into the Arab artery, the original Libyans can still be recognised by their black skins, pug noses and fizzy hair.

Having such a history, how can Libya afford to make the mind-boggling demand that, wherever they now live, all the ethnic and racial groups of our world should be rounded up and deported to their “native” countries?

Once the world body agreed on such an exercise, exactly where would it begin and end?

True, any casual look at the world’s history would convince you that, in some way, humanity has committed horrendous injustices to humanity.

Consider Joshua in Canaan, Temujin (“Genghis Khan”) in Asia, Attila in Rome, Cortes in Mexico, Hitler throughout Europe, Ben Gurion in Palestine, the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the Vandals in North Africa, England and France in Africa, the US in Latin America and the Middle East, and so on.

However, if Europeans destroyed the entire Tasmanian race, nearly annihilated other Aborigines and Amerindians, decimated Europe’s own Khazari Jews and moved whole black African populations to North America as slaves — so Arabs have killed or swallowed all the black natives of Mediterranean Africa.

But, although we are apt to condemn Caucasian and Semitic racism for such ferocity, black peoples are not the exception that proves our “humanity.”

Bantu and Nilo-Hamitic chieftains have always marauded the continent slaughtering tribes, grabbing property, forcing whole multitudes into refuge in other people’s lands, eventually grabbing those lands.

The upshot is that the blood of practically every ethnic group from every continent now flows in the veins of every other ethnic group.

For instance, African blood flows in the veins of every Arab, Armenian, French, Greek, Indian, Irish, Maltese, Pakistani, Portuguese, Scot, Sicilian, Spaniard, Tuscan and Welsh.

I use racial terms here (“Semitic,” “Caucasian,” and “Negro”) — not because imperialism is a racial category, but precisely in order to show that it is not.

I reiterate that the Semitic Arabs — helped by black West Africans (Moors, Berbers and Lixitae — ruled these white nations for half a millennium.

But, on the other hand, the entire Semitic stock are “foreigners” in the Middle East because they originated in the Horn of Africa.

The Mongoloids are “aliens” in Japan because the Negroid Tokigawa and Jomon of the Ainu — the original inhabitants of that archipelago — were an offshoot of the Negritos of India and Indonesia

The gypsum-skinned inhabitants of Pakistan and northern India came from northern Europe only 3,000 years ago, as did the Hellenes, Hittites, Hurrians and the foreparents of the Afghans and Iranians.

The people of America’s New England left old England’s Southampton much more recently.

But who in his right mind can suggest that New Englanders should be rounded up and shipped to Land’s End, Sussex and Kent?

Count me out of any movement whose plank is that Jokowiny — the Kenya Luo — should organise an exodus to Sudan and Egypt.

The ruling groups in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South America left Europe a mere three centuries ago.

Yet, although there is no country in the world which was not created by such mind-boggling human cruelty, practically all of these injustices are now time-honoured.

This concept of “time-honour” was what the Khazari Jews flouted when, in 1948, they used a dubious 2,000-year-old claim to grab Palestine with Anglo-Saxon help.

It was doubly unjust because the Khazari Jews are essentially Caucasian (from a Russian root).

Many Khazaris now admit they became Jews only by conversion, not by the blood of Judah.

As, the Jewish scholar Raphael Patai demonstrates in his book The Jewish Mind, Judah’s blood is essential to the definition of a Jew.

But nobody who appreciates its insuperability of implementation will countenance any suggestion that the present world demographic structure be disturbed to achieve ethnic justice.

It is much more cost-effective for each ethnic community to struggle for justice whenever it now finds itself.

Time may have extended respectability even to the Israelis.

As the Khazari writer Betty Caplan suggested in a Nairobi newspaper recently, even the Khazari State of Israel — if it tried to live less by brawn and stomach and more by brain and heart — would be admitted into the Levantine comity of nations sooner than it thinks.

But, even if we agreed in principle to repatriate whole ethnic groups to the native lands of their eponymous fathers, exactly where would we begin and end? In Libya?

Indeed, exactly who would these “we” be? Where everybody is guilty, how can there be a “we”?

Ali, Isaac, etc: Please reduce the capped words to upper-lower case but retain the italics.