The French are Having an Identity Crisis?

27craash

In the first half of the twentieth century, France saw America as a future rival colonial power. But the peoples of the two powers liked each other. Overt antipathy between France and America stems from the reasons surrounding DeGaulle’s decision to pull out of NATO. France thought that it had become enlightened due to their disastrous experiences as a colonial power and they thought America and the USSR were trying to duplicate the errors of colonial France.

Our Vietnamese experience looked like their Vietnamese experience. And Abu Graib especially reminded them of Algeria. Or something like that. But pulling out of NATO made the Americans feel that France was not a trustworthy ally against the communists and, later, against Islamic terrorists. France has now returned to NATO. But now the usefulness of NATO itself seems to be on the wane.

@Mizar5
I don’t think Ainu are Indo-Europeans. Your use of “caucasoid” is confusing.

@Robert Koehler
“Remind me, why should we care if there were crackers in Korea in cave man days?”

The better question would be to ask why anyone should care about French-ness, Korean-ness, or American-ness as if these ever were some static essential thing. So your nation absorbs a bunch of new people. Oh no. That would be bad because the essense of your country would be lost? And that’s a bad thing? Because it should be immutable? I think not.

Putnam has reported on something interesting. But certainly it is annoying that his simple straight-up investigation has caused a controversy. People should not be thinking that his conclusion must be made to be seen as wrong because it conflicts with one of their ideological objectives. That is just stupid. People should instead be saying that the conclusion was good to know. It has practical value in civic planning and illuminates something about human nature. But I do think the validity of his conclusion are temporally limited. Assimilation occurs over time one way or another. After centuries of denigrating and isolating the Ainu, the Japanese have recently been forced to acknowledge that they themselves have Ainu blood.

It should be noted that the framing of the French debate here is off. What is happening is not exactly that the French are all liberal and that they have concluded that liberal North African immigration policies have been a disaster. The French, too, have their liberal multicultural idealists and cultural progressives who have been struggling against conservative xenophobes and arguing over Frenchness for a long time. And there are defections either way in that debate. The mood of the majority in France has been turning increasingly conservative, as voting results attest. But such swings are cyclical.

Anyone’s constant harping on the necessity of maintaining the essense of an ethnic or racial or national identity in a pure form should be seen as both short-sighted and creepy. The current leader is part Hungarian, Ottoman, Sephardic Jew, and French. Their most successful leader was Corsican. Many of their star athletes and artists today came from Africa or have African blood. The local civilzation sprang up after technologies, crops, and domesticated animals arrived from Asia. The French have been absorbing massive migrations from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa for like more than half a dozen millenia. Today’s immigration problem is not something new. And the result will be something surprising and ultimately good for the French.

62Wangkon936

The “Nature” abstract you linked to does not contradict what I have posted. The Ainu are related to the people of Tibet because they both have the male Y-Haplogroup D. The only other people who have it are the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. It is derived from people who entered east Asia via south Asia about 60,000 years ago. Indians do not have it, which leads me to think that the Ainu are not related to the Indo-Europeans.

But what your link shows is that a minority of Ainu do have the Haplogroup C-M217, which belongs to the North East Asian peoples, particularly people in east Russia. These refer to genes that only males carry.

The mitochondrial genes that are passed down from females to females show what is common in northeast Asia, which suggests that a long time ago, genes from a certain group of women–whoever they were–came to become prevalent in much of north China, Korea, Japan, and east Russia. And the Ainu also have these. It seems to me that rice farmers from the south of Asia and Koreans and Chinese from the north found certain female genes in northeast China very appealing.

But the fact remains that the Chinese, the Koreans, the Yayoi Japanese, and east Russians do not have the Y-Haplogroup D. But people in Tibet and some islanders in the Indian Ocean do.

67mkaplan

“There is evidence of Mongoloid remains on the Korean peninsula coterminous with, and even before, the Jomon period. I imagine these are the early hunter-gatherers that were displaced. I suspect they were also absorbed to some degree and compose some of the multiple lineages that make up the contemporary Korean population.”

Well, the question for me is, why the hell are the Y-Haplogroup D owners so geographically isolated from one another? One group lives in Japan. One group lives in Tibet. And the third group lives on the Indian Ocean. I believe this group must have lived over a wide range across east Asia but at an extremely low density. And I believe that these people must have lived in Korea. But as the earth warmed and sea levels rose, cutting off the land bridge between Korea and Japan, did all the Jomon people leave for Japan, which is one of earth’s most fertile lands? Or did, some stay behind? If this is the case, since no Korean Jomon Haplogroup D genes exist, these folks might have been wiped out by the arriving Koreans, unless the Korean Jomon did merge with the new settlers and random selection erased it from Korean genes.