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To: GSlob
If any country where people wear western looking trousers and use proverbial toilet paper is considered as belonging to western civilization, then I haven't heard about a country that doesn't fulfill these conditions. So called developing countries don't look like a photo in National Geographic. Broadly defined middle class looks very similar in most countries around the world. What's more cities around he world look very similar.
Cultural differences are hidden deeper. For example if you aren't polite to your host's wife you are considered extremely rude in any western country, if you behave in similar way wife in Muslim country you are considered extremely indecent. In east Asia people are so polite, that you feel either like a Hollywood celebrity or like a butt of a joke. As far as I understand they consider our open way as rude and uncivilized. People in both Muslim and east Asian countries consider their culture as distinctly different from the western ways and much superior [which I considered healthy]. You would never find this kind of attitude in Russia.
I don't know why you bring Israel into this. Israel was mostly built by Eastern European Jews [among them Russian Jews]. In my native Poland, before WW2 more than 15% of population were Jewish [for comparison 60% were ethnic Poles]. Before WW1 most of polish land [with Jews living there] belonged to Russia. So it gives you idea how strongly Israel is linked to eastern European countries [Russia is one of them]. So the argument that part of Russian population that moved to Israel is part of western civ, and that part that stayed is barbaric doesn't make any sense.
Actually western civilization is split into Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox, the same way the Muslim civ is split into Sunnis Shiites and God knows what else. In Eastern Asia is even more complicated. You can argue, that Christians in f. ex. Africa don't belong to western civilization. Maybe, but Christians in many African and Asian countries are considered as western fifth column and persecuted. Just think about it.
By the way, culture is not ethnicity. You can choose one.
Judging by your devotion to Huntington, we have already clashed over Russia. Either you grossly misinterpret his book or his book is a simple BS.
24 posted on 02/14/2007 4:01:37 AM PST by pppp
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To: pppp
Greeks in Orthodox civ are a somewhat of an outlier. Still, they are not too much of an outlier - just watch their church-state relation and see, for example, the attitudes towards their own Greek civil war of late 40s.
Those [sociologically westernized] Jews from Russia and Poland who built Israel brought with them their sociology [including such things as the worldviews and the ideas about how people ought to relate to one another and to their groups]. For this very reason of sociological incompatibility these Jews, or their ancestors, were getting out of russia and ussr, starting even prior to May laws 1882. When they were getting out of so-called Russian Poland - was there any such movement out of the Austrian or German parts of the then partitioned Poland? They did not belong there [in sociological terms] just as the Balts did not. And so, the country they finally built [israel], just like the Baltic countries of today, clearly reject civilizational "Russity" and return to their true civilizational, i.e. sociological roots.
Culture is the stuff like national cuisine and architecture, arts, literature, song, dance and pottery shards - the stuff for the ethnologists and archaeologists.
Economics is nowadays mostly the same, or similar, around the globe - and that includes access to toilet paper.
Societies are distinguished primarily by sociology - by how their people relate to one another and to their groups in socially important situations, and how these societies exist and self-perpetuate as sociologically distinct entities. The social etiquette [of moslems, asians etc.] you touch upon belongs in this sphere, too.
When and if you read Huntington, use "umnoye chtenie" [archaic Russian = read thoughtfully.]
25 posted on 02/14/2007 5:15:35 AM PST by GSlob
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