The geography of division: How political borders construct reality and justify atrocity

“ The idea of a country arises only when a nation, either homogeneous or composed of several races, establishes itself in a region the boundaries of which may be defined and defended against aggression from without. Political geography takes account of the partition of the earth amongst organized communities, dealing with the relation of races to regions, and of nations to countries, and considering the conditions of territorial equilibrium and instability. ”

“ Thus, if Political Geography be closely connected and interwoven, as it were, with History, not less intimate are its relations to Physical Geography. It does not embrace all Physical Geography, but it introduces us to many facts and — 4 — phenomena, the causes and mutual relations of which we cannot understand without first mastering the teachings of Physical Geography. In the study of this latter science we come more closely into contact with Nature ”

“ In this universe, literacy and religion undergird the legal system. Politics defines national identity, subsuming language, ethnicity, ways of working, culture, superstitions, prejudice, art, and science. Within the nation-state's borders, citizens are subjected to a political practical experience of homogeneity, centralism, and uniformity, required by the efficiency expectations of the Industrial Revolution. ”

“ At the moment, I should like to think only about the world-wide spectacle of men acting upon their environment, moved by stimuli from their pseudo-environments. For when full allowance has been made for deliberate fraud, political science has still to account for such facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that it is acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones. ”

“ Every nation endeavours to realise the political value which it recognises; and in respect to political growth, ends are set up in the shape of the portions of the earth to which that growth aspires. Peculiarities in the conformation of states may be traced back to an appreciation of the value of coasts, passes, estuaries, and the like. With the spreading out and the concentration of nations, such portions of the world as are important from a political point of view have marvellously increased both in number and in value. ”

“ Life presents a diversity of interests. Left to themselves, they tend to encroach on one another. The ideal is to prescribe a special territory for each till the whole ground of experience is covered, and then see to it each remains within its own boundaries. Politics, business, recreation, art, science, the learned professions, polite intercourse, leisure, represent such interests. ”

“ In the description of the natural features of a region, little regard is paid to the artificial boundaries of political divisions and subdivisions. Thus, in the treatment of North America, which is preceded by a sketch of North and South America together, each of the general topics, surface, climate, life, etc., is dealt with for the whole continent, the portion of each of these features that becomes the share of one or another country being pointed out later. ”

“ One can hardly conceive the possibility of an intelligent student taking pains to become acquainted with the political geography of a country without at the same time endeavouring to learn something of its history—otherwise, his geographical attainments would hardly surpass those of a commercial traveller, whose geographical studies have been confined to the maps and tables of his Bradshaw. ”

“ This being admitted, I shall now proceed to show that Physical Geography, although, like Political Geography, it is a separate and distinct subject, yet, just as the study of the latter involves some knowledge of History, so the prosecution of Physical Geography compels us to make a certain acquaintance with Geology. We cannot, in fact, learn much about the atmosphere, about rain and rivers, glaciers and icebergs, earthquakes and volcanoes, and the causes of climate, without at the same time becoming more or less familiar with the groundwork on which geological investigations are based. ”

“ Virginia was shrunken to the limits contained in the present States of Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
Declaration of Independence
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ”

“ Iran has not withdrawn the fatwa against the life of Salman Rushdie.
Iraq's ability to carry out terrorism abroad has been curbed by UN sanctions. As events during 1996 clearly demonstrated, however, Saddam Hussein's regime continues to murder dissidents throughout Iraq and target foreign and local relief personnel in the northern part of the country.
Terrorism by Libya has been sharply reduced by UN sanctions imposed after the bombings of Pan Am Flight 103 (1988) and UTA Flight 772 (1989) . Libya still evades its obligation to hand over those indicted for these crimes. ”

“ According to reports, some activists or brokers detained for assisting North Koreans were charged with human smuggling, and in some cases the North Koreans were forcibly returned to North Korea. There were also reports that North Korean agents operated clandestinely within the country to forcibly repatriate North Korean citizens.
Section 3 Respect for Political Rights: The Right of Citizens to Change Their Government
The law does not provide citizens with the right to change their government peacefully, and citizens cannot freely choose or change the laws and officials that govern them. ”

“ Family members of activists, dissidents, Falun Gong practitioners, journalists, unregistered religious figures, and former political prisoners were targeted for arbitrary arrest, detention, and harassment (see section 1.d.) .
Forced relocation because of urban development continued and in some locations increased during the year. Protests over relocation terms or compensation were common, and some protest leaders were prosecuted. In rural areas relocation for infrastructure and commercial development projects resulted in the forced relocation of millions of persons. ”

“ Those who flee to the woods are tracked, hunted and killed like wild beasts by the soldiers! They spare neither old men nor children—the women are outraged. In short, such is the terror that reigns in the country that yesterday, as I crossed Lesneven, which was just occupied by a company of soldiers, I saw a score of peasants throw themselves upon their knees, clasp their hands, and offering their throats, cry out pitifully to the soldiers: 'Cut our throats, if you wish, but do not make us languish in torture!' Finally this morning, at Karer, a lot of drunken soldiers roasted a child alive! ”

“ A nation has the power, but never the right, to alienate its sovereignty, either in whole or in part, by delegating it to a hereditary family. Such an alienation, imposed amid the violence of conquest, borne out of habits of thought, or consented to in a moment of public aberration, binds neither the present generation nor those to come. ”

“ The memories of their terrible sufferings at the hands of the Japanese ground into the Koreans a hatred of their neighbour, handed down undiminished from generation to generation, to this day.
Korea might have recovered, but for another and even more serious handicap. A new dynasty, the House of Yi, succeeded to the Korean throne over five centuries ago, and established a rule fatal to all progress. The King was everything, and the nation lived solely for him. No man was allowed to become too rich or powerful. ”

“ Contrasted location.
Every land contains in close juxtaposition areas of sharply contrasted cultural, economic and political development, due to the influence of diverse natural locations emphasizing lines of ethnic cleavage made perhaps by some great historical struggle. In mountainous countries the conquered people withdraw to the less accessible heights and leave the fertile valleys to the victorious intruders. ”

“ A series of maps has been prepared which shows graphically what, of course, is known to social students—that the zone of deterioration and the areas of the greatest mobility in the city have the greatest concentration of poverty, vice, crime, juvenile delinquency, divorce, desertion, abandoned infants, murder, and suicide.
Political forces.—The political forces have to do with the more formal control of public opinion and law. Neighborhood work is concerned with political forces whenever social action is desired. ”

“ The dismal regions of misery and ignorance are peopled with beings of sorrowful hearts. Cleanse these sewers, spread there the inclination to labor, equitable salaries, just rewards, and soon these sickly faces, these broken hearts, will be brought back to virtue, which is the life and health of the soul.
We will conduct the reader to the visitors' room of the prison. It is an obscure apartment, separated down its whole length into two equal parts by a narrow, railed passage. One part communicates with the interior, destined for the prisoners. ”

“ My property has been confiscated, and I am sentenced to the galleys.
"'Tis a terrible time we live in! Misery and servitude! sanguinary despotism and religious intolerance! Oh, it is sweet to abandon life! sweet to rest and see no more such evils and such sorrows!
"'In a few hours, I shall enjoy that rest. I shall die. Let me think of those who will survive—or rather, of those who will live perhaps in better times.
"'Out of all my fortune, there remains to me a sum of fifty thousand crowns, deposited in a friend's hands. ”

“ So a Korean woman is as hidden from the world, in her husband’s garden or summer-house, as is a nun in her cell.
The wives and daughters of well-to-do Koreans spend a great deal of time in their gardens, sharing naturally enough the intense love of their menkind for nature, and probably finding their peculiar lives more endurable among the trees and the birds and the lotus ponds, than they do in their queer little rooms, through the paper windows of which they cannot look unless they poke a hole with their fingers first—rooms in which there is little space and less furniture. ”

“ But experience has shown that the taboo will not solve "moral and social questions"--that nine times out of ten it aggravates the disease. Political action becomes a petty, futile, mean little intrusion when its only method is prosecution.
No wonder then that conservatively-minded men pray that moral and social questions be kept out of politics; no wonder that more daring souls begin to hate the whole idea of government and take to anarchism. So long as the state is conceived merely as an agent of repression, the less it interferes with our lives, the better. ”

“ Location on a frontier involves remoteness from the center of national, cultural, and political activities; these reach their greatest intensity in the core of the nation and exercise only an attenuated influence on the far-away borders, unless excellent means of communication keep up a circulation of men, commodities, and ideas between center and periphery. ”

“ If we could see ourselves, no. But, remember, the baby knows nothing of men or women. To the baby whatever shape we're in, we are natural. It's accustomed to seeing us shaped like cubes or squares or pyramids, as it sees us from its separate dimension. The baby's had no other experience, no other norm with which to compare what it sees. We are its norm. On the other hand, the baby seems weird to us because we compare it to our accustomed shapes and sizes. ”

“ The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction—that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.” ”

“ For a recognizable type of experience, there is a character which controls the outward manifestations of our whole being. Murderous hate is, for example, controlled in civil life. Though you choke with rage, you must not display it as a parent, child, employer, politician. You would not wish to display a personality that exudes murderous hate. You frown upon it, and the people around you also frown. But if a war breaks out, the chances are that everybody you admire will begin to feel the justification of killing and hating. ”

“ You cannot take more political wisdom out of human beings than there is in them. And no reform, however sensational, is truly radical, which does not consciously provide a way of overcoming the subjectivism of human opinion based on the limitation of individual experience. There are systems of government, of voting, and representation which extract more than others. But in the end knowledge must come not from the conscience but from the environment with which that conscience deals. When men act on the principle of intelligence they go out to find the facts and to make their wisdom. ”