What Is A People?

This question is very difficult to answer with complete and total accuracy. No one single socio-political factor, standing alone, can isolate and identify any exclusive and monolithic aggregate of human beings forming a race, nation or society. On the contrary, there are several factors collectively responsible for the cohesion of such a group. Some of these factors are obligatory(sine qua non), while others are discretionary.

The first obligatory factor of social cohesion is a common language. Without a common linguistic communication system, society will not inter-act for very long. A second obligatory factor is a common set of socio-political and moral values, perhaps expressed through religious institutions and activities of one kind or another.

Racial solidarity is a discretionary factor in defining sovereign nationhood: most of the world's nations go this route, but a few--including the United States of America--do not. Several races of people had a historic hand in bringing America into its existence.

Today, however, new immigrants from all over the world collectively threaten to end the identity of the American solidarity as a single people united in a common purposiveness. This is because the new immigrants abjectly refuse to assimilate to the culture of those Americans having deep ancestral roots in American soil.

Past historic examples prove that not all who are within the national political boundaries of a country are one and the same people. Kurds of Syria, Iraq and Turkey are neither Arab nor Turk. Basques living in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France are neither Spanish nor French. Tibetans living within mainland China are not Chinese.

Israel is interesting: peoples from all over the world, having lived in its many divergent countries for several centuries, have immigrated in recent decades to that country on basis of claim of kinship with the people who lived there in ancient Bible times, two thousand and more years ago. Indeed, many eyebrows would be raised, to see actual familial historic records maintained continuously without hiatus for two or more millenia, to corroborate that claim. DNA blood-type comparisons, too, are dubious at best after being away from the alleged ancestral homeland for so long. Nevertheless, the existence of a Hebrew language and a religion called Judaism, both from Bible times, is indisputably well-documented and somehow continuous today.

History is full of examples where one group of people have adopted the language and culture of other peoples at a later date--a language and culture not originally their own. For example, very few black African-Americans and American aboriginals(incorrectly called "Indians") still speak fluently as native languages the languages of their ancestors from five centuries ago and earlier. QUESTION: Who and where are the Twelve Lost Tribes of the house of Israel, referred to in the Bible book of Revelations?

As best as can be expected, a people is defined as a distinct group of human beings sharing a common language and a common socio-political structure and agenda.

Finally, what about individuals who "swim up-stream" against the collective group's socio-political norms? Where is the line to be drawn between "politically incorrect" and "criminal", in terms of threat to the integrity of the society in question? There is always a conflict between prerogatives of individuals, and those of the group in the name of social unity and cohesion. So far, tolerance of differences between individuals and their group affiliation as a whole? Can collective society benefit from "wayward" individuals who march to the cadences of a different drummer? What about great individual writers, scientists, inventors, explorers, music composers and artists? These, and not government and political officials, are the people to whom the rest of the group should look as sources of inspiration by which to define group identity.

-LKM