Monday, April 14, 2008

Iranipedia

The Iranian regime is certainly taking their worldwide PR game wherever they can, and now seem to be fighting it out on Wikipedia. Check out Ethnic Minorities of Iran.
The main ethno-linguistic minority groups in Iran are the Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmen, Armenians, Assyrians, and Georgians. [...] While many of these ethnic groups have their own languages, cultures, and often literature, their languages and cultures are essentially regional variations of Persian and are all native to Iran.
This claim is practically Chinese in its audacity, and there are many similarities between both nations' needs to justify their empires. Of the above list, only Kurdish is linguistically related to Persian, while the Azeris and Turkmen are descendants of relatively recent Turkic invaders from very far away, indeed. So who counts as native? This is the problem with promoting an ethnic nationalism that tries to erase ethnic differences by redefining everyone into the majority.

1 comment:

Elephantschild said...

I have a friend who is engaged in pitched Wiki-war with someone else, editing sample sentences in an article on Asperger's syndrome.

You've GOT to check this out: Section 6.3, subheading, "Debate"

The original article used totally anti-Iraq War statements to demonstrate "framing" questions, and my friend has been going after the guy ever since. :) Ah, the free flow of debate - where would we be without open-source discourse?