Where one species begins from where another ends or divides along different paths is a hazy line at best. The idea of one species emerging out of nowhere such as Adam and Eve, has been replaced by the idea of gradual change and splits over many generations with new patterns emerging over time and gradually taking on traits which differentiate themselves from others also springing forth from the same family tree. It does not happen overnight, and it does not present itself as a new species at any one given point in time. It can only be understood by looking at it from a wider perspective than we are used to dealing with on a daily basis.
 

Migration:

           Humanity’s forebearers began as one small group of what to us would appear as ordinary apes slowly kept to themselves or were separated from others by environmental change or external isolation, perhaps from migration. However the division occurred, this small group of a few families slowly evolved apart from the rest and begot a lineage that would within a few million years or so grow to over 6 billion offspring, stretching from one end of the Earth to the other. The numbers sound astonishingly high but are a mere minor chapter in the passage of time on a planetary scale, and for added perspective, there are fewer years separating us from those earliest members of the Human branch of Earth’s family tree than there are people living now in a small-sized country, or in just a single large city.

           With thousands of times more people alive today than there are years separating us now from those few originating families, the real forebearers of our common histories and ancestry, whose physical appearances would hardly be palatable or salutary in our noblesque idealized views of where we as a group came from, we have a far shorter view or sense of who we are than seeing ourselves in relation to them, and are far more likely to see only our differences. While our view is historically myopic due to a lack of written history of such times, or even an oral history of them, we have begun to put the pieces of our common histories together on a larger scale than any of our forebearers ever could, though even now we often do so in regards to political views and only in regards to our branches as being of more noteworthy development or advanced.

           When we choose not to elevate our own culture’s branch of the new “Human” branch of Earth’s evolutionary tree, we can see that each division, each subsequent generation has taken their own paths to meet in this time where our numbers at only this one moment in time, so completely dwarf our years as a distinct species. That road seems long by the view of a single person’s lifespan, yet it clearly has not been untravelable since so many new divergent groups have been able to walk that path ever more separately over the ages, more cut off and isolated from each other, yet all making it together into this present circle where we have begun the process of seeing the fullest picture of ourselves as a species. Despite historical attempts to view others of our race, the Human Race, as a different species or sub-human, our present scientific and political dispositions have asserted our commonality over our differences, and acknowledged our wholeness as a species, in biology if not in culture.

           Through being relatively isolated from each other, for some by thousands of years, humans began to look increasingly dissimilar from each other. Differences in skin color, amount of body hair, height and weight, began to develop over time and lead to a wider spectrum of diversity. Regionalizations occurred as humans, often nomadic, began to settle down in regions where they began to exert greater control over their environments and with this greater success, needed to move less and less often and grew in accordance with, and adapted to the climate, food sources, and the regions in which the settled.

           With the emergence of language, these difference grew. Different histories, real or imagined, gave them senses of identity differentiating themselves from others. Creationist myths gave them a context in which to place their current cultures within. Often these myths did not have to take into account others outside of their regions whom they had generations before lost contact with, so often they grew in accordance with only those others within the region they occupied.
 

Re-acquaintances:

           As more separated groups of humans began to reestablish contacts with each other, learning each others languages and being able to compare notes, they found they often disagreed on practically everything. As each region which was cut off or had little contact with each other grew more numerous amongst themselves, they shared more and more ideas amongst themselves, and less amongst others. Whereas “culture” was simply the universal beliefs everyone in their group naturally agreed upon, they found now other groups in other regions having their own divergent “universal” beliefs and their own ideas on where they and the world came from. No one then and few now look back as far as I have here on where they came from in this context, culturally speaking, so the differences between them were the defining concepts in setting themselves apart from the other groups they increasingly came into contact with, and more often these differences provided them a sense of identity as opposed to, or in how they were separate or different from the other groups they reestablished contacts with after thousands of years of growing apart.

           The exploding numbers of people over the last 20,000 years, and the large room for them to expand into has let what was small groups of a few families become cities, develop their own languages and cultures, their own histories and myths, and those cities began to run out of frontiers to expand into. Cultures were no longer developing in relative isolation from each other but were constantly brushing up against each other and defining themselves in relation not only to each other, but in the context of that conflict with each other. No longer were their gods just ones of mothers, fertility, and harvests, but gods of war. Their identities and histories became imbued by their relations with other groups of humans in other regions. Some gods were thought to favor some people over others. Some, usually ones own culture worshiped the “true” or right gods, or were the people whom God, if only one god existed, wished to succeed more than the others.

           Greater mobility, increased commerce and trade, technological advancements in transportation across land and sea spread quickly across the globe, and these groups met more often in organized conflicts which we call war. War brought people together into larger communities. Whereas before widespread organized military invasions were likely, Humanity continued to spread out more, or as much as possible, and diversity flourished. With ever increasing larger groups becoming more organized and effectively subjugating smaller groups, they began to search further and further from their home bases for new lands to conquer. Smaller communities of nearby proximity often needed to band together to repel these invaders from other lands who were in general, quite abusive towards their populations, to put it as mildly as possible.

           Out of this cooperation with each other out of necessity to keep their families safe and themselves alive, a new race to keep up with those other groups began to dominate their cultural identities. Gods of war gave some ground to hero worship of great generals and kings who saved one’s lands or who conquered others. The stronger one’s opponents or potential aggressors were or were thought to be, the more united and larger groups formed to keep themselves “free” from foreign occupation. “Foreign” now meant those others who would conquer your lands and treat you badly, or simply put, “them”. “Us” on the other hand were those other villages nearby who would help you fight against “them”, but who presumably would go home after the conflict ended, and leave you in relative peace.
 

Democracy:

           Keeping the “us” together in a way that they could be relied upon to come together whenever the need arose, and yet keep the “us” from acting as abusive as the “them” would, became a new defining mechanism of one’s cultural identity. If one’s organizing factor was as cruel or as harsh as what one’s enemies might impose, people only tended to support it if they had no other choice. Though these stronger more centrally controlled regions proved the most powerful, the Spartans of early recorded history, forcing their populations into subjugation and states that functioned as military machines, they were gradually eroded internally by the success of cooperative states, or what has been ascribed as the Athenian model, democracy. Democracy was not new, for that was the whole point of banding together to repel the invaders, to keep oneself or ones group free of the ravages of what outsiders would impose upon you. It was simply a more organized form of the consensus one needed to unite smaller groups to fight larger ones, yet keep their autonomy at the same time. To keep the “us” from acting like “them”, all of the “us” would be equal, and have an equal say on important matters which affect us. If we can trust others in our group to wish to be free of the same controls we wish to be free of, then we can trust the consensus of the group to be generally non-abusive, or at the very least, far more kind than what level of control our outsiders would allow us to have, how much control they would give us over our lands and our lives, how “free” we would be.

           Democracy’s rise to prominence was not an easy one nor was its success ever long lasting. Like species’ evolutions into new forms, its dividing lines were hazy and its manifestations diverse. Democracy did not begin in Athens. Older communities themselves were far more decentralized groups than any ancient or modern models, with those who did not agree with the groups simply moving on to other areas and forming new groups. The great power of the so-called Ancient World of a mere 2000 years ago,  Rome, was a brutal dictatorship on one hand, but had token democracies, and had effective controls over other regions through local governments which were often less abusive than the previous independent ones they replaced.
 

Rome:

           This new Roman model of a kinder, gentler dictatorship with sometimes ineffective or even completely farcical democratic institutions proved extremely powerful and long lasting. It had the commanding reach and control over its society that previous autocratic groups used to consolidate power, yet provided an outlet against calls for reform by claiming itself to be the very embodiment of democracy in its most developed and sophisticated form. How therefore can you replace something which claims all the values of what you aim to replace it with?

           The hypocrisy of claiming to be operating in accordance with democratic values while behaving like a dictatorship did not keep Rome intact forever, and it eventually disintegrated into smaller groups of authoritarian regimes generally without the pretenses of democratic rule. The common cultural threads too which had been growing for nearly a thousand years which spanned over a thousand miles began to break down as well. As people themselves became more fragmented and isolated from each other again, regional dialects of Latin evolved into separate languages almost entirely incomprehensible to each other after a few hundred years. However, one common strand of culture remained which would later rebuild the Roman Empire and democratic structures less than two millennia later, Christianity.
 

Christianity and the Dark Times:

           Within a few hundred years before the fall of the Roman Empire, a new creationist story had spread within its boundaries and eventually became the official state religion of the entire empire. Originally an offshoot or sect of Judaism, Christianity borrowed the creationist stories of Judaism, giving it that historical context which identifies cultures by giving them a sense of history in which to place themselves, but it added a new dimension of time. Christianity was about the future. It spoke of a time to come in which current wrongs of the world’s structures would be replaced by fairer ones, the wicked would be struck down and the good oppressed people would be rewarded, and a new order or “Kingdom of Heaven” would rule the Earth.

           It is easy to see from that description what made it both so appealing to the masses and dangerous to present rulers. They were always looking over their shoulders to those mobs who were convinced their rulers were on the verge of being replaced by a new Kingdom of Heaven which was going to come about any day now. In complete accordance with the first rule of survival, if you can’t beat them, join them, the government of the Roman Empire eventually declared itself a Christian nation, therefore as with calling itself a democracy at times, now proclaimed itself to be merely a caretaker government until the coming Kingdom of Heaven arrived, which was more and more carefully crafted to be thought not as imminent as its original proponents conceived. (2)

           Following the breakup of the Roman Empire, Christianity gave what would later become the nations of Europe a common culture, a common language, and the only reliable archiving of a thousand years of human history which many of them had shared, but was in danger of being forgotten or remembered only through folktales and legends. The wide geographic reach of the Roman Empire allowed Christianity to spread out over much of Europe. Even as new nations emerged, a common contact and reference points between these groups remained, and the cultural identity and history was much the same outside of the new nationalistic contexts, for that culture predated the new national identities which developed later. The language which was spoken by the churches in these regions was usually Latin, the language of the former empire, and this allowed them both to communicate with others in other regions where new languages had replaced Latin as the common spoken language, and more importantly, it was written.

           The written word kept alive the notions of how Rome was ruled, as well as Athens, and everything else we know of Ancient History. Almost exclusively, this comes from countless generations of monks in monasteries constantly transcribing by hand entire libraries of books as faithfully as possible to the original texts as their papers would wither and decay in less than 100 years. While the literacy of the general populations remained extremely low, these treasures, knowledge of ancient times, common histories of much of Europe, other models of governments, these remained largely out of the reach of the public and safely contained out of sight from the point of view of the rulers then, who often were unaware of them therefore kept safely away from them as well, of what is now called the Dark and Middle Ages.

           With the advent of the printing press, literacy expanded and slowly more and more of Humanity became aware of this new dimension of their history to place themselves within. Words, histories, the lives of Emperors, Senators, philosophers and poets of a thousand years of cultural development, nearly lost forever, were suddenly dusted off and brought anew into the light of day, and reinstigated into that present’s human consciousness. Plato and Socrates, Cesar and Cleopatra, Pythogoras and Hippocrates, humans had begun to reconnect with their past, and much of Europe began to define itself in relation to, or as the heir of, that nearly forgotten culture they once had, however unwillingly, often shared. Even the more northern regions of Europe outside of the old Roman Empire’s borders had later adopted Christianity, and in a sense saw themselves as having shared in a part of that past as well, culturally at least.
 

Republics and Nation States:

           As in the past, the question of how to keep the “us” of ones society from behaving like the “them” whom we united together to repel was given a new model, or an old model rediscovered, republics. Slowly the notion of representational democracies of elected officials replaced the feudalistic monarchies which had filled the power void left by the collapse of the Roman Empire. Though many saw republics as improvements over feudalism, it did not prevent the regions from wishing to conquer each other. They may have now shared to some extent common historical identities based upon a common religion, and have been far kinder to conquered populations than in more barbaric ages, and even shared democratic systems or values to some extent between themselves, but “us” was still “us” and “them” was still “them”. Common cultural ties through religion and a shared Ancient History was not enough, nor even sharing common democratic ideals. New national identities were now the divisive factors and those identities were based upon language and other cultural histories, often only a few hundred years old to a thousand years old which formed their new senses of identity.

           Such differences always existed. Now however with greater increasing numbers, land was growing scarce and room for expansion was running out. Colonization of other areas of the world allowed Europe to grow richer and emigration allowed expansion to occur outside of their neighbors backyards, but securing the land nearby to your own regions was still the best means of remaining stable and safe in an uncertain future. With ever greater and increasingly destructive wars fought between emerging nation states now seeing themselves as civilized democracies, the impetus grew ever stronger to freeze or lock in definite borders between  themselves.

           By the 20th century, every square inch of the Earth’s soil was claimed by at least one group or another. Much territorial claims to these lands, often thousands of miles from where those groups who claimed them primarily lived and developed, overlapped with other groups claims. New frontiers where one could simply move away from groups they did not agree with and develop new cultures in relative isolation and peace were now all gone. The demarcation lines as to which groups would control which regions of the Earth’s surface were formalized into treaties, and the species’ populations were divided up along with the land, with some groups of humans simply given over to the control of others.

          Before such formalized treaties, the borders separating one group from another shifted with migration as well as with armed conflict. People moved to other regions and packed up their cultures with them, and brought them along. Emerging sub-groups would fight and gain independence from what they would come to see as “foreign” domination, another “them” and not an “us”. Now the movement of borders would become a relative one-way street in the modern era. Smaller groups were free to band together to form new larger groups of “us”, legally binding for all subsequent generations based upon the acts of only one election, plebiscite, or executive decision, and sometimes of dubious accountability in its fairness or legality. Woe be it though now for any group wishing to succeed from any larger union, no matter how they came to belong to such a larger “us”, however they were acquired by that group, in war, fraudulent or illegal manipulations, or by outright seizure. (The events following breakup of the Soviet Union appear to go against this trend, however such exceptional divisions were more than agreeable to the most powerful of nations as well as popular in the localities which became independent. If Russian had been more powerful and Western nations did not see the such independence movements in their interests or if they threatened to cause similar problems for sparking independence movements within their own borders, such divisions would not have happened, or the use of force by Russia to remain together could have been seen as perfectly legal and in accordance with international treaties and conventions in maintaining the integrity of its borders.)

           Now that the lines were drawn, many of the new formalized legal structures defining the legal sub-grouping of the common offspring of the original human “families”, now nation states, were often made up of groupings who had no common identities as single groups between themselves. Sometimes they included indigenous peoples who lost their independence as well as their lands under colonialism, belonging now to cultures whose languages they did not speak, whose laws they did not understand, which did not matter anyway because those laws did not often apply to them, often not allowing them to own or claim any land their peoples’ had lived upon for thousands of years, nor even being protected from openly being murdered, for it was in many cases not a legal crime to do even that to them as they had no legal status, nor even that minimal amount of protection from their new majority group “owners”, for lack of a more accurate term. No doubt other terms are kinder, though far less descriptive of those peoples’ realities.

           Though many of what are now termed “minorities” faired far better than these extreme examples of many indigenous peoples in the Americas, these new nation states borders included many groups which had weak and sometimes non-existent links to the larger groups they now were seemingly joined at the hip to forever more. (3) Though not always as legally ambiguous as not having any protection at all from outright murder or ethnic cleansing, these groups overwhelmingly were disadvantaged by now being cut off from any larger “us” they might have once been or have preferred to be associated with, or worse yet, simply lacking sufficient numbers to ever grant themselves with adequate protection or equal treatment in fact, if not in principle, before the law and often having such laws written intentionally toward their disenfranchisement.

           This present model of nation states can also be described as being intended to enforce and enshrine the very notion of the protection of minorities. The borders between this nation and that nation mark off where “they” begin and “we” begin. They are free to decide now to rule themselves, and can no longer come over here and tell us how to do things or take away our land or control our people. By entitling whoever was left in control when the music stopped (4) of which regions and which groups dominated those regions when the final borders were carved into stone, these groups were now free to rule themselves and make whatever laws they saw fit. Those groups who did not comprise a majority in the new finalized borders now were at the mercy of those who did. Short of open warfare, often doomed to failure institutionally, they now had to appeal to international institutions and international public media to plead their case for basic human rights and sometimes even the meagerest amount of limited autonomy, or protection from abusive or unfriendly majorities now firmly given control over them.
 

Nation-building:

           So with the borders now rigid and separatists branded as either criminals or disadvantaged minorities, depending on both their activities and the attitudes of the state they wish to succeed from, and how likely it is to grant it or how it reacts to such notions, as well as their abilities to garner international recognition of their statuses, how then is any change to proceed? The “positive” approach is thought to be “nation-building”. It would all be so much easier, it is thought, if group identities would simply conform to the lines on the maps as to where their allegiances and senses of identity should lie, and whom they ought to consider as being their “us”. Where there is a clear and dominant majority, they are seen as having the right to expect everyone to conform now with that culture and group identity, and can legally pass a variety of laws requiring such conformity or convergence, though the term convergence usually means in this context not a mutual convergence but instead that of the minority groups switching or adapting to the culture of the majority within those borders or that region. I do not wish to belittle attempts at building national identities or to reach a consensus and cohesion within societies, however the fact remains that by convention, those within a nations borders are viewed as the “property” of that government to be guided to whatever types of rulers or systems, language or philosophy, that government deems appropriate. However many guidelines and recommendations international groups like to legislate to protect minorities, they are meaningless and powerless when a powerful or independent country decides to “integrate” or assimilate what others see as a separate unique culture into its own. As with what China has been doing to Tibet, it is no different than what the Soviet Union attempted to do with some its regions, for all a country needs to do is say, as China repeatedly has, that it is an internal matter and none of anyone else’s concern.

           Even among nations that wish to respect and preserve cultural diversity, the needs of communication via a common language gets in the way. Few nations permit more than a single official language, including those most liberal proponents of protecting cultural diversity. By choosing one language which all must learn, one official language, that culture which primarily uses that language and that language itself has an advantage or will eventually dominate over all others by being the only language everyone is generally required to learn. (5) Language is not only a means of communication, but frames the very identity of a people as being a distinct group or entity. (6) Within a language is its literature which, though it can be transcribed into other languages, often cannot be adequately conveyed outside of its own context, such as with poetry. The greatest writers of a language have a mastery of nuances that few translators could be able to convey adequately into other languages, even if they possessed complete masteries of both. Beyond the mere preserving of cultural traditions and customs, folk heroes and tales of kings, wars, and other ethnic-historical contexts, language is something apart from these which defies the integration process of nation-building by having its potential loss seeming to threaten stripping away the very core of the minority group’s identity.

           The tendency for groups to diversify as they enlarge and new cultures to emerge from the growing numbers has been the natural course to where Humanity now finds itself, with over 6700 languages spoken in over 200 countries. (7) An even greater number than that would be needed to include regional dialects which can be often unintelligible to others outside of that region yet are not defined as, or have not been recognized as yet to having grown into completely separate languages. (8) Reverse nation-building such as the Soviet Union tried to do with Moldova and use minor linguistic variations to instill a group identity separate from what existed previously, (9) to divide a group, is far easier than to unite groups of divergent languages into a national identity without eroding the multilingual nature of that area’s divergent cultures. Differences between one town or region speaking the same language can be exploited and new senses of identities can evolve based on those natural regional differences, but combining separate cultures without sacrificing linguistic diversity for a sense of statehood is problematic. John Stuart Mill, author of the classic book “On Liberty”, believed that a common language is an intrinsic requirement for any sense of national identity, and that all must be able to converse, debate, and understand each other within a given society, in addition to being able converse with their governments. (10)
 

Supra Nation-Building:

           Where we are left in the present is with a species which by growing numbers and new communities forming from smaller sources constantly expanding and then further dividing itself, for even among those who once spoke a common language, we can see those once single languages having become roots of trees of related languages in the present which grew out of a common source. On top of that natural tendency to want to further diversify we have a world political system which considers in principle ceding smaller groups new national independence and sovereignty among it highest crimes or dangerous in giving hope to successionist movements in other nations or regions, often achieved or granted ironically, only by the use of force. The current nationalistic structures and the supra-nationalist treaties and organizations we build or have built to preserve that structure are de facto, merely how to justify and preserve the system we have inherited from the past as the result of power machinations, ethnic cleansing, genocide, forced migrations, and possibly even speciescide.

           Less than 40,000 years ago when modern humans (Homo-Sapiens Sapiens) first migrated to Europe, they were only one of the human-like creatures living there. Neanderthals, another species of Man very much similar to modern humans, did not die out millions of years ago, but had been living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before the first modern humans migrated there. (11) While it is nice to think that they all just died out naturally to make room for the emergence of smarter versions of humans whom they could not compete with for resources, given the brutal savageness which our species has shown to others we even deem like ourselves, and how even worse we treat other species, it is quite possible humans simply hunted them down and killed them all. Even today, as I have mentioned, it was recently not even considered a crime to have killed indigenous people in Brazil who lived in the rainforests, undoubtedly human, so how much of a crime would it be to kill off another different yet intelligent species today, especially if we thought they might one day threaten to replace us?

           Talk of this brings to mind the dark times of a mere century or less ago when others of our own kind were targeted for annihilation and deemed inferior. However, going far back enough, modern Humanity and Neanderthals shared the same ancestry, were children of the same parents, who moved away from each other and grew apart. As an outsider from a more ethnically diversely populated region, it is surprising that people living only a few dozen kilometers apart, having lived nearby each other for hundreds of years, speaking almost identical languages, can see themselves as different ethnic groups, not only in culture but as somehow being genetically different, when only a few hundred or a few thousand years ago they had the same ancestors in common.

           The reality is differences will emerge the more groups keep to themselves, and the more they will grow apart becoming new separate branches of Earth’s or Humanity’s family tree. Yet the roots or branches can often intertwine ahead as well. People of different nations unite, common new cultures emerge, and people when allowed to by law, intermarry with those of other nations, religions, and other cultures. The more this happens, the more diverse the background of those new peoples are, the more they are the direct result of all of them. If this occurs often enough, old divisions fade after a few hundred years and new cultures will emerge sharing more roots, but present cultures will die off as a result. 

           To see them as gone is shortsighted and to keep ones views always narrowed to the present way of seeing things. They can either grow apart forever, constantly becoming new factions, war with and eventually seek to annihilate all competing branches, or they can unite and grow together into something which is a direct continuation of all of them. Multicultural diversity as an aggregate is preferable to keep alive the differing notions of how and what it means to be human, but those cultures must be free to, and eventually, combine and split in new ways ahead as they have so often combined and split in the past. Roman culture grew for nearly a thousand years but it no doubt came at the expense of other cultures which might have developed in its stead, or which did but only to exist now if at all, by the ways in which they influenced it by and after being absorbed into it. When Rome did fall, many new cultures did emerge, yet sought to destroy or assimilate each other. The challenge for future governments and supra-national structures is how to enable this growth of constantly diversifying and reuniting into something which can keep us growing together as a species, yet constantly keep evolving into something new, or we will never be sure which group, be they at the other end of the globe or in the next village, might consider us not only a different ethnicity, but as something in competition with their branch, and must go the way of the Neanderthals. Any small group which keeps itself apart long enough will evolve differently into something with less and less commonality to the others surrounding it, a more isolated branch. Literally, the more we choose to build and maintain cultures whose branches never intermingle, the more pronounced these differences will become in each successive generation, and the more like different species we will become to each other. Combining our cultures, and allowing new ones to emerge between them, eventually replacing them, seems like the death of them on one hand, but on the other, gives a part of them their best chances at surviving, in and through a variety of new forms. Branches that never intermingle either become new separate trees altogether or die off completely.
 
 

 For more on similar issues, see the On Liberty Introduction

1   Romulus and Remus were twin brothers, and the sons of the god Mars (of War). Romulus killed Remus, and then became the King of Rome, which they had previously founded together, and renamed it after himself. Cain and Abel were both sons of Adam and Eve. Cain killed Abel, but did not get a famous city named after himself. The Islamic religion believes that Mohammed and their religion can be traced back to an illegitimate son of Abraham and a slave of his, and that the son's name was Ishmael. Judaism believes their nation descended from Abraham and his heirs, one of which was called Isaac. The conflict between these two resulting supposedly "family" factions or blood feud is well known. The brothers of Atlantis were ten kings, each mortal sons of the god Poseidon and a mortal woman, each of whom ruled over a portion of the kingdom of Atlantis which was created when Poseidon...(well, no need to go into that). They had many generations of heirs, and each of the ten sections of Atlantis retained its own king descended from one of the original ten brothers. Among the rules these royal (and godly) heirs had to follow, it was paramount that the kings must never war with each other. Though each king was rich, one was clearly always the most wealthy and the more they were distanced over time from their godly lineage in successive generations, the more prone they were to jealousy and other human-like frailties, and eventually this most sacred rule was broken, and war broke out. Zeus used this violation to force Poseidon to destroy the rich and prosperous kingdom of his children's heirs by dragging it all back into the sea.

2   An interesting comparison to this is how the Soviet Union portrayed itself as merely a temporary caretaker government until a paradise-like Communist era of Humanity would dawn and governments would be unnecessary, much like the Roman Empire claimed after it became a Christian nation, that it was acting merely as a caretaker government until the Kingdom of Heaven came to be established. Also, Lenin was viewed as Christ-like to many of his subjects even many years after his death with any suggested or implied comparisons of oneself or others to him being treated as heretical as the most pious or fanatically devout Christians would think comparing another person or oneself to Jesus would be.

3   The expression “joined at the hip” probably comes from the fame of the “Siamese Twins”, Chang and Eng Bunker, of the P.T. Barnum & Bailey Circus (the term “Siamese Twins” itself is still a colloquialism for the medical condition which has been since renamed “Conjoined Twins”). They were actually joined at the chest. The phrase means joined in a union one can never be rid of.

4   “when the music stopped” refers to the game of musical chairs in which a record would be played as a group of people, always one more than the number of chairs, would circle around the chairs. Once the music would be suddenly without warning stopped, each would run to sit in a chair and whoever did not get a chair of their own would lose. (in this instance, an internationally recognized nation state of their own)

5  Nation-Building, Ethnicity, and Language Politics in Transition Countries, Kymlicka, Will; Grin, Francois, 2003, Open Society Institute, Pg. 9

6  Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands, Smith, Graham; Law, Vivian; Wilson, Andrew; Bohr, Annette; Allworth, Edward 1998 Cambridge University Press, Pg. 167

7  Nation-Building, Ethnicity, and Language Politics in Transition Countries, Kymlicka, Will; Grin, Francois, 2003, Open Society Institute, Pg. 92

8  Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, Glanville, Price, 1998, Blackwell Publishers, Preface Pg. xii,

9  The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, King, Charles, 2000 Hoover Institute Press, Pg. 64 

10  Nation-Building, Ethnicity, and Language Politics in Transition Countries, Kymlicka, Will; Grin, Francois, 2003, Open Society Institute, Pg. 12

11 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2108hum3.html
     Johanson,  Don; Debenath, Andre; Stringer, Chris; Thorne, Alan; Rigaud, Jean-Philippe
        1997 "In Search of Human Origins Part Three", Nova TV Show Transcript