There are a few spots on earth that seem to suck, all the time, every year. Places known primarily for depressing, vaguely anonymous news stories about so an so rebel group blowing up buses, such and such government dropping cluster bombs on schools, everyone throwing rocks at each other and frothing at the mouth. I don’t have nearly enough knowledge to offer intelligent opinions on all of these countries, but I do see a pattern I call “the purity state.”

Since that term is my invention, it’s probably best I explain what I mean by it. A normal country operates to protect the interests of the people inside its borders. In a homogeneous society like Japan, this means mostly taking care of Japanese Buddhists, but not to the legal exclusion of, say, Muslims or documented Chinese immigrants. In a diverse  society like Brazil, that means the country’s laws, rights and privileges more or less equally to Catholics and Protestants, blacks and indigenous people, legal immigrants from Chile and native born people. A purity state violates these principals and operates for the benefit of a particular group to the exclusion of some other group.

Israel and Pakistan are examples of purity states. Israel is a Jewish homeland that spends much of its legislative energy maintaining the Jewish character of its territory. Pakistan was likewise formed as a homeland for Indus Valley Muslims to the exclusion of undesirable religious groups. Buddhists (not to mention Muslims), are not treated equally under Israeli law as Jews. Christians (or even certain types of Muslim) do not receive the same treatment in the Pakistani system of governance as do mainline Sunni Muslims. These purity states, to simplify, take the notion of “chosen people” seriously.

I would submit that purity states must, with very few exceptions, exist in a continual state of war and violence. The reason for that continual conflict lies with the purity state’s innate belief – some group is superior just by existing. And if you run with this idea that a person is superior just by being born in a certain, it gets completely unworkable. How am I, in a diverse world, supposed to get a job if I refuse to work for a racial “inferior?” How am I supposed to coexist with my neighbors if I believe I have more of a right to live than they do? How can you expect me to give equal rights and protections to people I believe are my inevitable inferiors? If I believe in my own inevitable superiority, asking me to treat another like a human being becomes an insult. Think of it, how would you react if I expected you to treat dogs as your social equals? It’s exactly the same feeling an inevitably superior superior Sunni in Pakistan will feel when asked to treat a racially inferior Hindu farmer as his equal.

That which I describe above is pretty much textbook dehumanization and, to me, it explains the blood-soaked, dysfunctional history of all countries where the people believe themselves chosen. Israel, Pakistan and Turkmenistan are actually, by purity state standards, relatively benign. Think Nazi Germany, Young-Turk era Turkey and Imperial Japan for examples of how repulsive these monstrosities can become.

What would happen if Israel, for example, acted like a real democracy and let the racial inferiors have equal protections under the law? It would cease to be a Jewish homeland, but so what? That seems well worth the price when you consider the benefits of becoming a normal country with laws that apply equally to everybody – the possibility of peace, the ability to brain drain neighboring countries, normal trade relations, fear free travel, the ability to pull a Rome and sex your enemies into submission, greater diplomatic pull, less vitriol worldwide towards Jews in general and a hundred other things.

Which brings us to the problem with the two state solution. It requires ethnic separation (cleansing) and, worse, would create a situation where instead of just one purity state making everyone miserable, there would be two. In any acceptable solution, there are going to be Palestinians who have dying grandmothers in the occupied territories and can’t leave. There are going to be settlers stranded in what becomes the nation of Palestine.

Think of Imperial Japan – one of the most virulent purity states ever devised. When the war ended there were thousands of ethnic “inferior” Koreans and Chinese in Japan, thousands of ethnic Japanese in China and Japan. Even with the super-racist Imperial Japanese, every identity group is bound to messy, any community mixed at some level. One of the very big reasons those nations were able to break cleanly from each other after the war is that the leftover ethnic something-elses were generally treated the same as the natives in Japan, Korea and China. Pick any even quasi-acceptable colony/colonizer split and you’ll see the same thing.

That said, it would be a shame to sacrifice the blessings that come with being chosen. 

The Aryan Homeland might have ended up on fire, but at least the victims got to spend 10 years feeling like they were automatically special.

They might have gotten a mushroom cloud for their trouble, but at least the Japanese got to tell everybody they were the master race for a while.

Who cares when kids step on landmines when you can preserve the amazingness of your Islamic homeland?

Visit scenic Israel, where they keep the trash locked away.