Orion > Thoughts on America

At the end of the first week of teaching in Samarkand a few years ago, my taxi driver invited me and my colleagues to his home for dinner. My class was part of a World Bank economic project in Uzbekistan. My teaching assistant was a young American Jewish woman who asked our driver, David, if we could stop and see one of the synagogues she had heard about.

"Of course," David said. "I will take you to my synagogue." And so we visited and learned that in Samarkand lived some 2,500 Jews still adhering to and practicing their faith, survivors of the Soviet efforts to eradicate religion. Those efforts had been hugely effective everywhere else I had been in the vast territory, especially among anyone born after the Great Terror of the 1930s.

We sat down to supper in David's modest house crammed shoulder to shoulder at a long group of tables with his 83 year old parents, his wife, and his three children, his nephew Igor and Igor's wife. His youngest boy, about 10, intoned a blessing in Hebrew. During supper a senior economist from the Bank, a scholarly Italian man, directed a question to David's father.

"How long ago did you come here?" he asked. He was expecting, as the rest of us were, a story about Lenin's efforts to collectivize wealth or Stalin's purges, the relocations during World War II, or the way Stalin had sent his own people who had been POWs to the slave labor camps of Central Asia and Siberia.

The old man looked puzzled and he looked at the translator who repeated the question. He answered, "Maybe 2,000 years ago."

Central Asia, "the Stans", unknown to most people of the world today except for Afghanistan, was for centuries a cultural crossroads and the greatest power center of the world. "In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree." From Samarkand, Tamerlane the Great ruled a vast world. From Mongolia Genghis Khan conquered lands that extended from the Pacific coast of China to Moscow and Eastern Europe. Marco Polo followed the well established Silk Road, introducing western Europe to the learning and arts of the Orient. Culture follows commerce and Central Asia's cities, villages and bazaars were home to Muslims, Zoroastrians, Christians, Buddhists, and Jews.

A week after bin Laden's fellow terrorists attacked the centers of commerce in New York and the center of the power that protects them in Washington, I received an e-mail from one of David's nephews I had met in Samarkand saying he was very sad and hoped I and my friends and family were well. The e-mail came from Kansas where he had emigrated four years ago with his wife. Three years ago they had a son, Daniel. With them in Kansas were Igor's mother and his uncle David and his wife and their three children and David's parents. All were well and happy.

I asked him about the Jews left in Samarkand. Maybe a few hundred remained, he said. It was no longer safe. After 2,000 years they had left a land that was as much their home as anyone else's.Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tadjikistan and Afghanistan - they are all losing the diversity that remained after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Why is it, I asked myself, that the greatest diversity of learning, religion, science and arts always flourishes around the world's commercial centers? It was true of Alexandria, of Baghdad, of Istanbul, of Venice, of London, of Amsterdam, and of Paris.

As dull and square, in every sense of the word, as the World Trade Towers were, they declared that New York and America were the center of world trade and commerce. In those towers died 6,000 people including many Muslims, Buddhists and Jews as well as Christians; also Asians, Europeans, and Africans as well as Americans.

Commerce, especially global commerce, is a demon for many people, in particular certain activists who blame it for the destruction of biodiversity and much more. Let us not argue this issue here, but it is important to note the fact that where commerce is free to create wealth, it also gathers a great diversity of the world's people and their cultures, and that in places like the Soviet Union and Afghanistan and Africa where commerce is crippled by the greed of state control and dictators or by the selfishness of tribal power struggles, biodiversity is destroyed along with cultural diversity.

The great cross-fertilization of minds and cultures that was the Silk Road in Central Asia came to an end because of terrorism. The mugging and slaughter of travelers made the human costs of that route too expensive. Europeans and Middle Easterners developed the maritime technology that allowed them to sail to China, India, Japan and the kingdoms of S.E. Asia. Central Asia withered and was all but forgotten. Karakorum of the Khans, one of the greatest cities of the world, is now an impoverished village of huts reached by jeep along dirt tracks in the Mongolian plains. The terrorists defeated themselves.

The terrorists who plague the Middle East, Europe and America want to bomb us back into the Stone Age, or at least into their monoculture medievalism. They would eliminate the diversity of human ecology by murdering it. The sterile dictatorships of the Middle East, and the acts of terrorists they breed, confirm once again the value of human commerce. The presence of my Samarkand friends among us confirms again how commerce among free people assures the truth of E Pluribus Unum.

E Pluribus Unum by Wallace Kaufman

E Pluribus Unum
by Wallace Kaufman