Protection Plan for Ethnic Communities

This vision expands an idea I once presented on a Native American internet religious discussion board for the protection of traditional tribal lifestyles and sacred ceremonies. All territorial religious and indigenous ethnic groups that wish to protect themselves from the culturally disintegrating influences of the modern world face the same problem: How to stop the modern world they find themselves embedded within from weakening and eventually destroying traditional ways.

 

A Trinitarian Community Plan

For securing protection of religious and cultural lifestyles otherwise vulnerable to disintegrating influences of the outside world, a trinitarian community plan is suggested as the ideal solution.

Here's how it works: an ethnic group, be it Israelis, Serbs, Kurds, Lakotas, whatever, that has a strong ethnic identity they wish to protect, secures their communities (of whatever size beyond a practical level of community self-sufficiency) by forming a three tier concentric ring arrangement.

 

The Inner Ring

The innermost ring is where those members of the group who wish to live completely by tradition can do so without interference from the outside world. Whatever religious or cultural beliefs inspire them, as long as they are part of a recognized religious or ethnic group, they can do what they want being governed by their own community rules as long as what they do doesn't present a physical danger to the communities of the outside world.

The Intermediary Ring

The second community ring surrounds the inner ring with a community that is comfortable living half way between the group's traditional ways and modern secular life. This community forms a buffer between the third outside ring and the innermost ring, a buffer allowing only the group's members entry into the innermost ring thus stopping all non-group outsider influence.

The Outer Ring

The third community ring surrounds the Intermediary Ring and is composed of those members of the group who, while still identifying with the group's ethnic or religious identity, feel comfortable living secular or modern lifestyles of the outside world.

These are the members of the community who should be the ones dealing with outsider communities because they have the necessary cooperative mindset whereas the "purists", the fundamentalists of the group living within the Innermost Ring, are expected to be the most intolerant of outside influences.

 

Why it is a Peace Plan?  

Because it provides Security without weapons.

 

This three-tier arrangement will give far more security to any ethnic or religious group than existing communities where there is no three-tier design element to buffer and protect the core identity of the group. The security rests upon those members of the group living in the outmost ring. They haven't reason to be paranoid of the outside world because they are part of it yet still are full members of their own ethnic or religious group. It will be these members of group who act as ambassadors to the outside world making sure the outside world has no reason to feel threatened by the group however antagonistic the group's core religious beliefs are to the outside world. Outsiders will interact freely with this outermost ring community but they will find it difficult to penetrate the intermediary ring community of the group and impossible to reach the innermost core community where the core beliefs and group lifestyle remains fully protected. And this is why the Tribal-Communitarian World Peace Plan is a world peace plan because throughout the world, most all modern conflicts have to do with one ethnic or religious group protecting itself from other groups that form the outside world influences.

Physical security hasn't been able to be obtained for most endangered ethnic or religious groups even though massive military efforts have been used in some places such as Israel. No, lasting peace requires cooperative neighbors and that requires cooperative peoples willing to work with one another. The outermost ring of tribal and religious groups can assure these groups that they produce their own cooperative peoples able to work out problems with the outside world without resorting to violence. Of course, standard universal social rules protecting communities from intercommunity/international warfare would apply so that a climate of peaceful co-existence is created, a necessary ingredient to make this plan work.

 

"Follow the Plan and you'll do fine, but don't follow it?

Given time you will find that they won't be kind."