SUNRISE INDUSTRY -- CREATING NEW FLAGS 

As modern communications, through new technologies, operate at the speed of light and radically change the way people see their nation "tribe", many more countries will be created during the coming decades. Flag designers and manufacturers will just love it.

Large, land-mass countries, created through conquests of the past, drafted international borders that ignored natural "tribal" boundaries. Such countries, including the U.S.S.R., China, India, Canada and the U.S.A., will fracture. The results will be many benefits and a few dangers.

For most countries, existing international boundaries were established via military conquest. Many of these regions are undergoing political turmoil today.

The U.S.S.R. is really 16 "countries". By the turn of the century perhaps 40 percent of Soviet citizens will be Moslem -- religious traditionalists in an atheist country. For various political and military reasons, the Soviet Union has placed most of its nuclear weapons in Shiite Muslim Azerbaijan. With the unrest there today, it isn't a big stretch of the imagination to see a transfer of these weapons, in a quick bold move, to neighboring Iran.

The population of China is mainly Han-Chinese -- about a billion of them. But where are the majority of their nuclear weapons positioned? In the area inhabiteded by six million non-Hans.

An obvious and as yet unrecognized feature of the recent hype over South Africa and Nelson Mandela being "recognized" as the black leader in South Africa belies the facts. Mandela belongs to the Xhosa tribe, one of the smallest, with about 1.5 million members. Zulu Chief Gotha Bethulazi, not Mandela, will decide when he is ready what will happen in that lovely land. Bethulazi leads Inkatha, the political arm of seven million Zulus.

Chief Bethulazi is an intelligent, well-educated politician and leader. No one, repeat no one, has ever conquered the Zulus. Not the British, not the Boers nor any other African black tribe. By sheer numbers alone, not to mention their superior organizational qualities (see the film Shaxta which is fairly true to history as an example), military discipline and physical and psychological strength, the Zulus excel. The Impis, legendary Zulu warriors, continually surprised the British during their occupation of South Africa, by moving massive armies great distances overland, with minimal supplies, during wartime maneuvers.

Since the distant past, friction between the Hindu and Muslim populations on the Indian sub-continent has been everlasting. Since the British took over in 1858, they provided the organizational struc- ture that kept the two historically-opposing factions working alongside one another. The British departure in August, 1947 uncorked the genie in that bottle. Pakistan was created and then breakaway Bangledesh was formed. Now Kashmir is in revolt, Sikhs hold sway in that and other areas and southern Tamils are in revolt at home and in neighboring Sri Lanka. And other ethnic minorities by the dozens want their own homeland.

Ethnic groups everywhere are seeking "self-determinization". They all have new (or old) dreams and aspirations. Colonies, empires and countries formed by decision, not negotiation, are under attack. It is not just in the developing nations either. In America, the burgeoning Hispanic population in New York, Florida, California, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado is starting to use its clout. In these areas, the signs of striving towards some form of Hispanic "nationhood" are readily apparent.

English-speaking Canadians are well aware that their impression of a "conquered" Quebec isn't working out the way our grandparents and teachers and history books claimed. Canada will fracture before the decade ends. Held together by political and economic bribery, Canada has always been an artificial nation buffeted by the unwieldly geography. These ruptures aren't merely local phenomena. Nationalism is now an outmoded concept. The tide has changed. It is now easier for a "tribe" to swim towards independence than it was in the past to submit to domination.

Flag designers and manufacturers will be in a pennant dreamer's heaven.

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