Re: Ethno-Nationalism, or Racism, or Whatever??? ( was Re: a discuss

--- tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
>
> I've had the misfortune of being involved in a car
> accident there when
> it was still Yugoslavia. The mentality of the
> officials in those
> public institutions I got in contact with pursuant
> to that was such
> that I would distrust any type of state those people
> would make based
> on whichever ideology.

****GK: This seems to indicate that Solzhenitsyn was
wrong when, in his famous letter to the Soviet Leaders
of 1973, he stated that all that needed to "make
things right" in the Soviet political space was to
abandon the Marxist ideology: "keep the power and drop
the Marxism!" But individuals brainwashed into Marxism
don't automatically become liberal democrats when they
"keep the power". Re-education is needed. If that is
unavailable you can easily get messy "transitional
situations".****

>
> In specifically the case of Yugoslavia, the scenario
> as I recall it
> was this: Around 1990 all the ex-communist states
> were converting to
> capitalism and some type of democratic rule, but
> some held out, the
> more easterly and southerly, the longer, so that
> when change happened
> in Yugoslavia, federal states (Yugoslavia was a
> federation) like
> Slovenia and Croatia were for change, Serbia
> against. Slovenia broke
> out with not much trouble, since it was ethnically
> 'clean' already, so
> that fact was recognized by most states. The trouble
> was that that was
> the first of increasingly unacceptable stepping
> stones,

****GK: I find nothing unacceptable about the
self-determination of Slovenia. In this context I
reject the principle that "some are more equal than
others" ****

since now it

> was difficult to maintain that Croatia, even though
> ethnically mixed,
> shouldn't be allowed to do the same. Predictably,
> England and France
> were against, while Germany and Denmark (foreign
> ministers
> Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Uffe Ellermann-Jensen
> were personal
> friends; the latter had great success with his
> personal involvement in
> the liberation of the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia
> and Lithuania from
> Soviet and Russian rule and he probably pushed
> Genscher in the
> direction of supporting the recognition of
> ethnically based states
> elsewhere) were for. Recognition ensued, chaos
> followed. Similarly,
> the Soviet union fell apart into ethnically based
> states, some
> descended into chaos, some didn't.

****GK: What smoothed things here (partially) was the
original inclusion of the "right of secession" in the
Soviet constitution, and the doctrine that ultimately
sovereignty resided in the "Union Republics", with
revocable "delegation" to the center. This system was
not that of Western federations like the U.S. or
Canada. But it was unfair in the context of the
doctrine of the right to self-determination in
general, since it denied e.g. to Chechnya what was
available to e.g. Estonia, merely because Chechnya was
not a "Union Republic".****

>
>
> > So all you've done is to cite a perfect example of
> the evils of
> > ethno-nationalism.
>
> People are not right in the head in that end of the
> world is all I
> can say,

****GK: With thoughts like that a world state is
unworkable. But that's OK since I don't think it would
work anyway.****