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Showing posts from August 19, 2018

against the "legitimate right of a people to self-determination"

I had a twitter exchange with a man who accused me of being an anti-semitic shithead because I did not recognize the legitimacy of the Jews right to self-determination.   I called him a general shithead and accused him of being the anti-semite. Things went from there, in the usual twitter way. However, if I had not felt like insults were in order, I might have surprised him by saying that I am opposed to the principle of self-determination period. I think that every nation state that grounds its legitimacy in ethnic identity is on the road to fascism. Sooner of later such a state will either have to re-constitute its legitimacy or become a racist state, and as such, begin suppressing criticism and begin the process of institutionalizing second class citizenship. The principle of the nation state was, up until the 1840s, I’d say, almost never identified with some ethnic group, rather than with a royal family, or a religion. The Atlantic revolutions identified something different