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Notes -
Take 2.
I posted and deleted this because I don't want to get banned, but if I can't talk about the things I want to talk about then I don't see much point in caring about the account, anyway. Still, I'll try to be subdued.
The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
I'm posting the reactions on twitter, because there are dozens of two-sentence sentiments that I share. I'll quote a couple, for posterity, and you can get the gist of the other side from the WP article.
Columbia Bugle
Jack Posobiec
Jack again
Maarblek
BlueandGray1864
Spencer Klavan
That last one is really quite striking, given this line from the WP article:
Really, you should read the article, too. In it, I saw the genocide of my race, and it scares the hell out of me. I suppose this must be how the Jews feel.
So, is it justice? Is it vengeance? Should it be celebrated? Should it be destroyed?
And does the symbolism of liquidating the statue of a white man apply to the declining white population in America? Is the deliberate melting down of this statue a parallel to the deliberate replacement of the American race?
ETA: One more tweet from this morning, just a few hours ago:
GigaThaad
Elon Musk
Musk, as a white man born in South Africa, should know what it looks like when your native country changes and now wants you and yours dead and gone.
I have to assume you mean this WaPo article.
If so, I guess I’d better head off any misunderstandings. There’s really no sense in getting heated over this long-dead loser. Even in its current state, this statue holds together better than the Lost Cause mythos. It’s more defensible than the Confederacy, too. I think Lee’s just getting caught up with what Sherman did to Georgia.
Also, it looks like the detractors are doing this legally. I don’t see why you should get the final say over whether Lee’s body parts get to remain in a Union.
I don't know. Personally, I consider myself a rather patriotic American, and I have no particular sadness that it remains a single country, and no particular fondness for the idea of the Confederacy. In general, I'm of the opinion that while political division is sometimes necessary, union is preferable because we really are stronger together when we peacefully work out our differences.
That said, I find it amusing at a principled level that modern neoliberalism doesn't seem to have met a separatist group it doesn't like: see the cause of Scottish secession, 20th century ex-colonial independence movements, and more recent splits like Kosovo and South Sudan, or even supporting an independent Ukraine against Russia. There's a lot of political momentum behind the idea of self determination -- as long as you're not from Virginia or Georgia: American jurisdiction is indivisible for any reason. One could point to slavery as the key point of contention, but that rule isn't exactly applied consistently: France's interests in North Africa were originally justified as ending the Barbary slave trade, and ongoing human trafficking in the region to this day apparently doesn't justify external political control (which I personally agree with!).
Under my principles, I'd rather maintain the US as it is, but I think one can make a reasonable argument about "Biden's 120,000 active-duty troops at Fort
BenningMoore occupying Georgia" that comes across a reasonable fraction as convincing as the Chinese in Tibet, US troops in Afghanistan, or any number of similar cases that the world seems to agree are morally-questionable "occupation".No, that's not really true. Secessions are very rare, compared to how many secessionist movements there are; as a rule, the acceptance of a secession requires the acceptance of the country which the original seceeding country originally belonged to, and as one might imagine this doesn't happen that often. Somaliland hasn't been granted independence even though it has in practice functioned as a country for decades and is commonly seen as vastly more functional than Somalia. Why? Because Somalia hasn't granted it independence.
Yes, there's a counterargument - Kosovo - but it's the expection, not the rule, and the Western acceptance of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence (which most countries of the world haven't accepted) was predicated on the idea that Serbia had been ready to implement an actual genocide there. The ex-colonial countries and South Sudan were different, since their independence was granted by the country's original owner, and Ukraine is not even in the same category, since the country it seceeded from - Soviet Union - doesn't even exist. (The idea of Ukraine as some sort of a secessionist entity from Russia requires one to purchase into Russian nationalist narratives generally.)
Here's how EU - certainly an organization that could be seen as one of the main pillars of modern neoliberalism - reacted to the vote of independence in Catalonia.
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