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Below, there is a discussion of the civil war due to Robert E Lee statute being torn down. The other main event of the day is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I would say as a general matter the biggest supporters of Palestine in the US are progressives. Progressives also hate the confederacy.
Question is can you separate them? The south was arguing for their right of self determination? Of course, imbedded within that is they wanted to savagely deny that right to blacks held in chattel slavery. Likewise, the Palestinians claim the right of self determination but their stated intention is to kill the Israelis (from the river to the sea has a meaning).
So in both cases there is a legitimate claim to right of self determination. But that claim is bloodied by what those people would do with such right and at least in the confederacy context that “bad thing” was enough to invalidate their right to self determination.
My question then is whether the right to self determination is properly thought of as as a right? If so, it seems at best it is a contingent right. If it is a contingent right, what contingencies are unimportant enough to “trump” the right?
That's not 'likewise', though.
It's pretty normal for both sides of a war to say they want to kill the people on the other side. That's sort of what war is. Many Israelis express the inverse sentiment.
Modern US wars are supposed to be more 'humanitarian' than that and it's tacky for us to express such sentiments, but. It's pretty normal war rhetoric, and war is about hating the other country you're fighting.
Whereas horrible oppressing and torturing your own citizens, in fact rather than in rhetoric, as a matter of course and a matter of enduring policy rather than as a temporary contingent reaction to an ongoing event like a war, is a qualitatively different thing.
First of all, war rhetoric tends to end after the war; policy like this may be permanent.
Second, even if the most bleeding-heart of liberals would like a world without borders where morality doesn't depend on nationality, the standard reality is that governments have duties and obligations towards the proper treatment of their own citizens that trump how they treat the citizens of other nations (to say nothing of the citizens of enemy nations during war). It's still nice for governments to not commit too many war crimes against enemy citizens, the UN will call them meanies if they do it a lot, but they're inherently a bad government if they do the same to their own citizens who they have authority over and obligations towards.
For people? Sure, it's one right among many, depending of course on what you even mean y the vague term.
For governments? Governments aren't people, they don't have rights.
There's a sense in which, even if 49% of the people in your democracy disagree with a policy, it is still interfering with their freedoms for some foreign country to come in and change that policy to what they would want instead. Yes, in a democracy, there is some connection between the self-determination of the state and the self-determination of the people.
But it's a tenuous link at best. Just gesturing at the individual's right to self-determination is not sufficient to justify states doing anything they want as an absolute right.
Especially when what that state is doing is taking away the right to self-determination form many of it's own people! At that point the link isn't just tenuous, it's basically just rhetorical.
Not really. There's a difference between saying you want to kill enemy combatants and saying your objective is to literally exterminate the other side. Very few modern wars have genocide as either an explicit or implicit goal.
Is there a lot of ugly rhetoric during a war? Yes. But most people still understand that the objective is to defeat the enemy, not eradicate them. Even Russia isn't claiming they want to exterminate Ukrainians (and indeed, that isn't their goal). Israelis do not want to exterminate the Palestinians, notwithstanding ugly rhetoric that might come from a few extremists.
The Palestinians, unfortunately, by and large, really do want to wipe out the Israelis. Not all of them, and many would probably grudgingly settle into a peaceful coexistence if that were presented to them as a living situation they'd find tolerable, and in future generations the genocidal hatred might fade.
But I think your equivocation here is just outright false.
Russia is led by boomers who heavily promote (and probably earnestly believe in) something called druzhba narodov. This is a kind of lame civnat narrative similar to GOP’s fawning over baste blacks and LEGAL immigrants, i.e. people who are content with not totally disempowering the majority population. The Ukrainians/Kleinrussen are a brother people being liberated from ebil Banderite Nazis who hate puppies and sunshine. The enemy is ideological, he has, strictly speaking, no nationality, just like crime has no color. Like America, Russia too is an idea defined by a vague adherence to Eastern Orthodoxy, but also baste traditional Islam and who knows what else, loving Stalin and hating homosexuals. This is, for example, why the Ukrainian language remains official in Crimea and the new oblasts (not that this has any real consequences, but it does show the kind of picture Russia’s leadership is trying to paint).
By contrast, Ukrainians are much more realistic and an order of magnitude more bloodthirsty, to the point where mocking the idea that not all Russians deserve death has become a national pastime akin to mocking #notallmen. Their enemy is not Putinism, Tsarism or neo-Bolshevism or cleptocracy or authoritarianism or whatever; it is Russia, the ancestral enemy of Rus-Ukrainians. It is almost unimaginable that Russian will be allowed in any state capacity should Ukraine ever retake Crimea. There is nothing surprising about this: the slaves of Haiti were more bloodthirsty than their French masters, so were the Indians in North America, and so too are Palestinians. What master in his right mind wishes to kill off his slaves?
Canada, famously, had programs designed to assimilate Indian youths into the dominate culture. Countries throughout the world like France, Germany and Sweden had programs designed to force a certain dialect on the people usually through the schooling system. This kind of thing was considered normal and progressive back then. This was also true in the USA with the once thriving Italian and German speaking communities dying out once it was deemed unpatriotic during the World Wars. I don't find my Grandmother's family giving up their Junker last name any great tragedy.
I don't find the Ukrainians, empirically, anymore bloodthirsty than the Russians in this war. Nor the Jews anymore bloodthirsty than the Arabs that have always wanted to extirpate the Jews by any means necessary.
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