Nation states as font of freedom

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Oct 19 16:56:38 PDT 2001


joanna bujes wrote:
>
>
>
> Huh? "For this historical epoch, the rejection of the nation state
> is the rejection of the possibility of human freedom." Huh?
>
> [CLIP]
> OK. You can skewer me now.

Certainly no skewering. I was focusing on nations _other_ than the U.S. Solidarity in the fight for freedom in those nations has to be double edged -- and one edge, the sharper edge, has to be the fight for national independence from U.S. (or E.U. or Japanese) domination.

Radical individualists (particularly many though not all anarchists) are apt to claim, for example, that Vietnamese should have fought against the U.S. invasion AND the Vietnamese state at the same time! On the other hand, attempts to invoke nationalism on the U.S. left (see for example the flag controversy) are apt to be counter-productive. As a friend once said: Opportunism is seldom opportune.

Carrol



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