[lbo-talk] Blowing Up an Assumption

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 9 13:54:42 PDT 2005


Well, the recency or antiquity of a nationality is neither here nor there if people form an attachment to it. In our own century, the Israeli identity is obviously recent and quite strong. As far as I can tell Arab (non-Kurdish) Iraqis have a strong Iraqi identity, and I don't knws about how most Kurdish Iraqsi feel. For that matter Turkey, a strongly held national identity, was also an administraive district of the former Ottoman empire. There were strong Yugoslav and Czechoslovakian identities that had to be destroyed by force or chicanery. Going back some, both Italy and Germany were manufactured national identities dating from the mid 19th century. And our our country (those of us who are Americans) created a pretty strong national identity in pretty short order, maybe between 1776 and 1787, even if it took another 60 years -- still not "time out of mind" --and a civil war to make the United Sattes singular rather than plural.

Now, I don't know the situation in Chechnya, so I can't comment there. But the point is that even if it is a recent national identity it could be a real one.

Btw my old Soviet politics teacher from grad school, Matthew Evangelista, now at Cornell, and a very smart and pretty progressive guy, has apparently written a book about the Chechen war. Some who has time and interest should read it and report.

jks

--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:


> Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com, Wed Jun 8
> 14:50:19 PDT 2005:
> >>Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed
> toward a strategic
> >>objective: From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to
> Kashmir to
> >>Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign -- 18
> organizations in all
> >>- are seeking to establish or maintain political
> self-determination.
> >
> >What ignorant crap. The (apparantly for the moment
> defunct) "let's
> >blow up widows!" wing of the Chechen "resistance"
> is motivated by
> >greed and Islamism, with the corresponding desire
> to "liberate" the
> >pro-Russian Muslim territories from Russian
> "oppression," probably
> >in that order.
>
> Surely, greed and Islamism aren't mutually exclusive
> to the idea that
> suicide terrorist campaigns are "directed toward a
> strategic
> objective" and their sponsors seek to "establish or
> maintain
> political self-determination," as Robert A. Pape
> puts it.
>
> >Actually the whole idea is ridiculous. "Chechnya"
> is an
> >administrative district arbitrarily created by the
> Bolsheviks, and
> >Chechens are not indigenous to large sections of
> it. Naursky
> >district (which is very big) has been the territory
> of the Terek
> >Cossacks since the 16th century. Several Chechen
> clans fled to join
> >the Tereks when Chechnya was islamized, due to
> their centuries-old
> >ties of intermarriage. But who needs knowledge when
> you can just
> >write bullshit.
>
> The origins of modern Iraq were similarly arbitrary
> -- Iraq was made
> of three vilayets (administrative districts) of the
> Ottoman Empire --
> Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra -- that British
> imperialists carved out for
> as a mandate for the British Empire:
>
> <blockquote>The history of modern Iraq begins with
> the last phase of
> Ottoman rule, during the 19th century. Until the
> 1830s Ottoman rule
> in Iraq was tenuous, and real power shifted between
> powerful tribal
> chieftains and local Mamluk rulers. Many of the
> nomadic Arab tribes
> were never fully brought under Ottoman control.
> Local Kurdish
> dynasties held sway over the mountainous north. In
> the second half of
> the 18th century the Mamluks established effective
> control over the
> territory from Al Basrah to north of Baghdad. The
> Mamluks imposed
> central authority and introduced a functioning
> government. In 1831
> the province of Iraq, then subdivided into the three
> vilayets, or
> administrative districts, of Mosul, Baghdad, and Al
> Basrah, came
> under direct Ottoman administration. From 1831 to
> 1869 a series of
> governors came and went in rapid succession.
>
> From 1869 to 1872 Midhat Pasha, one of the Ottoman
> Empire's ablest
> and most scrupulous officials, at long last imposed
> effective central
> control throughout the region. He modernized
> Baghdad, in everything
> from transportation to sanitation to education, and
> he imposed his
> rule on the tribal countryside. ("Iraq,"
>
<http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761567303_11/Iraq.html>)</blockquote>
>
> <blockquote>[B]ecause Britain, along with its French
> and Russian
> allies, coveted the Ottoman domains. Lloyd George
> wished to acquire
> two provinces above all: Palestine, on behalf of
> Jewish Zionists from
> Europe, for whom the fundamentalist chapel-goer had
> a messianic
> sympathy, and Mesopotamia -- with Baghdad at its
> heart -- for its oil
> and its position as the Arab world's frontier with
> Persia,
> Afghanistan and India. (Some things have not
> changed.) Although the
> twin campaigns in Mesopotamia and Syria, which
> included Palestine,
> were similar Allied land-grabs, the differences were
> significant.
> Syria's population sought independence from the
> Sublime Porte, Iraq's
> did not. Syria wanted to remain united; Iraq for the
> most part
> preferred to retain separate identities for Kurds,
> Sunni Arabs and
> Shiite Arabs. Britain would divide Syria, and unite
> Iraq.
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
> . . . [T]he King-Crane Commission confined its
> investigations to
> Syria, where it found the population overwhelmingly
> in favour of the
> two goals Britain had specifically excluded:
> independence and unity.
> In the event of their having to accept a mandate --
> a term invented
> by Jan Smuts at Paris to disguise what would in fact
> be protectorates
> or colonies -- the Syrians asked that the mandatory
> be the United
> States. Syria was actually carved into four mandate
> territories --
> mini-Syria and Lebanon under the French, Transjordan
> and Palestine
> under the British. (Charles Glass, "Iraq Must Go! A
> History of
> 'Regime Change' in Iraq,"
>
<http://www.zmag.org/content/Iraq/glass_iraqmustgo.cfm>,
> 9 Oct.
> 2002)</blockquote>
>
> The experience of having its borders drawn by great
> powers is a
> common fate among the majority of existing states
> today. Only states
> that are still or used to be great powers and their
> settler colonies
> have had a chance to draw their own borders more or
> less on their own
> terms.
>
> Nations and states are both historical constructions
> (as opposed to
> entities found ready-made in nature), so they are
> basically whatever
> human beings make of them, mostly based upon the
> principle of might
> makes right.
> --
> Yoshie
>
> * Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/>
> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/>
> * Bring Them Home Now!
> <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
> * Calendars of Events in Columbus:
> <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
> <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, &
> <http://www.cpanews.org/>
> * Student International Forum:
> <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
> * Committee for Justice in Palestine:
> <http://www.osudivest.org/>
> * Al-Awda-Ohio:
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

__________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Use Yahoo! to plan a weekend, have fun online and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list