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Nationstates? Bad Idea!

by ormondotvos Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 10:06:36 AM EST

Nation States were invented as a truce between empires. There was too much interference in each others' affairs, so a cynical bargain was struck: we won't interfere in your internal affairs, if you won't interfere in ours.

This was supposed to apply to all areas of life: territory, commerce, colonies, and the embassies that were set up. But it also included non-interference in human rights administration, or lack of it.

Thus slavery, torture, theft of property, child labor, and the subjugation of women were solely the domain of the nation state, and other nation states weren't supposed to interfere. Sort of like multiculturalism on a global scale, without an overarching law.

From the diaries -- whataboutbob


But then came the Enlightenment's discovery of human rights, the weird idea that every human, no matter their age, sex, color, religion, or place of birth, was entitled to things they'd never been entitled to before. International law was offered up, but seems to be more a sop to complainers than real control of nation states.

And the United States of America, the former colonies of the British Empire, became infected with this meme of human rights, a very powerful one.

But as the USA gained in power, it became a slave to its own corporations, which it foolishly allowed those same rights as a human person. Gradually, the corporations are destroying the government based on human rights, which have become submitted to corporation assumed rights to all surplus labor.

Now the USA is coming into conflict with the entire world, or the part that now believes in human rights, and is also coming into conflict with a spreading theocracy that submits the individual's rights to those of the state. Submission is the English word for this theocracy. You may know it as Islam.

How do you see this coming battle between the fundamentalist segment of Islam, Humanist Europe, and the schizophrenic USA, torn between Christian Fundamentalism (no more interested in the dominance of individual rights than Islam) and its founding documents, now being rapidly destroyed by corporate golems acting as overseers for a self-centered oligarchy?

Will liberal humanist citizen be able to educate and motivate a large enough majority of voters to stem the tide?  Or has the die been cast; the government broken, the ideals no longer capable of breaking through to the consumer addled minds of its slaves?

Will the United Nations be recast by the desperate First World to contain the United States and the Muslim Crescent, somewhere down the road?
" Jean-Marie Guehenno "End of the Nation State" has some parallel arguments.

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Jean-Marie Guehenno, the Undersecretary for Peacekeeping of the United Nations, wrote a book called "The End of the Nation State" in 1996, which I found after writing this diary. I felt like I was channeling him!

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!
by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Thu Mar 1st, 2007 at 04:10:48 PM EST
How do you see this coming battle between the fundamentalist segment of Islam, Humanist Europe, and the schizophrenic USA, torn between Christian Fundamentalism (no more interested in the dominance of individual rights than Islam) and its founding documents, now being rapidly destroyed by corporate golems acting as overseers for a self-centered oligarchy?

I think Europe would do well to extricate itself from this conflict and get on with business like China, India, Russia... Why did you leave them out of the picture, by the way?

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Mar 1st, 2007 at 04:55:15 PM EST
One of the problems with millenialism is that death, of the individual or the society, is not a major concern. They've got heaven as a goal, or paradise.

Nukes are the probable endgame in this conflict you would withdraw from. China, Russia, and India have them, but each of them has a reason to use them, and their existence alone make them likely to be used in time of conflict.

I left them out because they seem a little less driven by craziness, and a little more by pragmatism.

I was just reading an old blog, from June of 2001, about the prospects for the reforming of world politics into a cleaner brighter dream. September 11 2001 threw a monkey wrench into that, but I'm not giving up.

Apparently, you're not either, since you're here...

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Thu Mar 1st, 2007 at 09:16:15 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Oh, I gave up a long time ago.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 04:44:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]
No you didn't!

You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 01:38:23 PM EST
[ Parent ]
what a thouht-provoking comment, thanks.

i always felt the so-called 'communist' states were perhaps extra brutal and inhuman because they had lost the civilising effects of religion for a few generations, you made me wonder if their collective seperation from religion possibly made them less fanatical fighters.

sure they were indoctrinated with some equally irrational premises as claim most religions, but at the end of the day, if there is no pie in the sky, will a man risk laying down his life so readily?

does it perhaps make him more cunning, as he's no longer distracted by time spent scrying runes, deciphering theologies, or reading the future in sheeps' innards, crystal balls, tarot cards or tea leaves.

he can keep his eye on the ball...

how to get what he wants with the least friction.

pragmatism over craziness, i'll take it.

but is there another kind of craziness that ensues when you try to deny the religious impulse through force and try chanelling it into worshipping the ideal state, or the dear leader?

or is the religious impulse a left-over vestige of something archaic, like a coccyx?

or is it the pavlovian response to millennia of indoctrination by the various religions that have swayed our virgin belief-systems so often and drastically that we feel empty if we try to replace 'it' with 'pure reason', or 'science', or shopping, or videogames for that matter

that's what i wonder.

and yes i still do believe too, and indeed 9/11 may well be one of the signs and wonders presaging the grand finale of a whole era of human existence, as is climate change...

2012, said the mayans...

see what happened in Enterprise, Alabama yesterday?

if i was a reader of signs i would be seeing this last bout of usa storms as a warning not to fuck with iran, but my imagination was always a bit weird...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 05:50:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Have to get some work done. Will reply at length after dark.

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!
by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 06:57:05 PM EST
[ Parent ]
from it I'd like to comment that I see the possibility to early educate that endless why into some psychologically useful wisdom early on in childhood education.

I'll do a diary on "Religious Education as Child Abuse". Maybe here in Eurotrib it will get a reasoned reception. In the USA, the only madrassas we recognize are Muslim ones overseas. We don't see OUR Sunday schools as religious indoctrination, and most of us can't see the weird effects of stuffing the little Why Hole with myths.

I'd like to fill it with Carl Sagan and billions and billions of stars...more planetariums and fewer deities.

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Sat Mar 3rd, 2007 at 01:47:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I follow your deductions, but get stuck in the rough-edge categories you set as opposites:  The US vs. Islam, fundamentalists vs. founding documents, etc.  If I thought "humanism" wasn´t going to win, I´d give up.  

The obvious part is that economic-and-political power-mongers have played the religious extremists against the middle and let them step over the boundaries of the economic and political, as if they were interchangeable.  Blending religion with econ-politics is the explosive that has destroyed any balance.

The power of change is in people´s hands, but I´m afraid the apathy of those "consumer addled minds" will take time to reactivate the majority needed.  Given time to elect better leaders, fundamentalists will be set back to their limited fringes.  


Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

by metavision on Thu Mar 1st, 2007 at 04:59:59 PM EST
in the solution process used by faith-based and evidence based thinkers.

That is where the war lies, and that is where the battle for minds must come from. To subvert the fundamentalist message, we have to remove the fertile ground of poverty and life despair it grows from, and that means cooperating, sharing, donating with the realization that there will be a payoff down the line.

On our side, it is necessary to behave rationally as an example and not drop into idiocy. Less ranting, more cool.

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Thu Mar 1st, 2007 at 09:23:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]
My viewpoint more or less, with the proviso that since rationality can be very boring and unmotivational, we need to continue with humour, gusto, love and passion - even in the face of tragedy.

You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 04:02:56 AM EST
[ Parent ]
You're mixing up two different issues, both of them important: the end of the Nation-States and the confrontation between secular democracy and faith-based political movements.

First, the end of the Nation-State era. Nation-States were institutionalised by the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. In a way, they created a framework guaranteeing a greater political and social stability/cohesion, hence allowing the development of the economy and the industrial revolution. The Nation-State model is no longer the relevant level for the regulation/governance of the globalised economy and for tackling global problems such as pandemies and global warming. The deepening of inequalities within the countries is a sign of its obsolescence. The current trend is the emergence of continental blocks (EU, Mercosur...) and, paradoxically, the empowerment of the local level (big cities and regions).  I agree with you on one point: the United States look like the last attempt to "save" the Nation-State model.

Your second issue is not clearly expressed. Islam is not the only religion based on submission to God. For most of its history, Christianity also promoted the submission to God and its representatives on Earth (some of them still dream of re-establishing it).  It is not a fight between the United States and Islam, but a fight between secular democracy and faith-based political radical movements.


"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

by Melanchthon on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 07:45:32 AM EST
Ormondotvos...I notice this is your first diary on ET...thanks taking the time to write! And welcome to the fray!!

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia
by whataboutbob on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 10:05:39 AM EST
> And the United States of America, the former colonies of the British Empire, became infected with this meme of human rights, a very powerful one.

This is plainly not true. The USA has no conception of human rights. For instance, Americans do not even recognize human rights. Set down the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in front of them and they will sputter that most or all of them aren't human rights. This is because Americans automatically translate universal human rights into civil rights. It's a false cognate between the American language and the English language. The term 'human rights' simply doesn't exist in American.

> How do you see this coming battle between the fundamentalist segment of Islam, Humanist Europe, and the schizophrenic USA

Which battle and in what terms? Military, economic, social, legal?

> Will liberal humanist citizen be able to educate and motivate a large enough majority of voters to stem the tide?

No, absolutely not. Will humanists be able to educate the children of these people to stem the tide of barbarism? Almost certainly.

by richardk (richard kulisz gmail) on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 11:43:27 AM EST
I think you overgeneralize Americans. There are large numbers who demonstrate, constitute the NetRoots, and vote for decent candidates, but we suffer from the same limitations on our nastiness that all liberals do: hesitancy and failure to believe in our own morality.

As cognitive science educates us in the wellsprings of morality in reciprocal altruism and game theory, we may get off our fence and ride into battle.

Or we can play relativistic games and lose the war. The oligarchs sure don't believe in fair play. They're the free riders, the parasites who are sucking us dry.

Which battle and in what terms? Military, economic, social, legal?

I'm all ears. Lay it out. I'm here to learn.

Will there be any humanists alive to teach these children, and will their schools have been transmuted into Western madrassas?

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Sat Mar 3rd, 2007 at 01:38:14 AM EST
[ Parent ]
> I'm all ears. Lay it out. I'm here to learn.

Well, most people here aren't and my guess at your email address just bounced. Send me an email if you care.

by richardk (richard kulisz gmail) on Sat Mar 3rd, 2007 at 12:28:12 PM EST
[ Parent ]
You've got the history wrong. As Melancathon points out, the modern state system has its origins in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. But these weren't 'nation states' in the modern sense of the word. First of all nations as such didn't exist back then for the most part,  and secondly these states were often multinational. Seeing the Enlightenment as something that emerges to challenge the nation state is exactly backwards. The nation, in the sense of a mass collective identity dominating all others really takes off in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. It was a byproduct of the emergence of a public sphere and civil society autonomous of state and church.

At that point it is more associated with the revolutionary movements subverting the old order than with a prop for the state since the primary group identities of the ruling elites in most of Europe then are as royal subjects, as socio-economic castes, and religious. That remains the case until the mid nineteenth century - the movements for German and Italian unification, for Polish, Hungarian, and Greek independence are seen, and see themselves, as of the left, attacking the oppressive social order of the non-national elites in the name of the nation as a whole. That would quickly change over the next couple decades as states and ruling elites embraced nationalism as a source of legitimacy, while the new Marxist left tentatively retreated from nationalism (though only tentatively and as the anti-colonial movements showed, nationalism could remain a powerful left wing force even with a Marxist cast).

I also don't see any reason to see national identity as particularly bad. Group identities are going to exist and they can be harnessed for good and bad ends. And what this has to do with capitalist exploitation or the concept of corporate personhood is unclear to me.

by MarekNYC on Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 01:07:25 PM EST
I also don't see any reason to see national identity as particularly bad. Group identities are going to exist and they can be harnessed for good and bad ends. And what this has to do with capitalist exploitation or the concept of corporate personhood is unclear to me.

If it were group identities being harnessed for good, it would be a wash. Harnessed for ill, as raisers of the spectre of xenophobia to enable the armaments makers, they can easily be the death of humanity. Like now.

Like the famous scorpion in the fable, where the scorpion asks the turtle to ferry him across the river, and the turtle demurs, worried that the scorpion will sting him, and the scorpion says no, we'd both drown, and they set off and the scorpion stings him anyways, and as they go down, the scorpion explains "It's my nature," the oligarchs are too much in and of their greedy nature to see the turtle they are stinging. That would be us.

The concept of corporate personhood is this: corporations have been stupidly granted personhood in the United States. I'm not familiar with European law. In the United States, a person has the right to express themselves through the spending of money, which is considered speech. Money buys propaganda.

Corporations, which legally exist with only one strand of morality, to make their stockholders profit. As Reinhold Neibuhr clarified beautifully in Moral Man in an Immoral Society, corporations are amoral in the normal sense of being able to make the fine distinctions of interpersonal recognition upon which the Golden Rule is based. They shouldn't be "people" any more than seriously mentally disabled people should be driving schoolbuses. They sure shouldn't be writing their own regulations, and picking legislators.

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Sat Mar 3rd, 2007 at 01:31:05 AM EST
[ Parent ]


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