Thanks for the intercession.
I tried to repost the material, which I just finished reformatting. It includes some important additions and modifications.
All the business it pleases to have, in particular based on the fact that the borders of Georgia are by no means legitimate and are fully open to revision.
Having read ahead, I know you’re about to regale us with your personal formula for determining legitimate nationhood – longevity. I also know that I’m about to laugh, for the third time, as I explain why this is patently ridiculous.
It begins and ends here: a state exists because other states agree that it does. Other states agree that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are
de jure territories within the Georgian state. Russia, too, adheres to this ideal, which is the really important thing here, above and beyond your fanciful, special definitions designed to help bring about the Utopia.
Based on mere secession? certainly. Based on slaveholding, no, you stupid shit. The war was fought over slavery, not over secession. If the Ossetians were eating babies, I'd be cheering the Georgians. But here, it's the Georgians who are executing all adult Ossetians they find.
You have already ground underheel the very idea that popular attitudes toward self-government are in any way a legitimate basis for secession? See your own position on Croats, Bosnians, Tibetans, Uighurs, and many of the peoples of Eastern Europe, all of whom are rather vocal about the actual or supposed benefits of autodetermination.
As for the Civil War, I’m afraid you’re quite … wrong. The right to keep slaves was one of those enunciated by the southern states as an impetus for their decision. The Federal government, however, would have fought the Civil War whether or not slavery was at issue. You can argue, of course, that the war would not have come about without the peculiar institution. You cannot argue, however, that Lincoln’s motivation was elevating the black man from bondage.
Regarding the summary executions that you assert have taken place, how about an English-language source that doesn’t use strictly Russian reporting? Try as you might, you won’t convince me (or, I expect, many others) that Putin’s little land of liberty, where journalists die left and right, the state has been assuming monopolistic control over media, and official youth groups get into fascistic scuffles with the opposition, is cranking out
veritas by the metric tonne. And, before you throw a typical fit about how nobody shares your enthusiasm for Russia, let me preempt you by saying that I’ve got the same faith – i.e., none – in Gerogian post.
No, you stupid shit, I stated those reasons are invalidated by the fact that the fucking Bosniaks worshiped the ideal of the SS Hanjar Division and other vile nazi-era crimes their fathers had committed, and wanted to impose Sharia law on all of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
This is my favorite part of your bullshit, and it’s been aptly revealed as a great, steaming load of such by several others.
I will take this opportunity simply to remind you that minorities under Serbian rule suffered horrible depredations. Not least from fairly regular incidents of ethnic cleansing and rape by Serb forces. This wasn’t simply the lamentable outcome of an anarchic situation. Trying to balance the moral ledgers in the Balkans is a tricksy task. To watch you do it, and claim that Serbian morality is superior to Bosnian or Croat morality, thus solidifying their claims of the right to rule over other peoples, is quite amusing. Especially as you rail to the gills about the freedom-of-choice for South Ossetians.
Georgia has no real right to its present sovereign borders, as those were established by fiat by the fundamentally illegitimate Soviet government.
So, too, were the borders of a dozen successor states, not to mention
Russia itself.
I also find it outright hilarious that you consign to damnation the Soviet Union for all its internal repressions but identify China as a country that, while utterly polyglot at its frontiers, has a perfect right to perpetual integrity.
No worse than America, where we now are going to be locking people up indefinitely AFTER they've served their sentences, shitcock.
Unlike you, I don’t find red herring all that delicious.
Not only is this an obvious attempt to cast attention elsewhere while Russia and China have committed far worse outrages on a more consistent basis, but you’re also the one to have defended indiscriminate Russian attacks on Chechens simply because they are Muslims.
You’ve also, of course, misrepresented the entire Bosniak attitude toward Islam.
It's more about what they're doing RIGHT NOW. The Georgians lost their right to South Ossetia, you dumbshit, the moment they decided it was moral to use rocket artillery to slaughter civilians in their homes, fuckwad!
That’s one way to play the counter-insurgency warfare game. I don’t find it especially relevant to the question of right-to-rule. Bombarding civilian targets has been pretty routine throughout history when conducting a war of almost any sort – and on a consistent basis, too. Rather difficult to vilify Georgia for that kind of thing when one can make quite an easy list of other nations to have done this sort of thing in recent history. We deplore it; we don’t then say, more often than not, that they have lost the right to govern.
It’s also important to remember that this is par for the course. In August 2007, skirmishing featured South Ossetian forces – some of them apparently regulars – “shelling Georgian villages.” (This is from the Georgian-Ossetian Conflict main page on Wikipedia.)
A polyglot nation which has been unified for centuries and which has a coherent national identity shared by all but two or three disaffected fringe minorities on the outerlands, comprising a fraction of a percent of the population, and which was developed before the illegitimate communist regime came to power.
As Broomstick pointed out, plenty of empires and entities have “existed for centuries,” many of them with degrees of identity that could be considered high or persistent within historical context. These, too, were swept away.
Russia itself has only been preserved as a polyglot nation through conquest and repression of those who did not especially welcome what was then considered subjugation to a foreign power. If Russia was free to quash unrest and go on surviving, I don’t see why you believe Georgia does not have the same prerogative.
I support the complete union of the Chinese State--Tibet has been a part of China for centuries, and will continue to be a part of China, so, you are quite right.
You don’t really read your own argumentation for consistency, do you?
Also…
On the nature of the Russian presence in South Ossetia…
According to Wikipedia, the neutrality of Russian peacekeepers was rejected by none other than Richard Lugar and EU South Caucasus envoy Peter Semneby.
Yes escalation is such a good thing. I mean its war, and its good for the people over there, right? God, when are you going to extract your head from your too-purple-for-Doug-MacArthur, over-the-top histrionic, faux-sophisticated ass? You're the only person on this forum who insists on hoisting yourself up by your own petard so high and pontificating so pompously. Its disgusting. Its real easy for you in Washington State to agitate on behalf of a people who you have tenuous ties to at best (and if we were to extend to the other denizens, I suppose Mike hopes for PRC domination of the East, and I stand for the Reconquista of the Southwest; identity and racial politics are such good ideas), who actually stand to get fucking killed one way or another, and for what, so you can prop up the appearance of being passionate and cultured to a fucking Internet forum named after sci-fi battleships and full of dick jokes? Jesus fucking Christ. You are pathetic.
