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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Minority rights [was: Re: Ebonics/Spanish (Revisited)
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References: <glen.852565077@heurikon.com> <5b9lpt$6od@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <E3wrCE.3Iu@midway.uchicago.edu> <5be7pr$3sj@netsrv2.spss.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 01:55:23 GMT
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[Disclaimer:  This discussion no longer seems entirely appropriate for
sci.lang, but I've no idea where else to put it.]

In article <5be7pr$3sj@netsrv2.spss.com>,
Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>In article <E3wrCE.3Iu@midway.uchicago.edu>,
>Daniel von Brighoff <deb5@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>Jonathan Badger <badger@aquarius.scs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>>>Let's take the Kurds first. As far as I can tell, the Turks are
>>>slaughtering them not because they want to wipe out Kurdish culture as
>>>such, but because a few of the Kurdish leaders have dreams of an
>>>independent Kurdistan and are willing to resort to anything, including
>>>terrorism, to reach this goal. 

[snip]
>>	In other words, the Turkish authorities dream of a homogenous
>>Turkey and are willing to resort to anything, even terrorism against their
>>own citizens, to reach this goal.  The reason for favouring the Kurdish
>>terrorists against the Turkish ones in this dispute is the belief that
>>self-determination and/or cultural freedoms is/are /a fundamental human
>>right/s.
>
>No-- there's no reason to favor terrorists at all.  It's a mighty logical
>leap, to say the least, to go from disapproving of a state's repression of
>its own citizens, to approving any action whatsoever, including terrorism,
>undertaken by the most extreme factions of the repressed group.

It wasn't meant to be a logical leap, just a rhetorical one.  A cynical
observer would call both groups "terrorists" (lumping legitimate gov't
police actions together with mass slaughter and non-violent Kurdish
resistence together with armed struggle) and say, "Why should we support
either side?"  I'm saying that, insofar as self-determination and cultural
freedom are widely (not universally, as you rightly point out, although I
think that the UN officially endorses both) considered a basic human
right, the Kurds have the moral high ground in this dispute.  Of course,
if you consider violence of any sort a greater wrong, then a repressed
group sacrifices the moral high ground as soon as they take up arms.

>I'll also note that education in one's mother tongue is by no means a
>universally accepted right-- e.g. it certainly isn't accepted as a right
>in the U.S., as the Ebonics and bilingual education flaps prove.  Perhaps 
>it should be; but till it is, we might as well recognize that the Turks
>are simply following our example.  (Remember as well that an ethnically
>Turk nation wasn't the Turks' idea-- they were quite happy with a 
>cosmopolitan, multilingual empire-- but Europe's.  If the Turks applied the
>nationalist idea too thoroughly, well, perhaps Westerners should be more
>careful what ideas they export.)

	It wasn't their idea, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be held
accountable for the consequences of their implementation.  To do otherwise
is, IMHO, to suggest that the Turks are children hurting other children by
trying to imitate the questionable activities of their parents.

[snip]
>>>...one can hardly blame them for attempting to keep their
>>>country together. Just like the Russians in Checneya. 
>>
>>	One certainly can.  Who says its "their country"?  A right of
>>conquest going back less than two-hundred years (in the Chechen case)?
>
>I'd say you're on shaky moral ground here.  Presumably you live somewhere
>near the University of Chicago-- land stolen from the Indians rather less
>than 200 years ago.  The notion of a right of conquest isn't very attractive--
>but if you don't accept some form of it, it's hard to see how you can 
>condemn the Russians yet continue to occupy Illiniwek land.

	I'm not up on my Illinois history (for some reason, they didn't
require it in Missouri grade school) so I don't know for sure:  Was this
land actually taken by conquest?  I had always assumed that, like most
other former Amerind territories, it had been purchased.  Now, you can go
on all you like about the power inequalities between the two sides, the
presence of duress in the closing of the deal, and the failure of the USA
to keep their side of the treaty (although these are all important factors
and reasons why I support legislation of a legal means of restitution--
like what was recently passed in Australia, only with teeth), but there's
an important legal distinction between the two methods of acquisition.
There are other legal issues, too--like the actual basis for the Illiniwek
claim, for instance.  (Where I live was built on fill from Lake Michigan.
Do they have a claim to the entire lakebed?  Much of the area was swamp,
which was never permenently inhabited by the Illiniwek.  Now, if I buy a
piece of property and abandon it for ten years while people squat there
and improve it, I lose all claim to it.  Why should something similar not
apply to Amerinds?)

	So, please correct me if I'm wrong on the Chechen situation.  Were
aboriginals with internationally recognised claims to the land they had
occupied for millenia compensated in any way when it was taken?  Or were
they just slaughtered, driven off, and/or forcibly collectivised?  I don't
see many legal parallels at all.

>>Was Soviet use of force in Azerbaijan (several thousand dead) justified
>>because the Soviets were just keeping "their country" together (in spite
>>of the desires of the vast majority of Azeris?).
>
>Desires ascertained how?  By the statements of Azeri party officials?

By post-independence opinion surveys.  Granted, not the most reliable
indicator or the preferred method under international law for determining
these things...

>By the declaration of an unelected republic Supreme Soviet perceiving the
>chance to be bigger fish in a smaller pond?  

I have some problems with the way many republics acquired their
independence from the USSR.  But since I (and one or two other
international authorities, I might add) don't recognise their original
incorporation as legal anyway, it's not something I lose a lot of sleep
over.  Besides, if Russia's concern with protecting minority rights is
what prompted their intervention in Azerbaijan, why did they act
unilaterally?  And why did they not intervene in other, similar situations
when their help was requested.  (In Central Asia, for example.)

>And what, by the way, of the
>rights of the minority, tiny or not, which didn't want to leave the USSR?

What about them?  If you recognise any rights (such as self-determination)
that apply to peoples rather than individuals, than you have to be
prepared to allow that these will take precedence over the rights of
individuals, at least in certain circumstances.

>Again, there's something a bit unsettling about an American attacking
>other countries for doing precisely what our own government did in our own
>Civil War.  If a nation has no right to maintain its own territorial 
>integrity, your sympathies must be with the South-- even if the reason 
>it wanted independence was to preserve the institution of slavery.

It's not comparable.  The Southern States all chose, at one point or
another, to become part of the Union and abide by its laws.  These laws
did not allow for secession.  Rather than avail themselves of legal
recourses (e.g. amending the Constitution) and arrange just compensation
for the loss of Federal properties within their borders, they took up arms
against same.  I think the Union had a clear right to defend its property
against destruction and seizure.  It's not until Reconstruction that I
think some of the legal issues you raise needed to be addressed (and, in
all fairness, weren't.  Sucks to lose a war, especially one you started.)

By what internationally-recognised mechanism did the former Soviet
republics choose to form the USSR?  What legal recourse did they have, in
a fundamentally non-democractic country, to address these issues in a way
that would have been palatable to you?

>Perhaps you want to make an exception for rebels who won't allow their
>own subjects the right of self-determination.  But then you can't support
>the Azeris, who deny the Nagorno-Karabakh (a largely Armenian enclave
>within Azerbaijan) the right of secession, and whose attacks against
>Armenian residents prompted the Soviet show of force in the first place.

Again, people fired shots before negotiating.  If the residents of Artsakh
had tried to arrange some UN-brokered plebescite before taking on the
Azeri army, they'd be on firmer ground.  (Although, for reasons which you
yourself bring up, there's no reason to consider the gov't of Azerbaijan
rightfully-elected and so, arguably, taking up arms against it is not a
treasonous act.)

>Self-determination sounds good and in principle I'm for it.  But the 
>notion of "one people, one language, one state" has by no means been an
>unqualified success in the world.  One people oppressing another is not
>good-- but the answer is not to divide the world into ethnically pure
>cantons.  That's just an invitation for the nearly-pure regions, once
>independent, to turn on their own minorities, and perhaps "cleanse" them.

I'm definitely against the nationalistic principle of "One people, one
state".  People should realise that mutual interest is a more important
basis for state formation than ethnic origin and that the latter does not,
in any meaningful way, determine the former.  In some cases (e.g. Moldova,
Kirghizstan), I think they have.

>In another message I read today, you wrote eloquently in favor of the benefits 
>of culture clash.  I agree with you there: I think ethnic purity is sterile
>and ugly, and that the great outpourings of art, literature, and knowledge
>in our world have come from the intermingling of cultures.  You might let
>this insight modify what seems to be an unqualified support of ferocious
>nationalist movements.

I think you're hasty in attributing "unqualified support of ferocious
nationalist movements" to me on the basis of a few counterexamples I
provided to the apparent assertion that anything done in the name of
"egalitarianism" and "preserving national unity" is legal, just, and
moral.
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
