But don't you think that there is something we could do right now to try to fix this problem? I am not sure exactly what we can do, but I figure it is worth trying to make the world a better place.

Good to have that status then a ?

Europe is still full of nationalism despite the appearances. At the individual level there is a natural opposition against not ethnical rules enforced by the European Commission. There are hundreds of ethnic entities inhabiting a territory no larger than Canada. There always will be problems here. It might takes centuries to change this.

Its very amzing that a people who enjoy american and canadian status here, would deny the same right to palestinians.

Friends:

FYI: For a very fine analysis of what the author calls the "prowar left," but for which we need a different label, as virtually all of them are antagonistic toward authentic Left goals, see: 

"In the name of decency: The contortions of the prowar left," Richard Seymour, International Socialism, Issue 113 

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

We give immigrants full canadian status.. on the issue of race , canada also has bad history, it does not mean not to try for better.

What has triumphed in Europe in this century is the concept of nation-state, in which the nation, which is an ethnic group in American terms, gets the state, which is a territory and a government. The nation is sovereign. So the Germans are sovereign in Germany, and if you are not an ethnic German, you may be living in Germany but you are not part of the sovereign body. Most of Europe is set up in this way.

It seems to me that in second half of the 20'th century, majority of Europeans turned away from the ideal of the territorial nation-state when the bankruptcy of that model became clear. Eric Hobsbawm put it this way:

The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states, each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogenous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities. Such was and is the murderous reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial version, although this was not fully demonstrated until the 1940s. ...The homogeneous territorial nation could now be seen as a programme that could be realized only by barbarians, or at least by barbarian means.

israel is very nationalistic and exclude palestinians; you don't see rudu oppose to this.

Rudy:

The question with which you've closed, as well as the assertions that preceded it, are ill-informed.  However, I suspect that Milosevic the individual was neither a nationalist nor a fascist.  But this aside, it  is true that the history of the part of the world where the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia stood has been rife with nationalist and fascist-like beliefs for a very long time.  Beyond just "The Balkans," too.  As Robert Hayden once put it so beautifully ("A Very European War," Left Business Observer, April, 1999 -- the interviewer was Doug Henwood):   

Where did this all come from? People blame the Serbians, call them the new Nazis, perpetrators of a new holocaust.

Oh, the new holocaust, isn't that sickening? That's an insult to the people who died in the Holocaust. They played the genocide card because they wanted you to think "Auschwitz," but you didn't have cattle cars going into a concentration camp. You've had people being forced to leave their homes and go over a border into a new homeland. Now this is brutal, but it is as European a process as you can get in the 20th century. The immediate model for this action seems to have been the Croatian expulsion of a quarter-million Serbs from Croatia in 1995, a Croatian military exercise done with an army that had benefited from American military training, American military intelligence, direct American military support in the beginning, and all the political cover you'd ever want from the USA. That's exactly what the Kosovo operation looked like on the ground. That gives the administration a problem: if what happened in Kosovo was genocide, then what happened in Croatia was genocide, but since the U.S. helped organize what happened in Croatia in '95 that would make the Clinton administration an accomplice to genocide.

What has triumphed in Europe in this century is the concept of nation-state, in which the nation, which is an ethnic group in American terms, gets the state, which is a territory and a government. The nation is sovereign. So the Germans are sovereign in Germany, and if you are not an ethnic German, you may be living in Germany but you are not part of the sovereign body. Most of Europe is set up in this way. What won in the free and fair elections in Yugoslavia at the end of Communism was the ethnic state, and that required moving populations. The areas that were mixed in the former Yugoslavia have become unmixed, and Kosovo is the last stage in this.

But observations such as these are relevant only if we want to understand the wars over the breakup of Yugoslavia.  If, on the other hand, in the wake of the collapse of the old Soviet bloc, the objective is to expand the American-led NATO-bloc eastward, establish ad hoc tribunals as instruments of foreign policy, and demonize targeted enemies along the way (i.e., where ethnic Serbs and Milosevic came in), then we will find the sort of things that I oppose. 

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

 

Victor

    I think you're right, especially concerning college students (people either smart or affluent enough to afford a perpetual education) avoiding the draft.

However:

http://www.sss.gov/viet.htm

   Yet there may be other ways, like knowing which National Guard unit is unlikely to be deployed.

Mr Cheney and Mr Bush....prime examples of US democracy in action during the Vietnam War and the draft.

During the Vietnam War very few of the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful ever saw combat via the draft. The draft was just as lopsided toward the poor and disadvantaged as the voluntary military is today. The poor are always asked (no, REQUIRED) to sacrifice. The rich eat cake and enjoy the show. It's always like that.

UNFORTUNATELY, THEY ARE CORRECT.

    Although a formerly a volunteer in the military (a big lesson in state bureaucracy—some felt like they'd be fighting to keep societies from being more military like—luckily for me, my infantry unit was not deployed during the first Gulf War), I'm neither pro-military interventionist, nor would I like to see a draft—not even for the peace corps.

     However, a webpage like this illustrates the counter-point:

 http://www.whitehouse.org/news/2002/123102.asp

      I think Senator Charles Rangel's thinking on the subject is that our current volunteer military employs and deploys the poor and minorities disproportionately; and seems to imply that if the children of the “powerful” were drafted, the US policy makers wouldn't be so inclined to risk lives.

     On the other hand, I think the sort of arguments for using a draft for “humanitarian” interventions, demonstrate a weakness in some hawkish and utilitarian/consequentialist lines of reasoning: unintended interventionist consequences aside, just how few of “US” would we be willing to sacrifice for so many of “them?”  There's a tension between the rights of individual autonomy, and being snatched up for some perceived global duty.  Is there ever a point when randomly sacrificing the few for the many is legitimate?

     Such a question is a little abstract and removed from real world contexts though, but consequentialist thinker's like Peter Singer claim it is immoral not to consider a third world starving child's life as equal to your own: why buy a Buick when you could save lives?  But there is a difference between “sacrificing” some excess income, and being sacrificed for “the cause.”  I personally think responsibility might be focused hub-like on the self, and sort of radiate like a net out to the rest of the globe in a diffused manner: It seems natural to be concerned about one's and one's proximate loved ones' survival first, before moving on to sacrifice for some remote stranger.  How much of that global net needs to tug on an individual before they are legitimately swept away?  Somehow this reminds me of Ted Turner's comments on Jesus Christ: he wouldn't want to see someone else crucified for his sins.

     Senator Rangel's argument seems to parallel the contrast of historical slavery (which might  be justified on a utilitarian grounding without regard for human rights), with “wage slavery.”  People are “forced” to work for possibly exploitative wages (and so much turns on how you define “exploitation”)—and the military is a high risk job: more so than say fire-fighting.  Does he imply that rather than having a “wage slavery” military we should all be potential military slaves to the US government?  Albert Einstein's quote about not being able to simultaneously prepare for and prevent war seems relevant.  Both recruitment options seem problematic: why isn't less interventionism and peace on agenda instead?

J.D. Casten

www.jdcasten.info

David, in the year or so I've been reading this blog, you've always explicitly or implicitly supported Milosevic's Serbia.  What I don't understand is, as the term "fascist" gets loosely thrown around, after closely looking at Milosevic, one can only conclude that he is the real deal, he was an actual fascist.  He was a nationalist with a socialist economic program.  Why did you support him?