Self-determination

Is  self-determination finally coming of age after all these cruel centuries? Rearing its ugly head—ugly from the viewpoint of every tyrant that ever lived—during the age of revolutions, America’s, France’s, and finally Europe’s after Napoleon tore off the lid, is it finally going to be taken seriously?

Soviet, and later communisms, used ‘self-determination’ as an irresistible tackle in its bait box to lure and catch the fish, ‘freeing’ lesser nations from their capitalist oppressors, only to gobble them back up in reactionary imperialism, just as we still see happening today. Russia grabs Crimea, then Ukraine.

No one seems to be watching. Our eyes are diverted by more entertaining or more frightful menaces. Meanwhile Zionism slowly spreads as dangerously as the Ebola plague, taking lands as well as lives, and a maniacal ‘caliphate’ slips in and out of view, seeding the Fertile Crescent with severed heads.

Now self-determination comes to a nation that centuries ago married another in indissoluble union, as voters age sixteen and up flock to aye or nay a compact they had no part in making. Qualification used to be property, then education, then maturity, now mere calendar age. Yes, self-determination.

It is very selective, nor has it really come of age. Now as always, the worldly powers use it as it suits them, now to unite, now to divide, seeking how best to profit from the masses, engineering them to call evil good and good evil, educating them in the ways of ignorance, and unwriting their history.

It must be extended all the way to its logical conclusion, and that is, finally, something that will exceed any tyrant’s or oligarchy’s ability to control. It will not look anything like what it has ever promised, this idea of self-determination. It will be shown to be what it always was, a foundationless fortress.

Neither the empires, nor the kingdoms, neither the uncrowned republics, nor the cooperative states can ever deliver what they promise, neither self-determination nor any other good. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the inalienable rights we call them, little learning from history what they are.

Yet there is a real good and, when that is absent, a real evil. There is also at the core of every human what is inalienable, a thirst for joy which circumscribes all life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. We know what we want, but we pretend not to know where to get it. Hence, the ballot box.

But there is only one place we need go to make everything right, everything perfect, but to get there we also know there is a cost, and we tell ourselves the price is too high to pay. In this we are quite correct. There is only one path to self-determination, and never was there another. Will we ever take it?