Comment on Disgusted
hansolo@lemmy.today 20 hours agoNot really about “moving” the lines. It’s about Putin wants other people’s stuff, and the biggest picture way to define “not Putin’s stuff” is “everything within the internationally agreed upon lines over here.” It’s not an obsession with borders, it’s that they’re a definition of the historical land of specific peoples and cultures. You don’t want the whole globe named World of America, right? Lines that keep anyone willing to use force out of an area because the people within those lines said “nope, this is us, not you.”
cabbage@piefed.social 19 hours ago
The no borders crowd doesn’t want America to be anything more than a geographical term. There wouldn’t be borders and there wouldn’t be states. Possibly some sort of global federation would be acceptable depending on who you ask.
They’re right in principle. Borders are man made and lead to a bunch of conflict. The nation state is an arbitrary unit that has gained an absurd amount of power.
In practice of course few people would say we can just abolish borders over night and hope for the best. But criticizing it by saying that Putin would do this or that doesn’t work because Russia wouldn’t exist in this scenario and Putin would just be some powerless random guy with rapidly declining mental abilities.
hansolo@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
This pretty much ignores all of human history, though. We create leaders and territory needed to farm food since before we could write about it.
So those human tendencies you’ll just… What? Say are illegal with no government to enforce it? It just makes no sense in practical terms.
cabbage@piefed.social 14 hours ago
Yes, it intentionally breaks with human history, which has been largely built around and fought over borders for a really long time. What people argue is that it’s not human nature but learned. We organize ourselves locally and in communities, there’s nothing natural about patriotism and nation states.
I personally think they are correct in fundamental parts of their criciticism, but that doesn’t make it a realistic goal work towards any time soon. What we can do is to question the premises we are trained to accept and to think critically about how we should structure our societies going forwards.
Arguing we can’t abolish borders because of Russia and America is a bit like arguing nukes can’t be abolished because of the need for nuclear deterrence. It might make some degree of sense as a practical argument, but not as a normative stance.
hansolo@lemmy.today 12 hours ago
I’m certainly not saying that Putin keeps borders in place. I’m explaining why borders are used to define the conflict. Otherwise you’re taking about a full census and genetic testing to figure out which households are Ukrainian, and thus likely not willing to submit to the force on someone that just showed up from somewhere else wanting to tell people how to live.
Borders came from agriculture. Farmland. Who gets to feed their children the food they grow. Who can graze livestock where. Case in point, herder-farmer conflict is a huge problem across Africa. Because there are no real borders for Fulani herders, or fences for farmers.