-19
How to avoid war with China?
(lemmygrad.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
-19 points (24.3% liked)
Asklemmy
49393 readers
566 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Vietnam: the majority of the people of Vietnam didn't want the US there, the US was interfering in a civil war it shouldn't be meddling in.
Iraq: same thing, the US wasn't wanted and didn't have a reason to meddle.
Taiwan: the people of Taiwan don't want China there and China shouldn't invade. No one should invade.
People have a right to self determination. If China doesn't control Taiwan and the people of Taiwan want to keep the same government they have, then they should be allowed to. China invading Taiwan would be an unjustified imperialist act. Taiwan has a right to call upon its allies and friends for help if invaded and the alliances and friendships should be honored by those allies.
I believe that regardless of what happened in the past, the only thing that matters is what current Taiwanese people want.
That's quite impractical since all nations and their borders were established as a result of unethical conquest. This can be used as a justification for an unending cycle of violence.
My POV is that old events whose participants are dead stop being relevant for future moral actions. We should prefer justice for the living as opposed to justice for the already dead.
The problem is that it's all a huge "what if" amenable for any narrative you want. In the end it provides justification for the never ending cycle of violence on people having no personal guilt.
What you're saying is that children should carry the responsibility for the acts of their ancestors.
Who's the judge of whether it's "allowed" violence? If we say that the status quo of Franco-German relationship is built on the past injustice, and that this should be fixed, who will count all the past centuries of wars and massacres and calculate the outstanding balance?
Because if you let it both sides do it for themselves, then they both will naturally come to the conclusion that they've been unjustly treated and that the other side has to pay for that. In the end it will be the stronger one, not the morally correct one, who wins. For a time, then the sides will switch => cycle of violence is IMHO unavoidable if you hold the opinion that past sins are never forgotten.
History is basically never so nicely clear-cut. I mean, have you studied your family tree and made sure that all of that family wealth was gathered via perfectly moral means? What if it turns out that your grand grandfather was a soldier who brought home some gold of dubious origins?
The only people in Taiwan with the right to self determination are the Taiwanese Indigenous peoples and Taiwan's proletariat. And because of the constant state of western interference and propaganda upon the populace in Taiwan, much like South Korea, the are more barriers to understanding that being apart of the PRC, like Hong Kong and Macau, is a good thing in the long run.
While The White Terror did end, we must recognize that the ROC itself is still a western backed colonially dominated capitalist regime, and is therefore illegitimate.
There are no indigenous peoples in Taiwan. We all come from Africa.
Having established the extreme, where do you cut the line who can exert self-determination? Most inhabitants of Taiwan were born in Taiwan, on what ground can't they decide their fate?
It is more complicated than other examples of indignity because of Taiwan's unique history of colonial dominance, that being that it isn't a settler colonial project. The Han people there are not there with the explicit purpose of the eradication of the island's indigenous peoples. This is why I include the island's mostly Han proletariat as having, to an extent, to say in self determination. This situation is a lot less cut and dry than a settler colonial state like Israel, where the settler proletariat, due to their settler status, does not have any say in the self-determination and state of Palestine, only the Palestinians do.