#self-determinism

satanism was originally made up by christians as a boogeyman, but has gradually been adapted into some pretty chill modern belief systems

"Just because it has been normalised by society doesn't mean it's right." – Kevin Focke

So I marked this date on my calendar.. It is not only the 3 year anniversary of this blog's inception, it is 100 years to the day that a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip shot Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. You say, "So what? World War II was way cooler." I say, I used to think like you, friend, until Dan Carlin laid the educational smackdown on my brain. I won't go into the fascinating details like Dan does in Hardcore History, but would like to instead talk about this in a much more big-picture view. Colonialism + industrial revolution technology = deadly self-determination. You have very different ethnic groups lumped into grand empires. Combine this with ostensibly strong empires based on years of history, but actually just paper tigers (Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary), who depend on a web of alliances from much stronger technological nations like Britain, France and Germany, and you get a lot of big-dick-wagging going on. This would piss me off too if I was a Serbian of 1914... So I say all this and marked the date on my calendar for a reason. If you've read this far, you must be interested to know why I wasted a good 2 hours of my Saturday morning refreshing my brain on this fascinating subject. There has been a lot of talk lately about the rights of the middle-east to self-determination. People love to weigh in on this and say that a certain ethnic or religious group is in the wrong for forming militias and desiring to create a different geopolitical atmosphere; small armies telling the world through their violence that the national borders IMPOSED ON THEM BY THE WEST after WW1&2, and reinforced with the Cold War, are not working. I am positing that the events of World War I have never ended and the rights of the Iraqis, Sudanese, Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrian, et al., is just carryover self-determination that the rest of the world enjoyed before and leading up to the great wars. Is violence awful? Yeah, no doubt about it, suffering sucks. However, 100 years ago, you weren't hearing about every little gunshot on the internet to frighten you into demonizing the whole middle-east. These people deserve better borders, and to shape their nations as they see fit; only then will modernization occur. Now I'm not advocating WW3, all I'm saying is leave them the hell alone, because when big-dick-waggers get involved in the matters of another's self-determination, much more blood is shed. These people will work in harmony eventually - you must have a much more big-picture view of this. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. "It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see." ~Winston Churchill (quite possibly one of my favorite people to quote ever)