Post #1596515

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• @Voline@kolektiva.social 2026-03-15 00:59

  @aral I just read this passage in Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson's book that helped convince Abdulla Öcalan that a nation-state for Kurds was not what he should be striving for. Looking at the Cambodian–Vietnamese War (1978–89) and the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979), Anderson says: "I emphasize leaderships, because it is leaderships, not people, who inherit [mechanisms of state]. No one imagines, I presume, that the broad masses of the Chinese people give a fig for what happens along the colonial border between Cambodia and Vietnam. Nor is it at all likely that Khmer and Vietnamese peasants wanted wars between their peoples, or were consulted in the matter. In a very real sense these were 'chancellory wars' in which popular nationalism was mobilized largely after the fact and always in a language of self-defence."

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