[MD] the Underground

[Arlo Bensinger]

SA/Marsha,

I did not know Russia was in talks to recognize the Republic of 
Lakotah. The "freedom" crowd is unsurprisingly quiet on this topic. I 
posed this question under the Freedom topic (only SA responded), but 
here is another angle, repsonding to SA's comments about "borders" 
demarking the ROL land. When the nation of Israel was created, the US 
had no issue with deposing people who for generations lived on a 
certain tract of land to make way for the "original" inhabitants. 
What would be the difference between forcing some Montana farmers to 
move off their land (or become part of the ROL) and forcing 
Palestinian farmers off their land and into exile to make way for 
Jewish settlers?

I've looked over LILA to see if anything Pirsig wrote can shine light 
on this, specifically. There is one passage in particular. "The North 
could have permitted the slave states to become independent and saved 
hundreds of thousands of lives. But an evolutionary morality argues 
that the North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a 
higher form of evolution than a human body, and the principle of 
human equality is an even higher form than a nation." (LILA)

Here we see Pirsig affirming the denial of secession rights to the 
South based on the idea that had the South been left to secede it 
would have pursued a path of slavery. This refusal to grant autonomy 
was rooted, therefore, in the understandings of what that nation 
would do to the intellectual principle of human equality. Since this 
in no way applies to the ROL, and indeed conversely supports the idea 
that granting freedom to these people trumps the value of holding the 
nation together, I would say the MOQ favors the rights of a people to 
secede and seek self-determination.

And I think this applies to both Tibet and Kosovo.

By the way, here's a link for a young Lakotah woman singing a 
traditional Lakotah lullaby 
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxH0b7cFgj8). She does some goofy 
stuff in some of her other vids (she is a teenager, after all), but 
this video is striking because it is so "modern" (a teen in front of 
a webcam, making a youtube video) and so ancient as well (not only 
the lullaby, but the human soul evident in her mannerisms and plea).

Arlo