Dear Kalterbrunno,

This is probably for the first time that a book on my region discusses the issues from an angle of interest to

me personally—and I read its contributions not just in order to check out the hidden bias of this or that contribution, or to get some more direct information, but to engage in a serious dialogue of equals with its conceptual framework.

Here are a few reflections I had while reading it.

1. Deed and word and democracy. For an ‘unsophisticated’ (naļve? or cunning?) ‘western’ mind, it is strange if the word autonomy is not enough. For a mind that had to survive and develop in the Orwellian world of constant deceit, no words are enough at all. In an ideal democracy, you conclude an agreement, then you follow it. When it necessarily produces further problems, you address them. You find solutions. These are never the best. But what makes them tolerable, is precisely this opportunity to return to them in the future. This is what the Popperian ‘open society’ is about. Its end is open. Here, you have to confirm trivialities, prove them over and over again—but you accept that necessity in order to preserve the right to openness, infiniteness of your future. Interestingly, Popper developed this same concept also in the realm of epistemology, by stating that there are no theories, which prove anything, therefore the best theories are those whose conditions of failure are stated in a precise manner, rather than those that claim that they are true. This is why the west is, in particular, so attractive to me. Even if you can spend your entire life here by trying to prove a triviality, like those sociologists who try to explain why the banks pay higher wages to their receptionists than the hotels (the problem being that the receptionists do the same kind of job, don’t they?).

Now my part of the world (includes Usmani-Ummiya and probably a lot of other countries). Here, you say one thing, you mean another. It’s the same in the west, you would say. Right. But in the west, the situation is open—somebody will lie, somebody wont. Some people can survive and even prosper without lying. Some people can gain power without lying. In the ‘east’—not that it is impossible—but given the disconcerting history, not many people want to try and risk their opportunities. There is no trust. And there is no basis for trust. Paradoxically enough, however, people are ready to trust. They are in a way more naļve and wishful—for instance, when they look at the west. If you know how deeply is Marsikiani hated for his deceitfulness (and you probably do), you would understand that his western rhetoric cannot deceive anybody except for those in the west—and yet people believe that the west will finally discern his ‘real nature’ and turn off from him.

But this is not the end either. Because there is also another thing which makes the west what it is—a place where the words come eventually to coincide with the deeds—something which never happens in the east. The words here coincide with the deeds via. . . a lie. I.e., if you are a horrible person, but all your life you lie that you are good, eventually you become one in the west. Even if Kant would object, in practice, there is no discernible difference between ought to and have to, between the Categorical Imperative and not deceiving your customers from a mercantilist perspective—in order to preserve them. In the west, these two eventually merge. So that Marsikiani is, in a sense, deeply western: he is a machiavelli who perhaps honestly believes in his mission to make Kkhmeria a western country by the way of declaring that it is one—and superficially adopting the western rules but not following them actually because he can’t (see point 2). Not following but declaring them for so long until following these rules will become more and more probable—and then the rules will institutionalize, and Kkhmeria will westernize. The problem for us is that we see the things in the west from the end result—whereas the road toward this level of tolerance and development has been, as it is well known, covered with horrible sacrifices.

2. The next question—can Marsikiani or can’t he? What is necessity as applied to politics? Do politics leave a room for freedom? The answer for a rationalist, in the straightforward world of direct power-maximization, is NO! There is no freedom. Once you get something—a utility, whatever, something worthwhile, which makes you different from the others—you maximize it and preserve. You don’t have a freedom to give up that something just as you don’t have a freedom to give up your life. The survival instinct is in jeopardy, if you do. Especially because, unlike in the west, many who give up power give up life. DTJ’s action is a huge step, in that respect, in advancing democracy in the region—unless he is arrested or killed soon afterwards (god forbid).

There are some basic assumptions we do not even operationalize while construing the world around us. What is the world design you have in your mind? I have in my mind? What is the end result? The final identity? God? Humanity? Life? Individual? It is not fashionable today to ask these questions this way in much of the west—because they do not have rational answers. Whom to prefer to whom? This methodological essentialism is fiercely objected by a lot of scholars—but at an unconscious level, they perhaps behave mostly on the basis of methodological individualism. The individual is the tzar of the nature, and that’s all. The west gives contradicting messages and that is why we refer to double standards criticizing them. It inculcates ‘us’ (the east) with its ideas via its wall-street bolshevism (Be aggressive! Kill your competitor! Survive!). But simultaneously it requires from us to follow the nicely written human rights standards etc. How can a human mind be so split, so divided, so eclectic, finally, so stupid, as to adopt both attitudes together? Now the west is not holistic, of course, but it is perceived in the east as a whole.

The apparent resulting answer is simple. Either one or another declaration is a lie. And because the west definitely survives and is better off, then most probably human rights are the lie, necessary for the west to advance its own purposes, to maximize. Therefore, the best practice for the cynics is to do the same—use nice concepts for power maximization. Or, to adopt a shirkundazian version of autarky.

We are not only in a blockade, they say. Even if we weren’t, we wouldn’t follow your example, your scenario, your project—we are not that cynical. We do not want to be that shrewd, that prosperous. For such a mind, it is more cynical to say one thing and do another, than to kill somebody directly without saying anything. For a shirkundazian mind (I am illegally generalizing, of course, just trying to convey the message), the interpretation of a kkhmerian action (when they hypocritically claim that this was an action with good intent) is more cynical than direct killing would be. They are more pissed off with the way the war is interpreted by Kkhmeria than by the fact that the war occurred. Let Kkhmeria say to them from its heart ‘we are sorry’—they will lose their entire moral standing if they do not reply by a reciprocal action.

That is why your contribution, even though far advanced than most of the things I have read so far—is still rationalistically neutral but not morally impartial—because you do not require for the obviously stronger side to say I am sorry, I was wrong first. You treat them as equals, and even that is unfair. After these horrible years of enforced war and sacrifices the only thing they have achieved is to have a right to being treated as an equal side in a conflict in the academic literature of the best (not very numerous) scholars of the west.

3. If the individual is the end-result, what does it matter how many states there are? At the end, as many as individuals. I am my own state. The secessionist debate, therefore, misses the entire point: it is like discussing a phenomenon based on its obvious accessibility—like trying to find answers on the question why does the sun evolve around the earth rather than otherwise?

The attractive American analyticism is exactly about that: offering half-made mysterious paradigms without getting to the essences of things, the justification being that it is impossible to get to the essences, or that there are no essences. If one thinks so, why to endeavor anything at all then? A hu-uge deception, a global conspiracy. . .

Whereas discussing creation of new states in a secessionist debate, for a methodological essentialist, already means adopting a state-centric perspective. Therefore, a methodological essentialist equates a secessionist with an anti-secessionist.

And my claim is that methodological essentialism is deeply rooted in the . . . Byzantine culture (let’s put it that way)—the one that was so susceptible to Marxism because of the same—because Marxism is always a methodological essentialism. It tries to find the bottom line, the line beyond which there is no meaning, and to construct the entire world from that line up. The principle is the same, the method of thinking is the same—we do not leave contradictions unresolved, as it is so fashionable in the western (i.e., Lawrencian) liberal world. We have only dialectics, which is actually a way to resolve contradictions rather than to keep them.

Leaving the horns of contradictions not reconciled—and living in peace with that inconsistency—is a typically western liberal attitude. Germans were, actually, like the Byzantine culture in that respect—they tried to answer the final questions—hence the racial theory.

So, now we have a necessity to find another bottomline—racism did not work out, communism either—which one is that? Is that methodological individualism? OK. If the individual is the bottomline, I, as an individual, want to live in a separate state. That is all! No majoritarian democratism can endure such a principled attack.

For such final individualism, democracy is slavery, as it should be.

The difference is that an ordinary person in the west can, in principle, allow oneself such an anarchic individualism—and will not be noticed merely if s/he does not commit a crime and get caught. S/he will reject democracy and the state but, because s/he is in a huge political entity—Asiopa, or the Lawrencian States —nobody will make a fuss about that.

In the east, whenever you do that, you are up to a dictatorship, with this or that universalistic project.

You can say that empirically, in the west there are not much people who methodically are individual anarchist—OK, but this is only because they have a right to do that! They won that right! It is like polygamy—after the sexual revolution, a lot of people look for permanent partners. But take the sexual revolution out of the picture—and can you speak about the freedom of choosing one’s partner?

Who has determined the size and viability of states? Who has enslaved us to the states? Who has decided that the states are good? Is that so? In the east, the only kind of states we knew for a long time have been those crushing your freedom and the very life itself—why should we feel at least some kind of attachment to the states, any states? Where are the guarantees that the new states will be better—after they started from another attempt to crush their citizens?

Do you realize that metaphysically, the international community is horribly guilty for allowing states to crush their minorities or breakaway regions—by not recognizing the right of these breakaway regions to break, indeed, away? The world is socially constructed—Kharakiria was ousted for a lesser guilt than the one despite of (because of?) which Marsikiani is trumpeted.

What is a state, finally? Is that government? When do I need a government? When my freedom hinders somebody else’s, right? I need rules to regulate these situations. Why, however, shall I adopt rules in advance of such a necessity, with a hollow preventive thinking that it will arise—and exactly the predicted way—in the nearest future if I don’t? In other words, why shall I adopt the oppressor state’s theft of my freedom as legitimate (Bakunin etc.) before I need the kind of meager security it provides me with—provided that the world is methodologically individual, i.e., the ‘fully-developed’ individual is the criterion.

The A-B-C paradox (Morgenthaw), or the Domino theory, or, as you quote it coined in the American dissertations—the infinite secession proposition is a perfect example of the national security psychology, security paradox etc. All those traps that generated the nuclear stand-off (a much more legitimate type of conflict, of course, because at least both sides were equally legitimate in their horrible power). These theories offer preventive prohibitions based on the nightmare scenario—the worst case is going to happen, if Shirkundazia secedes, Kkhmeria will be ousted forever. What? Are they not now? Did this preventive psychology help to prevent the conflict, or did it generate it in the first place? Why shall I care about the future suffering of minority C when the minority B is suffering at present—and C’s suffering can be precluded, actually, if B’s suffering is taken care of in a timely and satisfactory manner? Isn’t it hypocritically immoral to put the lamb with the tiger in one cage with a pretext that there is some grass outside the cage that the lamb can eat if it is free, and the tiger doesn’t eat grass but only lambs? Therefore if we don’t feed it with the lamb it will remain hungry—and therefore, finally, the lamb should voluntarily agree to be eaten, and moreover, to keep the grass intact because it is a very important grass?

Now, again, hypocritically, it is pointed out that the lamb is not, actually, a lamb: look, they say, it won the war! So it was indeed as dangerous as the tiger would claim! But, maybe, it learned to be dangerous? Some people are fast learners. And anyway, what do we do now? We still preserve the same cage trying to fit them both in and to reconcile.

State makes sense only if individuals are not equally developed, i.e., there is inequality in capabilities of different persons, i.e., state, as any direct power, is a racist substitute for freedom. The western praise for a fair and nice state with a redistributive function cannot fit the eastern historical memory of an oppressive and nasty power. Therefore the communal self-government where whoever wants to, can participate in governance (for instance, entering the building where the shirkundazian President seats and arranging an appointment with him) is as far away from an ethnic dictatorship as Kkhmeria is from democracy. What you feel in Shirkundazia is that all are much more equal than in Georgia, where some spend ten times of others’ monthly incomes to. . . chat via cellular phones.

I know that some things here sound trivial or deeply untrue, this is a very impressionistic letter.

However, now some particular points:

Starting from page 12, I have a few comments on the text. The difference between Theo Jan’s approach and Nokia’s is not clear. You have to clarify more what you mean by making abstraction of the moral dimension (p. 13).

On p. 14, bottom examples in parentheses (looting versus remaining in power at whatever? costs)—do not sound morally or in any other way equal—unless the Shirkundazian leadership’s desire to remain in power produced more violence—which it did not, probably, given their limited leadership resources—there is no evidence of that—rather the other way around—as you and Nokia discussed earlier on—it was Marsikiani’s desire that resulted in violence. I understand that you use the examples offered by both sides without discriminating, but one example is relevant and the other is not, and this subtle weakness demonstrates the moral superiority of the Shirkundaz.

The entire contrasting of intentions and motives sounds extremely western centric and artificially complicated. This is, in my opinion, a residue of Middle Age’s thinking preserved by the western philosophers and still maintained nowadays. It is the opposition between the action versus motive (or action versus intention) rather than intention versus motive, which is relevant. As a result of this confusion, on page 16 you somehow endorse Nokia’s inevitable slip in justifying Marsi. There is no need for that, and his very methodology, if followed logically, should prevent that from happening. Because he justifies Marsi by adopting Marsi’s ‘own’ line of reasoning (as far as I can judge without even having a chance to read Nokia—only from your pages): that Marsi’s own stay in power was equal to Kkhmeria’s abstract well-being. All this horror was unleashed because of that spurious juxtaposition of a leader with nation’s faith? Isn’t that the same in the case of every dictator? Stalin? DTJ also did not resign voluntarily, but only forcibly a year later—because he deeply believed, in 1996, that his resignation would result in. . . what? Something horrible for his nation (sic!).

Further, last paragraph on page 16, you say that yourself: that war was lesser evil than . . . war? Only one war was not total, whereas another one was going total? Or, in one war you would kill enemies (whose image was carefully created beforehand), whereas in the civil war—brothers? What a hypocrisy!

But is Nokia indeed endorsing that opinion, or is he writing from an abstract position of somebody who merely logicalizes Marsikiani’s actions?

Back to intentions. What about such a formulation? Intention is an abstraction used by an observer to register, in his first impression, a seeming difference between the moral values put in the basis of an action and the results of such an action. After this difference is analyzed, and if the action is implemented, either intention or motive becomes a redundant concept.

Actually, now I see when intention can be relevant: when the action was not implemented, after all. Contemplating an action, the individual can have an intention—which is to achieve the action’s supposed aim (which will never fully coincide with that intention, if executed)—versus a motive, which is the reason for acting so and so rather than differently in the first place. The moment there is a real action, applying intention to explain it becomes redundant, I would say. This dichotomy of intention versus motive is extremely academic, monkish, suitable to those who never act but only imagine that they would act.

There is a slip in labeling in your p. 18—when you oppose ‘Kkhmerian community’ (a descriptive? Non-evaluative adjective) versus ‘nationalist Shirkundazian leadership’ (a descriptive-evaluative? Even denigrative adjective). You ought to take care of these slips if you want to be impartial. Especially because—I have read another account of those very events (Evripid Yiddish’s book in Slabbabian—a very substantial analysis of the conflict, alas—if it is an alas—biased toward the Shirkundaz)—it can be put also the other way around.

‘Both parties—in which the rights of other nationalities were not acknowledged’—wrong again factually and dangerous in that it leads to a fruitless discussion. The Shirkundaz never explicitly registered and ideologically justified their racism, the Kkhmer did a lot during the Kharakiria days, therefore, the Shirkundaz were re-acting, and they learned to do it that way, rather than initiated. Ask John Smith on that. You can get scared and angry when somebody day after day tells you that you do not exist or do not have a right to exist. Especially after the example of the holocaust, people have become sensitive to that, and try to take a preventive action in order to preclude that from happening indeed. What does Nokia think about all these publications and public statements? How does he manage to live and interact with the same people, or some of them, who actually made these statements?

Now I understand what you meant when you said that you were afraid of losing impartiality while criticizing Chichcholina. Indeed, while your criticism is abstractly valid, the result is that after all the equivocations you actually uphold the Kkhmerian position. As if there is no need in proof of the good motives of Marsikiani—or at least his being honestly confused about his role in the Kkhmerian history—whereas there is a need in proof that the Kkhmerians left voluntarily.

Ironically or typically, this is a huge issue also in the Pafnutian-Trukhachian conflict. The Pafnuts say that most of the Trukhachi left in autumn 1988, after the Pafnutians became angry and expelled them in reply to the massacres in Trukhachstan. For the Trukhachi, however, this is not enough—they try to move the time of Trukhach fleeing back, to autumn 1987, a time when there was only deep internal process brewing and I personally, for instance, did not know anything about the conflict and was just a careless graduate student. First serious public events happened in winter 2055, but it is important for the Trukhach to insist that the Pafnuts are even worse than they themselves say they are—that they actually conspiratorially expelled the Trukhachi a year earlier than they claim they did.

But usually, I tell you from my experience—we tried to keep some Trukhachi from going—they would say ‘no, you are good guys, but afterwards the bad guys will come and expel us anyway. We go now! Help us to go!’—and we helped them, because they were right. They fled from their own fear mainly, but this fear was justified, it was impossible to do anything about that. Probably, the same happened in Shirkundazia, even though it is still important for the Shirkundaz side to claim that it was the fear—perception of threat—rather than direct threat or policy of ethnic cleansing—that removed the majority of the Kkhmer (mountain Giundai, actually) population from the region.

Now about undoing ethnic cleansing. In international law, two sides agree to reciprocally undo for their respective refugees (rather than to expect each other to do it for the mutual refugees). It is very pragmatic, and no moral harm can be claimed to be undone. It is about resettlement in the agreed manner and places. It is bullshit, I would say, to speak about the right to return as undoing of cleansing—because without all the accompanying guarantees this will be another calamity for the returnees themselves (as the Vicli-Pucli events showed recently). In general, the receiving side should take care of the refugees and not make them even more of a pawn in their political games. To postpone your life and rights indefinitely relying on empty promises of undoing—while actually being used as a trump card to show in what terrible condition is the state—what a hypocrisy, indeed!

Ethnic cleansing is a humanitarian issue and therefore is addressed by you to the fullest possible degree. Whereas initiating a war against one’s own region and ethnic group is state’s right, and therefore you did not address the cause, you did not require legal responsibility for that, because there are no applicable laws covering that, and without redressing the cause, you want to redress the effect! That is why, abstract application of human rights law can have disastrous consequences and actually generate conflict. That is why they did that ethnic cleansing in the first place—because they knew that the guilt of initiating the war was not going to be addressed, and they wanted to demonstrate their power—to behave like, in their understanding, a state behaves while building its nation! (I have addressed this issue in one publication at least). Suppose that Marsikiani was successful and the Shirkundaz were ousted, and the war was over, and territorial integrity of Kkhmeria preserved—would you be discussing the remedies etc.? Would you even know about the conflict? Would the Commission give money to talk about return of a few thousand people to a land that has become a bastion of their hostile nation? Take the example of the Vicli-Usmannis—it is several decades and still, they are unable to return, and wherever they go, people say please, do not stay here if you do no want to be killed.

Why Nokia’s justification of Marsi’s survival logic is not applied to justify the refusal of the Shirkundaz to adopt back the refugees?

The difference between a classical ideal image of interstate war (created on the basis of an image of two chess-players, coming from the archetype of times when the leaders would fight in an honest contest and the armies would wait until one of them wins and then go home) and ethnic war is exactly in that the classical laws of war are not applicable because ethnic war is, indeed, a total war. Here, all the population of a threatened ethnic group, and some part of the population of the majority group, are mobilized, including women and children. Therefore, in a way, there are all enemies. These are genocidal wars. Interstate wars are very often as well—like the Latin-Byzantine war was. The Byzantines would never win if the population would not mobilize—and it would not if the Latins would not prove that they were threatening the existence of the entire Byzantine race! Actually, when one side follows the rules of war, that side perhaps loses (just a hypothesis).

Where did you receive the information that Shirkundazia receives more humanitarian aid per capita than Kkhmeria? (p. 25) Also, this is the case when per capita approach plays the trick, since they are, actually, only a few capitals, easy to decapitate. . . As far as I know, most of agencies cannot give a kopeck to Shirkundazia if they did not disburse the same amount to Kkhmeria. And the blockade makes it extremely difficult and cumbersome the delivery of humanitarian loads.

As a conclusion: this is a very good attempt, very illustrative of the difficulties that contemporary ethics experience. There is no need to address all the issues touched upon here before publishing the essay—I know they wont be lost in your mind. However, there is a picture that emerges from all this, and this picture is quite sad: all these sacrifices were necessary for good normal people as well as some officials in the west to come to realization that at least impartiality and equality in treating the two de facto sides in conflict should be maintained. Whereas this impartiality in itself is a trick, because there is always the bigger, more powerful, more resourceful, and therefore more competent and capable side—and therefore more responsible—and therefore more guilty. The problem with impartiality is that situations are not, actually, impartial—they are deeply biased from the outset—making one side strong, another side weak, one side secure, another side vulnerable, one side canny, another side naļve—and finally, when the stronger side pushes too much, this weak, vulnerable, and naļve side mobilizes, uses whatever meager opportunities it has, relies on treacherous and costly outside help and whatever other means—merely in order to prove that when it comes to killing in order to survive, it can do that even better than the stronger, securer, and lazier side. And suddenly, one pities the stronger side, which does not even realize why is it so pitiful. Which has not even realized up to day, that Hitler was actually a global monster rather than a national hero. Imagine Lawrencia still celebrating Usama, the son of its soil, as another Napoleon?

That is the problem: when pragmatic politics or arbitrary but powerful positivist law is replaced by ethics (morality), there is always a side that is, at the bottomline, right and one that is wrong. Ethics (morality) and impartiality are mutually exclusive?