Something more about ISIS

[The Comrade]

[Mr. Shaman]

[broken robot]

That is the ugliest map I've ever seen.

[The Comrade]

da truth is often ugly, friend

[broken robot]

[The Comrade]

see i'd agree, in that countries with strong feudal governments emerged as nation-states, which is something that was pretty unique to europe and east asia.

on the other hand, places like india seem to have a decent sense of nation-state loyalty, so either they're an anomaly or i don't know enough about indian history.

what i do know is that the middle east has, largely, not experienced the kind of centuries long political and social realities that lead to nationalism in the way the previously mentioned countries have and i think they missed the boat. pan-arabism seemed like their best hope.

[broken robot]

Yeah unfortunately I don't know much about the feudal history of the Middle East, but wasn't the Ottoman Empire quite strong? I mean, what happened. You also had the Safavids too, so there were clear attempts at state making, from what I understand.

India is funny--literally is one of the most diverse countries on the planet by almost any metric, and yet has a strong sense of national identity (well, except for all the fighting going on in its extremities Manipur/Assam and Kashmir). The British actually believed (again with all their colonial assumptions) that elite Indian nationalists were fools because there's no way that diverse ethnic and linguistic groups would commit themselves to a national project. Boy were they wrong.

My guess is two factors: 1) India was pretty much under the domination of one colonial power (Brits) who inspired an equally aggressive independence struggle that united groups north and south, which eventually morphed into the all powerful Congress party that could rule a relatively stable society, 2) federalism, often based on states defined along linguistic lines (ie. tamil nadu = tamil, andhra pradesh = telugu, maharashtra = marathi, etc.) If the Indians hadn't established federal principles early on, you'd have seen a Dravidian secessionist movement in the South that would have made the Tamil Tigers look like kittens.

Likewise I think in the Middle East similar lines of colonial/postcolonial political struggle would matter, not just the centuries of state making beforehand. Again, the issue is I don't know how much anticolonial independence movements had a role to play in defining the foundations of society, given that even by the early 20th century the West had already established complex relations of patronage with rulers and tribal chieftainships (mostly because of oil) that resulted in the patchwork we see today. It's why a white dude TE Lawrence is apparently the only anticolonial rebel we think of when it comes to the Mid East, in contrast to Gandhi, Nehru, etc. in South Asia.

[spacemonkey]

[The Comrade]

[Professor]

Map is pretty unrealistic. Unless and until you draw a map where every little city/town/tribe is it's own state, there will be civil wars. Then, when you make each one a state, there will be wars between those states.

There is no way that the region will stop fighting itself in the foreseeable future. That region makes the Hatfields and McCoys look like Little House on the Prairie.