Word: lithuania
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...usual answer -- the Lithuanian answer -- is an appeal to history. The American South voluntarily joined the American Union. Lithuania was conquered and involuntarily absorbed into the Soviet Union. Its original incorporation being illegitimate, it is not really seceding, it is merely reasserting a pre- existing independence of which it was robbed 50 years ago when jointly raped by Hitler and Stalin...
...history can be tricky. On the one hand, where exactly does history stop? Lithuania was independent for 20 years between 1920 and 1940, but for more than a hundred years before that it was part of the Russian empire. Which historical period is the norm? The Russian imperium? The brief interregnum of Lithuanian independence? Or the Soviet reality of the past 50 years...
...need firmer ground on which to base the justice of Lithuania's declaration of independence. And it exists. It has nothing to do with history. | It has instead to do with democracy, with a new principle of international relations or, rather, an old one that has been revived: the principle of democratic legitimacy. The Lithuanians are right to do what they did because it was an elected government, created by consent of the governed, that decided in the name of the people to secede. It is the democratic origin of that decision, not its historical antecedents, that makes it right...
...answer is, first, that South Carolina, unlike Lithuania, was not fully democratic. In 1860, 58% of its population was enslaved, denied, among other human rights, the vote. It was a white minority government, we would say today, that voted for secession...
...this applies to Gorbachev. He is protecting a dictatorial empire, not a democracy. The union he is defending is dedicated to no proposition. Gorbachev has introduced elements of democracy into the U.S.S.R. But ironically, the only part of the U.S.S.R. that can be said to be fully democratic is Lithuania, which has held the U.S.S.R.'s first free multiparty elections. For Lithuania freely to secede from a nondemocratic union is not to undermine the idea of democratic government but, in fact, to affirm...