by DAVID D’AMATO
‘THAILAND and Cambodia have’, according to BBC News, ‘reached a ceasefire after a week of fighting along a disputed border …. Both countries said the truce was struck following talks between the two militaries.’ The border between the two countries has been contested for years, and ‘nationalist sentiment’ has continued to give rise to intermittent violence. In the past, elections have enkindled the ongoing, if sometimes dormant, dispute, and the latest skirmish comes with elections looming in Thailand.
The language of statism has a remarkable capacity for transforming a turf war between two gangs of thugs into an all-embracing conflict between two nations. The notion that the disputed land ‘belongs’ to either state, that a government could possess rights in any legitimate sense, reveals the derisible assumption underlying the power of all ruling classes.
Because the state is simply systemised aggression, it cannot so much as exist without violating rights. Any claim of right it asserts, then, is an invasion, a trespass against true freedom, and —in the case of land—a theft. Through confrontations like the one between Thailand and Cambodia, crimes are ennobled as matters of national pride.
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via SACW