Subject: Re: Now That's a BAD Jobs Report
THIS IS A MYTH!!! I have a fried who's Hindi family was removed from Pakistan during the partition. They didn't want to leave.

What is a myth? I never claimed that all the people who ended up on the wrong side of the lines wanted to leave. I made a point of noting - at every mention - that Partition was horrible and traumatic.

The reason for the Partition wasn't that every single Hindu in Pakistan, or every Muslim in India, wanted to live in a homogenous country. Or that Partition would result in a homogenous country. It was because the many tens of millions of Muslims in the western part of the Raj did not want to live in a country where they would be permanently a small minority, with the lost of self-determination and autonomy that would entail. They were not going to accept it (even if your Hindi friend's family had a different perspective). The country was staring down a path of violent civil war, and Partition was the less-worse option than a Muslim War of Independence.

This is what

By the way, you are celebrating ethnic cleansing here.

That's just false. Again, I have tried to describe the effects of Partition as being absolutely terrible for the people involved whenever I mention it. I think it was horrible that the minority groups that found themselves on the "wrong" side of the line were subjected to the terrors of Partition, and I think all the ones who wanted to stay (like your friend's family) should have been allowed to do so with full rights as a protected minority in those states.

I'm not celebrating ethnic cleansing. What I am pointing out is that most nations/peoples have a legitimate (not imaginary) identity and community structured around their people, and that most (not every) nation-state has been formed in order to implement that real (not imaginary) desire for autonomy and self-determination of the people that make up the majority (not 100% down to the individual) of those peoples.

Tying that back to the subject at hand - forming a nation-state around the contours of a people in order to effectuate the autonomy and self-determination of that people, as well as to protect them against the all-too-common depredations that are inflicted on the minority members of a community by the majority (in any political structure whether nation-state or no), is not an illegitimate political project. It's not artificial, or imaginary, or whatever other imprecation you want to label it as. It's something that peoples throughout the world and throughout time have sought for themselves, and most peoples in most of the world today live in a country where that is available to them. There is nothing wrong with Jews wanting the same for themselves, and I think it's anti-Semitic to claim that they - and they alone of all the peoples of the earth - should not be allowed to pursue that goal.