More "Captive Nations" freed?

[Strategos' Risk]

"Captive Nations" is a term sometimes used in the United States to describe nations under undemocratic regimes. During the Cold War, when the phraseology appeared and was more frequently used, it referred to nations under Communist domination, primarily Soviet rule.

As a part of the United States’ Cold War strategy, an anti-Communism advocacy group, the National Captive Nations Committee, was established in 1959 according to Pub.L. 86-90 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The American economist and diplomat of Ukrainian heritage Lev Dobriansky played a key role in it.[1]

The law also established Captive Nations Week, traditionally proclaimed for the third week in July since then. The move aimed at raising public awareness of the problems of nations under the control of Communist and other non-democratic governments. When declaring the July 2009 Captive Nations Week, President Barack Obama stated, that, while the Cold War had been consigned to the history books, concerns raised by President Eisenhower remained still valid.[2][3]

The original Public Law 86-90 specifically referred to the following Captive Nations:[4]

• Poland
• Hungary
• Lithuania
• Ukraine
• Czechoslovakia
• Latvia
• Estonia
• White Ruthenia
• Romania
• East Germany
• Bulgaria
• Mainland China
• Armenia
• Azerbaijan
• Georgia
• North Korea
• Albania
• Idel-Ural
• Tibet
• Cossackia
• Turkestan
• North Vietnam

References

^ Edwards, Lee (02/14/2008), Remembering ‘Mr. Captive Nations’ Lev Dobriansky. HumanEvents.com
^ Captive Nations Week, 2009 – A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America. The White House Office of the Press Secretary. July 17, 2009
^ Dale, Helle C. (August 24, 2009), Captive Nations Past and Present. The Heritage Foundation.
^ Campbell, John Coert (1965), American Policy Toward Communist Eastern Europe: the Choices Ahead, p. 116. University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0816603456

Any chance of a Cossackia or an Idel-Ural state surviving anytime after the Bolshevik revolution?

[King Thomas]

It would have to be on the defensive from the start.

[Shevek23]

Whaaat? We didn't repeal that Cold War gimmick when the USSR ceased to exist???

Sure, it is possible to be just as much a "captive nation" of a non-Communist regime as a Communist one. But the whole point of the National Captive Nations Committee was to somehow establish in people's minds that Communist captivity was somehow or other much worse than the normal sort of subjugation that various national and subnational and aspiring national groups suffer all the time. The USA would look cute trying to make out that we have some general principle of opposing all subjugation of one nation by another and then turning around and invading and overthrowing governments all over the world because we didn't like their politics or policies or just because. It doesn't help that generally speaking, after we've overthrown those governments and put in something more of our own choosing, the sorts of atrocities that "Captive Nations Week" was meant to draw attention to generally go on still in those "liberated" nations.

Then there is the matter of other countries and imperial systems we don't interfere so openly in--we still have diplomatic, trade, even tourist relations with all sorts of countries that have some dark corner where order is kept rather violently. Are we going to denounce them too?

No. Only the Soviet-bloc ones in the 1950s; only the enemies of the week (usually some former protege of the same people who today tell us that say Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega are the scum of the scum and an existential threat but yesterday were giving them scads of aid and telling the world community what fine fellows they were) get that treatment today. It's a hollow, cynical ploy, and it only made sense (I won't argue about whether it was justified or simple propaganda sense) if we identified Marxist-Leninist regimes as the specific problem, everything is implicitly negotiable.

So, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union went belly-up along with the USSR itself, by what logic other than sheer bureaucratic inertia could this embarrassment possibly survive? Of the nations on that list, none of them are under Communist governments any more except those that have kept them for themselves, clearly not because some Russian bully is twisting their arms with a gun to their head. Except Tibet of course, but that's an interesting item on the list considering that China is on it too. So was China supposed to have been enslaved by the Russians, and thus presumably the Chinese invasion of Tibet was them just following their Kremlin masters? Or were the Chinese seen as "captives" of a gang of illegitimate usurpers in their own country, who then captured Tibet as well?

So on the logic that these nations were all captives of Communism, and it doesn't matter whether those Communists come from Moscow or are home-grown, the list should at any rate be a lot shorter today--just China, North Korea, Tibet, and Vietnam. Two of them insult our major trading and financial partner, China. Vietnam is also a nation that we've established more cordial relations with. North Korea everybody loves to hate because they love to hate everybody, but it's clearly absurd to talk of anyone "capturing" them but themselves.

So if self-captivity fits the bill, why the heck wasn't Yugoslavia on the list back in the 50s?

The thing was always a cynical embarrassment and I am deeply ashamed it didn't just get tossed in the trash where it always belonged, when the Soviet Union finally did go down leaving no Communist regime standing where it had formerly held sway.

[Strategos' Risk]

Actually I'm just wondering if any of those nations could have been out of the Soviet bloc at any time, even before the cold war.

[Shevek23]

Yeah, I noticed that you have at least one other thread up simultaneous with this one, asking a parallel question based on some list of possible successor states to a Russian breakup.

Personally, as much as I do admire the principle of national self-determination, I think the agony that Yugoslavia went through when it broke up should caution us to be careful what we wish for in considering the possibilities of breaking up some big state.

[I Blame Communism]

I like that they apparently just forgot Mongolia.