re: "China's Xi warns of 'grim' Taiwan situation in letter to opposition" (BP, September 26, 2021)
Dear editor,
More humans need realize that countries and nations, along with cultures, customs, and traditions, are all at heart only human fictions, as historian Yuval Harari correctly explains them in his justly famous book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" (2015). Mindless faith in blind nationalism or spurious ethnic myths notwithstanding, what might once upon a time have been some region's past political or cultural history is and should be irrelevant to its right to self-determination today.
If the people on the piece of land called Taiwan, or Tibet, or Texas, or Catalonia, or Australia, or whatever do not want to be Chinese, or American, or Spanish, or British, or whatever, that is for them to decide today constrained only by just contractual agreements entered into. Should they wish the people currently occupying some piece of real estate to remain within the same fiction that is a nation, it is for China, or the United States, or Britain to persuade those citizens to freely remain in that organizational structure. Force or threats of force already betray any pretence to respecting the rights of the people on the piece of dirt in question.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on September 28, 2021, under the title "Human fictions" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2188751/investigate-thai
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