Lord Keynes: Immaculate Ethnic Purity … Ah!

Villagers fleeing the village of Kibati during the 2008 Nord-Kivu conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. [A]

Deepak Lal (here and here) approvingly writes in “In Defense of Empires”:

“Skidelsky reports on one of Keynes’s fancies:

‘A view of the post-war world which I find sympathetic and attractive and fruitful of good consequences is that we should encourage small political and cultural units, combined into larger, and more or less closely knit, economic units. It would be a fine thing to have thirty or forty capital cities in Europe, each the center of a self-governing country entirely free from national minorities (who would be dealt with by migrations where necessary) and the seat of government and parliament and university center, each with their own pride and glory and their own characteristics and excellent gifts. But it would be ruinous to have thirty or forty entirely independent economic and currency unions.’

“But as Skidelsky notes, ‘this pleasing picture of a re-medievalised Europe did not survive in later drafts.’ This homogenized solution, which as Keynes recognized could involve ‘ethnic cleansing,’ has clearly been eschewed by the West.”

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Suggested advert for either a detergent or a neo-con world-shaping strategy marketing campaign:

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Sometimes there's just no way around it: one has to appeal to humour, even if dark and bloody.

But that's no laughing matter. To have Lord Keynes -- the Messiah of capitalism -- deciding, between cups of tea, the lives of millions is no laughing matter, either.

So, for those pimple-faced teenage reincarnations of the faux Prophet (MegaMaynard? KeynesJr? LordKv.2.0?) and admirers of Wikipedia and their "non-famous" editors, Population Transfer gives a general overview of these "encouraged", mass "ethnic migrations". The article is not complete (as usual for Wikipedia). But here are related entries: Flight and Expulsion of Germans (1944–50), Yugoslav Wars, Ethnic Cleansing in Africa. Some of these episodes, by their sheer madness, sound as if taken from a work of fiction, but since this is no fiction, they end up in untold horror.

The name for that is Ethnic Cleansing. Is not just that is has "been eschewed by the West". It's a crime defined by the Rome Statute of the Criminal Court. Criminals used to be hanged by Western courts for that: Nuremberg Trials, Tokyo Trials.


Image Credits:
[A] Villagers fleeing the village of Kibati during the 2008 Nord-Kivu conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Author: Julien Harneis (07-11-2008). File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. My usage of the file does not suggest its author endorses me or the use I make of the file. Wikipedia.