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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Most nations do not allow regions to become independent. The USA famously had a kerfuffle over this.

And that's even without statements like "it's really obvious that Russia fakes votes".

If you're not aware of Crimean demographics, it's never been majority Ukrainian. It was majority Tatar but then they got exiled by Stalin for allegedly colluding with the Nazis. After that it became and remained majority Russian. [1] The reason for the exceptionally high approval is that the demographics made the poll largely a formality - everybody knew it would pass, and so those that opposed secession chose to boycott it, in part on principle, and in part to undermine the poll numbers. But exit polling and various Western polls showed similarly overwhelming support for joining Russia.

As for the US - you could say we had two kerfuffles along these lines, or we'd still be Brits. Win some, lose some. And notably we probably would have also lost against the Brits if not for the French. Granted they didn't then try to take us under their wing as part of France, so the similarities end somewhere - but on the other hand that might have indeed been the exact outcome had we been majority ethnic French. Kind of an amusing parallel timeline to imagine.

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26598832

> After that it became and remained majority Russian

It became 'majority Russian' 50 years before that, pay attention to the bar labeled 10. Don't use BBC as a source of anything.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea

It's even more amusing to anyone who knows the history of 28th state. "Really obvious, ya 'now".

Eh, I think there's lots of valid cases for secession.

In the case of the South though, I believe they could have had a peaceful secession had they not fallen victim to their own version of the "sphere of influence" argument: they refused to tolerate a free North to which slaves could escape, resulting in opening fire on Fort Sumter.

That you think it’s valid for the South to break away so they could continue to treat black people as property says a lot of things, none of them good.

> That you think it’s valid for the South to break away so they could continue to treat black people as property says a lot of things, none of them good.

They didn't actually say that, though I can see how one might read it that way.

  valid cases for secession. In the case of the South though

Is two things. I wrote a thing and an example, he's replied to both the thing and the example.

It's like Al Gore "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" being taken as "I invented" rather than "This was invented, I took the initiative in supporting it when that happened".

That is of course not what I said; "valid" a complicated question, depending on whether we want to get all land acknowledgement and question whether any of the US should have existed at all, including but not limited to the slave states.

An example of "valid" secession is the split of Czechoslovakia.

"Peaceful" is introducing a what-if about whether and why the Confederacy started the actual armed conflict part of the secession.

I have introduced a line break into the original comment as a demilitarized zone.

(we can also see the sort of "historical sliding window" effect as to legitimacy here. At what point does de facto line on the ground become baked in to legitimacy? Does California have a right to exist? Clearly more so than the occupation of Crimea, but is it just time that makes it so?)

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