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One man is trying to create a utopia on what he says is unclaimed land between Serbia and Croatia. He's banned from setting foot in his would-be territory, but he has not given up.
The president stared across the water at his country, from which he is exiled.
We were in a boat on the Danube, only a few yards from the territory of Liberland - what he calls the "beloved country".
But we knew that if we tried to disembark, the Croatian river police would arrest us. Patriotism struggled with prudence, and lost.
Liberland is only 7 sq km (2.5 sq miles) of uninhabited marshland. But in the mind of Vit Jedlicka, its first president, it's the fulfilment of the libertarian dream - a land with no compulsory taxes, no gun control, with Bitcoins as currency.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday November 14 2016, @07:33PM
What's to stop anybody from just moving in and taking the land?
The fact that the guys living there sound to be armed?
I mean, there's always the question of whether the bigger country just decides to invade you, e.g. Austria-Hungary and Serbia in WWI, but that's a problem everybody has, and microstates wouldn't be unique in that regard.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday November 15 2016, @12:28AM
Is he armed with surface-to-air missiles and poised to strike round the clock? Because such a small spit of territory is just one drone strike away from oblivion. Other options include tanks, naval bombardment, or missile strikes. And even in the old days before all this force multiplication garbage, there's still the fact that the typical one-city kingdom could amass an army an order of magnitude larger than the entire population of such a small nation.
A larger country can survive the initial strike to complain to other nations and potentially form alliances to push back. That's after their real military resources make every inch of ground a battle, stalling for time if nothing else. A little nothing like this "Liberland" will be gone in less than an hour and all of its citizens dead. I don't think that the body count would even be big enough to qualify as a genocide.
I'm definitely not advocating for any of this, nor do I like that this is the reality in which we live. But you can't ignore the basic forces of human civilization that have been at work for thousands of years just because we now enjoy relative peace. Yeah, we're less free than we used to be. We also live longer and in enough safety to contemplate this kind of ludicrous isolationist fantasy. Come get me when you have a real solution to the freedom part.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:23PM
I mean, there's always the question of whether the bigger country just decides to invade you, e.g. Austria-Hungary and Serbia in WWI, but that's a problem everybody has, and microstates wouldn't be unique in that regard.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"