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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Typically, when a state annexes some territory, they do not give full citizenship to the people they conquered. At best, the conquered are second class citizens, at worst they are driven off the land or outright murdered. Also, the states that tend to favor imperialistic expansion are often not the states that put a lot of stock on citizen rights. If Hitler had extended German citizenship to the French, that would have improved their situation somewhat, but not greatly. Being treated by the Nazis as they treated e.g. German socialists would not have been a great improvement.

Afghanistan was colonized for 20 years

If Afghanistan is an example of colonization, it is a non-central example.

Normally, colonizers extract resources from their colony, their motivations are fundamentally economic.

We could debate if that was the case for Iraq (which has oil), but the occupation of Afghanistan was a net loss for the US taxpayer. I am sure that some PMCs and military industrial companies made a killing, but for the US as a whole it was a very expensive misadventure, which is why Biden pulled out.