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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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In my darker moments, I wonder if "decolonization" in practice is somewhat genocidal.

I think this just depends on the specific circumstances and usage of the term really. Many of the colonies controlled by Imperial Japan were so awful that their descendents in China and Korea continue to hold a powerful cultural grudge to this day. And it's easy to understand when they committed atrocities like the hundred man killing contest (the specifics of this event is historically questionable but even Japanese courts generally rule something most likely happened) Their forces were so opposed to the Japanese invaders that China put their civil war aside and worked together to fight back. Decolonizing the areas they had conquered was a liberation.

But in the same way "decolonization" is used by some wacky leftist types who seem to think that the US continuing to exist at all is equivalent to doing the trail of tears over and over again. The native Americans of the 18th and 19th century might not have fared well under American rule back then, but the native Americans of today certainly benefit from our country's wealth and power.

I don't have a time machine or a parallel dimension viewer to see the counterfactual where a native American tribe won and ruled over the land of the US to see what happened. Maybe that tribal America is even wealthier and more powerful, maybe it's worse off. But it doesn't matter, we don't live in that time or alternate reality and the native Americans of today benefit from the country existing. "Decolonizing" makes no sense even from a pro-native perspective, we would be hurting them.