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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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India's hatred may be unique, but one must surely admit the Anglo-American countries also share a very unique perspective - one of always having been the invader and never the invaded, at least within the last few hundreds of years. US has arguably never been in a situation where there was even a serious risk of the country being occupied as a whole, unless one counts the fleeting moment in time between the colonials developing an American identity and the US independence being acknoweldged by Britain, or really stretches the narratives around the War of 1812. The British have been cocooned quite safely in their little island as well.

I cannot, of course, have an inkling about how the Indians really feel about the British colonization, but I certainly know that when Russians go around invading other countries, an atavistic fury rises in me - and pretty much all other Finns - that is probably not felt in the same way in countries that don't have the same history. When Russians go around explaining that no, it's Russia's duty to teach the smaller, more inferior nations about their true Russian-ness or save them from fascism once again, and that the conquered nations should have been grateful to Russia or Soviet Union for peace or modernization or whatever, it doesn't exactly work to quench that fury.

The importance of national sovereignty - never being ruled by another nation if it can be avoided - is crystal clear to me, again due this history. As such, I can only grant the same to the Indians regarding their conqueror-nation, or one of them - crucially the one conqueror-nation that always remained a foreign one, not one of the ones that set up shop in India and ended up becoming Indians of a sort.

The British have been cocooned quite safely in their little island as well.

UK was bombed a bit during WW II (total death count lower than single big German massacre in occupied areas).

USA mainland was technically actually bombed during WW II with some civilian death - 6 in total ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_balloon#Fu-Go ). But it is extreme nitpicking.

Compare with Belarus (occupied by USSR at that time) where 25% of population died/was murdered, or Poland where 16% of population was killed/murdered during war.

Yeah, that's the "quite" part. The main point was that despite the bombings and such, there has not been a real threat of the island of Great Britain actually being invaded and occupied for centuries. (years of reading soc.history.what-if convinced me that Operation Sealion was never a realistic possibility, and the same probably goes for any threat of Napoleon invading.)

To be clear, I was not disagreeing - just expanding.