Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
Replace "Iran" with "North Korea," "China," or "Russia," and "Israel" with "South Korea," "Japan," and "Ukraine" and no-one (well, almost no-one; Ukraine is a bit more controversial) gets all that upset. Still leads me to believe the concern with Israel is overblown.
Supah_Schmendrick
10d ago
That was a chokepoint that the great powers sought to control or invade and yet also a great centre of wealth and industry even before coal was ever discovered there. The Spanish were spending all the silver from the New World buying German cannons and German mercs to fight in Flanders.
If we were going post-colonial, we could easily create a narrative that Belgium's been very hard done by - centuries of imperial rule, getting tossed around and partitioned between the French, Spanish and Dutch, constant warfare, along with the bloodiest fighting of WW1 and getting wrecked in WW2.
Just going strictly by this description, that sounds a lot more like northern Italy (massively entrenched systems of medieval and early modern fortresses protecting mercantile interests from encroachment by numerous outside hostile powers, frequently fought over by Napoleonic armies, then the scene of ridiculously bloody WWI battles [e.g. the literal dozen battles of the Isonzo]) than southern (backwater latifundia)
I think Americans would also lose their shit and demand bombing if China did half the shit to Japan that Iran and the broader "Axis of Resistance" pulls in the Middle East. Moreso, if China was vaguely associated with significant local ethno-religious tensions and terrorism the way that Iran is associated with islamism (despite being Shia, rather than Sunni like the vast majority of the problematic refugees/terrorists).
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