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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25832 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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ignorant Western boundary-drawing

Ignorant? They knew exactly what they were doing. You know what's nice? When you have to pull out of somewhere, but you don't want it getting all strong and independent because you'd still like to exert influence over the area.

So, you set up lovely borders that incite ethnic/religious conflict and let it rip!

The USSR/Russians did the same with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

The West also drew some odd boundaries in the West, post WWI, but the Treaty of Versailles was more a mess of conflicting priorities and petitions than it was "let's set up European ethnic/religious conflict!"

The Brits leaving Palestine was like the Americans leaving Afghanistan. We’d been through two gruelling wars, we under constant lethal attack from both Jewish (the Stern Gang) and (I think) Arabic terrorists who made it extremely clear they wanted us to get the hell out of there, and we did. The fact that the area is full of bloodthirsty maniacs isn’t our fault - it’s been like that since the Old Testament days and all we’d ever been able to do was keep a lid on it.

The USSR actually tried incredibly hard to create logical boundaries in Central Asia. They did not deliberately leave minorities places. But Soviet ethnographers did not always access groups accurately because of ignorance on their part and lack of national consciousness on the populations part. Or more commonly because these groups were all mixed together and it was impossible to draw clear lines. Regardless if you read the commission on nationalities (headed by one Joseph Stalin) they were not intentionally leaving minorities anywhere but rather a clean national delineation was just impossible. The jigsaw boundaries and enclaves and exclaves were an attempt to gerrymander clear nations where there were none.

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