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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Side A:

This patch of desert is ancient Moroccan land, stolen by infidel colonizers and justly returned. The people living there are Moroccans, who are thanking God every day that they were reunited with their homeland. Everything is fine, everyone except gaggle of grumpy terrorists is happy, no reason for anyone to complain.

This position is hold by Morocco, US and Israel, all alone against the world.

This is certainly an interesting framing, given that 120 countries reportedly supported Morocco's proposal of the western sahara under Moroccon sovereign control in the distant long past of... current year.

Truly, a mere 60% of the nations of the Untied Nations on board during contemporarily international negotiations is such lonely, and jewish, company.

Side B:

This patch of desert is country of Western Sahara, the people living there are ancient Western Saharan nation, dialect they are speaking is separate language. The country is illegally occupied by Morocco, and deserves their self determination.

This position is hold by UN and the whole international community.

This is also an interesting framing, given not just the aforementioned UN nations apparently outside the international community, but African nations supporting Morocco in nparticular.

Normally I'd be inclined to snark about Europeans conflating European diplomatic consensus with the world, except the recent Morocco proposal is backed by such notable American vassals / puppet states / your pejorative of choice, as France and Spain.

Instead, I'm inclined to note the historical context that the historical high point of UN and international community support for Western Sahara was back during the Cold War, with a relative silence in the two and a half decades since then. This not so coincidentally coincided with how Morocco's chief opponent on the Western Sahara issue, Algeria, was a major beneficiary of Soviet sponsorship, while Morocco generally aligned with the western block. In turn, Soviet sponsorship included much of the sort of military aid that Algeria provided to the Polisario Front, one of the major western saharan freedom fighter groups you refer to. As was normal in those time, as the Soviet Union freedom fighter aid went, so did the diplomatic votes of the soviet block, especially in the global south where the pro-Algerian position was the anti-imperialist / anti-western thematic vote as well.

Once the Soviet sponsorship and anti-capitalist politics faded with the Soviet Union, so to did international support for Algeria and western sahara as a cold war proxy issue. Which might be why more than half of the UN states had withdrawn their recognition of the Sarhawi Arab Democratic Republic during the 2000s and 2010s.

Which is not normally something the whole of the international community does... if you consider 80-odd states (which is 40 less than 120, I might add) 'the whole international community.'

If Palestine was either getting wrecked by a larger more advanced Islamic state instead of a Jewish one or the population didn't identify as Muslim it'd be getting substantially less support as a flashpoint.

Yeah, sure, but the same can be said about the Holocaust. (How much sleep did people lose over the Khmer Rouge, or Stalin's mass starvation campaigns?)

The Bolsheviks and Khmer Rouge were both flash points, but they represent separate instances where genocidaires either won a temporary victory or won a longer-term victory. People tried to stop them. They lost.

The Holocaust would be spoke of differently if the Allies lost WWII only for the Third Reich to collapse several decades later.