Sid Guttridge wrote: ↑02 Dec 2019 15:17
Hi futurist,
None of your examples are equivalent.
Israel hasn't been offered the West Bank and so is in no position to turn it down.
It could unilaterally annex it if it so desired. There would certainly be severe consequences, but theoretically, it can be done.
India didn't want partition to preserve a Hindu state. It was the Moslems who wanted a separate state of their own, which became Pakistan.
Yes, but I'm just saying that if I was a Hindu, I would have probably supported the partition of India (but certainly not the mass killings, ethnic cleansing, or the general half-assed way that it was done) in order to preserve a Hindu majority in India.
France left Algeria because it, like other colonial powers, couldn't afford the expense of retaining increasingly hostile colonies (which were meant to return the mother country a profit) by force in the modern world. It was not an act of generosity but one of increasing necessity. It was a matter of jumping before they were pushed.
France militarily won its war in Algeria, no? It withdrew at least in part because Charles De Gaulle made statements such as this:
https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_pu ... aulle.html
"There was also a rather cynical side to this. The defenders of so-called French Algeria argued for what they called ‘integration’: that Algeria should be fully integrated into France and its Muslim population become fully French citizens. This was a bit hypocritical on the part of Europeans who had done all to deny rights to Algerian Muslims for decades. But de Gaulle’s objection was a pragmatic (one might even say racist) one. As he put it once to one of his Ministers: ‘Have you seen the Muslims with their turbans and their djellabas? You can see that they are not French. Try and integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a moment they separate again. The Arabs are Arabs; the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty? If we carry out integration, if all the Berbers and Arabs of Algeria were regarded as French, how would one stop them coming to settle on the mainland where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombes-les-deux-Eglises but Colombey-the-two-Mosques.”"
You can also see the same comment by Charles De Gaulle here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=yBxCD ... 22&f=false
Frankly, I am in complete agreement with Charles De Gaulle in regards to this. I think that it's perfectly reasonable to want to maintain France's European character by allowing Algeria to become independent. I would have, of course, also let the harkis into France in and after 1962 but would have been much more selective with subsequent Muslim immigration into France.
As for the Belarus question, wm is yet to provide any evidence in support of his claim that it was offered to Poland by the USSR. Nor have you.
I will believe anything, so long as robust evidence supports it, but it is currently lacking in this case.
I therefore feel impelled to ask you, too: What are your sources?
Cheers,
Sid.
This book provides some information about this topic:
https://books.google.com/books?id=2T9zY ... sk&f=false
