I ain’t greedy ’bout land. I only want what jines mine.
Statement by Congressman Abraham Lincoln noting that the land hunger of supporters of the Mexican War reminded him of the above statement of a Springfield farmer.
Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Dialectical territorialism?
Emphasis on ‘suggest’. Territorial boundaries in Latin America hardly differ from what they were in 1885. Those in tropical and southern Africa are about what they were in 1918, with the notable changes occurring in the Sudan and the Horn of Africa; of course, the territories are now formally sovereign and not dependencies of Britain, France, and Portugal. Changes in Southeast Asia (bar the incorporation of Dutch New Guinea into Indonesia) derive from Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States shedding their dependencies. Changes in South Asia have derived from the end of the British Raj and the (assisted) secession of Pakistan’s Bengali provinces. All of the boundary changes in the Near East and North Africa have since 1939 been confined to the former Mandate of Palestine, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, and southern Lebanon. The break up of the Soviet Union generated bloodshed only in the Caucasus and Transnistria, and little in the latter case. The breakup of Yugoslavia was sanguinary, but the perpetrators are largely gone from the scene. Wishing to chow down on others’ territory is currently limited to the governments of Russia and China. Wishing to kill large numbers of people in others’ territory is an ambition of Iran’s.
“Buffer states”
“Buffer states”
Post-Soviet Russia had two buffer states in 2012. They proceeded to trash their relationship with the larger and more populous of the two, because drunken boors.
As for China, it has three buffer states, two of which it treats shamefully.