>Australia has also turned into a pretty darned good country given its origin.
Didn't mean to slight the land of OZ, but my analogy was to those colonies like India, the US and Canada that could have easily fragmented and managed to hold a union together. Though I now I have to brush up on Aussie history to see how close they came to that. ( aside form reading
The Fatal Shore and skiing with a lot of Aussies who did the Endless Winter I'm not sure I have the details of Aussie autonomy clear in my mind )
( did you survive kickoff or whatever they call the opening day of soccer ? )
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>>The analogy I was going for was that the Balkans contained a number of local identities with ethnic and religious distinctions - and then were occupied by Moslem invaders - causing both conversions and settling of yet another group. The strength of empire more or less kept the lid on until the Ottomans decayed then there were brief stirrings previously surpressed identities then another lid was put on by a centralized government with little patience for "Balkanization" ( as the word has come to be understood in English) - not sure how well the analogy holds - comparing Tito to the Raj - but then the lid comes off again and there are scores to settle and demagogues waving bloody banners and some perfectly understandable strivings for identity.
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>>I think the amazing thing about 1947 wasn't that India and Pakistan didn't immediately become fast friends ( and there were 15 million people scrambling for a number of years to get on the right side of the border ) but that India maintained unity and democracy. That certainly ranks with the miracles of the US and Canada as a credit to what Britain gave the world.
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>>>>The Hindus and Moslems may have very well killed each other by the 19th century if the Brits hadn't showed up in the first place. ( remember the whole Moghul thing and the Balkan-like fragmentation of the Indian principalities
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>>>Take that back, sir, unless you can count which great forces have caused that. Take any clash in the Balkans, and I should be able to dig out who was involved.
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>>>The example at hand looks to me more Greek-polis-like.
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
