Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Wednesday 23 April 2014

Yesterday, Joe Biden,

the ignorant US vice-president, declared
that the annexation of bits of one country
by a powerful neighbour was totally unacceptable.

He overlooked the fact
that the United States grew and grew
partly by annexation of large chunks of Mexico
(for which derisory sums were sometimes paid
as for the purchase of New France)
or land which it had simply occupied.



The annexation of Crimea by Russia seems paltry by comparison.

3 comments:

Bearz said...

Granted that the 2014 annexation of the Crimea is modest, but the politics on which it is based, the Soviet Empire, was a far bigger and more savage land grab. The Soviet Russians were rather un-inclusive. The soviets held on to death/slave camps for at least 10 years after the Nazis were stopped from keeping theirs. Do we want more of that and pogroms and oligarchy to extend? Probably not.

Wofl said...

America had its slave-economy which lasted (in attenuated form) right up to the 1960s - i.e. when Khrushchev was dismantling the Gulag. It also gained its territories by war with Spain and with Mexico. Thousands of people (many of them German-speaking) crossed the border into Mexico to start an "independence" movement, an insurrection against the United States of Mexico. Texas became an independent republic, and, 10 years later, American by incorporation.

read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_annexation

Marcus Billson said...

The maps are expressive of powerful conditionings compelling dominion. Like all English-speaking countries the US has had from its very beginnings an implicit sense of a "Manifest Destiny," much like the ruthless Spanish conquistadors of Mexico and the South American continent, a sense of a divine imperative to settle and dominate, ravage and steal. Russian annexation of Crimea was brutal, but historically less brutal, less rationalized by religion, than, well, the above.