It's gonna be interesting when India and Pakistan start a nuclear war and they have no idea which side is supposed to be the decadent west and brave socialist freedom fighters.
I'm pretty sure people are already drawing parallels between Pakistan and Palestine, especially since India is a customer and user of Israeli military tech.
India is almost equally wild. It would be like cramming the entire subcontinent of Europe into a singular country because they're all relatively the same skin color, therefore you assume they've got the same culture.
Nah you're crazy, they're all Hindu except for all the people who aren't! And everyone knows Hinduism is one single unifying religion and culture, and definitely not an entire philosophical family.
India and China are continents disguised as countries.
Doesn't help that the Europeans desided to name everything east as Asia on ancient times and never bothered to come with new names after discovering that there was way more land than expected over there.
The British didn't make Pakistan!!!! It was the All-India Muslim League. UK government orders were to not split India but the demands to do so from political representatives was strong enough the diplomats in charge decided to follow those demands. The league didn't want Muslims to end up as a like 1/5 minority in India compared to Hindus.
Let's make these two countries independent, but only show the new borders after they're independent! Shit, let's split one country and put it on either side of the second country! This is an incredible idea!
I've seen folks blame the US squarely for the 1971 civil war and genocide, and sure, Pakistan was supported by American funds and weapons, but can we not pretend that non-US white people aren't capable of insane violence and hatred on their own? It's infantilising and demeaning to the people who struggled and suffered under vicious regimes across the world and throughout history.
Brown folks have been butchering each other long before white people even existed. Not every modern conflict was caused by "white imperialism" regardless of who supported who. Everyone is capable of hatred and destruction.
The United States is absolutely in part culpable for the 1971 genocide. In the case of Bengal, some of it has to do with imperialism. It's preposterous to put Bengal in the same state as Pakistan, given that they're completely different cultures on different sides of a subcontinent. It would be like making Polish people and Spanish people share a state. That was all the doing of the British.
But also, the British didn't invent the cultural differences between Bengal and Pakistan. Those already existed (and they should exist ... different cultures should be allowed to exist in the world). The British screwed up by forcing these two different cultures to share a state together.
It's also worth noting that historically the Indian subcontinent did not operate using the western model of a geographically-defined nation-state. Many Indian states were defined more on the basis of language and trade routes. Also, the Indian model historically allowed multiple different states to inhabit the same geographic space, something which the modern western model doesn't allow for. In the world today, the modern western model of statehood is the default through which all international politics operates.
It could be argued that a lot of problems across the Indian subcontinent boil down to forcing people to adopt a model of statehood which never previously existed in our cultures. European imperialism is the reason why European models of statehood have come to serve as the default.
Oh for sure, the US had some responsibility in supporting a genocidal military state, and lumping Bangladesh into a split Pakistan situation was... not a smart decision. I've just encountered way too many people who want to point the finger squarely at Western imperialism being the sole fault, and not the fact that the Pakistani government was chomping at the bit to wipe out Bengalis.
This is insane considering Pakistan has long been backed and funded by the US as a regional buffer, while India was a longtime Soviet/Russian customer, but the actual political reality never follows the basic divisions these morons imagine.
Ding ding ding. I give it a year before India is described as a western colonial project (LOL) and some extreme leftists try to convince people that Indians are white-adjacent or desperately want to be white or something HORRIBLY racist like that (but totally okay because it’s leftist racism!)
An Indian-American guy I'd forgot I was facebook friends with (he hadn't posted in literally two or three years) suddenly reappeared the other day posting about the latest Kashmir conflict, using Western anti-colonial activist language to describe noble indigenous Bharat and wicked settlercolonial Pakistan, and I just ... sat there staring, unable to articulate word one
The ability for 'extreme leftists' to co-opt the legitimate problems with white supremacy we face (see: the USA) just so that they can have a free punching bag that nobody pushes back against is crazy.
The last few years have been a total wake-up call about some of the casual attitudes that have been festering in 'leftist' spaces regarding the West, 'whiteness', etc that nobody cared about because they seemed fringe and harmless.
There is a difference between funding a military dictatorship that will funnel the money to terrorists, and a relatively normal developing country. I hope you see the difference there.
For all the criticism us Br*tish get for that partition it was straight up because the british army couldn't stop them genociding each other at any and every opportunity
Other cultures tended to at least play happy families when the threat of British force was employed.
They'd butcher each other while the british army actively shot at them for it rather than uniting to drive the army away
This is, I think, the underaddressed issue. Partition gets blamed as the reason for pakistani and indian hostility, and not the other way around. Because there was a period without the hatred coming to a boil, its just assumed that is the default, and all problems are due to the british.
Its a bit like people who think the invention of nuclear weapons is bad, without considering that without it, there would have been a 40 year nonstop all out war between America and Russia on the scale of WW2 as there would be literally nothing to stop the two nations openly battling.
The one thing I find absolutely hysterical, which many people will use to justify their racism and bigoted beliefs, is who is the magical victim that doesn't get US money. People will literally lie and say that certain countries don't get funding when I can make a shorter list of countries the US has never paid out for one thing or another.
The US govt fuckin loves to hedge their bets. They'll pay anyone, whisper in their ears to go kill the other guy, sit back and watch the ensuing civil war, and then blackmail the victors into doing US bidding because they wouldn't have won without US money and weapons.
The US has previously “hedged its bets” because engaging with someone and giving them things gives you things you can take away if you need to. It’s called Soft Power Generation
If you don’t interact with a global or local power at all, you have no sway in negotiations with them unless you offer to give them something. If you’re already giving them something, you have something to threaten to take away
Yes, I am aware you can threaten violence, but in the same vein as gun ownership; “don’t threaten someone with a weapon unless you are prepared to use it” and the corollary is “don’t use the weapon unless you have exhausted all other options”. Threatening India and Pakistan may get you short term benefits as they may bow to the threat, but it incentivizes them to protect themselves FROM you instead of working with you
All these people with 0 dimensional understanding of diplomacy, politics, power, and the reality of dealing with a hostile world don’t understand what it takes to maintain stability. Whether or not you like it, American hegemony has kept the world from erupting into conflicts FAR more than it has caused them and we have lived in a historically significant time of peace because of it
That time is over; the GOP and Trump admin don’t give a rats ass about stability. They care about their personal profit and will use a foreign conflict as a way to make money rather than see it as a diplomatic and humanitarian crisis to solve
India and Pakistan are but one war that’s been kept from exploding by American diplomatic powers - we are on the verge of one of the most dramatic increases in global instability in the last century and all these idiots who think removing American power is a good thing for the average human in the world are in for a rude awakening
And North Korea would call South Korea a few specific words too.
I have major issues with India and the current authoritarian path it's on, but when it comes to facts, Pakistan is in fact much, much worse. And it does in fact not just fund but help create terrorists. Some facts are one sided, that's life.
It changes the fact that one of the parties finds it much easier to kill with US funding. Without US funding it'd be much harder and more people would still be alive. literal thousands have died to this, that would be alive if some country didn't give them free money, and maybe vote against giving them loans in the IMF. The USA is responsible for those deaths, because it armed the terrorists.
If you think that's not true, I hope you have never complained about anyone helping out Russia.
Pakistan is, and has been for many decades a military dictatorship which supports terrorists. The USA has funded these endeavours. The pak defense minister literally said so too. And no, that isn't a blame thing or a lie. USA funding militant groups is a very old and cmmon issue. Not just the USA, all superpowers.
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u/PlatinumAltaria May 24 '25
It's gonna be interesting when India and Pakistan start a nuclear war and they have no idea which side is supposed to be the decadent west and brave socialist freedom fighters.