A reader writes, apropos the “Remnants of Empire” puzzle:
I’m not sure what the point of this article is. Was it to pointedly make western nations look like world aggressors?
I thought rule #3 was quite interesting. It arbitrarily rules out all of the non-western nations that are or have occupied other countries. Also, there is one other country that is left off of your list — Lebanon which is a de-facto vassal state of Syria. Taiwan doesn’t yet fit the description, but quite possibly will within the decade.
Now if you tried to reverse your question and list all of the occurrances of countries that either allowed their former colonies to become free or have gone out of their way to liberate other groups of people, I think that you would get a much more interesting picture. I’d have to think about it, but I can’t think off-hand of a single
non-western nation that answers that description.
The point of the post was to have fun with a cute geography puzzle. The point of rule #3 was to avoid interminable debates about Tibet, Northern Ireland, Wales, Quebec, Transylvania, and all sorts of other places that some people say are a true part of the whole country and others say are colonies or dependencies.
Some things just aren’t about politics, folks.
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