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Comment by ArkanExplorer | Hacker News Reader

50,000 people petitioned France last year to recolonise the country:

https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/06/over-50-00-sign-petition...

You can find 50K idiots in every country.

Vatican City - 801. Nauru – 10,824. Tuvalu - 11,792. Palau - 18,094. San Marino - 33,931. Liechtenstein - 38,128. Monaco – 39,242.

Edit: population of Vatican city might be the wrong measure, I'm actually not sure how many can stand in Piazza San Pietro

What’s the point of this posting this pedantry? Please don’t.

Generally I agree, but this time I took this more as an interesting thought.

Well, consider the tourists present in most of these places, often many times over the local population.

Why would they want to be colonized?

Presumably to be under the control of a less corrupt and more capable government?

And what would France get in return?

A basket case, which people will blame France for when it can't be fixed. Plus a battle for influence with Iran.

If I were France, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-meter pole.

(Completely off topic: I have seen a literal 10-foot pole. It had a hypodermic needle on one end. It was used to tranquilize a skunk caught in a (humane) trap, without getting sprayed.)

>A basket case, which people will blame France for when it can't be fixed. Plus a battle for influence with Iran.

You can add more Islamic terrorism in the future in mainland France.

In the 80's Lebanon was also a bit of a crazy place, I remember seeing pictures of American battleships firing into the mainland to attack enemy militias, which kinda reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and thinking that place will never be stable. Looks like I was wrong up until a few years ago though, it's a real shame for the people there.

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/20/world/us-warships-fire-in...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing...

I bet both France and the US will run the other way. The above is another thing that happened during that era. Hundreds dead.

I was just a really young kid but even I remember it.

However if you reference it a decade earlier you find female rock bands smoking hashish after a gig, etc. I’ll not be so simplistic as to blame a particular power, but the place was dismantled, and didn’t just fall apart. Regardless of Roman and Ottoman provincial divisions, it ended up an accidental buffer zone. Bear in mind which group legs are required for a consensus government there and bear witness to ground zero of where Shia Sunni and Copt meet etc. and yes, when you see Lebanese in Israel it is due to them having to flee during the war as they had sided against Hezbollah. The Middle East is a complicated place but the complications are largely the result of trying winner take all policies on all sides,not to mention a fair dose of”enemy of my enemy is my frenemy” compounded with colonialism in onion layers and a distinct lack of shanti shanti all around.

Same things we get in Sahel:

- A foothold in the region.

- Access to negligible amounts of natural resources.

- A shit-ton of bad press and diplomatic conundrums.

- Needing to constantly fight islamist insurgents to stay in place.

- Not having to deal with a refugee crisis ten years down the line.

Macron has visited a few times, but considering he recently announced France would withdraw from Mali, I doubt he'll move towards any kind of re-establishment of the Lebanese protectorate any time soon.

The christian-aligned population is lukewarm to the idea at best, and the muslim-aligned population will fight it to the death, so it would have to be an active invasion. It's not a realistic prospect by any consideration.

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