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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

Anybody have ties to the continent in some form or another? It could be work or something like that.

Ultimately, we care about is salient and relevant to us. Abstraction don't usually have strong feeling attached to it.

I am connected to Asia simply because my family was from there and that America fought in Vietnam, changing the lives of millions.

So people in America have lot and lot of opinions about the war fought there.

What did America do in Africa? Somalia. That warranted a whole movie. What else? I heard there was some fighting in West Africa against terrorism. America sell some tanks to the Egyptians.

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Do you remember that decades long Cold war?

That toe to toe superpower standoff that saw 2,000+ atomic weapons, many that dwarfed the Japanese explosions, detonated in airburst and underground "tests"?

That saw the construction and stockpiling of thousands more nuclear weapons?

    During any given year of the Cold War, between 20 percent and 50 percent of the Western world's uranium came from African nations: Congo, Niger, South Africa, Gabon, Madagascar, and Namibia.

Officially, of course, at the time, the USofA wasn't there in Afica, nor was the USSR much. The French and others were about as proxies and there was an awful lot of coups, dictatorships, unstable governments etc that were all being heavily nudged by the Cold War super powers.

So what did America and Russia do in Africa? Pretty much screwed it up for decades to keep the uranium flowly regardless of how many attempts at self determined government they each had to topple, how many warlords they had to fund, etc.

https://theconversation.com/how-a-rich-uranium-mine-thrust-t...

barely scratches the surface, it's an abyss of barely told history that is only recently coming to light.

I mean, a bunch of us here are sitting on the continent right now.

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