Can you? When our economic system's only driver is "extracting wealth", can we actually develop a country without it? The extraction of wealth isn't some unfortunate byproduct, it's a central cog in the machine of what makes it operate. Money is invested for returns.

No, not really. Developing the country is effectively a service being performed, and a wildly expensive one at that. Never mind the high instability greatly increasing the risk of investment. And the ROI is likely decades in the future, during which time any tyrant can come to power and seize all your stuff for their state.

So if the people of Sudan wanted to buy "country rebuilding service", the only way they could finance the loan to pay for that would be by offering their resources to skilled foreign enterprises to convert to usable resources. Then run the risk numbers and you get a crazy interest rate, that will last decades.

If all goes well, Sudan gets a functioning society with a skilled workforce, the foreign players get a nice ROI and made whole for the service they performed, and everyone comes away happy.

The problem is, that places like this are so chronically unstable, and the people so in tune with living in unstable, that it is practically guaranteed to go sideways.

So work for free?

Who would invest in facilities, develop workforces, etc, without a payoff?

I don't think this was the British. (Not to apologize for them - they certainly made things worse, not better.) Sudan sits on a historical chattel slavery route that stretches back to Roman times. It's hallmarked by the Northern population raiding the south, along racial lines.

Scholarly article for reference if you want to learn more: https://www.jstor.org/stable/827888

Let's say that all of the problems in Sudan are the fault of British colonialism. (I don't think that's completely correct but just for the sake of argument.) The British are gone and not coming back in any significant numbers. Now what? What is the solution?

A typical British colonial strategy was to ally with a minority ethnic group. The formerly downtrodden minority group now got to be the leaders, but, being the minority, they would stay dependent on the British, else the majority would rise up and kill them. In the post colonial world unfortunately that is what happened in a number of cases.

Sudan was under British rule and Cyprus was under British rule at the same time. Outcome is vastly different. The Brits brought civilisation and made Cyprus what it is, enabling its current prosperity (only difference between Cyprus and Greece is that Cyprus was a British colony and Greece wasn't). Somehow it didn't happen in Sudan.

And no it's not because they handled locals differently. They didn't care about locals. Colonialism is about exploiting territory, not population - locals, for colonialists, just "happen to be there" and are usually an obstacle or annoyance rather than a resource to exploit.

Maybe it's because locals were different.

This is just a lazy argument: polities build their infrastructure also based on resource extraction, but from that economic opportunities follow, so people and communities gather around them making infrastructure also useful for them. It's like saying roman roads were bad because built by the empire, when even after centuries it fell, they were used by the locals. The problem is that there was no know-how passage, not that said infrastructures exist, and if anything they are still useful to them.

I’m surprised you’re being so polite. The parent just called for colonization of a region that has been colonized by proxy for some time now. In fact current events are a direct result of said colonization.

> Colonizing only helps the colonizers, not the indigenous population.

I am not sure that this statement is completely true in all cases.

Take for example the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean. Romans tended to win their wars because they had superior organization - they could field more armies, and equip those armies, better than their adversaries, even if their adversaries had better commanders (eg Hannibal).

Once conquered by the Romans, the indigenous population got access to all the benefits of being part of Rome's 'empire' - access to what was then one of the largest trade network, the roads, the aqueducts, the Roman legal system...

I do believe, although, not being a professional historian I have the humility to admit my belief could be wrong, than overall being conquered by the Romans led to an overall increase in living standards for the local population.

Or consider the brutal conquest of what is now Mexico by the Spanish. We rightly remember the conquistadors as being incredibly violent and oppressive, but if large swaths of the local population chose to join them in their assault on the Aztec empire, it may have been because the Aztecs were even more violent - indeed, if my understanding of Aztec culture is correct, the Aztec religion required a human sacrifice every day to ensure that the sun would rise. Compared to that, arguably even the Spanish Inquisition is a step up.

Finally, consider that the practice of slavery in what is now Algeria ended only in 1830, when the French colonized it. Now you can accuse the French colonizers of being vicious brutes (and you'd have a lot of evidence to support that claim), but... at least they weren't enslaving anyone. Of course, this last point makes a value judgement that basically boils down to "slavery is always bad", if you have a value system where "some things, including colonization/colonial/imperialist violence are worse than slavery, then you can safely discount it ^_^

> Sudanese population and diaspora hold no great financial or political influence globally so they have no visibility hence, no audience

This makes sense. But the Palestinian diaspora is tiny. Did it really kickstart the economics for new content?

We need to say Sudan has natural resources. Eg Oil. The world turns around

The most accurate way to say it indeed

From moral perspective, the same entities (UAE, Qatar) who have done the most to raise the profile of the I/P conflict with funds and media campaigns are directly funding and sending weapons to the parties responsible for the genocide in Sudan.

Which has much clearer properties of "genocide" than the I/P war, and killed 3 times as many people in the same timeframe despite having far more primitive and less powerful weaponry involved.

>> In the first three days of the capture, at least 6,000 killings were documented. 4,400 inside the city. 1,600 more along escape routes. The UN writes explicitly that the actual death toll from the week-long offensive was “undoubtedly significantly higher”. The governor of Darfur spoke of 27,000 killed in the first three days alone. The Khartoum-based think tank Confluence Advisory estimated 100,000. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab assessed that of the 250,000 civilians remaining in the city, nearly all had been killed, died, been displaced, or were in hiding.

>> RSF fighters, according to survivor testimony, said things like “Is there anyone Zaghawa here? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all” and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur”. Men and boys under 50 were specifically targeted, killed or abducted. Women and girls of the Zaghawa and Fur communities were systematically raped, often in groups, sometimes for hours or days. Those perceived as Arab were often spared.”

I mean, the RSF is very clearly the bad guys in this conflict. The reason there is no coverage is that there is widespread agreement on this point, and western govts aren't directly funding the bad guys as is the case with Israel.

[flagged]

> There was and still is much more money to be made on the pro-Israel side

Has anyone actually measured this? If I were to create two sock-puppet AI-content accounts and let them loose on social media, I'd guess I'd be monetising at a multiple with the pro-Palestinian one. It's just the more-mainstream position in today's media environment across the aisle.

This reads like a bad parody of the Soviet "west = bad" trope. Big wide brush strokes, painting ALL Europeans as somehow enabling this when it was only a few players and likely no real European peoples made decisions beyond a few powerful people. Buffoonish thinking.

In the Spanish colonies they speak Spanish.

In the Portuguese colonies they speak Portuguese.

In the __BLANK__ colonies they speak Hewbrew.

Fill in the blank.

[flagged]

‘Beholden’ might be the wrong work, but Netanyahu sure played this administration. It’s astonishing how easily he got his way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa...