Map is inaccurate, Japan and South Korea are colonies in all but name
Just missing the -r recursive flag for the European colony colonies. It’s turtles all the way down.
Imo:
Japanese state is a junior partner, unless you also want to claim Germany is colonized by the US. Parts of Japan are colonial, e.g. Okinawa which was colonized by Japan and is currently a occupied by both Japan and the US military.
Otoh, Korea was subjected to Japanese colonialism, which in SK transitioned into a pro-west puppet government. I think this probably counts as a colonial relation still.
Japan was basically a whole ass empire itself getting colonized, and its imperial core while still being subjugated and extracted from in a colonial way also received extra privileges and continued to be a sort of lesser core for the new American imperial holdings in Asia and the Pacific.
Like the American economic strategy for how to exploit all of those countries was a model (which was explicitly racist, because of course it was) drawn up by an Imperial Japanese economist and the State Department internally was explicitly describing their strategy as wanting to rebuild and restore Imperial Japan as a controlled client state of the US. But then the economic model imposed on Japan itself was also one of colonial extraction as it was industrialized to produce commodities for Americans to consume and harsher working conditions were imposed on Japanese workers on the suggestion of American businessmen.
Ireland not being coloured as colonised is sending me. I understand it’s Europe but how are you going to exclude one of the prototypical examples of colonialism?? Many of the colonies on this map were modeled after the Irish experience. Also love how French Guiana, a literal actual still extant colony in South America (see the little sliver of grey in the north), is labeled as “Europe” because it’s technically a metropolitan province of France (like Algeria was). And Liberia never being colonised by Europe because it was actually colonised by freed American slaves who went “back” to Africa to then immediately set up a horrifying simulacrum of American slavery by enslaving the indigenous Liberians and having actual slave labour until the 1920s. Real “oppressed merely dreams of becoming the oppressor” hours. And of course Korea was a very explicit colony of Japan for decades.
Liberia was practically a dictatorship for most of its existence. Elections were not fair and fraud was ridiculous. The US controlled almost every aspect of the army and the government. Then, when the American-Liberian president William Tolbert began to make reforms, pushing away the US and initiating relations with the USSR and China, the US supported a native coup by Samuel Doe, which started massacres and repression supported by the US. Until Charlie Taylor attempted a coup in 1989 that broke the country and started an open civil war
The scale of the tragedy is incredible, straight up apocalyptic
Europe was also colonized by Europe over and over again
Turkey is considered part of Europe here so shouldnt Saudi Arabia be darker shade of blue because of the Ottomans?
