re: #692 Spare O’Lake

I hate to bring this up, but aren’t you forgetting the North Vietnamese military conquest of South Vietnam which occurred AFTER the 1967 Israeli conquest of Gaza and the West Bank?

Good question. I’m not sure what the “traditional” state boundaries were in that area previous to the French and Japanese exhibiting control in Indo-China. The area was partitioned in the 1950s, but how artificial was the boundary? Something I’d need to look into more. And the same would apply I guess to what the borders are for Laos and Cambodia as well.

And I wonder if the same applied to Korea right after WW2. Was Korea traditionally more of a monolithic cultural block with a “modern” artificial divide made, or was the border devised along something of a cultural split between north and south. (At this point I think there might be a readily identifiable cultural split there.)

Thus my quick answer might be that Vietnam was a country re-uniting by conquest. But I do not want to say that since I do not have the facts on hand to back it up. So I simply present that as a theory. :)