It is practically the same, you're beholden to all the laws of the European Union without having a say in them. Kind of like Puerto Rico, which is still considered a US State despite having no votes in congress.
The best book I've ever read isn't the best book I've read but one that connects me with a particular moment: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov.
It was the start of summer school holidays back in the late 1980s, in my teenage years. I went to my local library and, because I didn't know what I wanted to read, I decided to pick one book blindly from the fiction section. I didn't know what book I had borrowed until I got home. I had never heard about Bulgakov or that particular novel. I had no easy way to know who that writer was or if the book was good or not. I was tempted to return it. But I didn't.
I read the book over several weeks of a particularly boring (and lonely) summer. I enjoyed reading it although I didn't love it. Looking back, I suppose that book gave me something I needed in a completely random way.
The fact that, as you say, "it's just a military base" is the consequence of the forced eviction of the local population (around 1,500 people) in 1968 by the US and the UK.
That’s not a lot of people. More people probably lost their homes to Hurricane Helene just this past couple of weeks. And the average Mauritian wasn’t even born in 1968.
Saigon fell in 1975. Millions of people fled the country in fear for their lives or gave up their children, with hundreds of thousands dying in the process. The fall of South Vietnam was a humanitarian catastrophe on a monumental scale, and basically no one cares about it anymore. And you’re expecting me to care about 1500 people being peacefully resettled from one island to another? All of this handwringing is a disingenuous excuse to vilify Britain and the West in general from the very same people who sympathize and make excuses for the Vietnamese communists even to this day.
Edit:
If we were holding a consistent standard here, we would have to say that the Vietnamese government should withdraw from illegally occupied South Vietnam and return it to the people who were violently displaced in 1975. Nobody advocates for this. Vietnam has somewhat liberalized into the kind of country that doesn’t do this sort of thing anymore and the refugees of 1975 and their descendants have built new lives in the countries they ended up in, including the United States. This sort of revanchism causes more problems than it solves, and there’s no obvious limit to it. Should Turkey return Constantinople to the Greeks? If we want to learn anything from history, it shouldn’t be a catalog of ancestral grudges to be settled; it should be that holding onto these grudges achieves nothing.
+1 for Addy, been using it for ~2 years now with my personal domain and its been great.
I want with Addy over others because plans are per badwidth used instead of per alias, so one-time email verifications for some signup doesn't count towards a total limit.
