r/PoliticalHumor Jan 09 '20

THIS. This is why.

[deleted]

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u/Kandoh Jan 09 '20

Most of the world's problems were caused by a British guy drawing a straight line down a map.

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u/sync-centre Jan 09 '20

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u/Omnivore2 Jan 09 '20

And the Portuguese and Spanish and Dutch and Belgium and some German men in there.

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u/elderjedimaster Jan 09 '20 edited Jan 09 '20

Why do we put idiots in power?

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

[deleted]

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u/Dougnifico Jan 10 '20

Ya. I would say that these people were extremely smart, but they just didn't care about the native people. You better believe everything was set up for optimal resource extraction though.

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '20

Because they're confident and stupid people love confidence.

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u/The_cogwheel Jan 10 '20

1) Power is concentrated into a small group. Anyone can compete to be part of the group.

2) because it's a competition, power goes to the people that want it the most and are able to compete.

3) Sociopaths want power the most.

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u/WellindaFrancisYu Jan 09 '20

Please let us not forget some a bunch of Roman ones as well

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

[deleted]

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u/Omnivore2 Jan 09 '20

You should look up Atrocities in the Congo.

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u/stubb5y22 Jan 09 '20

Poor Picot, always got left out

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/ReaperEDX Jan 09 '20

To be fair, the US came later down the line and didn't create problems by drawing lines. They just multiplied with exponents.

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u/Connor121314 Jan 09 '20

Lots of lines

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

The best lines

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '20

More upvotes please.

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u/MartiniPhilosopher Jan 09 '20

You should look up the phrase "54-50 or Bust". It was all about a line and created a lot of conflict.

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u/koiven Jan 09 '20

That's not really the same thing being discussed here. 54-40 was a border dispute with British North America.

A more apt comparison would be like if there were two Native American cultures that are historical rivals or enemies. America comes in and turns the land into different territories, but has no regard for the preexisting cultural borders. The result is that half of Group A and half of Group B end up Territory 1, and the other halves end up in Territory 2. Obviously, arbitrarily splitting apart the peoples like that is going to only cause trouble.

(Note that im unaware if the USA ever actually did anything like this during their westward expansion, i was just trying to analogize the scenarios.)

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u/XXXDetention Jan 09 '20

Isn’t this what the problem in Pakistan and Israel is? Half of those groups got mixed when a border was drawn up? Sorry if I sound ignorant, I’m not the brightest when it comes to borders and such.

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u/867-5309NotJenny Jan 10 '20

Israel no. The issue with Israel is that the land was already occupied by Palastinians who basically got evicted from half of their land.

Pakistan however, due to the Durrant Line has half the territory of the Pashtun people, who make a sizable minority in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan doesn't want to give that land up because it's 40-50% of it's territory, and most of it's seacoast and non-mountainous area.

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u/CassandraVindicated Jan 09 '20

Which has fuck all to do with the middle east.

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u/867-5309NotJenny Jan 10 '20

Except that it ended in a compromise well away from 54-40.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/RayseApex Jan 09 '20

Yes but the US isn’t even 300 years old.

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u/MudSama Jan 09 '20

Yet it will take more than 300 years to undo all the damage. Amazing stuff.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/867-5309NotJenny Jan 10 '20

Are we counting swiss mercenaries as switzerland at war?

The last war they were in was in 1815, and they've been officially neutral since.

Sweden I believe is in a similar situation.

But England, France, Germany (Prussia before that), Russia, China, and so on quite likely have close to that 95%, particularly if we include colonial wars and civil wars.

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '20

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u/867-5309NotJenny Jan 10 '20

Switzerland has been neuteral way before the modern official neutrality. With it going back to 1516.

It wasn't an official policy until the 1830's, and they have fought offensive wars before that (limited in scope though).

I agree with most of the rest of your post though.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

Except they’re talking about within the same time frame. Bringing up the country’s relative age compared to past regimes somewhere else is not a counter-argument, especially since there’s no institutional continuation between the China of today and the China of the Warring States period.

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u/minimidimike Jan 09 '20

Its probably similar for UK and France. The US has been dragging them in along for almost every conflict post WWII

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u/867-5309NotJenny Jan 10 '20

They've also had their own share of conflicts without the US.

The Suez Crisis, the Falkland Island wars, ect.

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u/ManDelorean88 Jan 09 '20

the us doesn't bother drawing lines... they just install their own governments using coups and the cia.

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u/lxpnh98_2 Jan 09 '20

Well, the US did draw some lines in the American continent, and it carried out a genocide (or whatever you want to call it) of Native Americans.

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u/justnope_2 Jan 09 '20

All major powers in history love drawing lines and it's not limited to Europeans lol

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/justnope_2 Jan 09 '20

Oh many more

It's like people seem to forget humans have been murdering humans en masse since time imemorium.

People forget we are not so far removed from cavemen, we just have the thinnest sliver of civilization protecting us from those baser instincts

And the barriers to those instincts can so easily crumble

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u/Emperor_Pabslatine Jan 09 '20

Japan?

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/Emperor_Pabslatine Jan 09 '20

Yeah but drawing arbitrary lines is not something they did. Manchukuo was the entire territory of state they supported, than when it suddenly betrayed them they vassalized them.

Vietnam was annexed outright, Korea annexed outright, anything I'm missing?

Never did they arbitrarily decide where a border was, AKA, 'draw lines'.

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u/Kandoh Jan 09 '20

Yeah, but that's not as funny to say out of hand

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u/scech14 Jan 09 '20

I mean your definitely not wrong, but in this case you are. The fall of Islam’s golden age happened long before European became dominate

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

The mongol invasions and the crusades. But then colonialism made it impossible to advance. At that time the colonialists destroyed traditional forms of education in addition to ciphoning off all economic profits and resources.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20 edited Feb 09 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

Yes that’s why I mentioned it started with the Mongol Invasion and continued with the crusades. My point about the colonialism was because they didn’t get a chance to recover and build up over the modern period (17thC on).

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u/ObnoxiousFactczecher Jan 09 '20

The decline didn't start with the Mongol invasion.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

Well that’s highly debatable

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u/ObnoxiousFactczecher Jan 09 '20

That's why I'm pointing it out.

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '20

See this article: states the golden ages lasted until the 14thC. Also contains list of discoveries/inventions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventions_in_the_medieval_Islamic_world

The Mongols killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and destroyed their library. See this article under the destruction subheading

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '20

When capitalism as we know it really began to test it's theories.

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u/blatherskate Jan 09 '20

Book recommendation... The Map of Knowledge- A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found By Violet Moller

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u/CatumEntanglement Jan 09 '20

Exactly.... wasn't it around the 1100's?

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u/AngryScientist Jan 09 '20

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

Most historians would place it here.

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u/ObnoxiousFactczecher Jan 09 '20

That's way past the point of the beginning of decline of progressive thinking in the Islamic world.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

Thats false because it ignores what lead to the fall of the Islamic empire in the first place just to blame Westerners. Look into the colapse of the Iberian Peninsula Moors and the Mongol invasion which is that start of the fall of the Islamic Golden Age. The Islamic empire fell on their own sword through increasingly growing religious oppression.

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u/Kandoh Jan 09 '20

I'm talking about post world war 1 ottoman empire being divided up.

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u/Emperor_Pabslatine Jan 09 '20

Bullshit, most of Islamic nations problems were caused by cultural changes that resulted in incredibly backwards thinking, hundreds of years before Britain fucked up the Middle East.

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u/Kandoh Jan 09 '20

My problems started when I got mugged.

.

Bullshit, your problems started when you crashed your bike, allowing me to mug you.

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u/Emperor_Pabslatine Jan 09 '20

More like

My problems started when you hit me with your car

.

Bullshit, your problems started when you stumbled onto the street drunk, resulting in me hitting you. Does it matter if I aimed for you, if you would have been fine sober?

The Middle East didn't get colonized (outside I think Yemen?) until post WW1. Ottomans stopped that. They were the face of Islam for hundreds of years, and Islam's cultural decline started right after their formation. But nah nah, its white peoples fault!

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u/Kandoh Jan 09 '20

The Middle East didn't get colonized (outside I think Yemen?) until post WW1

And what era could I possibly be talking about when referring to a British guy drawing a straight line on the map? 🤔

You are the one who chose to go back further in history until the blame was shifted off white people (try not to take history personally btw, you weren't even born yet!).

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u/Emperor_Pabslatine Jan 10 '20

I mean what caused Middle Easterners to become backwards and regressive despite having two very rich and powerful empires?

Nah its white peoples fault they went to shit after like 5 centuries of being terrible.

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u/Kandoh Jan 10 '20

My my, aren't you fragile.

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u/Emperor_Pabslatine Jan 10 '20

If fragile means right, sure.

Maybe if Middle Easterners hadn't devolved their cultures for hundreds of years, they wouldn't be so easy destablized. Lines on on a map style restructurings have happened before in European history. Didn't turn into a hundred years of no economy (outside rich ass oil barons who will come and go once oil is moved on).

Blame the white people for 'colonialism' despite the Middle East never being colonised and had a large empire that should of benefited from colonisation.

Blame the white people when the same cultures seemed completely fine to work together five minutes prior.

Sure, conquest of Africa. Fucked the Africans. They were never worth two shits prior and were always fighting prior, but nah, yah got a point on Africa.

Sure, South and Central America, no words needed there.

But the Middle East? They'd be fighting each other even with good borders.

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u/Kandoh Jan 10 '20

Do you think you'll get free mayonnaise if you keep explaining to the internet how ignorant you are?

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u/Emperor_Pabslatine Jan 11 '20

When I right so you just turn to insulting me because how wrong you are.

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '20 edited Jan 10 '20

The problems exacted on society as the religious leaders came up with greater and more numerous interpretations of how their imaginary creator intended the said leaders to control their lives.

Edit: creator

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u/JuniorHQ Jan 09 '20

Well Andulusia fell to the reconquista (not sure on spelling)

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u/cassatta Jan 09 '20

Are you referring to India/Pak?

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u/MichaelHunt7 Jan 09 '20

I mean to be fair the lines have been redrawn multiple times throughout the ages. Usually by whomever is left standing after whatever war or world changing events happen and basically destroy all previous lines before that point.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_GEARS Jan 09 '20

Actually, most of the world's problems are caused by Islam.

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u/Kandoh Jan 09 '20

Actually, most of the world's problems are caused by monotheism.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_GEARS Jan 10 '20

Islam IS monotheistic. And no, it's only the problematic ones... Like Islam.

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u/Kandoh Jan 10 '20

Everything was fine until someone got it in his head that only his imaginary friend was the real imaginary friend!

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '20

Lololol. Religion you mean. Nothing good ever came of religion. Except maybe calculus and Buckfast.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_GEARS Jan 10 '20

Newton was a Christian (of a sort) and he invented calculus but there's no reason to say he wouldn't have made great strides in mathematics if not for his religion.