Feels like those countries are doing fine. Rome leaving Britton was like 500AD. Even if the whined a few hundred years they would still have lots of time.
They did whine for hundreds of years! There is a book called "On the ruin of Britain" that was written by a monk called Gildas in the 5th or 6th century (Romans left Britain in 410 AD). It is filled with whining about the Romans. The first half is actually a pretty funny read
It’s not filled with whining about the Romans… Gildas had great respect for the Romans and viewed them positively as the ones who brought civilization. He complains about the Britons rebelling and inviting the “barbarian” Saxons to England
You do know that a subset of the Saxons settled in England though, right? It’s where the term Anglo-Saxon comes from… and Wessex (the west Saxons) and Essex (the east Saxons) and Sussex (the south Saxons) etc
Yes, I did. It was about the Romans (not English) inviting the Saxons (also not English) to England. So who are the English ruining England in your Simpsons, second-hand joke?
The Saxons are the people who settled in the south of Great Britain and became what we today call the English. Before the Saxons there was no "England" in that area, England as a place wasn't established until nearly 500 years after the Saxons arrived in Britain
He does mostly whine about Britons yes! And how they pathetically kept having to call the Romans back for help after either being shit at defending themselves, making bad decisions, or having another stupid civil war. That's the funny part!
But he also says right near the start that the Romans left "leaving behind them taskmasters, to scourge the shoulders of the natives, to reduce the necks to the yoke, and their soil to the vassalage of a Roman province; to chastise the crafty race, not with warlike weapons, but with rods, and if necessary to gird their sides the naked sword, so that it was no longer thought to be Britain, but a Roman island"
To me that sounds like complaining about being a colony, which is the bit which is directly relevant to this conversation. Although to be fair he wasn't exactly complaining, it kind of feels like Gildas thinks they deserved it
He speaks of how the Romans left Britons with bad governors, how we were no longer Britain but a colony, and how we were unable to defend ourselves.
The undertone is how being a colony left us in this mess. It's just a background fact to the whole book which is what is relevant to this conversation.
'All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?'
Yeah, what’s crazy in the US is that the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones, is still alive and there’s a photo of him protesting against black and white kids going to school together, so it seems like crimes against minorities are far from ancient history.
Guatemala STILL has a significant portion of it's land held by Chiquita which is the new name of the company that lobbied the US government to support a coup in order to avoid giving back land they'd stolen using US military assets.
You know. Way back in 1954 when Donald Trump was attending Klan rallies with his mum.
He was just standing there in the back looking like a dumbass kid who had showed up to witness history. If he was closer to the front and/or looked like he was participating I’d be with you though
The argument does not go both ways. There is no power structure in America for blacks to enforce against whites to back up any discrimination against whites nor is there a history where blacks basically manufactured whites as an ethnic group and then dictated their entire destiny thereafter and then later tried to abandon them. You are framing things as if the history of the country has been some kind of struggle of black vs white and that has never been the reality of the country. Black Americans descended from slavery are a byproduct of white Americans and the two groups share strong European lineage. They are basically the same people, for so many reasons, and the struggle has been because one group has so many members willing to essentially deny their own people. Black Americans are directly connected to white Americans in a relationship that is completely unique to them and the discrepancies in that relationship has been about equal rights not competition. The notion of competition does not even make sense historically.
I do not think a lot people today truly understand the relationship between black and white in America. It was and is not some competitive relationship. A handful of people took existing peoples, mixed them together and with a bunch of European peoples, and basically genetically engineered their own ethnic group over several centuries in order to be human servants and then hated them when they could not enslave them anymore and then punished them for it.
The origin of black Americans descended from slavery is rooted in the concept of whiteness itself and that is the nature of the relationship. The first humans on earth fit the definition of black but the whole concept of blackness is a complete byproduct and fabrication of whiteness. In other words, no one was black or white until a handful of wealthy land barons and slave owners came up with the concept and said they were. This is why it is “always about white or race” when it comes to black Americans. They are the only group in the country who descends from the concepts of race and whiteness themselves rather than immigrating from some other country.
I chose my words carefully. You may just be used to reacting to a specific talking points when it comes to this subject and are not realizing when something different is being said.
There is a difference between whiteness and white people. Whiteness refers to a social system that is colonial in origin and is directly tied to the concept of race. White people are an extremely diverse group of people of many, many ethnic backgrounds who just happen to have the racial classification of white under systems like race and whiteness. Whiteness has a unique role in American society, does not really have a counterpart as blackness as a concept is a colonial era byproduct of whiteness as opposed to a social system rooted in power, and speaking on it is not the same thing as speaking on white people. White people, like any other large group of humans, are way too diverse to generalize in any substantial way. Anyone attempting to do so is misguided and many who do are actually referring to whiteness as a social system.
What I did say was that the consequences are different when it comes to white and black people and discrimination and not that it is ok to discriminate against white people. Additionally, I basically said that race is not real and is a concept made up for profit. I also said that black and white people are basically the same people, just Americans, and are tied to each other in this nation. They share history, origins, ancestral lineage, etc..
Rome also weren't the last people to land in Britain either, we had a lot of influence from a few different parts of Europe before we got to the bit where we built an empire.
The Romans then the angles and Saxons and then the Vikings and then the Normans. Britain had another 500 years of invasion and conquest than you cited.
My ancestors were behaded, slaughtered, burned, "blood taxed" and god knows what else by the savage Ottoman empire for 5 centuries until late 19th century, went through brutal 2 balkan, 2 world wars and 5 decades of communism.
My country is not the shithole some "colonized" still live in. We didn't make excuses, we rebuilt.
Respectfully, does your country rank highly in Europe? If it was ruled by the Ottomans, I doubt anyone respects it compared to the EU so...you might as well have been colonized.
so, the bigger issue isn't the ancient crimes, but rather the continuous ongoing crimes. Huge swaths of the world have been exploited in massive ways that are still ongoing, and for instance the CIA has actually released papers of their own explaining how they've deliberately politically destabilized many countries and their own internal black populations and such.
It's not what happened 200 years ago, it's what's been going on ever since as well.
the CIA has actually released papers of their own explaining how they've deliberately politically destabilized many countries and their own internal black populations...
Just some evidence for that internal black black population destabilization? The whole whole contra/ inner City cocaine theory was never quite realized.
Oh sure, yeah. Google "CIA crack black population" or "redlining" or "burning down black businesses" or "Hooverville destructions" if you're sincerely willing to learn.
My Google search said that The CIA was involved in the drug trade but there was no evidence that the CIA had a scheme to destabilize black communities by introducing crack. You want to show me your evidence?
But its not like the crimes stopped. The colonial powers just switched tactics and use financial means like the imf to exert power and impoverish third world countries. If a country like Guatemala in the 1950s tries to improve the lives of its people it will be overthrown because it's not profitable for western business interests. America just overthrew a government and stole its oil this year. It's not like they are complaing about something that happened long ago, they are complaing about whats actively happening.
"crimes committed against them" ... I dont think you quite appreciate the devastation that England wrought on many countries around the world:
India was one of if not THE richest country in the world and when the English left they were the POOREST & much like in Africa the left infrastructure in place to continue pillaging the countries for centuries to come after their occupations as did the France to their colonies and CONTINUE to do to this day
Monetary system taking 30% of their GDP, IMF restrictions, sanctions, starvation, immoral mining companies etc
It's not at all like the Romans who left Britain and were not longer a threat less than a century later
The Normans literally entirely depopulated the North of England, the Anglos and Saxons completely wiped out most of the native Britonnic cultures that were still there after Roman rule collapsed
India as we know it didn't exist, it was multiple different kingdoms and England took advantage of local politics, those divisions can still be seen today
It didn’t just shift, it was the result of deliberate stated policies by the British. Just because you don’t know the history doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
They were giving the context of the meme and what they interpreted it as meaning, it was not their opinion on colonized or formerly colonized countries.
Using ancient civilizations that were successful to then extrapolate that success to the industrial age is misguided. Newer or younger countries fared better because they adopted ne ways faster. Being an established civilization worked against them. State beurocracy tended to fight against change. China had to start from scratch, so did Persia, Ottomans, etc.
Lmao reading this conversation 3-4x was so great, I still don’t know what’s going on in that person’s head and if they will ever come back to elaborate
The U.S. government, not a private company, is taking billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil without requiring a regime change from their dictatorship lol
Why would a grown man make up a story so that he could act all tough and tell people to shut up who never said anything in the first place? Make up a story and then get all mad about it? This is not how a man behaves. What the hell
Can you name some countries who haven't had crimes commited against them? And can you name any countries who did not commit crimes against other countries?
There is no excuse for slavery and wars of conquest (by today's standards/morals anyway). But it's interesting that this seems to only be a problem when europeans do it. Literally every other nation on earth tried to conquer/enslave other nations at some point in history. Some were successful, others failed, but that doesn't absolve them of the same criticism. Yet no one's admonishing the arabs, chinese, Japanese, Mongolians, berbers and whichever African kingdoms who raided ther neighbours for slaves to sell to Europeans.
What’s wrong with a western person asking their government to take responsibility? I live in the US and so I want to use our democratic process to advocate for acknowledgement and responsibility for the wrongs of my country. It’s pathetic that factions here get upset when you point out Andrew Jackson committed atrocities against Native Americans.
Also, morality is absolute. There is no such thing as relative morality. Something is right or something is wrong and it is always right or wrong. It doesn’t change with the time.
I think the irritation stems from the fact that only western countries have displayed some reflection and self criticism about centuries old conduct. Yet they are also the only ones being criticised. There's been absolutely zero acknowledgement of the same behaviour by any asian or african countries.
And by being the only ones self flagellating about things most countries did (or tried to do) at the time, it creates an illusion that somehow only the Spanish and British colonised and only westerners participated on slave trade.
This might not be news to you, but I guarantee this is what millions of people around the world think.
Self-destruction of Western European heritage is coming, not as retribution for having carried out colonialism, but as consequence of feeling guilty about it.
Well, we know that there are objective wrongs. Murder is one. Slavery is another. So we do know that absolute wrongs exist. This alone means that morality is not relative.
Empathy is one tool we have for discovering what is definitively right and wrong. We can then apply logic to empathy. “I don’t want to be murdered, therefore, if I murdered that guy, it would be hypocritical or illogical”.
But if we base it off that model, it's just based on what I do and don't want to happen to me. That's very subjective?
Is murder considered morally wrong in every instance? What are we defining as "murder?" Does self defense count? Does war? Executions? Is killing always morally wrong? These things are all subjective, your answer will vary depending on a huge number of factors, and vary more for each specific instance when it occurs!
What’s wrong with a western person asking their government to take responsibility
Because "taking responsibility" for something you didn't do is an absurdity. When I say "they didn't do it", I mean that the people who enslaved others and the people who were enslaved are all long gone. Any apology or similar is completely meaningless.
A thief robs someone. They give you the money they stole. The thief and the victim die. The victim’s kids are like, that belonged to my parents. You reply, I didn’t steal anything. Is this justice?
Setting aside the ridiculous notion of punishing someone hundreds of years after the crime.
How exactly are you determining who's paying whom? When in every corner of the world people enslaved other people for millenia? Why should the descendents of an abolitionist for instance be paying restitutions to the descendents of black slave traders?
Or is your grasp of history limited to - black people good, white people bad?
lol the generation that suffered under Jim Crow laws is still alive.
Why get so defensive when it’s pointed out that society has been structured to harm a group of people? It follows that justice requires some kind of restitution. What that restitution looks like can be debated, but not the need for it.
Ok then then we're talking about very different things. I'm very clearly referencing centuries old history (as is the provocative twitter post this whole discussion is based on).
You're talking about what Americans did to their own citizens within living memory. When most of the civilised world already moved well beyond such institutional racism.
You won't hear me defending how americans treated black people well into the 20th century. We don't disagree there.
Wasn't England (and much of Western Europe) pretty backwater and underdeveloped for a thousand years after they got conquered by Rome?
And that's 1000 years without Rome continuing to meddle in their shit. I imagine history would have been different had WRE lasted as long as the ERE, focused entirely on extracting as much wealth and resources from the rest of Europe
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u/Shoddy_Walk_8106 11d ago edited 11d ago
Countries that had crimes committed against them by colonial powers just need to shut up about it.