- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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Historians: Everything always bad.
God, ain’t that the fucking truth.
Tbf the last 300 years put the white people in a pretty comfortable first place.
Well yes, but once you start oppressing a people, they generally don’t get much of a chance to oppress anyone else.
Actually, quite the opposite is true for colonialism. Colonizers often chose a “favourite” group of local people and gave them a tiny sliver of power on the condition, that they help oppress everyone else. I’m not judging that btw.
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Are you trying to suggest that the Great Satan USA isn’t responsible for every single genocide in world history? Preposterous!
Indeed, everything bad that happened in any other country was caused by the USA, thereby proving that capitalism is the most powerful thing in the world. USA! USA! USA!
That type of comment is really taking the wrong lesson from OP. You are just doing more tribalism, now with a strawman.
The weirdest part is that the US never really got up to much imperialism compared basically every other world power.
I think it shakes out much more evenly if you count the westward expansion against Native American polities as imperialism. Don’t forget taking part of Mexico, opening Japan and attempting to open Korea at gunpoint, engaging in ‘unequal treaties’ with China, annexing Puerto Rico and the Philippines, occupying Haiti, etc. And the whole Cold War we engaged in a similar level of hegemonic imperialism as the USSR did, even if we were more tolerant of democracies on ‘our side’.
I love this stupid-ass country more than most (and more than I should honestly), and I go to bat for arguing against American Diabolism regularly, but we definitely have a long list of skeletons in our closets.
It engaged in a lot of imperialism, but then when it found itself on the top spot a new form of colonialism was being built, that of cultural and economic hegemony. Occupation by corporation rather than by military.
It’s called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism, tankies love this fallacy for some reason.
It’s “appeal to hypocrisy”. It’s very similar to butwhataboutism, but butwhataboutism relies on constantly shifting the focus and making the opponent jump through hoops while the butwhatabout-er never concedes anything. Hypocrisy is saying “you did bad shit too so you don’t get to talk.”
Historians looking for genocide in history:
Let’s try the commie shit again and see if it’s better this time around
Sure, but no Lenin 2.0 please. Oligarchies and dictatorships tend to go down the same tired old path.
Just one more revolution, bro!
It’s more like “communism has never been tried” and “that wasn’t true communism”. We’ll make sure it’s done right this time.
The nth time’s the charm!
tbf, gods only know how many anti-monarchial revolutions were between the first attempted peasant revolt and the mass fall of the anciens regimes
Well, the Alliance would never have invaded Draenor and put orcs in concentration camps if the orcs didn’t invade Azeroth in the first place!
tankies punching air rn
I don’t think there’s any evidence for genocide, but my pet peeve for this is how the indigenous people of the Americas are held up purely as victims, as if the concept of violence didn’t exist until Columbus arrived. When the Europeans first arrived in North America, the tribal villages they encountered were surrounded by fortified wooden palisades. Those weren’t just there as decorations. Everyone sucks.
I have yet to encounter this explicitly where someone would say that Native Americans were “purely victims”. At best, they aggregate and dehistoricize all tribes into a conglomerate term, “Native Americans”. I’m sure there are some who cling to the “n{now savage” trope, but I don’t see it these days.
What ever intertribal conflicts happened, they never reached the level of disease spread, displacement, and systematic violence aimed at cultural erasure. The unprecedented scale of violence unleashed by colonialism, which led to devastating consequences for these communities is important and to flatten the intertribal violence along side the colonial conquest is narrow minded. They may have sucked, but some far more than others.
What ever intertribal conflicts happened, they never reached the level of disease spread, displacement, and systematic violence aimed at cultural erasure
Not because they were noble savages though, just because they lacked the ability to do that to their enemies.
That’s a huge statement. Do you have equally damning evidence to support that statement?
Do I have damning evidence that humans are humans and behave the way humans always do?
I don’t accept your framing. Its defeatist and rooted in modern projects.
K
“I’ve never seen someone cling to the noble savage trope.”
“Intertribal conflicts between Native American polities were less brutal because of material constraints, not any fundamental cultural restraint on the behavior of human beings, which is largely consistent across recorded history regardless of region and culture.”
“I don’t accept that.”
???
Do you legitimately not understand how that is the noble savage trope?
The frame I’m rejecting is the idea that, given the same material conditions, all people and cultures throughout history would react in the same way. This view oversimplifies and dehistoricizes the diverse experiences of Native Americans, as I mentioned in my first comment.
Culture and material conditions are interconnected; they shape and influence one another. If culture only emerged from material conditions, then people would merely be reacting mechanistically to their environments, lacking the richness of creativity, belief systems, and individual agency that shape societies in diverse and meaningful ways. Recognizing this complexity does not mean I’m relying on the noble savage trope.
The way you dismissed my response was uncalled for. I’ve take time and care to craft my response to be honest and considerate. I’m not interested in a discussion that is otherwise.
The frame I’m rejecting is the idea that, given the same material conditions, all people and cultures throughout history would react in the same way.
Broadly speaking, they do. People are people. I didn’t realize we were entering into an argument where cultural chauvinism is the very foundation.
This view oversimplifies and dehistoricizes the diverse experiences of Native Americans, as I mentioned in my first comment.
How the fuck so? When Native Americans have, even just during the time period of European record-keeping, have been observed engaging in displacement and systemic violence aimed at cultural erasure?
Or are we laying it all on some strange notion of an especial-but-unproven cultural immunity to the development of novel diseases?
Culture and material conditions are interconnected; they shape and influence one another. If culture only emerged from material conditions, then people would merely be reacting mechanistically to their environments, lacking the richness of creativity, belief systems, and individual agency that shape societies in diverse and meaningful ways.
No culture yet seen has been observed to prevent human beings from acting in according with their own interests; our interests are determined overwhelmingly by material conditions.
The way you dismissed my response was uncalled for. I’ve take time and care to craft my response to be honest and considerate. I’m not interested in a discussion that is otherwise.
The entire point of the Noble Savage trope is exactly the line of argument you laid down. I’m sorry that you feel being called out is being ‘dismissed’, but perhaps before denying using a trope you should at least check what it means first?
This conversation has become repetitive, and it feels like my arguments are being mischaracterized as arguments I am not making. I reject the notion that people act solely based on material conditions, and I’ve articulated my view in full. Your insistence on framing my position as cultural chauvinism or invoking the noble savage trope is not only unproductive but also dismissive of the complexity I’m trying to convey.
You’ve called out a strawman and I am not interested in continuing this discussion.
I don’t think there’s any evidence for genocide,
Back up, there may not be evidence for a single, concerted policy of genocide, but there are many verifiable genocides of Native American peoples by colonial polities and societies.
I think they meant there isn’t evidence of Native Americans committing any genocides per se, but there is evidence of violence between them before colonists showed up
Ah, I misread it in that case.
What I mean is genocide by one native group of another native group prior to the arrival of Europeans.
My apologies, I definitely misread it then.
Regardless, they were still victims of colonial genocide, they didn’t have to be pillars of esoteric religious morality for that to be wrong. Considering how many wars between england and literally every other kind of person they could identify not being english, it’s hardly a stone to be thrown in this context.
Historians tells us that after the war the nazis vanished without a trace. But after Hess died they sure did come out of the woodwork.
Historians? Who and what are they?
Do they keep the secrets, or do we?
People just been fully convinced to hate themselves for shit that happened 100+ years ago
fuck tankies, but to be fair, capitalism is responsible for more suffering and death than any other ideology
Only insofar as one is willing to subsume multiple economic systems without even marginal ideological similarities between them as a single system that bears the guilt for the actions of the polity.
I wouldn’t say central planning has caused most deaths attributed to ML countries, and I wouldn’t say capitalism has caused most deaths attributed to non-ML countries. Both have caused more deaths than they have any right to, but the fundamental problem lays in political and military power more than the exact structure of economic hierarchies. They can feed each other, but then we must get into questions of how much guilt and in what proportion - especially since ideological application in the real world is rarely ‘pure’ - each piece holds.
Not only that, but these two economic systems have dominated an age where an order of magnitude more people live on the planet than previously. It may be technically true, for example, to say that capitalism or central planning has killed more people than feudal economic systems, but that does not really capture the actual moral value of each of the three.
Capitalism is shit. We need to get rid of it. But that’s not the same as saying it’s responsible for more suffering and death than any other.
With all due respect, this smacks of rationalizing. I’m not talking about ideology, I’m talking about outcomes. You and I both know that everyone who dies or suffers from a lack of healthcare, food or shelter, just as an absolute fundamental starting point, is a victim of our system of resource distribution. We have enough food and housing for everyone, but it isn’t profitable to provide it to those who need it.
It is a disgusting system and I agree with you, it has to go. And to get rid of it, we need to talk about how evil it is. Tankies are wrong because they want the system to persist but be controlled by the working class. But the system is the problem.
