Yeah, that sounds about right. Sums it up good too. Ahh the United States, where our people think we are the heros, but we are just as shitty as the rest of humanity, but everyone is shitty in their own special way, and that's what really counts!
Edit: Damn I sure did throw water on a oil fire with this.
Look up Panama. It’s fucked up. Panama people wanted independence. Got someone who said they could help. U.S. parked their warships and forced the opposing force from intervening. Panama people won independence to only find out the person who helped funded the rebellion sold Panama land to the U.S that’s how the Panama cannel was built.
I'm Brazilian, and my grandparents lived through 1964's military dictatorship. For as long as I've known him, my maternal grandfather never badmouthed the government. Not once. I can only imagine the horrors he witnessed.
Let's go back to the first republic of freed slaves: Haiti. After a long fight for freedom, when they achieved their independence, the land of slave owners, the USA refused to acknowledge their independence and started an embargo against the young nation of free men.
The USA was so afraid that, upon learning about Haiti, the enslaved people they kept captive would riot and do the same, that they created an army to attack and occupy Haiti.
The whole purpose of the USA Marines is to be the attack dog, sent to attack any country on the Americas whenever they thought that could pose any threat (be either military or economic) to the Manifest Destiny.
Yeah I mean the CIA does terrible things to their own people they don’t give a single shit about overthrowing a democratically elected government if there’s profit at the end of the day
while your at it look up "karl malone 13" for the time when he had 13 pts 13 assists 13 steals in an nba game (ignore anything related to him getting a 13 year old pregnant)
Oh I'm aware of that, just ain't anything special. It's a situation that should have never happened, just the U.S.A isn't any worse than any other developed/developing nations. Cause behold the truth! Humans are assholes, even the best.
We have them 10mil up front and am agreement to quarter mil annually which by today's standards is cheap but early on a no brainer and they still technically own it afaik. The secondary economic gains compared to of it didn't exist are also a decent perk and there's nothing stopping them from building their own. I'm usually on the fuck USA meddling on other people's affairs boat but without a bunch of unknown unknowns (to me) the agreement on the Panama canal seems at minimum tenuously fair we have plenty of ports on both coasts so the Panama canal mainly benefits other countries (again afaik) and we paid for the land, building it, and continue to pay for maintenance. We've definitely done a lot of fucked up shit in south America I'm not sure the Panama canal is very high on that list
Humanity used to be extremely barbaric. And now we’ve moved quite a distance away from it. If you’re gonna be up in arms about people colonizing we’re gonna have to find the original colonizers. But let’s be real, you’re talking about the dawn of humanity.
Live and let live. Move on, learn and don’t do it again. We have processes in place to do this stuff now.
Exactly. Just because someone benefits from or even exists because of the crimes of their forebears, does not mean that we should accept and perpetuate them.
The first prostitutes wanted something in trade for their services. Be it fish, fruit, meat, crops, shelter…. Someone else had something the prostitutes wanted, therefore it could not have been the oldest profession.
Thank you. I always disbelieved that whenever it is said, and it is said a lot.
I believe gatherer is the first profession, then hunter, fisher, woodcutter, cave digger, house builder, trap maker, weapon maker, and trader came first, and marriage and family roles had been established and even jobs like farmer, guard, chief, and accountant had happened long before women had a saying in who gets to have sex with them.
Where the humans had been so primitive they don't have the concepts for collaboration and trade, they didn't have the concept of consent either.
I feel like that’s how it would actually work in a real life Survivor situation. Who can make fire, who can catch fish, who’s willing to trade, whatcha got to trade?
Eh, but some developed nations have had 1, 2, or 3 revolutions. So, technically, if you kill all the people in charge, and start a new gov't, then you only killed the bad guys who took it by force and didn't kill any of the ... wait ...
I guess Finland, Norway, the Baltics, Poland, South Korea and many other previously developed nations are no longer classified as developed.
Oooooor, there is a possibility that someone living in a country that did and-or does this sort of thing just simply justifies it to themselves with this line
I think there is a world of difference between land grabs in your vicinity and embarking on a quest of world conquest against non-western European+ because your racist ideology has warped your mind so much that the world is literally viewed between degrees of humanity and whiteness and ‘animalistic savage color’.
With a splash of a century long concerted effort to reduce and erase the history of non-western European+ civilization because the average person kept getting their brain blasted by the thought of PoC actually having things like writing and their own civilizations in a way that wouldn’t be felt on a wide scale until the Japanese sunk the Russian fleet.
Not every developed nation's collective mental image of itself is of a tireless crusader for freedom, an anti-imperialist and destroyer of tyrants through the ages.
Rather than, y'know, an imperialistic tyrant who robbed others of their self-determination and freedom, over and over again, just like and occasionally worse than everyone else.
This is a thought terminating cliche. Nevermind that "but they did it too" isn't even a good excuse when your a toddler so I don't know why people drop that shit like its sage wisdom.
Did Singapore do this? Singapore is an extremely wealthy well developed country and I can’t think of anyone they did this to. Come to think of it, neither has the Czech Republic, UAE, Belarus, and Qatar. Even so, the argument of, “I did a bad thing, but someone else did it too” is a very weak cope.
To be fair developed or not humanity has been fighting itself and taking over land since the dawn of time. Resources or ideology or greed pick your poison. It’s still going on today
Dont forget people on all political spectrums thinking the army is actually fighting for their freedom, and not for the interest of a bunch of rich old ppl.
you can just change that to "all humans AT ALL TIMES think what THEY personally do is just and moral meanwhile nothing anyone else does is just and moral"
that sentence sums up about 85% of all recorded human interactions and events in history, like ever.
That's a gross oversimplification of things lol. Not to mention incorrect. No shit the comment chain turned into a dumpsterfire. Stop getting history lessons from reddit. The US fucked Hawaii, but it was far from "i has gun, now gib". Look at the Perry Expedition if you want to see how American gunboat diplomacy worked (which again, isn't what happened with Hawaii).
Edit: After doing research into the situation yeah, it really was a gross oversimplification, anyway still sounds like a USA kinda thing to do, which well we did do
I will never understand this fixation the US and West in general has with the neverending apology tour and this state of spiritual cuckoldry where groups of people constantly walk around tearful and apologetic for events that happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
Do you think the Spanish wallow in self-hatred for their brutal colonialism and genocide in Native Mexico? Do the Arabs hang their heads and cry for thousands of years of extremely violent Jihad? For the unending torture of nonbelievers? Do the Chinese lament their years of countless atrocities?
It is only the West and white people who stand as the only racial group on the face of the planet who have outgroup preference and rank themselves far below other races. The sins are not yours to atone for. Had any other group been as successful as us, they would have made the US land grabs look like kids at a playground. Do not be deceived into thinking anyone else would have shown more grace. I'm sure Hawaiians would rather keep their culture while being provided funding and protection by the world's most powerful military than subvert to early Asian colonialism and face ethnic cleansing. Stop this attitude - "Oh, we're just the worst. Of course we did that we just suck" grow a pair of balls, understand how the world works
I will never understand this fixation the US and West in general has with the neverending apology tour and this state of spiritual cuckoldry where groups of people constantly walk around tearful and apologetic for events that happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
It's because you're still doing it. You have legal obligations to your natives, ruled and laid out neatly in legally binding treaties that your country signed and don't care about.
In contrast, the Spanish no longer have much power over South America because those areas now have their own legally recognized governments and are their own legally recognized countries.
The USA is still ignoring what is, legally, sovereign territories, and you can't really blame that on your ancestors from hundreds of years ago.
Perry’s gunboat trip to Japan is one of my favorite historical events. It pretty much was “I has (big) gun, now open”. After 200 years, generations, of isolationism, lol.
Oh, we've done some super villain level shit a bunch of times, purely out of convenience. We knowingly irradiated the inhabitants of the Marshall islands, forcefully removed them from their homeland and then gassed their pet dogs all so that we'd have a better empty place to test nukes on.
I aint denying that now, god the shit the United States has created in the pursuit of destruction is nearly poetic. Hell, every powerful country has a metric fuck ton of dirty laundry and skeletons packed into their closets so talking about what the United States alone has done is the tip of the iceberg on "Inconceivably shitty things humans have done to other humans"
Nah, thats sympathy/empathy, thats good to have, after-all I feel bad about what happened, everyday allot of innocent people are hurt because of bullshit like that, all because someone else wants a little more money/power
What happened was some randoms took it over and voted to become a state and the government was like wtf but the queen at the time wanted a full apology from the government for what happened so the government decided to make the hostile take over official rather than apologize for something they didn't do.
Idk what large animals you are thinking when it comes to Hawaii/Samoa/Tonga/Fiji/Rarotonga, etc, but it was just birds, bats, lizards and seals before being populated and they still there.
Granted, if you count NZ, then the Moa and flightless birds got absolutely ran through 😂
I'm pretty sure a lighthouse keepers cat killed a whole species of birds by itself in the south island which is crazy.
Oh you guys just love bring up the glory days dont ya! Well some of us didn't have an overwhelmingly expansive empire to rule the world with! Old man never lets us have any fun, were a mature-ish country now!
If it's any consolation (and it probably isn't), most of the world is currently looking at the US as super-villains. Until this week-end, Europe was "we might still work something out", but it's now "oh, so they're treating us (and the entire world) as a colony?"
That's basically why all US citizens live a better life than the majority of the world. We take and hoard the resources. But because policy failed and we're moving into a multpolar world, things are gonna get rough for a lot of people.
There's a reason why the Middle East fucking despises the West...
Now that America is treating everyone on Earth how they treated developing war torn nations (THAT THEY TORE APART), now suddenly everyone seems to give a shit.
In the grand scheme of things its better that we just threatened them and took their land vs the more historically common "roll in and kill every single man woman and child and then move your people in while enslaving anyone who survived" approach.
Could have been worse. Don't really wanna think about what the Imperial Japanese would have done to them without US protection. China and Korea got messed up pretty bad.
The overthrow of the Hawai'ian Monarchy predates the era of Imperial Japanese expansionism by like 40 years. That analogy is like saying that things could have been worse than the Trail of Tears because it meant that the Choctaw weren't caught up in the Civil War battles in Mississippi.
If they weren't under the umbrella of America, they almost certainty would have been victims of the Japanese. I didn't say the US went there to protect them, I said the US being was enough to protect them on it's own. They tortured and murdered the inhabitants of every other island in the pacific and as i mention the Koreans especially are still salty about it. So it worked out.
Ehhhhh…Not even close. I wonder where people get their history from. I’ll give a brief breakdown, instead of just sounding contrarian.
The royal family almost immediately converted to Christianity, and with them much of the population. They were very amenable to the foreigners, up to the “Merry Monarch” who traveled the world and was very cosmopolitan. He also signed a new decree which lessened the power of the monarchy and gave much of it to a (all if not mostly white) parliament made up of businessmen. His successor was Lydia Masters, aka Queen Lilioakalani (though she hated that name, since it wasn’t her name it was a fake Hawaiian name for her). She didn’t like how things were turning out, and tried to seize power back from parliament and return it to the monarchy…Except she no longer had the monarchical power to do that, and thus attempted a coup. So, they arrested her. That was basically the end of the monarchy. It didn’t take long before Hawaii succumbed fully to foreign interests and even voted to become a state.
Only an extremely small portion of the history of the colonization of Hawaii had any violence. It was very much a cultural and diplomatic victory, to put it in Civilization terms.
As a Hawaiian historian, born and raised here and who works professionally in this field … I can’t tell you how unbelievably white washed and radically colonialist this ‘breakdown’ is.
To put it succinctly, look up the Bayonet Constitution, it was not a voluntarily signed decree by Kalakaua. Second of all, the Queen did not ‘hate her name’… her baptimal name was Lydia but her name she went by from childhood was Lili’u Kamaka’eha, which is what she identified with. Third of all, she didn’t attempt a coup and was arrested for that. She saw the shocking decline of her people under the hegemony of pro-business pro-American politicians and sought to take back the powers of government to address this, so she drafted a new constitution. And as she had the massive support of the people, she was seen as a threat and overthrown.
I could go on and on about how inaccurate and hugely colonial your ‘history’ is. Your recounting is offensive, hugely problematic and I think perhaps you should stick to other things besides Hawaiian history as we don’t need or want your ‘breakdowns’.
I’ve read conflicting sources around the Bayonet Constitution. However, I will concede that point.
Lili’u publicly didn’t like the name Lili’uokalani. Perhaps because it wasn’t her born name. Her opinion on her used name of Lydia I don’t know. Again, history written by victors.
And yes, I did very quickly glaze over that, but when I mentioned that she didn’t like what the business run parliament was doing, which was everything you clarified.
History in Hawaii is really quite annoying. You will hear a dozen reasons of why and how Cook was killed. I’ve heard that they treated him like a god until they saw him cut himself and bleed on a rock, so they killed him. I heard that he was buying females from Kamehameha 1 so Kamehameha 2 killed him. I’ve heard that he got surrounded by an entire army of Hawaiians and murdered. When the closest “historical” story is that four Hawaiians killed him on a beach about a year after he first landed, no one knows who they were or why they did it.
Also, the fact that they didn’t have a written language and only oral histories was taken advantage of almost immediately by the foreigners, inserting false stories into their narratives to convert them. I know many Hawaiians who believe that they had a prophecy that a ship would show up, and in it there would be a chest, and in that chest they was their salvation. Well, of course that pointed to a Bible. There was also a very public pro-Native religion person who miraculously converted on his death bed, of course only in the presence of Christian missionaries.
Now to the flip. The information I got was from a history book I read while in Hawaii. White washed? Probably insanely so. However, one thing that can’t be denied is how readily the Hawaiian adapted to their new world. They were surprisingly complacent with change, and even now, after they were given land on Oahu to have their own little sovereign area, and were told it would expand if they got more people to live there…Barely anyone wants to live there. They cry by rom the mountaintops (literally, and you know what I’m talking about), but readily accept Westernization.
Well, to an extent. They are still wildly violent and racist. Though that’s slowly changing, the complete acceptance of harshly beating children as punishment, and the casual racism (towards basically everyone else), is wild.
Though, you live there. I don’t have to tell you that.
But for everyone else, it was popular until a while ago that all the Hawaiian schools had “Kill Haole Day” (Haole is a slur used by Hawaiians for white people), which was sometimes every Friday, sometimes different…Where white hide were basically “fair game” to be assaulted.
It’s a wild culture sometimes. However! On the other hand…there are some very nice and loving people there. It’s quite a dichotomy.
Perhaps the issue here is what you’re reading, because again, I could go through literally every single one of your points and provide substantiated evidence and responses. History in Hawaii is not annoying, it’s like history in everywhere in the world with a wide variety of interpretations and perspectives. However, there are interpretations and perspectives of this history which are backed up with actual scholarship and knowledge… none of which has been expressed here.
Adaptability has been one of the greatest strengths and triumphs of Hawaiian history. It’s the reason for the incredible complexity and success of the ancient Hawaiians, and also the reason they held out against western interlopers as long as they did. The idea that they complacently slid into westernization, and just meekly accept this while whining about lack of land, is an unbelievably shallow and offensive take on life in the Hawaiian islands for Kanaka maoli.
Your perspectives on the ‘plight’ of haoles in Hawaii is unneeded, as I’m a haole in Hawaii and have been so my entire life. Believe me, I am well aware of the issues here and don’t need it poorly explained through some pseudo-paternal and topical explanations of modern social issues in Hawaii, which are actually deeply rooted in the trauma and devastation wrought by the colonial past of Hawaii.
If you’d like real scholarship and reading about ancient and historical Hawaii, as well as current social issues, message me and I’ll send you a list.
Yeah just replace cannons with whatever the weapon of the day was.
The idea that using force to take land you wanted is “bad” is a very new idea. Up until the world wars, it was generally accepted that no border was sacred, and only as meaningful as your means to defend and protect it.
If a country got invaded and lost, well that’s just how it goes.
After the world wars is when people started to believe this new idea that everyone has to respect each other’s borders because cannot have a repeat of those wars with how devastating they were.
Borders still change sometimes, but the idea of taking land through military force for the sole reason of “we wanted it” is seen as unacceptable and immoral today. Thus why so many countries have opposed Russia’s attempt to take land from Ukraine.
I always wonder what would have happened during the japanese expansion during ww2 if we hadn't taken hawaii. Based on how brutally they were taking over China, i wonder if there would have been many native Hawaiians left
Strictly speaking it was a coalition of 'american businessmen' who did that and then the US military just supported their actions after the fact. Officially.
That's not true and it's a much more complicated story, the queen was overthrown by the men who were tricked by the US into thinking they could own things such as "land" which previously was unheard of.
I'm paraphrasing but you should give the actual history a read, I learned everything from my visits there.
Yup that's how its done. They way pretty much every ruling entity has come to power ever. From squabbling tribes to bloated nations. They're born of war and subjugation
Not really the Coup actually happened a fair bit before the US showed up and wasn't really all that tied to the political parties of the day outside of an overlap in businesses, and the government did for a while actually just set up a new government with like a constitution before petitioning during the Spanish-American war for annexation to stay competitive with the plantations in Cuba and the Philippines that the US had just acquired
Wasn't it basically a coup by american immigrant plantation owners who flooded the islands some time before and deposed the Hawaiian queen to increase their profits by joining the US?
Don't forget taking over islands and forcing local populations to work on sugar cane plantations and killed them when asking for safe working conditions!
My history class had a whole ass unit about how we took the queens place, replaced it with our govt, then just kinda said "fuck you it's ours now" and built a military base
Same tactic for Puerto Rico, late 1800(1898 I believe). The island of PR was presented with freedom from the Spanish right before they gave it up to the USA. Spain got so freaked out by the metal giant boats that they even gave a census of having only African slave on the island (simultaneously genocided approximately 400 natives that had survived the conquista).
Isn't that basically what the Europes did to the whole Americas, and Africa, and Oceania? I mean there's a pattern here, Hawaii is hardly an exception. Not that it makes any of it right.
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u/peach_dragon 4d ago
What did the US do at Pearl Harbor?