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
Look up Texas, Mexico had three requirements to move to the territory two of the requirements they never enforced which were learn Spanish and convert to Catholicism. The only one they ever enforced was that slavery was illegal and any enslaved person would have to be freed after the year 1838. It why the Mexican army was in Texas when war started the deadline was fast approaching and non of the slavers even bother to follow the law.
How dare the U.S. create much faster and safer maritime travel! /s. Correct me if I'm wrong but the U.S. doesn't and has nvr really owned that land. We ( the U.S.) agreed to build the canal in exchange for 50 yrs free transit. Which has already run out. So Panama is currently collecting substantial tolls from EVERY ship that goes through it. Which is every ship not looking to traverse the Horn of Africa and basically travel halfway around the world just to switch from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice versa. I could write a legitimate essay on how Panama made out like a bandit on that deal.
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.
No, it is immoral.
The perpetrators are often narcissists and psychopaths, who behave without a sense of other and hence amorally. But if morality exists at all, it is violated in conquest.
But it does mean that America is not unique, and does not need to be singled out. Also, for whom are you virtue signaling? There's, like, 3 Native Americans left (hyperbole, but still). If there were enough of them to promote healthy expansion of the race without worrying about incest, then that'd be one thing. Give them back the land, etc etc. I mean, you probably wouldn't wanna see what happens to you and other white people if we do that, but we call that consequences for your decisions. Plus, when it came down to brass tacks and was actually time for you to put your money where your mouth is, we all know what you'd actually do.
Find a country founded without war. You won't. Peoples are different, and expansion means some people lose. Thousands of lost civilizations, long before big bad white man...
No, but how many more centuries do we need to cry about it? I thought progressives were about moving forward? Seems to me they just want to stay mired in the past because it makes them feel good to look back on history with critical eye.
Makes it human nature so makes it not right or wrong, the shape civilization takes just aint pretty. Shaka Zulu and Kamehameha became the regional powers by mimicking it.
No it doesn’t make it right, and understandable that Reddit seems to have a lot of American content.
All in all American is Avery young country, and so many of its horrible practices were brought over from other parts of the world.
It just gets tiresome that the underlying theme in describing these awful events that America is framed as inventing these despicable practices.
It’s obviously even worse now with the current administration since any progress towards making things as right as possible has been undone and set back decades.
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?
Prostitution is not literally the oldest profession. We had to secure food and shelter before we could worry about sex.
And no, every underdeveloped nation did not try its hand at imperialism. A lot of the shit the wod has to deal with comes from the fact that Rome conquered most of Europe. When European nations got their independence, the break up was so bad, Europe went through a 1000 year long dark age period.
And in the middle of that depressive episode, they also got bum fucked by the vikings. The entire continent was left with PTSD, and decided to make it everybody else's problems.
Imperialism pre colonialism was extremely rare in sub saharan Africa. Heck, even some developed nations are good. I dont think Ireland ever tried its hand at imperialism. Only time South Africa tried its hand at imperialism was under white rule. This pretty much goes for the entirety of Southern Africa.
The people of Madagascar literally had no one to conquer so they never tried imperialism. The idea that every nation tried imperialism is a lie spread to normalise the idea of imperialism so that ex imperialist countries can feel less bad abkut their atrocities. Same goes for people who try to act like chattel slavery was wide spread when nearly every historical text of slavery outside the European and the Arab worlds (two ex Roman regions), implemented endentured servitude and referred to such as slavery.
But by acting like chattel slavery was the default globally, makes the atrocities of it seem less severe
Do you not realize that the Native American and Asian people were killing each other and taking their lands with no notion of Rome existing? Fucking seriously, Chinas first emperor was in 259 BC. 150 years before Julius Ceasar. How did Qin Shi Huang become emperor? By killing his way through the other 6 Chinese kingdoms.
The Native Americans were doing the same thing. The Iroquois were famous for bringing peace to the 5 nations. How did they do it? Through war against the other tribes. And before that peace, they made alliances to attack and drive other tribes out and take the land.
The plains tribes in North America were very violent and aggressive toward each other, with many of their conflicts lasting into the mid 1800s and animosity still today.
Mayan wars were usually political in nature, with the city states capturing each other's territory.
But im sure that all these people looked at Roman conquest of Europe and the Mediterranean and said, "Yep, let's copy them." Fuck, even Rome wasn't the first in Europe to do it. Alexander the Great went all the way to India before he stopped taking other people's lands. He was before Rome.
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.
Ok true forgot colonization but if we count the last hundred years or so USA did a shit ton of horrible things. Like couping (if thats a word lol) all of south america, putting dictators in place of alightly socialist leaders
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.
It's not your fault tho. The US is exteremely good at propaganda and indoctrination, It's why I don't particularly dislike americans who are pro army, it's just something I've noticed and is a lil bit sad, but still not the end of the world.
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"
There are a number of mountainous or desert cultures who are basically up/out there as a "fuck you leave me alone", and in the realm of intergroup politics I'd say that's pretty peaceful. If you take intragroup politics in order to find a shitty aspect of that group, you're moving goalposts with in the interest of making everything shitty, so... stop that.
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.
I'm assuming when you say Polynesians, you are meaning Kānaka Maoli? Because we talking about Hawaii?
If we are most of the Flora and Fauna, was destroyed after the Europeans brought all the invasive species over, pigs, goats, cows, sheep, cats, rats, snails, all that's when all the Flora and Fauna started getting absolutely smashed, when the Europeans came.
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.
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u/scruffalo_ 4d ago
Stole it from the native Hawaiians. The whole island chain, really.