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talkpoliticsAn imperialist power whose actions were soaked in the blood of the locals over a strip of line it drew on a map by sheer arbitrary power taken in the rarefied counsels of its capital has made arrogant demands that heroic anti-imperialists should stand down as they deny it the victory of the faction it wants to see win. This power has been the most avid state beside the superpowers to wage the war in Syria, and has waged wars in Libya and Mali without hesitation, and with minimal effectiveness.
The state in question is France.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/24/syria-war-unga-france-warning-russia-extend-ceasefire
France was the state that after getting the shit kicked out of it in the Napoleonic Wars chose to cross the Mediterranean, invade Algeria, colonize it and reduce the locals to a tenth of their own land, deny them any rights or even the prospect of assimilation had they wanted it (and most of them didn't). This Algerian War still haunts it now, and brought it to the closest it's come to a military putsch since the 19th Century.
In one noble gesture, the French officially admitted what people already knew, namely that they waged war via torture of the locals:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/frances-macron-admits-to-militarys-systematic-use-of-torture-in-algeria-war/2018/09/13/6b0e85cc-b729-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html?utm_term=.afc544bf6c0a
And then undercut that by honoring the colonialist stooges who betrayed their people to work with the savages who looted them and denied them their own land in their own countries.
https://www.france24.com/en/20180921-macron-harki-algerians-audin-france
Germany will pay reparations to Jews but not to the Herero and Namaqua, because white Europeans have a lobby that will make sure their genocide is honored and black people really don't.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/05/06/606379299/why-the-herero-of-namibia-are-suing-germany-for-reparations
Ironically the way these victims' descendants are pursuing the case? The evil US court system, part of the state that is the root of all evil that has ever been or will ever be, because nobody in all the world was capable of independent, though, action, deed, or willpower after the USA secured the Treaty of Paris boundaries in 1783.
https://www.thelocal.de/20180126/germany-asks-us-court-to-drop-namibian-genocide-suit
And not to be outdone, the Belgians are forgetting their role in the murder of Lumumba and acting like the CIA would have cared the Congo existed without that Belgian role (and more bluntly the uranium from that one-time natural nuclear reactor there):
And finally, the British people are entirely proud of their conquering a quarter of the world and unleashing on it the United States, the Israeli-Palestinian disaster, and the potential nuclear war with the Indo-Pakistani standoff. And oh, yes, the colossal bloodbaths in Nigeria.
Between them the European powers collectively (well, in practice it was Belgium, Spain, Portgual, the UK, Russia, and France and a wee bit of Italy) overran 75% of the world. Spain and Portugual overran between them all of South America and parts of North American and the Philippines before the USA swallowed up bits of their empire and the remnants split off into their various unhappy histories made unhappier by the overbearing Colossus of the North overthrowing their rulers on a whim and waging imperialism abroad for slavery.
European colonialism killed at least as many hundreds of millions in the name of civilizing the barbarous black African and yellow Asian and brown Asian as communism did and both more than fascism, due to the brevity of fascism's existence in the original model due to how poorly suited "Blood for the Blood God" actually works as a social MO.
This is a staggering bodycount with legacies clearly alive and well in the unrepentant and shameless attitudes of the people whose ancestors gleefully committed barbarism.
Of course the USA is no different in Puerto Rico, where we've waged a capitalist Holodomor via a hurricane, the Philippines where our involvement started on genocide and bad faith and has never been anything but blatant European-style imperialism, China until Mao replaced missionaries with the splendid Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Vietnam where we waged a French war even less well than they did and they didn't do a great job of it, and our idiotic wars in the Middle East.
We are an empire and no less repentant than our predecessors. Those who tut tut at us for the actions we took to prop up their dying empires and absolved themselves of willingly asking us and then pretending when we tried and failed that there was no blood on the hands stained red to the shoulders, and the mouths likewise.
The sheer unrelenting horrors unleashed by all imperialism are the single greatest inhuman nightmare in human history, and they can never in truth be confronted fully by the perpetrators because to do so requires admitting our prosperity, such as it was, and our cultural pride, such as that is, are rooted in blood and horror and pyramids of skulls.
Ordering the USA to maintain those empires when the locals were done with them and then wailing it was America's fault the attempt failed does not retroactively alter that reality, nor that the genocidal wars of savagery waged by Europeans, specifically Italians, British, and French (and Russians, though for some reason confronting people who send people the bodyparts of their families is less popular than the democracies, for entirely inexplicable reasons) have left lasting issues not so readily ignored. US terrorists are homegrown fascist white men who can't get their tube sock pregnant and no woman wants them so they go shoot shit up.
The European version are people radicalized by wars and the memories of wars and not the immigrants so readily blamed, because admitting the prior wars are still causing issues now requires an honesty nobody wants. There are no mass graves in closets people will embrace.
Such has it ever been, so ever shall it be.
The state in question is France.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/24/syria-war-unga-france-warning-russia-extend-ceasefire
France was the state that after getting the shit kicked out of it in the Napoleonic Wars chose to cross the Mediterranean, invade Algeria, colonize it and reduce the locals to a tenth of their own land, deny them any rights or even the prospect of assimilation had they wanted it (and most of them didn't). This Algerian War still haunts it now, and brought it to the closest it's come to a military putsch since the 19th Century.
In one noble gesture, the French officially admitted what people already knew, namely that they waged war via torture of the locals:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/frances-macron-admits-to-militarys-systematic-use-of-torture-in-algeria-war/2018/09/13/6b0e85cc-b729-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html?utm_term=.afc544bf6c0a
And then undercut that by honoring the colonialist stooges who betrayed their people to work with the savages who looted them and denied them their own land in their own countries.
https://www.france24.com/en/20180921-macron-harki-algerians-audin-france
Germany will pay reparations to Jews but not to the Herero and Namaqua, because white Europeans have a lobby that will make sure their genocide is honored and black people really don't.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/05/06/606379299/why-the-herero-of-namibia-are-suing-germany-for-reparations
Ironically the way these victims' descendants are pursuing the case? The evil US court system, part of the state that is the root of all evil that has ever been or will ever be, because nobody in all the world was capable of independent, though, action, deed, or willpower after the USA secured the Treaty of Paris boundaries in 1783.
https://www.thelocal.de/20180126/germany-asks-us-court-to-drop-namibian-genocide-suit
And not to be outdone, the Belgians are forgetting their role in the murder of Lumumba and acting like the CIA would have cared the Congo existed without that Belgian role (and more bluntly the uranium from that one-time natural nuclear reactor there):
And finally, the British people are entirely proud of their conquering a quarter of the world and unleashing on it the United States, the Israeli-Palestinian disaster, and the potential nuclear war with the Indo-Pakistani standoff. And oh, yes, the colossal bloodbaths in Nigeria.
Between them the European powers collectively (well, in practice it was Belgium, Spain, Portgual, the UK, Russia, and France and a wee bit of Italy) overran 75% of the world. Spain and Portugual overran between them all of South America and parts of North American and the Philippines before the USA swallowed up bits of their empire and the remnants split off into their various unhappy histories made unhappier by the overbearing Colossus of the North overthrowing their rulers on a whim and waging imperialism abroad for slavery.
European colonialism killed at least as many hundreds of millions in the name of civilizing the barbarous black African and yellow Asian and brown Asian as communism did and both more than fascism, due to the brevity of fascism's existence in the original model due to how poorly suited "Blood for the Blood God" actually works as a social MO.
This is a staggering bodycount with legacies clearly alive and well in the unrepentant and shameless attitudes of the people whose ancestors gleefully committed barbarism.
Of course the USA is no different in Puerto Rico, where we've waged a capitalist Holodomor via a hurricane, the Philippines where our involvement started on genocide and bad faith and has never been anything but blatant European-style imperialism, China until Mao replaced missionaries with the splendid Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Vietnam where we waged a French war even less well than they did and they didn't do a great job of it, and our idiotic wars in the Middle East.
We are an empire and no less repentant than our predecessors. Those who tut tut at us for the actions we took to prop up their dying empires and absolved themselves of willingly asking us and then pretending when we tried and failed that there was no blood on the hands stained red to the shoulders, and the mouths likewise.
The sheer unrelenting horrors unleashed by all imperialism are the single greatest inhuman nightmare in human history, and they can never in truth be confronted fully by the perpetrators because to do so requires admitting our prosperity, such as it was, and our cultural pride, such as that is, are rooted in blood and horror and pyramids of skulls.
Ordering the USA to maintain those empires when the locals were done with them and then wailing it was America's fault the attempt failed does not retroactively alter that reality, nor that the genocidal wars of savagery waged by Europeans, specifically Italians, British, and French (and Russians, though for some reason confronting people who send people the bodyparts of their families is less popular than the democracies, for entirely inexplicable reasons) have left lasting issues not so readily ignored. US terrorists are homegrown fascist white men who can't get their tube sock pregnant and no woman wants them so they go shoot shit up.
The European version are people radicalized by wars and the memories of wars and not the immigrants so readily blamed, because admitting the prior wars are still causing issues now requires an honesty nobody wants. There are no mass graves in closets people will embrace.
Such has it ever been, so ever shall it be.
(no subject)
Date: 25/9/18 08:09 (UTC)Yep.
The suggestion is that all empires are Tamerlane in petto. The Australian Aboriginal peoples will attest to this, as will the Maoris, the Irish and even the Northern American indigenous peoples, though they had a better deal from us than from you chaps.
I must agree. So our post hoc judgements become relative; ergo, one looks for the least bad model, which can sometimes be difficult. Wading through the rivers of blood to do the body-count in order to come up with sensible statistical analysis which can be placed in context makes any historian of decency liable to PTSD.
Some of us are proud of our countries right or wrong. I'm not one of them, as you know. But I do allow context to inform my opinions. Dead is dead, but if I had to be a living subject of a C16th-C20th Empire, and then gauge my probabilities of surviving and prospering, even relatively: if I were White, I'd want to be under American rule; but if I were Black or Asian I think I'd rather have been a subject of the British, than the Americans, French, Belgians, or Germans - at least statistically speaking.
But in the context of the colonial horrors/the horrors of slavery/how bad it was in the past, where do you think you would get best advantage for you and your offspring, if you will allow me to frame the question in a Selfish-Gene context?
I wouldn't equate being Black in the Deep South as being quite as immediately universally existentially threatening as being Jewish in Nazi Germany for example. But it is still too horrible for someone like me to understand, so maybe I can try to balance or weigh the abstracts without understanding; because that is the only way to deal with it without throwing-up.
Nevertheless I have to agree that all of what you say is true, for a given value of truth.
(no subject)
Date: 25/9/18 12:15 (UTC)That is true, and yet I've found that bringing up that colonialism in the US sense is replacing a European empire with our own variant and that the locals don't forget the European variant just because we take over for it, and that in fact our taking over for them is no small part of where hating us *starts* tends to fare....poorly.
(no subject)
Date: 25/9/18 23:05 (UTC)So I guess, we do our best; for less should be beneath us.