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talkpoliticsThe founding and most driving elements of world history have tended to be Empires, whether trulthfully so or merely seen as so by the biases of the historical record and the imperial elites being those who commission and commissioned the histories and built the Ozymandian monuments for the mighty to look on and despair as they become derelict and rotten and covered in vines and fungus, the pedestals obscured in languages forgotten and unreadable to later years.
All Empires are foul and evil things that blight whatever they touch.
Whatever good they produce is by sheer accident, a chance set of decisions that tend to rebound on the creators as their not entirely willing figures who were 'aided' to be grateful for the invaders who came in and looted and raped and massacred them taught them to rewrite the destruction of their own ancestral ways as somehow being benevolent, or a good thing. Whether it's Basil Bulgaroktonos at Kleidon, Colonel Chivington at Sand Creek, Julius Caesar slaughtering a third of Gaul, selling another third into slavery, and creating the most horrible of all his legacies, the French, Israel creating a diaspora of its own with irony sufficient to choke on it, or what have you.....empires rise in the same means and are sustained by the same means.
Soldiers march in and raise pyramids of skulls and because the people massacred lack the ability to halt or reverse the blood-tide that flows and drowns their ways, they are rewritten into treacherous and brutal savages who deserved it, and the reward of brainwashing the shattered PTSD-ridden survivors into aping the slogans of conquest is pretended to be one, and not something to shun.
The imperialism of the Congo Free state and of the settler-colonialist states, of Nazi Germany and the USSR, of the Western Hemisphere's awe-inspiring chattel system that dragged millions into an endlessly hungry maw of hellships filled with vermin and filth and the reeking bodies of the dead and created the African communities of this hemisphere, and then a lesser community of the original Indians when the Africans decided if it was all the same to them no they wouldn't work for their former masters for money, all of this built the modern world.
It is built atop a foundation of evil that cannot be redeemed nor readily altered.
What then does one make of a world whose cornerstone is laid, and whose foundation rests atop the bleached bones of those whose true morality was to resist the very thing that made it? How can a moral world be built when the very societies that lead it, for a loose sense of that word, are built atop evils that will never see true justice?
Is there any kind of justice here, or is there just rearranging the chairs on death row to make the inmates feel better about the injection and the electric chair?
I've yet to find an answer here in fifteen years of pondering this question and I'm sure I could live for millions or billions of years and still not find it. But....it is one that continues to haunt me.
All Empires are foul and evil things that blight whatever they touch.
Whatever good they produce is by sheer accident, a chance set of decisions that tend to rebound on the creators as their not entirely willing figures who were 'aided' to be grateful for the invaders who came in and looted and raped and massacred them taught them to rewrite the destruction of their own ancestral ways as somehow being benevolent, or a good thing. Whether it's Basil Bulgaroktonos at Kleidon, Colonel Chivington at Sand Creek, Julius Caesar slaughtering a third of Gaul, selling another third into slavery, and creating the most horrible of all his legacies, the French, Israel creating a diaspora of its own with irony sufficient to choke on it, or what have you.....empires rise in the same means and are sustained by the same means.
Soldiers march in and raise pyramids of skulls and because the people massacred lack the ability to halt or reverse the blood-tide that flows and drowns their ways, they are rewritten into treacherous and brutal savages who deserved it, and the reward of brainwashing the shattered PTSD-ridden survivors into aping the slogans of conquest is pretended to be one, and not something to shun.
The imperialism of the Congo Free state and of the settler-colonialist states, of Nazi Germany and the USSR, of the Western Hemisphere's awe-inspiring chattel system that dragged millions into an endlessly hungry maw of hellships filled with vermin and filth and the reeking bodies of the dead and created the African communities of this hemisphere, and then a lesser community of the original Indians when the Africans decided if it was all the same to them no they wouldn't work for their former masters for money, all of this built the modern world.
It is built atop a foundation of evil that cannot be redeemed nor readily altered.
What then does one make of a world whose cornerstone is laid, and whose foundation rests atop the bleached bones of those whose true morality was to resist the very thing that made it? How can a moral world be built when the very societies that lead it, for a loose sense of that word, are built atop evils that will never see true justice?
Is there any kind of justice here, or is there just rearranging the chairs on death row to make the inmates feel better about the injection and the electric chair?
I've yet to find an answer here in fifteen years of pondering this question and I'm sure I could live for millions or billions of years and still not find it. But....it is one that continues to haunt me.
