double post
You are wrong, even based on your idea of “best interests”. The West and its closest allies such as Japan, South Korea or Australia are good because they tend to seek prosperity for both their people and the friends outside their borders. Prosperous friends make potential customers/human resources so everyone wins.
The major decisions made by leaders in countries such as Russia hurt not only their own people’s interests but often that of their neighbors(Russia has no friends, try guess why that is). Moldova is partially occupied, Georgia and even Ukraine, Russia’s “sister” country, suffered the same fate. How have the Russian people benefited this? Russia is most certainly evil.
This is absurd. There is a point where your hyperbole goes so over the top that it discredits your entire argument.
Yep.
Denmark dominated the North Sea and Baltic area on and off for 500 years. First peaking with Canute the Great, who bring Norway and England under his rule (the first North Sea Empire). Upon the loss of the West, Danish attention instead turns east, where the Baltic coast is conquered in a series of crusades. That fell apart as well (as tended to be the case for most Empires during the era), but Danish dominion peaked against under Margrethe the First, who through marriage, diplomacy, and judicious application of force brought Norway and Sweden (including Finland, Greenland, and Iceland) under Danish rule. Although Sweden was lost a generation after her death, Denmark remained the most powerful state in the North until Sweden usurped that position during the Thirty Years War. Even with that loss, Denmark remained a powerful player in European politics (in part because of large land holdings in North Germany), up until the Napoleonic Wars (the Danish colonies in the Virgin Islands, for example - later sold to the US - were conquered from the Dutch Republic). Denmark remained a significant power in European politics until the Napoleonic Wars (when the fleet was lost in war with the British, followed by the loss of Norway to Sweden).
Sorry, when people talk history, I can’t help myself:
P.S. Historically Danes? Not Good Guys.
Nor were the Swedes,
And Iceland - those guys used to take summer trips down to ireland, Scotland and England to rape and pillage.
I have seen the argument put forth that Greco-Roman ancient slavery, at least, was probably less harsh than the Southern Plantation style.
However, I think you could make a very good case that slavery in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) was even worse. It was crazy brutal over there.
Anyway, there’s a billion variables and holes in knowledge so very hard to pin it all down.
The hurricane is a partially valid comparison. Many of the people who died in Iraq died not because of terrorists but because their infrastructure had been destroyed. That was on us. The US did place Iraq under sanctions for ~12 years, damaging much of their infrastructure. We caused infrastructure damage during the first Iraq war, continued it with intermittent bombing after the war, and then did even more damage during the second Iraq war. We also failed to keep order after the invasion, resulting in even more devastation. If you destroy a city’s power, water, hospitals, police department, and economy, you don’t just get to sit back, go ¯\(ツ)/¯, and pretend like you don’t have responsibility for the resulting chaos and deaths.
I would also dispute your continued use of the word “terrorist”. We were the ones who traveled to the other side of the planet to wreck their country. We were the ones who set up torture camps in their country. We were the ones who completely upended their social, political, and economic structures (as unjust as they were). If the situation was reversed, and the Ruskie’s flew into our country and occupied it, the word you would be using for the resistance would be “freedom fighters” or “patriotic veterans” or “people who no longer had a job and signed up to fight just to get food”. I think you’re using the word “terrorist” waaaaaaay too liberally, and it’s hiding a ton of history and context. If you have a chance, I’d really, really, really recommend viewing this FrontLine piece:
(or reading the book Fiasco, which is longer but also good)
So to draw from the FrontLine video, what do you do if your local police department is heading out each night, picking up a few dozen of your tribe, and then dumping their tortured bodies in the police parking lot in the morning for their families to find? If you fight back against that, are you a terrorist? Were the Shiites that we installed and that were committing state violence also terrorists? Should we have turned around and bombed the government we just finished installing? The word “terrorist” isn’t at all accurate, and it hides way more than it illuminates here.
As for the infinite recursion of blame, don’t worry! I have plenty of blame to go around. I’m perfectly capable of blaming everyone involved to the precise degree that they deserve. I do blame Hussein for being a mini-Hitler, I do blame the CIA for supporting him, and I do blame the British for intentionally creating a state that would be divided and unstable. I also blame the USSR and Stalin for forcing us into having to care about the Middle East in the first place. My judgementalism is an infinitely renewable resource. But it is helpful too, as it is important to perceive the world accurately as a first step towards making better decisions. And we can talk more about that in part 2 of my lecture series.
Edit: Sorry, I messed up the FrontLine link.This is the one I should have linked.
OK, this is a valid critique to a point. The uniqueness of the antebellum plantation system (and New World slavery in general) was that it was based on race, which allowed a slave society based on multi-generational slavery. That was new, that once you were a slave, you could expect that all of your descendants would also be slaves. Chesapeake states had perhaps the most hardline laws in this regard ever, including laws against manumission, i.e. it was illegal to free slaves, and laws granting total ownership over and above the right of life and death, including the right to dismember them to prevent flight.
Can’t you guys just come to the conclusion that like all human organizations everywhere and at any time, it’s had good effects and bad effects, depending on who you are and where you live?
The ideal, the whole “Being American” being something that anyone* could aspire to, that it was built from ideals and thoughts, and not blood and history, that one was great, but the practical side, much like any other empire ever, you take your good with the bad. Your roads, public safety and irrigation with your brutal repression and slavery. Your flags, manners and 4º clock tea with your brutal repression, racism / class system and systematic plunder of resources.
There are no Hollywood good guys, not really.
And Japan has always been a “good guy”?
I don’t know enough about the histories of South Korea and Australia to comment on them. But I would argue that the larger and more influential a country is the less likely it has a clear history of always doing good to it’s neighbors.
I think if you talked to some Aborigines, they would have opinions.
Urban, domestic slavery could be relatively comfortable, especially if you were an educated Greek and were lucky in your choice of owner. But the vast majority of slaves worked on agricultural estates where the work, and the treatment were brutal. While the mines were a straightforward death sentence. And grim as the stories of trans-Atlantic slave trading are, they don’t bear comparison to Roman methods.
Oh, and let’s not forget crucifixion as a routine punishment.
But we get all of history to compare, so how about we start with Nazi slave labour. Less cruel or unique than American slavery?
But this isn’t even vaguely true either. Africans on the Barbary Coast, and steppe Asians from the Khanates traded large numbers of European slaves. Arabs on the Indian Ocean traded huge numbers of African slaves.
And however bad antebellum slavery was, it didn’t have galley fleets.
I thought the idea that galleys in the ancient world were operated by slaves has been somewhat debunked or at least challenged?
Not trying to get into an argument, just making random observations.
Right, but galleys in the early-modern Mediteranean definitely were.
Ah, didn’t know that.
It’s time to acknowledge that I’m out of my depth here. You probably won’t be able to convince me that America is the shining city on the hill, but you’ve convinced me that our horrible system of slavery wasn’t uniquely bad in history. Strangely, this doesn’t make me feel better.
Some points to note:
- Abu Gharaib was the exception, not the rule. And once it became apparent what had happened there, it was shut down, and all those involved were disciplined in various ways. Further, while entirely unacceptable to us, Abu Gharaib was mild compared to torture enacted by Hussein’s own government against its people, which had gone on for decades, and would still be going on today if Hussein were still in power.
- Upending a Stalinistic system that systematically murdered and oppressed its people is not something I’m ashamed of. If one good thing came out of Iraq, it was the removal of Hussein.
- While there were certainly Iraqi insurgents in the early years of the war, there were non trivial numbers of straight up terrorists, who were not Iraqis. All the Al Qaeda guys were from outside Iraq, and then the Islamic State guys. A bunch of these attacks weren’t even aimed at police or government forces, they were aimed at shiite and kurdish civilians. Blowing up buses with religious worshippers in them are acts of terrorism in my book. Ultimately, a lot of the native Iraqi Sunni insurgents ended up turning against these guys around 2006.
Iraq was not a good place in 2002. Certainly, it had suffered from the repercussions of the first Iraqi war, but what should we have done then? Just let Iraq invade and take over Kuwait? Hell, even before that, Iraq was a fucking nightmare if you weren’t a baathist.
The US made a ton of mistakes in Iraq, but I don’t think they were guided by malice… Whereas the actions of Hussein himself, absolutely were. If evil exists, he absolutely was it.
If you want to watch a good - and fairly accurate - documentary on the modern slave trade, get hold of the recent French TV mini-series “Les Routes de l’Esclavage” (Slavery Routes). It goes all the way back to the Roman Empire, and traces how Africa became the enslaved continent (as usual - follow the money).
I particularly like how they trace how slavery developed into colonialism which was effectively slavery v2 - all of the colonial nations exploited native labor in Africa in ways that were absolutely barbaric (with the Belgians in Congo being the standout most barbaric).
Worth watching, if you can get it in your language.
…as long as they weren’t too high up the chain of command. I mean, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Dick Cheney, Bush Jr and a host of other folks responsible for the whole “enhanced interrogation” thing that Abu Ghraib was [art of all seem to be fairly unscathed. (A significant failure of Obama, in my opinion.)
Crikey, I knew they couldn’t be perfect. :)
This is the only point that really matters. For whatever nitpicking there is about US history and it’s various blunders or shortcomings in past and present, the world would be a worse place for commerce and civil freedoms if led by any of the other realistic candidate, or simply lacking any leadership.