this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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We were never that great. We got to where we are through exploiting the natives land and through slavery. Also rampant sexism and homophobia to name a few. But if you don't give a shit about any people in those categories, i.e. only care about white people and even that mainly just white men then sure I guess we were great back then.
Meh, we were great at many things, and horrible at many things. Life is grey, not black and white.
Every nation on the planet has sins. I'm not minimizing America's; they are grave. But across the world, throughout history every parcel of land was taken, and every nation has at one point exploited it's people. It's childish to imagine any nation/culture/people is clean.
Certainly not agreeing with the "back in the good old days" rhetoric. As you point out, "the good old days" weren't so good if your skin was the wrong color, or had polio, or didn't want to serve in a war, or many other reasons.
Colonialism is definitely a unique sort of evil. If you don't think that I'm sceptical that you're particularly broadly read.
The scale of atrocities committed is just beyond comparison, like the most hardcore genocide in ancient times (that we have evidence of) was against a single city. In colonialism we are talking about continents.
Huh? Various ancient peoples led continent wide conquests. In the new world and the old.
I'm not saying modern nations are "better", I'm saying human nature, the process of power, and the means of acquisition are uniform through time. Further, nearly every section of territory we are discussing was "conquered" multiple times.
Of course there were less people there hundreds of years ago, that doesn't change displacement/ acquisition/genocide/ etc
So genocide is the key word. A lot of conquest did not involve the displacement or extermination of entire peoples until colonialism.
Conquering a place was largely "so you pay tax to me now" prior to colonialism, at which point it became more "so you are subhuman and need to be exterminated or bread of of existence"