“It has been dubbed Britain’s ‘most woke’ roundabout because drivers must give priority to pedestrians, then cyclists, and then other cars and lorries before continuing on themselves. Locals have pointed out the priority for cyclists and pedestrians is unnecessary as only cars and lorries regularly use the Boundary Way route.”
Facile and lazy. In reality, the norms and practices in “third world” countries are pretty comparable no matter who, if anyone, colonized them. It’s just a question of development. Not everything in the world is the responsibility of big bad white man.
Now, the OP is a bit reductive, as lots of colonizers fucked things up. But it’s so fucking funny to me that people take it personally when you point out that humanity experienced massive waves of cultural homogenization due to imperialism and colonialism.
Think I’m just talking about European settlers? That’s racist. Not everything is about the “big bad white man.” Entire swathes of human population hold roots that go all the way back to Khan. He literally has a genotype named after him, because he sowed his seed across the world. It’s not racist to talk about that. Romans had their fun too. Latin sure is popular. Weirdly enough, they didn’t lead directly to Latinos. That was other empires. Slavic is pretty common. “Chinese” sure is a massive and diverse group of people for a country with a single timezone. Only difference there is, they never left.
Norms and practices differ wildly between cultures. It’s incredibly, wildly ethnocentric to claim that culture is just a function of “development.” To claim that the cultures of people with roots in Slavic, Latino, or French, all just sync up once they reach the industrial age. It’s the most quintessentially colonial idea I’ve ever heard.
Of course the history of imperial expansion and colonization impacts the cultures they paved over, and leaves a lasting effect. Of course the world is forever changed, when a single group of people conquers most of the known world. And unless there’s a goddamn time traveler from Victorian England, nobody was talking about a “big bad white man.”
Chill, bro
If anyone’s “fucking” taking things personally here, then it’s not me.
The argument I was responding to is an obviously ahistorical attempt to blame almost literally everything on “Victorians”. That’s dumb for exactly the reasons you just outlined.
(E: whoops, yes I did suggest it was personal. That’s a fair contention, sorry for that.)
I don’t like the trend towards censoring swear words (not that you did) and interpreting them as inherently hostile, I genuinely do find it funny. But I am hostile towards the idea that all cultures are basically the same once they “develop,” that’s just a fucked up statement.
Most of the third world literally was colonized by Victorian England, though. The rest was mostly colonized by a number of other predominantly white empires.
All those other empires I described almost exclusively stayed on their own continents. It was primarily Western Europe that conquered the entire Southern Hemisphere.
About “fucked” this and “fucked up” that, personally I just see it as laziness and weak language skills. Always reaching for the bazooka because hunting for the scalpel is too hard. But it’s probably a bit generational too.
On empire, it’s the story of humanity. Every nation in the world has been either the author or the subject of imperialism, and it’s usually nonstop back-and-forth. Sure, the European empires were the first to cross seas, but why should that change anything fundamentally?
Personally I find it interesting to observe the relative fates of those countries that choose to dwell on their imperial victim status, and those that don’t. Look at the different outcomes of Algeria and South Korea, for example.
Eh, to each their own. I find them to be a touch of salt and spice, useful adverbs for emphasis.
It informs the origin of influence. The OP you responded to suggested that a lot of “third world mentality” is really just the aftereffects of the first (and often only) empire to conquer and colonize the region.
This is massive “chicken or the egg” territory here. It’s silly to suggest that an entire nation is suffering from victimhood, when the much more likely scenario is that they were victims of worse / more recent abuse.
South Korea has tremendously different geopolitical conditions that lead to its modern success. It was the staging ground of a proxy war (sorry, “police action”) because it has significant strategic importance, and the US had clear and transparent interest in developing and maintaining a successful capitalist society.
The US literally still holds the line at DMZ, not many other nations ever enjoyed the stability of developing under the umbrella of the world’s most oversized military instead of being pillaged by said military.
Whereas Algeria had lots of oil.
As you say, Algeria sat on natural resources. It also had a “better” experience of empire than Korea, which was absolutely brutalized by Nazi-adjacent Japanese, leaving it (IIRC) the 2nd poorest country in the whole world. Korea has no natural resources, as doesn’t Japan, possibly the world’s least colonized country. The different trajectories of these three countries suggests very clearly to me that degree of empire-suffering - at the hands of “white” people or otherwise - is not the determinant factor in human development. Nor are material resources. It is something else. But anyway, none of this is falsifiable, neither of us is going to convince the other and nobody else is reading, so let’s call it a day there.
It’s almost as if the nation of Algeria was specifically colonized for those natural resources, and people have continued to fight over those natural resources, because they have always been attempting to extract those natural resources.
Look into the railroad structure of Sierra Leone. They don’t connect the people. They connect the mines to the ocean.
Those natural resources are the exact reason why these nations haven’t been able to recover. There are incentives in place to stop them from flourishing. They don’t have time to stabilize because there is a pot of gold sitting on the table, and everyone wants it. This is literally why Taiwan still hasn’t achieved sovereignty, and why the Middle East is constantly awash in a river of blood.
Also, Japan? Really? The literal former empire? The former empire that also flourished in the aftermath of WW2 because it fell under the umbrella of the American military? Because of its incredible strategic importance in the region? Literally the exact same situation as South Korea?
Seriously, these aren’t good comparisons. At all. Claiming that Algeria suffers because it wants to be a victim - and then justifying that stance by comparing it to Japan and South Korea is so fundamentally wrong that it’s genuinely fucked up to say these things. The shit you say is falsifiable, you just don’t want to listen.
These nations uniquely benefitted from the influence of a white empire because they weren’t plundered for natural resources, they were reinforced as a wall against the Red Scare.
So please define for me - exactly - what you think that something else is.
Just popping in to say that others are reading and I found your exchange interesting. Have a good day!
It was all worth it, then. Thanks.
Yes all third world countries are the same /s. Not at all a reductive viewpoint.
Techno fascists have set our world on an unsustainable path and it is past Colonial powers that started that. So, revisionism aside, those “big bad” technology and industry obsessed empires will be attributed most of the blame and they better fix it or we won’t be here much longer.
That, or China will have to fix it since Western countries have been thumb twiddling for decades (despite being the source of the problem). Either way it will be ugly once past colonial powers lose their shine and history reflects an honest assessment of them. “Great” Britain is already a shadow of its former self. More will follow that march into relative obscurity as the rest of the world fixes the mess they created.
The cultural, economic and environmental impact of the Colonial era is much more profound than most know (largely because its ignored in most Western curriculums). You may not recognize issues if you’re white or man, but that can be remedied by going outside and speaking to people that don’t look or talk like you.