Even in the past, US was more of a gangster supporting its gang rather than a fair hearted policeman. Its support to Pakistan during Bangladesh (East Pakistan) genocide is well known.
Or the Indonesian genocide. Or giving Pol Pot diplomatic cover as soon as they saw him as an enemy to Vietnam. Or couping essentially every country in Latin America.
The "policeman" narrative has always been propaganda.
The key point is not what they have done (too many examples of bad behavior to list.)
The key point is how they see themselves. The average American sees the US as "the good guys". This is not a self-image lightly over-turned. Regardless of how the rest of the world views them.
This is subjective, but I think this image wasn't uncommon in US-aligned countries either, but at least this seems to have changed in the last decade or so.
Anyway the part that makes the us unique is pretending to be ethical, which makes a farce of the entire concept of ethics. Admitting the entire concept of america is based on justification via violence would be a massive step forward
This person has and used to prefer a conversation style that is not according to the average population. Outliers should be allowed to exist as long as they are not evil.
> necessity to cultivate trust and comfort in others before,
Con artists are very adept at building up such conversations. So the trust and comfort it builds is superficial.
> Con artists are very adept at building up such conversation
Yeah, and there's chlorine in "mustard gas", so what? That doesn't implicate salt.
> as long as they are not evil
Look I'm not advocating for the guy to be hanged, but I think his "conversational style" is evil, or is the innocuous tip of an evil iceberg. We live in an increasingly atomized society— One in which both casual and intimate relationships are mediated—when not wholly replaced—by machinery controlled by absentee landlords.
Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
Why are we relegating locals to menial restaurant jobs? Why not have programs to get them trained and into higher earning jobs?
A local working a restaurant will often need to take advantage of welfare. If instead we funneled the locals to higher paying jobs, we would be better off. We're supposed to look after our own citizens, afterall --that's the whole point of electing a government.
Britain was the largest empire in history and covered 25% of the Earth's surface area. What was it which allowed them to become the largest empire in history?
Having lots of ships and not needing a standing army to defend against neighboring countries who share a land border.
A navy is, effectively, mulitpurpose when it comes to trading and colonies and such in a way that an army is not. Therefor countries that can invest only in a navy are at an advantage.
Also, while it is true that the british empire was very large and impressive by almost any measure, and I don't want to downplay it too much, it's worth remembering that a very, very large portion of that empire was made up of the indian subcontinent, and while they certainly had political control over the place, the actual reality was a (very) tiny elite who replaced the previous group of rulers.
Also this empire as described lasted barely 100 years.
A lot of things. The British empire is a master class in financial engineering (largely by luck imo). They started by raising capital via IPOs to create trading companies. The first successful ones were the ones that established the 13 colonies that became the USA and Jamaica.
While they maintained control over those, they engaged in war and looting against the established Spanish empire. They managed to entice the Indian elite by being extremely effective at paying back loans using the loot they got during the Spanish era. Internal division among elite in India meant that the bankers in bengal thought they could use the British for deposing a king they did not like and at the same time handle the raids that the Marathas were performing. The British essentially used the money to bribe the king's army and took control of Bengal (which was the ricebasket for one of the largest empires of the time and the largest cloth producer). Unfortunately for said bankers, once the British took control of bengal they betrayed the bankers who lent them money. They raised an army of local sepoys and went on to take the rest of the subcontinent (although this was a slow painful process).
Even as the US revolted and gained independence, the British found themselves with a growing colony in India where civil wars and divisions between kings made it easy for the British to move in. One thing to remember is that when we talk of a British army at this point it really is an army where the lower ranks are made of Indians who were trying to make a living (as it turns out British were just better paymasters than their local counterparts).
Once they conquered India, they moved east and use Indian soldiers to take on Chinese while waging the opium war (and making a tonne of money from the trade of drugs).
Ive glossed over a bunch of things but honestly the success of the British in the 1800s is built over many many years of multiple investments some of which started in the 1500s (for instance their acquisition of Mumbai was entirely by sheer dumb luck as it was part of a dowry given by the Portuguese, who in turn received it as part of a peace treaty with a local ruler)... Many of the things that brought them success was a result of fairly immoral behaviour. And while their governing class in Europe is fairly small they had massive local administrations run by locals reporting to them.
The navy absolutely was key. But apart from that mercantilism was instrumental. They used trade companies, the most famous being the East India company, as front which allowed the government to deflect responsibility coming their way and this incentivized the moneyed class in Britain as they could "invest" in the colonial loot.
Aren't all empires extractive? How is that supposed to be distinctive to Britain?
If you compare Thailand (never colonized) with India pre-independence, they look about neck-and-neck in terms of development. At a glance, it seems Britain "looted" India to about the same degree that the Thai monarchy "looted" Thailand.
The outward flow of money amd the second order effects like famine make mercantile colonialism more exploitative. A good counterpoint to Thailand is Britain becoming insanely wealthy by contemporary standard during Victorian era.
Sure, the British aristocratic class did exploit the working class. But then we're no longer talking about geographies.
"The outward flow of money amd the second order effects like famine make mercantile colonialism more exploitative."
So why was India's development status comparable to Thailand in that case?
"A good counterpoint to Thailand is Britain becoming insanely wealthy by contemporary standard during Victorian era."
Britain was the first country to industrialize. Switzerland and the US also industrialized early, and did not have a massive colonial population to exploit. But you can see their per-capita GDP was still in the same neighborhood as the UK in the late 1800s:
A lot of stories that Indians tell about their history fall apart when you look at the data. You can argue that Britain delayed India's industrialization, but since most of Asia was not industrializing at the time, it's a bit of a dubious argument. I have little doubt that Britain exploited India, but I don't think it was a historically exceptional type of exploitation.
Non colonized countries like China and Nepal were still semi-colonized due to unfair treaties. Japan which largely remained free did industrialize.
A debate does exist around the how much of India's decline can be attributed to the British as fragmentation of central political authority started long before British arrival.
US and Switzerland had their respective advantages like large domestic market and high value industries. The population of these nations had the time to learn and adapt. The familiarity to western education obviously helped as transferring IP was relatively easy. These opportunities were absent in company ruled India(things did improve marginally once the crown took over). I would largely agree British colonial rule was not exceptional when compared to other mercantile colonies. But I do not see the similarities to Mughal rule of India where the wealth stayed in-house and was even invested locally, the key difference being assimilation vs extraction.
You're still disregarding Thailand. Not colonized, wealth "stays in-house". But that doesn't necessarily lead to industrialization. If the rulers spend the money on entertainment for themselves, that's essentially the same as sending it abroad, from the perspective of a peasant.
IIRC India's GDP was approx. 25% of the world's in 1700s compared to Thai 1% around the same time. In case of India it came down to 3 to 4% in 1947. So India faced quite a drop.
I don't think comparing an already declined India to Thai is a fair comparison.
India's economy didn't get a boost because there was practically no industrial policy. British authorities would get their raw materials at gunpoint from the colonies, ship it to Britain for processing, and then ship the finished goods back to colonies (which were artificially shielded from the international markets).
Before getting absorbed by East India company, some native kingdoms/empites did start with modernizing their military which indicates there would be a strong effort towards industrialization if it weren't for the British regulations.
Unfortunately not many people understand or appreciate how colonialism destroys a country and they just see the end result and claim that the citizens of the country were incapable of developing by their own.
Not only economical, but also psychological (as in lose of self confidence) and cultural (assuming own culture is somehow inferior to the rulers) destruction happens. It is not much different from abused people losing self confidence and blaming themselves and additionallyhaving to suffer victim blaming from others - just at a nation scale.
I don't expect that to happen. I suspect even the democrat politicians are internally happy that Trump has pushed boundaries of everything and has given a precedent. The new admin if it comes, would cherry pick all the delicious parts and put on backburner more controversial ones until it is ready to bring it out again.
Once power is corrupted, it is very hard to bring it back to more innocent times. The power of presidents have only increased under both parties.
1000 years ago is not mud huts. Although in terms of civics and rights I would say India seems quite a lot further back than 1000 years, if you take the ancient Greeks as your yardstick.
> Although in terms of civics and rights I would say India seems quite a lot further back than 1000 years
How so?
> if you take the ancient Greeks as your yardstick
You mean the slave owners? Who only allowed free men to vote? And required property ownership to hold office?
I'm not aware of widespread slavery in India, nor a requirement to own property to hold public office. Women are allowed to vote there. They've even had a woman be Prime Minister and two women Presidents.
Goodness, there was a huge amount of slavery, back into prehistory, then lots African slaves from the 6th century, then when Islamic conquest hit almost 1000 years ago many Indians were enslaved. Just as slavery was everywhere, it was in India. The big event was in 1843 when Britain did the moral thinking and emphasis to abolish it throughout their empire and also just in general, with British ships going to war against slaver ships and the British Empire buying slaves' freedom. The two big things about India and abolition were 1) the East India Company was definitely not as morally clear as the people in England, and 2) there was a worry that ending slavery in India would be too disruptive to the local culture, it was so embedded. So it was only abolished 10 years after the rest of the Empire.
Today, with 70 years of independence and self-rule, India has the most modern slaves in the world[0].
> Women are allowed to vote there.
Yes, as of 1950 when democracy was copied and pasted from other civilisations - some, like ancient Greece, almost 2000 years prior - who did all the discovery and moral thinking for this. It's not hard to copy something, particularly when declaring it to be so is what's measured, and not how well it's implemented.
Quite a motte and bailey there. You said India is backward today compared to ancient Greece. Then when I pointed out all the ways in which ancient Greece was backward you began comparing to something else. To be clear: ancient Greece, the "fountain of democracy" had legal slavery. Modern India does not.
"Countries with large populations have large numbers of people doing " is hardly a revelation.
> Yes, as of 1950 when democracy was copied and pasted from other civilisations
So weird that those "moral" British didn't allow Indians to vote before that. I thought you said they were the good guys!
No extant country has adopted democracy from first principles. Everyone copy-pasted it. 1950 was the first time India had the choice and chance to do it, and they took it.
> You said India is backward today compared to ancient Greece
No, I didn't mean that. I said if Ancient Greece is your yardstick, India would be more than 1000 years behind today without external influence. Ancient Greece was 2000 years ago, not 1000.
Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent, so of course it's got more than most of Western Europe. If Luxembourg had a million modern slaves there'd be nowhere to hide them. And it has much, much more sensitive systems for detecting this sort of thing than India does, so you can imagine that number is not lowballed.
> India would be more than 1000 years behind today
Behind what? And what are you basing this on, other than vibes and your biases?
> without external influence
Of course it would be externally influenced, even without being colonized. It isn't an island. It couldn't shut itself away like Japan did pre-19th century. Japan is more modern than India because it wasn't colonized. They just took ideas from abroad - industrialization, capitalism, mass literacy, adult male suffrage, (some) democracy (pre-WW2) - and adopted them.
> Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent
> They just took ideas from abroad - industrialization, capitalism, mass literacy, adult male suffrage, (some) democracy (pre-WW2) - and adopted them.
Japan is more modern because it already had a very advanced, well-organised society. Japan is more like the UK in that it's a source of civilisation rather than a recipient. However it hugely calcified around religion, where the Emperor is basically god, and the utter decimation of that belief upon two nukes landing on Japanese soil meant that Japan had a huge reset, and took on - extremely well - the latest and greatest at the time, which was UK and US-based lower-case liberal capitalism.
> Japan is more modern than India because it wasn't colonized
This is backwards. Japan was organised, modern and hard-working enough to not be colonised throughout history.
> > Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent
> And India isn't?
I think you need to bear in mind the conversation being had, rather than goldfishing through statements forgetting where they came from. This was: "The US has more slaves in it than anywhere else in Western Europe". Answer: "It's much larger than anywhere else in Western Europe." Nothing to do with India.
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