Things that are so obvious and ingrained that no one even thinks about them.
Here’s a few:
All US americans can go to Mexico EASILY. You’re supposed to have a passport but you don’t even need one (for car/foot crossing). Versus, it’s really hard for Mexicans, who aren’t wealthy, to secure a VISA to enter the US. I’m sure there are corollaries in other geo-regions.
Another one is wealthy countries having access to vaccines far ahead of “poor” countries.
In US, we might pay lip service to equal child-hood education but most of the funding pulls from local taxes so some kids might receive ~$10000 in spending while another receives $2000. I’m not looking it up at the moment, but I’m SURE there are strong racial stratas.
Treating the usian “founding fathers” as democracy-loving freedom fighters
Their deification in general gets on my nerves. Everything they’ve ever said or written is treated as infallible words of god and nobody may ever dispute them.
I suppose the British considered them to be rebels, insurrectionists, or maybe even terrorists. It’s all a matter of perspective isn’t it?
The British press and government explicitly called them terrorists.
But the other side of it is just as laughable. Whenever the framers of the constitution wrote about what they were trying to do, they would endlessly hand-wring about how bad it would be for everyone to have a say in government. They thought only rich land-owning men had proved themselves worthy to hold power. You know, them and all their friends. The american “revolution” had more in common with a coup than any sort of real liberatory movement.
It’s like Bezos and Elon being the “founding fathers” of an independent US West Coast, nothing revolutionary about it.
Well it was still a step in the right direction, distributing power a bit more locally instead of living as a colony under a monarchical foreign power. You may also recall that initially they went too far in decentralizing power before the Constitution replaced the articles of confederation. Even then voting rights were mostly decided by each state, some allowing non land owners and even free black men (though sometimes later removing that right) to vote pre 1800s. Whatever they may have discussed, voting and ability to participate in government was enjoyed by over half of the citizens, which is a significant improvement over the foreign tyrant they had previously. But regardless of how the British tried to label colonial rebels, and regardless of how much the rebels didn’t get right, I’m on the side of the historical revolutionaries.
I would love to know your opinion of the CPC within this context. You have made it clear that you support American revolutionaries if only because their system was ostensibly better than the one that came before. What about Chinese revolutionaries?
Hmm, interesting question. That depends if you think that the society they have now is better than the one preceding? The two situations aren’t entirely analogous since one involved separation from a foreign power while the other involved dismantling of the old culture and society in order to make a brand new one. I think that China is more powerful now than they would be otherwise, had they not gone through their cultural revolution, but it came at a great cost where centuries of culture was destroyed. I don’t think it was worth it, but that’s also easy for me to say because I don’t live there and because my perception is certainly skewed by Western perspectives. I think they lost something of great value with how the cultural revolution played out and the Chinese people are irrecoverably different as a result. Makes me a little bit sad, but we can’t change the past, so it doesn’t really matter.
You think “destroying centuries of culture” outweighs abolishing extreme poverty, ending feudalism in a country of more than a billion, redistributing land to the peasantry, taking the country from a cycle where every few years millions would die in a famine to being an economic super power, leading the world in space age scientific progress?
I couldn’t even be bothered to engage once they tried to imply that the Chinese revolution didn’t involve separation from a foreign power. what was the Shanghai International Settlement? they sure don’t know, maybe it was a floor wax or a dessert topping.
Parenti quote about evaluating how a country is before and after a revolution, but a bizarre messed up version where he decides Cuba was better off as a colony with no self determination.
Also the environment was devastated and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) died. Also how do you feel about China’s current treatment of indigenous Tibetans? Maybe you should take off your red colored glasses and look around.
The environment being devastated is mostly a fair criticism. China is making huge efforts toward sustainability today, but maybe too late to make enough of a difference.
Hundreds of millions died, yes, that’s what happens when 80 years go by in a country of hundreds of millions. I don’t see your point.
How do I feel about their treatment of indigenous Tibetans? I think China did a heroic thing by ending slave labor in Tibet. I’m not sure if they took the best path toward liberating Tibetan slaves while also not erasing their culture. I don’t know if such a thing was possible, and my personal opinion is that if it wasn’t, it’s preferable for them to be free and not keep a reactionary culture than keep their slave state intact, the same way I don’t care about preserving Confederate monuments in the US despite their cultural importance.
All in all, for a real, existing country, China has a really good batting average.
The PRC ended feudal theocracy and slavery in Tibet
Calling the founding fathers ”revolutionaries” belongs in this thread.
I always get a kick out of how silly they were and how bad at designing governments they ended up being. Like you pointed out their first attempt was a shitshow, and when you read the federalist papers he outright says the entire plan is for there to be no political parties, if we get those it won’t work and we’ll all be fucked.
And yet as soon as King George relinquished the presidency we had a two party system, in fact the Constitution more or less makes a two party system inevitable. And it has no provisions for the legislature being unable to legislate etc, basic stuff that the British had already had to solve with their Parliament.
And yet they’re supposed to be these incredible architects of a genius system of intricate checks and balances.
Makes you wonder if our success as a nation had more to do with explosive growth, immigration, and opportunity. Or maybe the system worked well under those conditions, but now the whole environment is steady state and it doesn’t work quite as well.
I consider them both to be colonialist, genocidal freaks deserving only of a pit
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Most of the world never did settler colonialism you genocide apologist
Many civilizations came and went over the ages, displaced by integration into other civilizations or straight up genocide. Most of these we have little record of, other than a few shards of pottery or other artifacts. I’m not advocating for that approach, but you also can’t look at history through some kind of idealistic lens, acting like people were any different back then.
yes I hold all cartoonishly evil slavers, colonialists, genocideurs, imperialists and capitalist exploiters to the same standard of deserving to be overthrown by the people they abuse
CW: Depiction of a slave getting whipped and a dog getting hanged on orders of George Washington
You do realise some states do this more or less, right?
I’m not assuming you’re being intellectually honest by claiming every civilisation has practised genocidal colonialism, I have complete confidence that you pulled that factoid out of your arse.
This is true. I wonder what the Iroquois thought of George Washington
if I hold you in chains and whip you for not picking cotton fast enough for me, would that just be a “matter of perspective” you smug liberal?
Lol what are you even talking about? How does that relate to my comment?
since you’re confused let’s trace the entire context of the conversation from the thread title down to here.
Since the hegemonic perspective of the founding fathers in the US is that they’re democracy-loving freedom fighters, it doesn’t really matter what the British thought. We’re discussing the normalized racism and chauvinism of worshiping a bunch of slave owning proto-bourgeois settler-colonialists. It’s not just a matter of perspective. The shit they did to people had real material consequences. Hence my question to you which you didn’t answer: if I hold you in chains and whip you for not picking cotton fast enough for me, would that just be a “matter of perspective” you smug liberal? That is. If you were actually treated by me the way the founding fathers treated people, would it still be this vague “matter of perspective” or would you be justified in despising me?
If I were a slave, I would probably be less concerned about who exactly is holding the whip, and more so the fact that I was getting whipped. Whether the colonists were considered terrorists or some kind of freedom fighters would be largely irrelevant to me in that case, despite that perspective mattering a great deal to the rest of the world at the time and even still to this day.
John Brown, Nat Turner, and The Haitian revolutionaries would tell you that those two concerns are identical since the latter concern provides you with your target in regards to how to bring about a real material change in the former concern. If you are a slave, and you want to stop being whipped, you run away. But if you want everyone else to stop getting whipped as well, you fight the slave owners. That is how slavery ended in the United States after all. War with the slave power.
So do you think that slavery would have ended sooner if the American revolution never happened? Do you think there was any net benefit to humanity as a result of the American revolution? Is it possible for good men to do bad things or does bad things make them bad people?
Considering the British Crown ended slavery in its colonies in 1833, a full 3 decades before an independent America ended slavery with a civil war? Yes! But that’s neither here nor there. I’m not arguing nor have I argued against the American “revolution,” though I will say it was a bourgeois nationalist independence struggle waged by the colonial ruling class against the ruling class in the mother country because the ruling class in the mother country taxed the commercial profits of the ruling class in the colony too much and wouldn’t let them expand west against indigenous people as quickly as they wanted to. That’s not really a “revolution.” War of Independence is a lot more accurate. What happened in Haiti in the 1790s and 1800s was a revolution, and it involved the oppressed class, the slaves, rising up against the ruling class, their masters. Interestingly the American “revolutionaries” for all their talk of “freedom” and “liberty” and “revolution” and “refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants” (Jefferson quote) never supported that revolution. In fact they were highly in favor of crushing it (along with Daniel Shay’s rebellion), because they were slave owners. And they were in favor of forcing that enslaved people to pay reparations, amounting to most of their annual national GDP, to their former masters, for the better part of 2 centuries. A tax far more tyrannical and impoverishing than anything the British leveled against the likes of the American tobacco planters. And now they are blamed for being poor and underdeveloped despite those absymal economic conditions that was enforced by America and France jointly. Two “democracies” shaking hands as they make sure a state of liberated slaves is in permanent debt… very interesting how these things are framed.
Ask an indigenous American that question. No. In general I don’t think it was a “net benefit” to humanity. And I’m an American. I live here. I am part indigenous but being indigenous is more about culture than blood quantum. I wasn’t raised in that culture, which was decimated long before I was born.
Yes it’s possible for good men to do bad things and vice versa. But I don’t think they were good men in the first place. I think they were bourgeois slave owners who liked to wax poetic about “Freedom” and “Liberty” as though they were the ones who invented these concepts. That’s a big part of the American civil religion. The idea that these men somehow invented the representative republican form of government. Like it was some kind of innovation they brought to the table. Their “net benefit to humanity” as you said earlier. But they didn’t invent that. They were a bunch of Rome revivalists attempting to resurrect ideas from classical antiquity, which is why America loves the fasces and the marble statues and the ionic columns and the latin phrase mongering. And even if they had somehow invented these concepts, they were still realizing these concepts in a completely hypocritical and incomplete way that was obvious to every abolitionist even back then.
Oh yes, and there’d be a whole lot less ignorance like this because a whole lot more settler bastards would’ve been turned into mulch about a hundred-fifty years sooner, with less destruction of the Black and Indigenous. There was no net benefit to humanity; only to the coinpurses of British nobility who were sick of being taxed by their crown.
real shit JAQoffs like this only make me think that neither John Brown nor General Sherman went NEARLY far enough.
If the guy whipping me was deified and seen as a paragon of a man I’d be fucking livid
Sometimes it’s more about what that person symbolizes. Take George Floyd for instance. By almost any metric he was not a good person, but he didn’t deserve to die, and the way that he died became a symbol, a representation of an entire people who have seen injustice at the hands of the police. George Floyd is practically a saint in the eyes of many, despite all his flaws as a person. So why not the founding fathers?
The founding fathers owned people. Bought and sold them. Denied them basic comforts and dignities. Bred them and then tore apart their families. Raped them and brutalized them.
They engaged in the genocide of native americans. Killing as many as they could and displacing the rest. All so that they could move lines on a map.
To compare these monsters to the progeny of their atrocities is racist. It is unquestionably cruel and unfeeling. Know that I have no respect for you. Know that if I learned we shared any opinion it would cause me to question it.
You want me to ignore all this for America? The country that orchestrated the genocide of native americans? The country that built its bones with the flesh of black people? The primary inspiration for Nazi Germany? The warmongers behind the korean and vietnam war? The country that supported and enabled genocides in bangladesh and indonesia? The country that invaded iraq for oil money? The country that is currently engaged in genocides in both palestine and the congo?
That was never the point of the protests surrounding his death. The point was to call out police brutality. This was true of all the other anti-police brutality protests before George Floyd as well, regardless of whether the victim had a perfect past or not in each case. The press, both local and national, humanizes some victims of state or corporate violence, while demonizing others. Seemingly without noticing, people too often create tiered systems of moral worth by trying to find “the perfect victim.”
This ill advised search for the perfect Christlike victim, and its corollary desire to smear those with less than perfect pasts, makes humanity conditional, further entrenching negative stereotypes and destructive narratives about entire communities. The difference between a victim of systemic injustice who made mistakes in their life and a person who gets deified despite their mistakes is incalculable. The demonization of George Floyd in the wake of his death was IMMEDIATE. The media did not even wait for his blood to be cold before they started digging up his arrest record, etc. The lionization of the founding fathers on the other hand was overwhelming and immediate, in spite of their slave ownership, and an entire American civil mythology was constructed around that image that for many is still considered unquestionable. That’s the difference. You’re assuming a total symmetry of context between the contemporary victims of systemic violence and the actual ruling class founders of American society.