• 🏳️‍⚧️ 新星 [she/they]@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    America itself didn’t benefit from slavery.

    My point is perhaps best expressed as follows:

    Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.

    — Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980)

    When you frame your arguments in this nationalist way, you’re concealing these conflicts of interest. It would be clearer if you frame it in a way that specifies exactly who you mean.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.

      How does any of this pertain to my claims about historical conflicts over warm water ports?

      When you frame your arguments in this nationalist way, you’re concealing these conflicts of interest. It would be clearer if you frame it in a way that specifies exactly who you mean.

      Right, but I never claimed to be framing it in a nationalistic way, that’s just how you’re interpreting it. Given that I was talking about the history of Crimea, it would imply we are talking about a timeframe that reaches back to the Russian empire. In the given context, saying Russia has always needed access to warm weather ports is obviously referring to the governments in control of Russia.