RE: Pros and cons of Colonialism?
November 6, 2015 at 5:18 pm
(This post was last modified: November 6, 2015 at 5:19 pm by paulpablo.)
abaris
abaris said
I don't see how anything you typed did anything to dismiss any of the claims made by the post you were replying to.
He didn't start his post off by saying "What I'm about to state will make the genocides of the past, better." So I don't understand why you would start your post off by saying pointing fingers won't make it better, as if that's what he set out to do.
If you graded people's posts on this forum on the basis of how much they make the genocides of the past better you could say all our posts are pretty crap.
I think what chadwooters was saying is that tribal people used the technology and ability they had to kill and enslave people, so it's not a hugely contraversial claim to say that if they had better technology (ocean faring, gunpowder, stirrups.) They would have still used that technology to kill and enslave people.
But then saying that I don't think chadwooters post really did address the pros and cons of colonialism.
In my opinion, pros and cons of conquest and colonisation in general would be a difficult question to seriously answer.
If you want to say if something is good or bad or not it has to be relative to something else, it would be difficult to imagine a world where colonization didn't happen.
You'd basically be deleting the history of the world, starting fresh and then asking someone to take a guess as to if it would be better if a certain form of natural human action never took place ever.
My country for example, England, was invaded by the Romans, Germanic tribes, The vikings, The normans, The danish. That's before England itself went on to colonize quite a lot of the entire world.
The pros to this would probably be that the people with better technology and organization would be able to capture more resources and carry on producing advanced technology.
The colonized are forcibly thrust into a world of better technology, whether that's good or bad is subjective.
The cons would be lots of slavery and death, increased pollution and human overpopulation from all the advanced technology.
(November 2, 2015 at 9:23 am)ChadWooters Wrote: If those other counties had had the means they'd have done the same or worse to the West. No one is innocent. Many of those cultures were brutalizing each other long before Europeans came along. The Sioux fought the Cherakee. The Navaho fought the Apatche. Winners aren't always bad and losers aren't all saints.
abaris said
Quote:That's a classic. Pointing fingers and saying, they did it too. As if that would make it any better, even when leaving out the major difference between tribal scuffles and outright conquest, with the only goal of exploiting a region and it's inhabitants for national gain. The most abyssmal experiment of all being the Kongo, privately owned by the Belgian king. The rule there was outright genocidal.
Which, partly, is responsible for a lot of the troubles we see today. A look at a map of the Middle East or Africa tells the tale quite clearly. No nation has straight borders, if it has grown naturally. These states are the results of colonial bureaucrats, sitting in their comfy offices at London, Paris, Brussels or Berlin and dividing the loot between them. Or to determine monocultural regions and structuring the economy accordingly. Giving no regards to the different ethnicities, cultures, religions, being forced into one big boiling kettle.
I don't see how anything you typed did anything to dismiss any of the claims made by the post you were replying to.
He didn't start his post off by saying "What I'm about to state will make the genocides of the past, better." So I don't understand why you would start your post off by saying pointing fingers won't make it better, as if that's what he set out to do.
If you graded people's posts on this forum on the basis of how much they make the genocides of the past better you could say all our posts are pretty crap.
I think what chadwooters was saying is that tribal people used the technology and ability they had to kill and enslave people, so it's not a hugely contraversial claim to say that if they had better technology (ocean faring, gunpowder, stirrups.) They would have still used that technology to kill and enslave people.
But then saying that I don't think chadwooters post really did address the pros and cons of colonialism.
In my opinion, pros and cons of conquest and colonisation in general would be a difficult question to seriously answer.
If you want to say if something is good or bad or not it has to be relative to something else, it would be difficult to imagine a world where colonization didn't happen.
You'd basically be deleting the history of the world, starting fresh and then asking someone to take a guess as to if it would be better if a certain form of natural human action never took place ever.
My country for example, England, was invaded by the Romans, Germanic tribes, The vikings, The normans, The danish. That's before England itself went on to colonize quite a lot of the entire world.
The pros to this would probably be that the people with better technology and organization would be able to capture more resources and carry on producing advanced technology.
The colonized are forcibly thrust into a world of better technology, whether that's good or bad is subjective.
The cons would be lots of slavery and death, increased pollution and human overpopulation from all the advanced technology.
Are you ready for the fire? We are firemen. WE ARE FIREMEN! The heat doesn’t bother us. We live in the heat. We train in the heat. It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home, we’re where we’re supposed to be. Flames don’t intimidate us. What do we do? We control the flame. We control them. We move the flames where we want to. And then we extinguish them.
Impersonation is treason.
