this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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anti imperialist/colonial supporters when they find out that the entire timeline of human history is conquest, colonialism, and imperialism.
the ones who prospered were the most aggressive ones, even conquering the whole world by force, it's a survivorship bias situation.
not every group of humans is aggressive, but those eventually get conquered by the agressive ones, military power always ends up winning.
It's unscientific to say that any country, given the chance, would do the same as the europeans or the US empire did to the world.
At least the Chinese century will prove or disprove this theory, given it's the first significant power shift in the last 500 years, let's see if they will be so brutal as the US and its allies (you know who) are to the world.
I firmly doubt it, there are no signs of brutality to other nations coming from the chinese, at most you could argue of some internal issues. There are no invasions, war or regime change operations done by China yet.
As someone from the global south, I don't fear China or even Russia in the least, I only fear what the US or Europe will try to inflict in my country, like the recent regime change operations that I lived through, that was pretty harsh.
the "always conquered" thing, this is a fatalism only justified by it being what happened, not what always must happen. this is an incredibly important distinction.
China is literally committing genocide on the Uyghurs. What makes you think they wouldn't do the same to other groups they dislike if they get into power?
Now they are buying all resources they can in Africa doing the same type of Colonialism Europe did a hundred years ago.
That is pure empire/hegemon propaganda that gets to write your history. The same applies to Ukraine agitation Holomodor designation, and the writers would will tell you Hamas is responsible for existing and near future genocide.
China responded to terrorism through education and job creation, in what is now a free and prosperous sharing region. Empire has purely demonic intentions in its foreign policy and propaganda.
Even if you buy into all the best Chinese propaganda (oh, so it's "terrorism" when Uyghurs fight against the state, but you're ok with Palestinian freedom fighting? Where's the consistency, tankies??), there's no denying that China is imperialist by virtue of the fact that they rule over the Uyghur and Tibetan peoples despite enormous cultural differences to the ruling imperial core and a demonstrated desire for independence.
US rules over California
You'll note that at no time did I try to make an argument that America is good. That's...the whole point of this post
And btw Hawai'i would have been a much stronger example to pick to highlight American imperialism.
Even if your sources weren't biased western rags and people that can't speak a lick of Mandarin but can talk all the trash in the world about China in support of white settlerdom (adrian zenz has 23 citations on your bullshit-ass wikipedia article alone), at least China pays for the things they buy; rather than stealing it at gunpoint like the Americans, the French, any part of the countries that profited off the Transatlantic Slave Trade rly, other et cetera. While we wanna bullshit about 'debt trapping', since that's obviously what you're talking about, what's the IMF again?
Deeply unserious; and DEFINITELY not beating the "weakest link" allegations.
this is my fundamental gripe with the problem, yes it's technically a survivorship bias, but how do you remove it, that's the hard question.
If 10 people in a group agree to leave 10,000 USD on a table, such that after 20 minutes, they can all split it amongst themselves, and then turn off the lights in the room and plug their ears in the meantime, someone if not multiple people are going to try and take it all for themselves.
Evolution has fundamentally programmed in a form of survivorship bias within basically every species. I don't think you can separate it unfortunately.
exactly.
i wouldn't say that they would explicitly, but i would argue that being in a position of that much power, over that much of the world, in that much of a volatile position, there is a very high likelihood that they would influence some amount of the world, in a similar manner.
if we're talking about modern day china, they already do a lot of power projection in the sea, illegally, same in the air. I don't know if they're doing any predatory lending to other countries, but that could very well change in the future, so we can't say anything about it now. It's highly likely that china at least wants other countries to be dependent on themselves at the minimum, which i would argue is a form of this power projection.
They are 100% in a position to do things that are more predatory, time will tell, i predict they will, it's inevitable, but i could be wrong. Either that or china itself implodes before we get to that point, so who knows.
personally i know nothing about their military presence outside of the previously mentioned stuff. So i can't really say anything about it, but there's probably at least one bad thing they've done. Again, time will tell.
I may prefer being dependent to being conquered by force
You can't remove the bias in favour of aggression, but you can decouple aggression and oppression. You need to train the non-predators to get aggressive in defending one another. Look at elephants. They're herbivores. They're not out there attacking other species to exploit them. But no predator, not even lions, fucks with elephants. Because if you fuck with elephants, they'll kick your ass.
Interesting point, based on this I could argue that military might (elephant power) is necessary for peace, if not used to coerce others
a country that builds nuclear power to protect itself but has a no first aggression rule could be a parallel to the elephants
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
That's Latin for "if you want peace, prepare for war". It was true 2000 years ago and it's true now. If you want to be a pacifist, you should learn a martial art. If you want a peaceful government, you should learn to use a gun.
I'm on mobile (and sleepy) rn, so I don't think I can properly respond to all your points, but thanks for this comment, I found it overall very constructive!
I'd just like to question one point for now
Where are these people from? Urban, Rural, which country, which region etc, culture can have a big influence on that, I'd guess more collectivist cultures would have a different approach to this experiment than individualist ones such as you described. The country I live is also individualist so I see your point, but is all of humanity really like that?
A Native American tribe of 10 people would probably coordinate to be able to split the money, or even to invest collectivelly in their own village for example. A group of 10 New York executives with survival of the fittest mentality would probably act like you described.
Just some food for thought, hope you or anyone reading finds this interesting.