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  • The people telling you communism goes against human nature also tell you it's human nature for a nation to slaughter people for land. Just normal human nature shit.

    Jesus what a fucking terrible argument. I'm sure the native americans were just happy white people weren't killing other white people. "At least it's intentional," they thought as they were being driven from their land.

    • Every time I hear someone try to claim things are human nature (greed, cruelty, selfishness, etc) I just interpret it as a confession of that person having those traits and an attempt to project that unto the rest of society to feel better about it.

      • One thing I like to do to really leave the libs shooketh to deconstruct that argument of "But greed will always be a part of humanity!!" is by telling them that if we look over history, murder has always been a feature of humanity.

        But do we award the murderers with the most money, political power, and prestige in society? (I know exactly where your mind goes to when I say this but stick with me for a minute and remember that this is when I'm talking on the role of Lib Whisperer.) Or as a society do we actively take steps to mitigate the murderous impulses of humanity by disincentivising it, condemning it, and punishing those who commit murder?

        Why then would you do something different with a negative and destructive impulse like greed? Why would you reward it, encourage it, and give the most political power and the most prestige to the greediest people in society?

        Who would want to live in that sort of world?

        If they object to this notion because they are suffering from a deficit of imagination, you can point to the potlatch ceremony, in which certain societies would give the most prestige in their communities to the people who gave the most to the community in these ceremonies, where people would sometimes even effectively bankrupt themselves in the pursuit of prestige within their communities.

        I usually tell a person like that they should stop making pronouncements about all of humanity because they've clearly never stepped outside their comfortable little bubble long enough to realise that, shockingly, different societies do things differently and whatever they say about humanity is just a reflection of their own narrow cultural biases.

    • "Your honor, you must aquit. For you see I intentionally killed my neighbor for their land!"

    • Really shows just how vile they are. They honestly think everyone else is as cruel and disgusting as they are.

    • Smallpox blankets were normal human nature. After all, we are apparently animals with no higher cognitive functions of empathy.

      Literally one step from saying gas chambers are human nature, jfc.

  • "The native American Genocide wasn't that bad, because they weren't considered human"

    • Sincere post - am I doing something harmful to myself or my psyche? Am I being too insular in staying away from the mental sewer pipes of

      , twitter, etc in search of places where I don't see this shit? Should I desensitize myself a little to people like this? Because I tend to avoid people like this. In real life, I'm careful to only stay close with people who are, at their core, kind and loving and empathic. I also do this online.

      I hate this person. I truly do, and every other sniveling, servile, cowardly, shithead like them. I don't like hating this person, and I don't like hating people at all. I'll always hate

      , but it's no moral crime to hate your oppressor. For this person, my hatred feels more real and visceral and it makes me uncomfortable.

      A few years ago I visited White Sands National Park. To get there I had to drive through Alamogordo, a town that seems to mostly exist to service the nearby air force base. On the main tourist track that leads to the park, I passed a kind of mini strip mall set up alongside the road. It was all run-down buildings or shacks or roadside tents covered in native American symbolism with shitty names that I don't care to repeat, selling trinkets and baubles. The people working there all looked, at a glance, to be native American as well. An entire culture reduced to selling bits of "authentic Indian silver" or whatever to scratch out a living. The survivors of a genocide trying to make some money off of the bits of their culture that can be commodified. This is my first time ever discussing that sight, and it's still hard to articulate it. The feeling was so heavy, so suffocating, such a powerful sense of wrongness and injustice that it defies my limited powers of this language to communicate. An entire continent of people - dozens of cultures and languages and histories and peoples slaughtered and displaced and deposited at the edges of a new society that would prefer them gone and relegated to black-and-white photos.

      So, GBU_28 is trying to handwave away what America did because Ghengis Khan did it as well. Native Americans weren't "noble savages" by any means. I'm sure they fought and inflicted cruelty and callousness on their fellow man just as all peoples have done. But we stole this place. In its entirety. This entire nation, as well as its equally savage brother-country to the north, ground up the first peoples' bones to use in the foundational concrete. Mods remove this if it's too much, but I truly hope that GBU_28 suffers in this life. I'm fully convinced that this person who I've never met and I never will should truly be subject to the worst agonies and miseries conceivable by the human mind. No physical or emotional torment could compare with what they're trying to "yada yada yada" away.

      It can't be good for me.

  • The whole "Manifest Destiny is innocent because colonialism is just human nature" is very popular with Amerikkkans. I've heard this same shit from grade school to the workplace.

    They fucking love essentializing their national crimes as products of evolutionary behavior so they can pat themselves on the back for "overcoming" their "natural" urges while being flabbergasted about the oppressed for wanting accountability from the still existing regime that perpetrated it (and still is!).

  • As a person of NATO, Andrew Jackson is allowed to order the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples. People of NATO being able to steal land from Indigenous peoples is allowed because people of NATO are justifiably hierarchically over Indigenous peoples. I'm definitely an anarchist.

  • Very far from the only issue with this, but how can someone be so ignorant? Mongolians and Chinese had their worldviews shaped by modern race science, so that we can assume they saw themselves as entirely equivalent people (backwards Asians), and Mongolians were conquesting and killing their own people.

  • "their actions are historical in nature" man i sure love readin about History it's so cool how it doesn't have anything to do with the present at all hmmmm wait a minute what's going on oh nooooo this can't be right uh oh stop aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh

    the fuckin "their own people" meme

  • For me the concern in discussions like this is that it seems like the implication is that if Americans aren't constantly ripping our hair out and rending our clothes over the genocide of the American Indians, we have no right to decry modern genocides, or something?

    It was absolutely evil what the US government and the governments of the several States did to the American Indians. Just like it was evil what the US government and the governments of the several States did to black Americans. And it was evil when the US government decided to drop nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians twice after Germany was defeated, instead of for example near Japan but with no human fatalities. And on and on.

    But that doesn't make it not evil or less evil what, for example, Putin is trying to do to Ukraine right now. Or the various military coups in Africa right now. Or the profiteering off curable diseases that multinational corporations are doing right now.

    And an American ought to be able to criticize those things and call for peace without having to list every evil thing America has ever done first. And the evil things that America has done shouldn't prevent individual Americans from calling out evils that they see.

    This false implication that not calling out America's past evil is the same as supporting it is chilling to good discussion.

    • it seems like the implication is that if Americans aren't constantly ripping our hair out and rending our clothes over the genocide of the American Indians, we have no right to decry modern genocides, or something?

      Yeah, but the issue isn't that they aren't ripping their hair out and decrying the crimes of the American empire, it's that these crimes are being presented as something in the past and not something ongoing (which they are).

      The implication that killing "the other" is less bad than killing "your own" is also a major dog whistle.

      You also need to approach, specifically in this instance, mass death from famine not from a position of "this was an intentional genocide", but from the historical perspective of the pain and suffering caused by transition from agrarian feudal society to industrial society.

      The famines in Russia and China are always treated with a different pair of gloves compared to the famines caused by American industrialization (mostly pushed onto the native population and the stealing of land was used to feed a growing industrial proletariat), British industrialization (the Irish potato famine and at least a half dozen Indian famines that pushed the grain shortages on to "the other" to protect their own industrial proletariat).

      Another thing to pay attention to is always the response to these famines within the context of a given socio political order. Both Manifest Destiny and British colonialism ignored the effects of the famine because the people it primarily effected were enemies of the imperial cores. Whereas both Russia and China experienced famines that harmed their own industrial output and forced them to reconcile the massive issues within their political structures. To the point that famines which used to be common were all but eradicated after massive political pressure to fix the issues that caused them.

      The green revolution has given us ground to stand on as productive output per labor hour in the agricultural sector has massively improved and allowed for a majority of labor to be in industrial and service sectors, but now that we're experiencing the effects of climate change we're gonna start seeing the conditions for mass famine re appear.

      And I guarantee that the US empire and Western powers will do what they always do and force the hand of their neo-colonies to absorb the mass suffering caused by grain shortage to maintain the proletariat in the core.

      This isn't something that's "in the past", it's still standard operating policy all across the Western world. To siphon land and grain from imperial subjects and cause destitution and starvation to maintain profitable industry for their domestic bourgeoisie.

    • For me the concern in discussions like this is that it seems like the implication is that if Americans aren't constantly ripping our hair out and rending our clothes over the genocide of the American Indians, we have no right to decry modern genocides, or something?

      Americans don't need to rip out their hair and rend their clothes. Americans need to give land back to tribal governments and pay reparations to Black people. Americans can then pay reparations to other marginalized minorities and other countries that the US has destroyed (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on)

      It was absolutely evil what the US government and the governments of the several States did to the American Indians. Just like it was evil what the US government and the governments of the several States did to black Americans. And it was evil when the US government decided to drop nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians twice after Germany was defeated, instead of for example near Japan but with no human fatalities. And on and on.

      So where are the reparations then? "Oops I made a big boo-boo" doesn't fucking cut it. Vietnam still has victims dying from Agent Orange. Laos still has millions of UXO littering their country. But has the US foot the bill to clean up the mess they caused? Of course not.

      But that doesn't make it not evil or less evil what, for example, Putin is trying to do to Ukraine right now.

      The US has killed far more people than Putin. Hell, Dubya alone has killed far more people in eight years than Putin did in his entire life. Orders of magnitude more people.

      Or the various military coups in Africa right now.

      Most of those coups are anti-French coups with popular support because no one there wants to be ruled by the French. It isn't a threat to democracy if some neocolonial puppet who's only there due to rigged elections got kicked to the curb by anti-French military officers.

      And an American ought to be able to criticize those things and call for peace without having to list every evil thing America has ever done first. And the evil things that America has done shouldn't prevent individual Americans from calling out evils that they see.

      Talk is cheap. When is the US going to actually do something about it? Where's the forty acres and a mule Black people were promised for turning on their plantation slavemasters?

    • And an American ought to be able to criticize those things and call for peace without having to list every evil thing America has ever done first. And the evil things that America has done shouldn't prevent individual Americans from calling out evils that they see.

      Broadly, I agree with this and I can see this point of view. "What does America's evil have to do with it? I thought we were talking about Russia?"

      There are several things which widened my perspective on discussions like these, though.

      1. Oftentimes, America's evils have a lot to do with it. With regards to the current Ukraine war, the US and NATO have been ramping up aggression against Russia for years prior to the current invasion. The 2014 Maidan was a far-right initiative closely watched and de facto backed by the US, like in Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and countless others before. The fighting that this kicked off in the Donbas region has killed more than 10 000 people since then. What I've seen too often is this sort of historical context be waved off as "whataboutism", as though the direct material reasons for the current situation were irrelevant.
      2. The point is often (or at least, it should be) to get people to think more critically about their media. The double standard constantly being applied to other countries is meaningful and worth scrutiny. Our western sources have the inherent privilege of being considered trustworthy and not propaganda, and from those sources we hear about how any foreign or dissident media is propaganda and therefore untrustworthy. This is a dangerous sort of thinking to internalize, because all media is propaganda, including the western sources. The end result - which is what this so-called "whataboutism" is often trying to bring attention to - is predictable: the typical US media consumer will see other countries have their history exaggerated, distorted and outright fabricated while the atrocities of the US are downplayed, quietly mentioned if at all. What we are told about other countries by our supposedly unbiased and reliable media often comes with a massive conflict of interest attached. (Further reading: Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky, and Inventing Reality by Parenti)
194 comments