EMFCRACKSHOT said:
Starke said:
The last five years haven't been too bad, the last ten, more so, but it still pales in comparison to the blood and hypocrisy of the British Empire. Now, I have confidence we'll catch up with either you or the French, but you're going to have to give us time to eclipse either empire's actions.
The thing is, that was all nearly a century ago. There is no-one left alive who can be blamed for those actions (with the exception of northern ireland but lets face it, both the British and the Irish did some terrible things there).
The thing is, this isn't how people deal with being wronged. Well, for the most part anyway.
Ignoring for the moment, that the Empire did exist 50 years ago, and there are people that have been alive since then, there's another issue at work: When I was a child, I heard the stories over and over about how my great grandparents had fled for their lives. And this would be illustrated with "that tray wasn't supposed to come with them, but it got thrown on the cart at the last moment", shit like that. It was impressed into me to distrust and hate the people responsible (the Turks, if anyone's wondering), without regard for the whole picture.
In the case of the middle east there is a lot of people who have been raised in a culture of being wronged. We see this with Palestinians in exile who've kept their keys, we see this with Syrians and Algerians hating the French. So while there's some merit to saying, "no one's alive who saw this," that only makes sense up until the moment when you realize that these people had families. Iranians tend to still hate the English for bringing the CIA in, and there tends to be an awareness that both the UK and the US are to be hated for different reasons. Now, there, the US has the balance due to Reza Pahlavi, but, the fact remains people do remember, even if it isn't first hand.
EMFCRACKSHOT said:
America is the one acting like an imperial power when the age of empires is dead. 100 years ago it was the norm for the great powers to act like that and because there was more than one blame was never foisted on one power alone (America is hardly excused what with the wars fought with the mexicans and spanish and the genocide of the native americans so don't act so holier than thou about your own country's past, its kind of annoying)
sorry if i'm kind of rambling, rum can do strange things to a guys mind xD
Nah, it's okay, it's not a terrible point. The problem is, everyone has engaged in this behavior. If you want to talk about what motivates American action, there is a philosophy of ends justify the means we picked up someplace in the Cold War, when trying to fight off the Soviets, and for many Americans that created a permanent bipolar understanding of the world. I don't object to America being painted with the same brush as everyone else, what I do object to, is posters like Thyunda, who seem to believe that England is cut from a cleaner cloth, when in fact, they were the power we learned our nastiest habits from.
EDIT: In fact, some of the early and infamous bouts of genocide against the Native Americans were conducted while we were still subjects of the crown.
EDIT 2: A also really object to Thyunda's assertion that the British were somehow loved by the middle east until Bush, and that the animosity there is our fault. When in point of fact, they were as much targets before.
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