Jill Stein

**Pannonian** · 04-27-2016, 17:43

Originally Posted by Husar

http://en.internationalism.org/wr/235_sleone.htm

That may well be, nothing to do with Britain making its colonies so great then I guess.

If you look at India vs China, it seems like China is quite a bit better off than India. Despite being a communist country and not having been a British colony the way India was. http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/CN/IN

It's just way too simplistic to say colonialism is usually a force of improvement or whatever exactly the original point was.

China benefited from having a doctrinal technocrat as its head, who trained a cadre of technocrats who've since succeeded him, on the basis of nationalistic ideology and a doctrine of whatever works is good. The mix is probably the best formula there is for palpable improvement, but it too has led to various problems due to not having considered all parameters when assessing whether something is working or not.

**Papewaio** · 04-28-2016, 03:39

Originally Posted by Husar

http://en.internationalism.org/wr/235_sleone.htm

That may well be, nothing to do with Britain making its colonies so great then I guess.

If you look at India vs China, it seems like China is quite a bit better off than India. Despite being a communist country and not having been a British colony the way India was. http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/CN/IN

It's just way too simplistic to say colonialism is usually a force of improvement or whatever exactly the original point was.

Colonialism is not a key factor in long term. Singapore and all its neighbors were colonies at one point.

Pakistan and India were both GB colonies. India which is less fundamentalist is doing better then Pakistan.

China is doing better than India over the last few decades. India's rising Hindu fundamentalists will possibly dampen the economy to. However right now India is surging ahead so it might be a blip or more likely the years of investing in engineering and IT are paying long term dividends above the encumbrance of more traditional detractors.

Key is if you want a middle class service and engineering based economy you need an educated populace.
If your economy relies on outside expats digging out ore or oil you can keep an under educated fundamentalist population.

**Idaho** · 04-28-2016, 10:40

Originally Posted by rory_20_uk

As the EU is finding, free movement is a lovely idea as long as everyone agrees they won't move.

Socialism often remembers the "to each according to his needs" but forgets "from each, according to his abilities". So everyone should do work that they are able to do (and very few people are so crippled by chronic illness they can do nothing).

Free movement will unsurprisingly end up with the wealthier countries reaching the point that people want to live there as much as they do elsewhere due to crime / overcrowding / pollution / tax being as bad as the local problems.

Classic conservatism. Freedom of movement, but only for rich people.

Also classic conservatism blaming the poor and jobless for their lot, when employers are finding ever more clever ways to reduce the payroll and keep wages down.

You can't have it both ways... although as a conservative you can and do.

**Greyblades** · 04-28-2016, 15:05

Originally Posted by Husar

That the influence of western countries on other countries can even have detrimental effects on these countries while you seemed to be arguing that it is mostly positive. If western countries are willing to ruin other countries for their own gain, then you have to explain what they gain from making their colonies more like them. For isolated ones it may pay off to develop them further, but why would a western country build lots of industry in a colony for example if that industry would then rival the one at home?

I have not at any point denied that previous colonial efforts have caused damage. People died, hell was imparted both intentionally and unintentionally, there have been those lessened or destroyed by the experience. I have argued that it was rarely a one sided endeavor and as time progressed the colonies lot improved; the colonizers softened, their actions became more benelovent and their intentions increasingly went from "make a profit and kill the native savages if they get in the way" to "we can make make money and make these people as enlightened as us at the same time"

Had the colonial project continued to completion instead of being cancelled half way I dare say the prosperity of those that reached dominion status would be the norm among post colonial nations, not the exception. The intent could have fully transitioned into "we're here to uplift them and make them worthy of being our equals" but the wars at home made that impossible.

It is true that Colonial nations were unwilling to create compettitors to themselves but the industry of a colony did not have to compete with the ones at the homeland. Indeed it largely was developed to complemented them; There are materials that can be extracted in the colonies that cannot be found easily in europe, plants that can be grown that cannot survive in our climate, livestock not suited to digest european vegetation. Once a colony finished development and became independant it could choose to expand to compete with the industry of the motherland, it was be their perogative after all, but they were still benefited by the development of the colonial industries, particularly by the infrastructure left behind.

Originally Posted by Showtime

Your grounded view of colonist life doesn’t change the power relations of the colonial experience. These were nation-building efforts, to some extent, that did not heed the needs of the colonized. It involved economic servitude to the motherland for the colonizer and subjugation of the private sphere. A colonist's livelihood depended/depends on the subordination of his/her counterpart. Subjugation of any form is not a true nation building effort, however cruel or benevolent the people partaking in it are. Colonial experiences intrinsically involve the robbing of dignity and self-determination, both prereqs of real nation-building.

Can workers and servants not have dignity now?

Self determination... on the personal level it is allways limited in the name of law and order regardless of the nation type, many colonies gave the former lowest strata more freedoms than the nation it replaced and sometimes more than the ones that followed.

As for the national level; self determination is only as worth respecting as it's results. The results of the un colonized were medieval at best, often outright savage and barbaric. The spanish for all their faults did not raise the native people as chattle with intent to leave them to starve on a mountain after all, and the african slave trade was rampant long before the Europeans came and went on uninterrupted until the interferance of later Europeans.

Self determination is a result of, not a requirment for, nation building and the best dignity comes with knowing you dont need help anymore, which the devolution process provides.

Originally Posted by Tuuvi

Colonizing efforts were often justified as being a missionary endeavor but the main goal was to extract wealth and resources, that was what really drove European nations to establish them.

The main goal differed between participants and the greed of the merchant did not often prevent those missionaries from working and their efforts did help the locals; the famous Ghandi and Mandela were able to become western trained lawyers after all. At the end of the colonial era there were more europeans in africa inclined to the missionary's goal than merchant's.

You claimed that the power and ideals of western nation states could help protect the peoples of developing countries from the exploitation of the global market, so I was demonstrating that western nation states don't care about protecting people from the global market, their goal is to make the global market more favorable towards western multi-nationals.

It is not the governments but factions within with that goal, factions with frequently fluctuating degrees of control that right now are in a downturn.

The west has higher standards of labour rights already in place and while not perfect it has had a much more effective performance fighting corruption than most of africa has had. In several places a western nation's administration would ensure much more of the wealth generated by multinationals would reach the locals, it certainly would ensure more of the foreign aid did.

How so?

...are you really so ignorant of the situation in africa? The oppression of zimbabwe, the chaos of somalia, the famines of south Sudan? You think that would happen were they subjects of a modern first world country? They werent ready to be left unsupported, they didnt have the money or motivation on their own to sustain a liberal democracy and so they fell into poverty and tribalism once left to their own devices.

**Greyblades** · 04-28-2016, 15:58

Originally Posted by Husar

whatever exactly the original point was.

My point was that the only proven way we as outsiders can "tackle inequality elsewhere in the world, so people don't have a reason to move enmass and resettle elsewhere" is colonialism.

We cant do that because we are crippled by a glut of people who have come to denounce any old method of doing things that isnt completely rainbows and sunshine, regardless of effectiveness or benefit, without realizing that such perfection is almost completely impossible. Often their complaints are outdated, pointing to problems that were solved hundreds of years before, "it does not matter if they improved: they were bad once thus they must allways be bad". The alternatives that these same people have come to espouse are almost invariably either snake oil doomed to fail or are flawed in ways that they are often unwilling or incapable of recognizing.

So unless these people were to grow a brain our best course of action is to wait, throw a bit of money at what few missionaries still venture into the brush and hope the locals figure it out on their own without causing too many genocides that would have been avoided in the first place, if we hadnt been forced to spend our efforts instead putting down some insecure men with mustaches, twice.

**Pannonian** · 04-28-2016, 17:54

Originally Posted by Greyblades

My point was that the only proven way we as outsiders can "tackle inequality elsewhere in the world, so people don't have a reason to move enmass and resettle elsewhere" is colonialism.

We cant do that because we are crippled by a glut of people who have come to denounce any old method of doing things that isnt completely rainbows and sunshine, regardless of effectiveness or benefit, without realizing that such perfection is almost completely impossible. Often their complaints are outdated, pointing to problems that were solved hundreds of years before, "it does not matter if they improved: they were bad once thus they must allways be bad". The alternatives that these same people have come to espouse are almost invariably either snake oil doomed to fail or are flawed in ways that they are often unwilling or incapable of recognizing.

So unless these people were to grow a brain our best course of action is to wait, throw a bit of money at what few missionaries still venture into the brush and hope the locals figure it out on their own without causing too many genocides that would have been avoided in the first place, if we hadnt been forced to spend our efforts instead putting down some insecure men with mustaches, twice.

See the claim in the Europe thread that Britain doesn't have the right of freedom from slavery. Whatever theoretical rights Britain has or doesn't have, Britain created the practical right of freedom from slavery for humanity. Flagellants rarely think about the practicalities of the moralities they preach about.