Quote:
Originally Posted by DMSmillie
Laughable!
Intellectual property is hardly the invention of the US - see Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. And have a look at the history of pretty well any country in the world, and you'll see the oppression and displacement of one cultural group or another, enslavement, exploitation. There are plenty of places where it's still happening. The notion that these things are unique to the US (or even to the "Western World") is one of the biggest ideological scams of the current age.
If you want to find justifications for ignoring the rights of authors around the world, you'll have to come up with something a bit better than that. |
I did not imply that intellectual property is an American invention. I implied that it was the new means by which America planned to keep its place as global hegemon, a position articulated by people with as great a divergence of opinion as Samir Amin and Jaron Lenier. And while many countries have human rights abuses in their past, the system of organized exploitation and expropriation perpetrated by the West and specifically by the United States is unique in its intensity and in the degree which it has shaped the modern world. There have been massive migrations in the past, that it is true. But generally these migrations have resulted in the blending of peoples, not their annihilation. The Arabs, for example, formed an upper class that gradually absorbed (Arabized) the the peoples they conquered (or not: Iran became Muslim without becoming Arab). The Spanish, while brutal conquerors in some sectors of their empire, interbred and merged with their subject peoples in others (although there is a clear racial hierarchy such as in pre-Morales Bolivia, for example). The American (and Australian) style of displacing or slaughtering the indigenous inhabitants, while not unique, is a.) indicative of the style of conquest that became typical of emerging capitalism and b.) justified by an ideology, tracing its routes to John Locke, that is still very influential. Critiquing the Barbarian migrations or the Mongol holocaust would be academic at this point. Critiquing the various shades of capitalist ideology is still to the point.