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Originally Posted by DMSmillie
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.
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That's true but most countries aren't located on recently stolen territory - EVERYONE's ancestors killed SOMEONE to come where they are, except for the Eskimos maybe, there's almost no place on Earth where the majority of the population are the first humans who came there, but mostly it happened at least a millenia ago, or several millenia ago in some cases, but in the US it was happening a century and a half ago. And USA had wide-spread slavery and it's wealth is in large part based on that, and the same goes for many other countries but not all certainly. So you can't say the history of the US is just like everyone else.
Anyway, what matters is how things are now... And teaching history right.
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Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore
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
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Actually, it seems to me it's the military/technological supremacy that's their main means of keeping the position of the global hegemon (and the domination and spreading of their culture as an effect of that).
I wish the UN was the greatest world power and that all including the smallest countries decided together how to shape the world's course but it's never going to be like that. Not as long as people are greedy for power and superpowers armed to the teeth.
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Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore
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.
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Regardless of position, that was quite eloquently put ! Shows knowledge and culture...