> yet to meet someone IRL who thinks what was done to native Americans was just
By was, I presume you mean five years ago, as the US broke the Treaty of Fort Laramie, pepper spraying and sicing guard dogs on natives in Standing Rock in order to build an oil pipeline. The natives testified at the UN human rights council as to what was happening.
I hope that the Taliban's 1 week takeover of the Afghanistan opens people's eyes as to how little Westerners understand what residents of developing countries perceive to be good or evil.
Oh, their presence there was definitely ill thought; so was destabilising it during cold war through the same means that bit them back. For this, tough action for them and their allies did make sense just like it does for CCP at this point.
> For this, tough action for them and their allies did make sense just like it does for CCP at this point.
But why? Would you still support this if the punishment cost you your job? Meanwhile, does this disincentivize the CIA from stirring conflict in another region? I think that biggest weakness with American foreign policy is that it's incapable of distinguishing between geopolitical interests and humanitarian interests. As a result, we aren't particularly good at advancing either.
Not “just” but I suspect most people in the world are indifferent to a more technologically advanced civilization displacing a less technologically advanced one. It’s how most of the world got to be the way it is and most people don’t really think about it too much. In Bangladesh we have the hill people, which we have treated similarly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chittagong_Hill_Tracts_conflic.... People are pretty blase about it when it comes up.
Sure but using the past tense implies that the thing does not happen anymore.
That's why the Mitch Hedberg bit is funny (I used to do drugs... I still do but I used to, too) is humorous. It subverts your expectation that the thing you "used to do" is a thing you no longer do.
The US used to do horrible things to Natives... it still does but it used to, too.
You'll immediately find a lot of those people if you re-frame the question in terms of reparations.
In the same way, there's no shortage of people in America condemning police treatment of HK protestors (Repressed people fighting for freedom), who also support police treatment of BLM protestors (Rioters and lowlifes with no real grievances who just want to ruin everything).
That's because most people don't hold political ideology derived from first principles, they just check what their political tribe likes/hates, and follow suit.
Not everyone views reparations are an appropriate response for past injustices. Your framing the situation is a litmus-test aimed at excluding people.
Every human being in history is at the tail of a long line of injustices and atrocities. The current way to fix things today is to look at the situation people are in, today, and remediate as necessary. I'm the 4th generation from eastern european serfs, who were treated as livestock or part of the land. It doesn't affect me today in the slightest. I don't deserve reparations.
This isn't an argument against a social safety net or social welfare. It's an argument against crude race-based cash transfers that ignore who is and isn't hindered today by past injustices.
My framing is the only meaningful litmus test. I don't give a shit about feelings, are you going to do anything about past and current injustice, where you can?
The answer, in the United States, is predominantly "No" from both sides of the political spectrum to the first question, and "Mostly No/No" to the second.
I'd also like to point out that even the Soviet Union/the Russian Federation flirted with reparations for victims of Stalin's repression.
Not sure of the point of this comment, other than textbook whataboutism.
Yes, the situation with the Native Americans wrt the expansion of European settlement in the Americas is similar.
At the same time, chattel slavery was widespread and common amongst most nations in the world. Should we tolerate a nation today having slavery because it was a thing for us previously?
You don't see any links with successive US governments treatment of conquered (first) nations? To borrow a Canadian phrase. I think there is value in deep consideration of patterns across time and political ideology, and perhaps draw informed generalizations on certain societal failure modes.
Judging the past by the standards of the present is problematic at best and regressive in the worst case.
The best examples of the human condition represent a desire to improve on our mistakes. Because we are imperfect, those with the will to do so must always be striving for improvement.
If we appeal to this erroneous view of history, what will future generations be able say of us under the same logic?
If we subscribe to this flawed logic, which past atrocities are not justified to be repeated today?
> Not sure of the point of this comment, other than textbook whataboutism.
And mission accomplished. Almost all the comments in the top 50% of the page right now aren't talking about the topic of the OP, but rather the distraction from it.
Tibetans are not unified by language or religion. There are more than a dozen Tibetic languages, and speakers of more distantly related language families like rGyalrongic are also classified as Tibetans by the government. The official policy of one standard language per recognized ethnicity does mean that many of them will have been educated in Lhasa Tibetan at school.
On the religion front, next to the various schools of Tibetan Buddhism, there's also the older Bön and other, less popular religions like Islam.
To be fair, a majority of the native population died due to the Europeans inadvertently introducing Smallpox. While I agree with your argument as a whole, I would advise against trying to use numerical arguments for Europe's treatment of the natives.
Although that article says that "there’s only one clearly documented instance of a colonial attempt to spread smallpox", the fact that there is any "clearly documented instance" of such an attempt is pretty horrific.
> Imagine being called a minority in a place you are the majority
which implies that only the area of Tibet is being discussed. And
> Tibetan people represent 0.4% of the Chinese population
implies that all of China is being discussed.
So there's a disconnect there. The comment about Native Americans was presumably being read in the context of "Native Americans in the Unites States", which is a context where they are, indeed, a minority.
I expect the original comment about Native Americans was made in the sense of "like how the US treated Native Americans", not "the facts presented (majority, living there for a long time) also apply to the Native Americans". Whereas the reply to that comment was, I assume, made based on the second interpretation.
So not dense or intentional, just a different understanding of what was being said, because of ambiguity.
And, because people like to feel superior and assume everyone interprets everything the same way they do even when ambiguous, the poor responder got a bunch of down votes lumped on them.
You can't compare pears to apples. Tibet and Crimea annexations were quite different.
Crimea used to be part of Russian Empire and then part of the Russian SSR until it was gifted to Ucranian SSR as a region in 1954. A 65% of the residents are Russians, 16% Ucranians and 12% Crimean Tatars. And most of their population speaks Russian (85%). There were tensions between Russia, Ukraine and Crimea thanks to that transfer (and they haven't disappeared). The annexation was a bad thing economically wise but it was done quite fast and clean.
The Tibet was already under Chinese control since the Qing Dynasty (1720). At that time, Korea was also a vassal state of the Qing Dynasty. The Tibet independence (1911-1950) sadly didn't have any strength (obsolete military, bad and few foreign relations) and they were absorbed by the CCP military. Also, they speak different languages, have different cultures and the Han are still a small minority in the region.
Native Americans are not the majority in the Americas, outside of reservations. So if you meant "Native Americans on a Native American reservation", then I guess so... but I don't think they're considered a minority in that context, are there?
Also Tibetans aren't the majority in Shanghai, just Tibet - Like native Americans on current reservations, which continued to shrink in size for a long time.
Yeah, the chinese government is looking for a way to get rid of the Tibetans. The Americans have done well in ensuring the native population has lost power and are shrinking. The end goal of china is to be rid of their Tibetan scourge, just like the Americans would like it if the natives stopped existing
