The Amerindians were nowhere near the level of political complexity, economic development, nor military advancement as the British Empire/US government, thus… they had no right to the land they were living on? Shenanigans.
A more accurate US model for getting rich is 1) Ethnically cleanse a massive amount of land using vastly superior firepower. 2) Settle on newly acquired land with a massive influx of colonists. 3) Use newly acquired land for it’s untapped natural resources. 4) Innovate.
Great, so since Africa has lots of land already they can skip straight to steps 3 and 4.
Only if one assumes that “Africa” is the political equivalence to 18th century colonial America.
One was a collection of 13 (English founded) colonies of roughly similar: demographics, size, wealth, culture, history, age, religion, language, climate. The other is the world’s second biggest content, a collection of 54 states, +2000 languages, varying climate, etc…
Results [del]may[/del] will vary.
Of course they will, and I agreed with what you said earlier about Africa likely charting a unique course for itself.
In the meantime, Africa contains a number of stagnant economies. Many of us would like to help such countries. I give money to various charities (mainly oxfam), but I don’t think such aid will turn countries around.
What is really needed is to convert stagnant economies into growing ones, and as we’ve seen countless times in south america, asia and the “exceptions” in africa, is that this is mostly about scaling up and getting exports going.
Genuinely I’m confused as to what the point of the opposing side is now. There have been a number of tangents as to how we’re all teh evilz, but not much relating it back to africa and what we/they should do going forwards.
That’s not a logical inference from what I said. Just because some countries got their wealth from stealing doesn’t mean every country has to. You’re confusing what my observation with me saying it’s some sort of imperative. Far from it.
Wealth *can *come from the sweat of your brow. That’s just not generally the case with capitalism.
It’s as good a word as any. Let me guess - you’re also one of those pedants who say American hegemony doesn’t qualify as an Empire.
Trading with Africans on equal terms and for truly distributed mutual benefit would not be.
And I don’t want a hand-out. I want back some of what was stolen from us.
No. That trade only “works” if you define “works” in strictly capitalist ways like GDP and Balance of Trade, and ignore the fact that Botswana, too, is an oppressive regime more than willing to stamp out its own minorities for some of that lovely green. The only difference between Botswana and some other states is that the Botswanans don’t outright machine-gun their minorities. They just remove them from their own land and call it “progress”. Botswana is only “well-governed” if you’re not living where they want to mine, or where the view attracts tourists.
I inferred nothing; I said for your observation to be relevant you’d have to be saying Africa must follow the same course as us.
Since you aren’t, we can close this tangent; there’s really no relevance in going into history.
It’s hardly pedantry to say China trading with Africa is not “SinoColonialism”.
This kind of hyperbole is hardly advancing the discussion.
No-one is being forced into doing deals with China.
And if the Chinese are getting good deals, it’s because other countries have avoided dealing with africa, for fear of being labelled as exploiters / colonialists.
Whatever was stolen was peanuts compared to the requirements, and opportunities, of the future.
History’s full of fucked up things. Forget about it and move on.
The point is this: Raising GDP does not solve all of a country’s problems. But having a very low GDP exacerbates just about all of them.
While a country is dirt-poor the long-term focus must be on firing up the economy.
I don’t believe that this means sacrificing human rights, but even if it did, I think you could make a case for saying it’s worth it.
I’ll just point out that the wealth generated on the backs of slaves wasn’t accrued only by the owners of plantations in the South, but also by Northerners and even Europeans who participated in or facilitated the trade in slaves, or the trade in slave-produced commodities, or the processing of same. Many fortunes were made by shipbuilders and merchants and early industrialists in an economic context that was partly based on slavery, even when much of that economic activity actually took place outside slave territories. For example, Francis Cabot Lowell is a key figure in starting the Industrial Revolution in the United States. His Boston Manufacturing Company made textiles of plantation cotton; the town of Lowell, Massachusetts by 1860 was spinning more than the entirety of the Southern states.
Slavery is inextricable from American, not just Southern history.
Exactly. The slave trade alone- aside from the productivity of slave labor- was a huge industry booming at a key point in both American economic development and American history on the whole.
Regarding Botswana- Botswana is not magic. It’s current situation (which we should not get too comfortable with; Africa always has a darling, but we all remember when Abidjan was the Paris of Africa.) stems from a mix of history, culture, available resources, locally available talent, and a million factors that are going to be completely different in CAR or Guinea or Angola. It’s not as simple as “decide to give up corruption and thrive!” There are pre-conditions to “giving up corruption.” Most of the corruption in place serves some purpose. In more than a few cases, it directly serves our purposes. It’s not as simple as people just suddenly deciding not to be corrupt anymore. Botswanans are not just somehow better people than their neighbors. It’s a question of systems and incentives, not morals.
I’m in Cape Town right now.
In the 1950s, they began segregating the towns. In the 1970s, they bulldozed a huge chunk of the city where people of different races lived together and relocated non-white people to outlying zones physically separated from the city by canals, highways, and other physical barriers. Men were housed in crowded bare-bones dormitories, and their families were forced back to villages. In the 1980s, this was still going on.
It’s not until 1994 that this bullshit stopped. 1994.
You cannot separate the city from the past. The vast slums are not surprisingly right where people were relocated. Families have moved in to the already overcrowded dorm/barracks, leading to extreme overcrowding and the creation of informal shacks. The physical barriers that were put up in the 1970s and 1980s are still right there. The cleared chunks of the city are still weedy unused lots in what would probably be among the most developed parts of Cape Town. People still have little or no compensation for the land that they often owned before they were forcible removed. How would your family be doing if you lost all your real estate in the 1970s?
The educations system in South Africa was purposefully dumbed down. They specifically engineered it so that black people got a poor quality education, even when they had enough resources to provide a real education. They kept them from learning on purpose. This generation would have been my mother’s. How do you expect several recent generations of purposefully undereducated people not to still be a factor?
I worked in one of the former “homelands.” The local government is unsurprisingly formed out of structures and power players from the “homeland” era. How can they just move on.
South Africa is an extreme example, but really it’s not that different in other countries. Sure there are not fireworks and obvious morality plays of apartheid, but there were plenty of practices that were equally heinous that continue to resonate today.
Yes there are significant social problems still.
But what does that have to do with the topic of this thread?
Can’t.
This is certainly true. For reference, see Joseph Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England. It’s kind of a tedious book but is chock full of data that support these claims.
No, it’s relevant as an example of what not to do…again.
I disagree. You want to skip history because history clearly shows that just letting external powers exploit your resources without due recompense leads to just enriching the exploiters. And that’s what China is doing - enriching itself and doing nothing for Africa
Treating foreign countries as a place to get cheap resources and dump your excess population is colonialism, even if you don’t annex the countries you exploit
Your pedantic insistence on calling a spade a “stick with a blade on the end” is what is not advancing the discussion. What China is doing in Africa is a form of colonialism, not just “trade” - once you see that, you’ll see why some Africans are a bit skeptical that the Chinese model is any better for us than the continuing efforts of our former colonizers to squeeze some profit from us.
Actually, sometimes they are. That they’re being forced by their own corrupt governments and officials is no excuse.
And that’s a bad thing?
Bullshit. What was stolen was our future.
Colonialism’s history is partly written in sjambok scars on my leg and my scalp, and the writing on the tombstone of my grandfather. Not about to forget about it. Not about to move on.
I never said different. But only focusing on GDP is silly - look at the example of any country where a small percent is rich off oil. GDP doesn’t reflect the experience of the poorest sectors of society. You can raise GDP while *only *making the rich richer.
I am talking long-term. That’s why the emphasis must be in building *sustainable *industry in Africa, not just stripping its resources.
So make the case. I’d *love *to see what case you can make for sacrificing human rights for profit. :dubious:
ETA: and it’s never the rich who have to sacrifice their rights. It’s always the poor.
No response?
Nope.
First of all, it’s a straw man as I wasn’t talking about “for profit”, and you know that.
Secondly, I was happy to leave things with your previous post (#73). None of your counter-arguments actually address the points I’m making and I’m confident anyone reading that post would think the same.
No, I don’t know that - how are you going to raise GDP and “fire up” the economy without *someone *profiting (the Chinese, in this case). Are you claiming the Chinese aren’t going to profit? There’s no strawman.
You mean the one that offered you a challenge to defend your statement? I can see why you’d be happy to leave it there - or “slink away from the argument”, as i’d call it.
Appeals to the peanut gallery are irrelevant. I addresses your points, you just don’t like the response.
And you said “a case could be made”, but it appears you were talking out of your dogma.
I’ll remind you that my statement was even if raising an african country’s GDP meant sacrificing some human rights, one could make a case that it would be worth it.
I’m quite happy to defend that statement (it’s not really asserting very much), but I’m going to wait until you’re done with your straw men.
I did not say “sacrifice human rights for profit”. Nor did I say “china is not going to profit”.
Can we cut the crap? I’m hoping this thread can return to actually debating the topic. I’m not interested in a slagging match.
Let’s stick with that, then - make your case.
Sure.
So again, my statement was:
So, the logic is very simple. Some parts of africa are in extreme poverty. This poverty can directly cause severe problems: famine, disease and (less obviously) war. Things that threaten human survival. And affect other basic human needs like shelter.
And this appalling situation tends to be self-perpetuating.
What we consider “human rights” however tends to encompass more high-level human needs such as the right to a fair trial and free speech.
So, if it were the case that there was an either/or between raising prosperity and human rights (and remember, I’ve explicitly said that I think this is not the case), it may well be worth it, on Utilitarian grounds.
This is even allowing for the fact that some transgressions of human rights may involve murder (depending on how we’re defining it and which country we’re looking at); probably there is still more suffering on the “staying dirt poor” side of the equation.
Hopefully we can close this tangent.
Let’s stop there - I wasn’t restricting it like that. Are you?
The human rights that get trampled on in the case of Africa are usually much more basic than that i.e. the right to life and liberty. Freedom from forced removal from your land is not, IMO, a “high level” right, either. It’s a form of genocide. Would you still say “a case could be made” for sacrificing these for some for overall prosperity? (and I get that this is not your view, but you’re the one saying it *could *be justified.)
It’s *not *a tangent. The whole thread is about whether the Chinese Model is best, and the Chinese Model *explicitly *includes not worrying about human rights concerns (“politics”) in potential trading partners e.g. Sudanese Govt. So if you say “a case can be made,” you’re saying it about the Chinese too.