Isaac Asimov’s concept of psychohistory isn’t as much fiction as it seems, groups of people have huge inertia.
A lot of the borders, and consequently sociocultural issues in central europe today are caused by kingdoms a millenium ago.
This may, in fact, be true. But in this specific context, it's an argument that proves too much.
We can't even measure GDP accurately in quarters already passed, let alone predict what it will be in future, and surely predicting the movement of GDP is the most basic task a psychohistorian could possibly set themselves.
Unless that original power structure is dismantled (a tough task since those in power entrench themselves against any insurrection), you can't fully say what a country's growth trajectory could have been. Botched though the surgery may be, the former colonies still seem to be connected to the colonists in some way.
Talking about blame is about status and power games right now.
If you want to understand what happened, the changes colonialism caused cannot be reversed and first-order effects are still obvious today. If you want to blame people, well, people love to nurse their grievances.
100 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but unfortunately, it can all be undone quite quickly. When older generations sacrifice short term gains for long term security is when progress can happen. Unfortunately, I don’t see much appetite for that where I’m from (the US), and once a sufficient number of people choose to take more from the system than they give, it will start decaying.
"How do you solve long-running civil war?"
"Murder all the grandmothers."
His point being that they were (a) the only ones who survived into old age (everyone else getting murdered) & (b) were thereby the ones educating a new generation in the hatreds of the old.
He was only half-joking.
But it really made me think about, as you say, just how long it takes for institutions to be built in a society. Which is order-of-"the time it takes for mindsets to change (usually via death) or new generations to rise into power (~40 years)".
I'd never really thought about it that way before.
Or put another way, it's easy to push systems towards increasing entropy, but hard to push them in the opposite direction.
That's part of why terrorism (of any persuasion) often chooses targets of symbolic value, like social, political, and economic hubs. They are trying to push the target social system toward entropy.
See also the overthrow of Iran, 2 invasions of Iraq, hundreds of billions of US arm sales to both Israel and Saudi Arabia, indirect involvement in the invasion of Yemen, the Russian/US/Iranian proxy war in Syria, I'm sure there's much more.
I can't think of another region of the earth that has faced more foreign involvement in the past 50 years.
They (Saudi Arabia) were a full participant in the partitioning of the Ottoman empire, and annexed much of the west side of the Gulf themselves.
The Saud dynasty did form an alliance with the US, but this wasn't until 1945. That's well after the what most people think of the colonial period, and the terms of the alliance were nothing like a colonial-style arrangement.
The effects of the agreement didn't magically go away just because the British empire was failing 16 years later though.
Being after the time people perceive as the colonial period isn't really relevant either, the arrangement is distinctly neocolonial rather than colonial and absolutely built the current strength of the Saudi regime. Of course that isn't to ascribe any unique evil to any of the players, the arrangement was very profitable for the Sauds and the Americans, and pursuit of profit, not geopolitical foresight is what drives any arrangement like this.
Reducing that to a question of "blame" I would agree is kind of an irritant 80+ years on... but it does serve the purpose of challenging other even more oversimplified views, such as assuming that the culture is predisposed not to thrive.
But isn't that just because they are a single-resource export oriented economy? It's Dutch Disease[1], but hundreds of times larger?
Britain passed the economic and military reins to the states
Why are you bringing up Britain here? They weren't a colonial power in Saudi Arabia. The closest they came was Kuwait.
Because I didn't know the history myself, tl;dr from Wikipedia:
Ottoman empire controlled the entire area at the turn of the century, to various degrees at various time. Al Rashid family allied with Ottomans. Al Saud family, under Abdulaziz (later, simply Ibn Saud), fought Rashids in the Riyadh region. During WWI, pan-Arab revolt against Ottomans encouraged by British. Ibn Saud mostly avoided participating in revolt to focus on defeating the Rashids, with the help of Ikhwan (Wahhabist) forces.
Pan-Arab revolt failed, but allies won, resulting in creation of independent Arab states. In years after the war, Saud and Ikhwan forces captured and most of modern day Saudi Arabia.
In 1927, the Ikhwan forces attempted to expand farther afield, into British-administered Arab successor states (Transjordan, Iraq, Kuwait). Saud disagreed, and a two year war was fought for control of Saudi Arabia. Ikhwan forces lost, most of their leaders killed, and the Saud family rules to today.
Are we just going to pretend the UK hasn't almost incessantly meddled in the Middle East for the past 75 years?
The Saudis (and other Middle Easterners) should own up to the issues challenging them, and work hard to overcome the colonialist past. That being said, colonialism continues to this day, just not in the outright visible way that happened previously. Just look at the West's interference in Middle Eastern politics.
I don't mean this personally against you, but people who tend to talk this way often don't understand the sheer magnitude of what colonialism wrought upon the world. And I understand why; it's downplayed in the history taught in the developed world, and generally only brought up where it resulted in more or less "okay" situations once it had more or less passed, like the founding of America. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Britain was perhaps the most prolific, but it was far from the only nation doing this shit.
Belgium skull-fucked the Congo for nearly a century, and did pretty much every horrific thing they could think of: mass executions, cut off limbs when the people couldn't pay their taxes, bought "land rights" from the locals for gemstones not even remotely worth enough, murdered probably millions of men, women, and children. IIRC the last time I read about this, by the time they were done almost 2 in 3 Congolese people were dead or crippled beyond the ability to work. Those left had no leadership qualities or training, since leadership was always Belgian and they fucked off home. They didn't know how to do pretty much anything other than grunt labor, and suddenly when Belgium left, had to figure out how to assemble a Government.
The kind of damage that does is incalculable. Not just the economic damage, not just the ecological damage from the mining and farming, not just the emotional toll left on the populace, etc. This sends shockwaves through history that will likely take centuries if not a millennium to fully dissipate. And then of course after Belgium left, giving the country back to it's populace, they started funding various tribes sitting on the natural resources they wanted, to start civil wars that would then last EVEN LONGER STILL, doing EVEN MORE DAMAGE.
And this is what just one nation did to one other nation. Colonialism as a whole was a bunch of nations ripping up a sizable partition of the entire planet's worth of places and people, the effects of which, mainly cultural loss/damage, and the incredible wealth enjoyed by developed nations remain to this day and show no signs of slowing down, save for finally the topic of national reparations being on the table.
Edit: And of course colonialist problems or ones that look a damn lot like colonialism continue to this day, from the ship-breaking beaches where workers are paid pennies a day to scrap ships from the developed world, sold to those firms because it's cheaper that disposing of them in an ecologically friendly way, to the exports of trash electronics to various nations where they demolish their environment to scrape out a meager living. People will look at these things and say "well why can't they just have eco regulation and proper laws, and just say no?" and the answer is that a shit job beats starvation, but the fact that those are their only options is itself a relic of colonialism.
Please try incorporate all the data when formulating a hypothesis.
True but one thing they can't be blamed for is the lack of infrastructure before they got there. Knowing that, they can't be blamed for the lack of infrastructure built after they left. Colonialism then is the same as corporatism today - there is a very large amount of value extraction, which good or bad, still exists. One can say that the cruelty has diminished somewhat, but perhaps that's because the wealth to be gained has only increased? Oddly though, this cruelty often means that the regions affected by it have better roads, cleaner water, at least traces of medicine, and on the whole better transit. Not always, to be sure.
Feel free to believe the common lie that every indigenous was a graceful peaceful person that wouldn't hurt a fly. Hard to come up with a greater untruth than that.
"Might Makes Right" is an appealing philosophy, until you're on the wrong end of it.
If you believe that "home grown" totalitarianism or serial killing is okay as long as it's "home grown", I can't help but feel bad for your awkwardly backwards "nationalistic" views.
This is not to say that all indigenous are serial killers, but some regions are well known for such behavior among their indigenous.
Edit: I don't believe in racism. Only genetics and statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Apparently, Congo is in the 50 most violent countries. That's also recent. It has no accounting for what they were, but I'm willing to believe it may have been worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
> Apparently, Congo is in the 50 most violent countries. That's also recent. It has no accounting for what they were, but I'm willing to believe it may have been worse.
Unless we have data that hails from the 1800's regarding pre-Belgium rates, which I'd say is pretty damn unlikely, I don't see how you can possibly make this point. It just sounds like good old fashioned racism with the window trimmings of science and data stripped of any and all context, which is a pretty standard fare tactic for a racist. "The crime rates are so high in Detroit, must be all the blacks!" Can't possibly be the catastrophic recession or the lukewarm response by the Government to address the problems, no, black people are just naturally violent. That's why we had to kill them and put them in chains.
https://www.verywellmind.com/are-personality-traits-caused-b...
Genetics is suddenly very unpopular as it can predict negative traits. Imagine that.
This happens when you have societies that do not adequately punish violence. Societies that reward violence will most certainly produce more violence.
In my background in the south, people want to justify their racism so they just say "I'm not racist, I am just making observations of people's behavior". That's just an excuse for being racist.
But here's the engineering counterbalance: What is the utility of atrocity memories, for those who were subjected to them?
How does recounting an injustice help build a better future?
There are concrete steps: colonial injustice means there should be international financial renumeration.
There are emotional steps: reconciliation councils provide a place for telling, listening, acceptance, and forgiveness on all sides without violence.
There are... maybe policy steps: people were traumatized in this way, ergo this is the best way to incorporate that into where we want to go.
Past that, not so much.
I absolutely own my first world, non-minority entitlement here. But my point is that it's not productive to anyone (including those who suffered) to simply relive trauma. And that it's easy, especially on the internet, to get trapped in a narrative of retelling, expression of sympathy, and then nothing gets done.
Stories should be told to move people forward. And if they don't do that, then aren't they themselves tools of oppression?
What do you suggest the Congolese tell their children happened for that block of time? What should they tell them when they ask about the mass graves? Their relatives who didn't survive, or the ones who did who just sit quietly in the corner and jump every time someone picks up a belt?
The traumatic history is their only history for this time period. That's not to say that nothing good happened anywhere, but this is akin to saying that the German curriculum should just pretend nothing happened between 1935 and 1950. Just because it was horrific doesn't change that it happened.
> I absolutely own my first world, non-minority entitlement here.
Are you, though? Because this is exactly how people talk to victims of rape or other violent crime; there's no use in recounting your trauma, just move on. As though that never occurred to them. As though that's not what they're trying to do, literally all the time. An emotional wound does not have a logical solution.
And the problem is impossible magnitudes larger when the victim wasn't a person, but a nation. I don't pretend to know what the average Congolese feels about this, but I have to figure those who know the history see the evidence and the landmarks of colonialism everywhere. And those who don't still suffer under it's long term effects.
> Stories should be told to move people forward. And if they don't do that, then aren't they themselves tools of oppression?
I would say they're effects of oppression. When you receive a really bad wound to your body, it leaves a scar. It probably doesn't hurt, maybe just feels strange when you move it just right, but it's there. Every time you see it, and for the rest of your life, you'll remember how you got it, whether it was a fun drunken stunt that went wrong, or whether you were ambushed in a park at night and nearly gutted for $12 in your pocket. You'll remember, you can't not. To say that the Congo and countries like it should just stop talking about their nation's collective injustice and just "get over it" is catastrophic simplification of a lot of human pain and suffering, and I'm sorry but when you're more closely affiliated with the side that did the oppressing than the suffering, it sounds a hell of a lot like trying to whitewash history because you don't like how it makes you feel.
If hearing this stuff makes you feel shitty, good. That's the correct reaction to learning about horrific events that have contributed, non-trivially, to the lifestyle you have. Now the next step, if you're inclined, is to get involved in activism that seeks to at least attempt to make these countries whole again, to share the benefits that the developed world has seen, and not just in the "whatever falls off the table is yours" way, but to find them a seat at that table.
If you have a point to make that's not outrage-driven, I'm happy to listen.
It's reasonable to expect any major effect to take several generations to revert to mean. If the person who suffered the effect is alive and plays a part in raising a child, the effect will continue to reverberate.
Other countries mess things up too of course, including the us. For example, the us just caused major problems with suddenly moving out of the way of the turkey invasion to the kurds. Maybe the us declined to get in a war with turkey to stop it or whatever it was, but we fucked things up by moving out of the way.
The problems in the Middle East region need to be solved, and only then this will be possible. Almost everything - from the current state in the various dictatorships over Kurdistan to the Israel/Palestine conflict (and even much stuff in the Asian continent, like the Pakistan/India conflict!) can be traced to the disastrous end of the British colonial era.
For example, most europeans do not worry much about the next war between france/germany/italy/spain/austria.
The "war is a constant between large powers in europe" issue appears to be solved enough, for now.
As long the English insist on sticking their noise -- and soldiers and arms and spooks -- in that area's business I would think.
This isn’t a jab at your comment more of a question. Here’s an article that talks about Arab army’s inefficiencies and has a lot to do with the family holding power over others.[1]
[1] http://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2000/12/why-arabs-lose-...