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.
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.