Comment by ramanujan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramanujan | Hacker News Reader

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jacquesm: As a "third world person", I don't think the West owes anything to us. It's actually a very Euro-centric and arguably racist model of the world to believe that only whites have agency and that everything hinges on what whites did or did not do.

Nonwhite people are perfectly capable of killing themselves (and whites!) in huge numbers. Genghis Khan, Shaka Zulu, the Aztecs, and the Arabs conquered lands and put many cities to the sword. Islam radiated out from the Middle East to the Atlantic and the Pacific, with sword.

What do you think Genghis or Shaka Zulu would have done if they invented guns and ships first? They're human. They would have conquered Europe and enslaved Europeans. Indeed, many Europeans were enslaved by North African slave traders.

Europeans do lose battles. It is racist to think otherwise. Didn't the Japanese win the Russo-Japanese war? Wasn't the Muslim world on the offensive when Europeans were in disarray? Weren't China and India the centers of the world economy for hundreds of years?

All civilizations rise and fall. Europeans had a great run from 1492 to 2008. China is currently the top dog, even if many people in the West haven't realized it. And they didn't get rich from Western aid, and they sure didn't benefit from the export of that oh-so-Western ideology of communism, thought up by a dead white guy named Karl Marx.

They created their wealth and are lifting a billion plus people out of poverty.

When they're on top, which they already are, are you going to still claim that the West is the sole driver of history, that everyone is what they are because of Western action or inaction? Or will you agree that China (and India, and all the others) are human too, and can build up their own societies without "help" from the West? Because China doesn't want your aid and it sure doesn't want your pity. But it'd be happy to sell you a chip for $199, as an equal partner in a trade.

> It's actually a very Euro-centric and arguably racist model of the world to believe that only whites have agency and that everything hinges on what whites did or did not do.

Feel free to read into my words whatever you want but don't make it sound like that is what I wrote it makes any kind of discussion impossible.

The world is a lot more complex and involved than you make it seem, the west does have a debt and I highly doubt it even can be repaid, especially because we're still raping and plundering the African continent as we speak.

That dead white guy you're referring to was actually on to something, he just missed on important little detail: the amount of greed and the willingness to commit crimes that is present in the people that he thought would be happy to make the world work in a better way. The fault lies not with Marx but mostly with those that co-opted his ideas in name only to use as a fig leaf to further rob the general population. Note how every communist country was very keen to adopt the stance that they were owned by 'the people'.

Sure China is happy to sell us chips (and Korea as well) but the only reason that trick still works is because of environmental impact denial and low wages make it competitive to do so. That won't last for ever.

China is economically powerful, but morally bankrupt in many ways. India has similar problems, Africa is going from bad to worse reducing its un-replenishable stock of precious resources at bargain basement prices in deals that benefit no locals other than a very select few. With the loot safely stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

Whatever happened in the dark ages is none of my concern, right now a great many fortunes can still be traced directly back to crimes in the past or crimes ongoing today. And that is a debt that is on the books, not lost in the mist of times.

I completely agree that China and India are where the next huge improvements will probably be made. One of the reason the WIPO is so strong in favor of nailing down IP rights globally is to make sure that the west will get its cut, even if it doesn't actually produce anything anymore. Just another chapter in that book.

The dead white guy was responsible for 100 million people dead, most of them non-European. If you want to feel guilty for something, feel guilty for denying that. His great idea was to abolish private property, such that you didn't own the very toothbrush in your hand, the clothes on your back, the house you built with your own hands - or your farm.

Why is it that rejecting the ideas of Marx led China (and Vietnam, and Singapore, and Taiwan) to unprecedented wealth? Why is Chile rich and Cuba poor? Why is North Korea dark while South Korea is alight? Why was Eastern Europe impoverished while Western Europe was wealthy? Why was the Comintern established, why did the Soviet Union foment revolution all around the world, why did Pol Pot stack up a million skulls?

And, most importantly, what exactly "colonized" Eastern Europe and China and North Korea within the span of 10 years to drive them so far behind Western Europe, Taiwan, and South Korea respectively?

It's all Marx. Every time. You want to atone for something, atone for that. That is your sin: converting millions of indigenous people to an alien, white, Western ideology that promised heaven and yielded hell.

I think you're confusing Marx with Stalin, Mao and a bunch of other guys.

Marx -> philospher, Stalin, Mao etc -> opressors, mass murderers.

> That is your sin: converting millions of indigenous people to an alien, white, Western ideology that promised heaven and yielded hell.

So sorry, no that is not my sin.

But part of my sin is the fact that the country that I live in exports a lot of weaponry, that the larger portion of the wealth this country was founded on was based on the slave trade and a few other dirty pages in our history.

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