Quote (sylvannos @ Sep 11 2015 08:26am)
There's no other way to put this:
Read a fucking book instead of watching YouTube videos.
The entire situation in the Middle East, especially in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, is the direct result of European colonialism post-WWI where they carved up the Ottoman Empire and German holdings with complete disregard for ethnic, language, and religious relations.
Then, after WWII, they finally went "Oh, sorry! You can have your countries back now that we're done raping them. Hope you don't mind us keeping the oil and minerals we stole. BTW here's our Jews because we don't want them here."
If anything, this is a long time coming. Europe owes a great deal of reparations and meddling from the shit they pulled from 1911 to 1948. At which point, to be fair, the U.S. and soviets began using the region to fight proxy wars.
It's not the "white liberal guilt" you're claiming. The issue has always been White Man's Burden, the negative effect it's had on the world, and getting rid of it. It's the entire reason for radical extremist, Arab nationalism.
People who are white don't share collective guilt for crimes that people, completely unrelated, who may or may not have looked like them a good century ago, did. Your brand of identity politics is far more oppressive than the tribalism conservatives hold in vogue.
Besides, your historical revisionism is ridiculous. The Middle East was in a state of decline for centuries. The Ottomans ruled by force over disparate ethnic and religious groups, the collapse of that system was always going to be chaotic. The conflict between Persians and Arabs is not a white man's construct, and the religious divide between Shia and Sunni is not a European creation.
Western civilization has developed, for one reason or another, institutions that promote internal stability so as to provide a basis for economic growth. Again, this isn't a "not-white" problem. The Balkans and much of South-Eastern Europe has failed to develop at a similar pace when compared to the West. Part of this can definitely be blamed on the inherent difficulties they faced in establishing credible (i.e. nationalistic) governments. Beyond that, there are many countries within Europe that did establish credible national institutions, but are still in a position of relative poverty vis-a-vis France, Germany, England, and a handful of other European nations. It's a difficult thing to move from middle-income to rich. In the last 50 years there are only a handful of countries that have made that transition successfully (to point, I can really only think of the Gulf states, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea).
The West did not create modern Arab culture, and the amount of credit you give to "white Europeans" when it comes to shaping the modern Arab experience is astoundingly racist.
A pan-Arab state was never feasible, and your history in which the only thing stopping a prosperous pan-Arab union was evil white men is farcical. Oil wealth in the Arab world is not equally distributed;there are serious linguistic, ethnic, and religious variations to an enormously widespread group of people. Control over oil wealth is localized, there is no reason to believe that Arab tribalism in the Gulf would have given way to a utopia of mutual brotherliness.
I don't think you have ever thought critically about what you're saying. It does not hold up to any semblance of scrutiny.