Quote (ofthevoid @ Jun 2 2018 12:24pm)
And your point?
Since you want to be historically accurate lets consider history. Can you point me to other cultures during that time or previously for that matter that weren't oppressive? Did not the native tribes of the Americas butcher and often enslave each other? Did not the Mayans, Incas & Aztecs annihilate smaller neighboring tribes and consolidate power by the sword? Did not the Japanese butcher and subjugate the Chinese and Koreans? Did not the African tribes enslave each other? Did not the Muslim expand and domineered much of the Middle East, North Africa & eastern Europe? Did not the Russians and Germans oppress the Poles? Was not Eastern Europe under Ottoman occupation for 600? I can go on for awhile, you get the point.
In those same cultures, without outside forces coming and conquering did not the strong oppress the weak? Whether it was Japan, Africa or Europe, the strong, the kings, the lords, etc. have always used the masses for personal gains. You think the average farmer in Europe really benefit from the colonization by their king or rich merchants? Were taxes still not levied on the pleb? Was the pleb still not oppressed for much of history? Are not the overwhelming majority of whites the descendants of these same plebs? Did not many of these people who originate from common plebs have to fight in bloody wars like WW2 in which 80 million of them died?
The point is 99.99% of humanity is descendant from someone who was at one point or another oppressed. You think the average white should feel some collective guilt for what happened to Blacks, Natives or Africans 200, 300 years ago even though they had nothing to do and in reality their ancestors were also oppressed? Many of the whites in America today came here during the late 19th and early 20th century, after slavery, after the ordeal with the Natives, why should they feel responsible for slavery? or are they supposed to feel guilt just because of their skin color? I'm from eastern Europe, my homeland was domineered by the Ottoman empire, the Russians, the Austro-Hungarian and so on. My Grandmother was shipped off to the gulags, before that my ancestors were probably some peasant farmers that were forced to toil in the field for long hours and pay taxes, tribute, whatever and probably faced some sort of oppression at the hand of those empires. Is their oppression somehow less significant because of their skin color or ethnicity? Sorry i don't buy into these oppression Olympics. It's 2018, make your own way in this world and stop looking for excuses.
I would rather have my homeland been colonized by England and benefit from their advances like China, India, North America, Australia, etc. did, then face oppression by some of these other empires. Ironically some of the places that were colonized by England are the wealthiest or projected to be some of the wealthiest places in the world.
Why do conservatives like to pretend oppression of blacks happened 300 years ago?