Pretty interesting when you really think about it. - eviltoast
  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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    3 days ago

    The weapons you would support being sent to free them in some hypothetical better world, in this world are used to oppress them. These places aren’t poor because the people just did a bad job at managing them, they are poor because they were bombed and looted.

    You can go to the US’s policies in South America, their policy of keeping it under control as their own “backyard”, how the School of the Americas cranked out death squads, how neoliberalism was born with the sponsorship of a fascist coup in Chile, and how the Chicago School taught countries to privatise and disinvest from public infrastructure.

    You can look at the IMF and the World Bank putting out predatory loans where the rulers of countries are bribed to sell out their own people, leaving them impoverished and in debt.

    Or how the United Fruit Company kept several countries under its thumb, coining the term “banana republic”, so you could buy cheaper bananas.

    Further back you can look at the rape of Africa, where European colonial powers did a campaign of unmitigated atrocities for decades, setting up imperialist structures that keep many of those nations subjugated to this day.

    Or you can look at the modern example of Israel, which is sponsored by the US specifically to project power in the region. The extended wars fought by the US in that region are purely to maintain control over their oil.

    I’m just pulling these off the top of my head. This is a tiny fraction of all crimes done to keep poor countries poor.

    Neoliberalism works to ensure free flow of capital but restrict the movement of people, so that when their infrastructure is destroyed and they have nowhere else to go, they will be desperate enough to accept extremely low wages.

    If you’re going to claim to be class conscious, you need to educate yourself on these issues and learn to have solidarity with workers everywhere. Talking about how you don’t want to sacrifice anything to make others’ lives better is the opposite of what we need to win the class war, especially when your better quality of life was bought with their blood.

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      I’m not American. But I’ll give a clear example about my country.

      In Spain people used to migrate to Latin American. As life was better there. It was only until the 70… That the trend changed. We became a democracy and started fighting for working rights. And that worked. We made our country a better place. And people starting coming more and more snd more and now they are coming in mass.

      From this 40 years where migrational policies changed. And Spain moved from beeing poorer that Latin American to richer. We did not colonize anything, we didn’t use slaves, became s colonial power, invaded any other country or organizing any coup in any place, we did not divide Africa or done anything bad. Countries can get better without exploiting others. We got better by fighting for worker rights and making this place one of the places with more worker security in the world. That made us richer, that made us a place desirable for inmigration. I shall not accept negation of the worker struggle, and the worker sacrifices that achieved this by any identity-policy propaganda, where people are based or good based on their skin tone or the country they were born in. We achieved what we got without exploiting others. The FMI tried to destroy us as well and we managed to overcome it with socialist politics. We must now defend what we achieved, were are entitled to it, as we fought a lot for it.

        • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 days ago

          Ah yeah, the spanish empire from many centuries ago. Whose colonies are full from spanish inmigrants because latin America was richer than mainland Spain. You know that you are talking about something similar to the relationship between UK and the US/Canada don’t you? Old time colonies that got, in fact, richer that the mainland country. Is the US exploited by the UK? Is the US poverty fault of the British empire? Do you know that fucking Texas was part of the Spanish empire? Do we own Texas some reparations?

          You don’t know anything. You have a dogma.

          Do a research on Spanish inmigration please.

          And don’t go to fucking 15th century.

          Go to 1800s 1900s. Search for the “gallegos”, search for “hacer las americas”. Spanish people used to go to America to be servants, to be cleaning workers…

          Spain has been a very poor country for many many years, until very recently.

          • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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            3 days ago

            Your empire didn’t end until 1976.

            And absolutely none of this has anything to do with the fact that stopping people from migrating will do nothing to fix poverty.

            You call yourself a leftist and you have no concept of how imperialism shapes our world.

            • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              3 days ago

              You are looking terribly wrong by anyone who knows anything about Spanish history right now 😂

              The great Spanish empire of 1975😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

              Really. You are doing yourself a bad favour writing such irrational things.

              Left is supposed to be rational, please.

              Be rational! Think about what you are writing!

              You are being incredible insensible and offensive to the poor Spanish workers that had to eat street cats in the 1950s because they were starving to death. But according to some Lemmytor they were a colonial imperialist superpower.

              • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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                3 days ago

                Nobody said imperial powers were immune to poverty. They thrive off of it, that’s where they get their soldiers. Like what, I’m supposed to ignore US imperialism because of the vast poverty that exists in that country?

                Either way that doesn’t mean you get to turn away the people who were made poor by imperialism and tell them to fix their own country, regardless of how much you personally benefited.

                It isn’t fucking relevant that you’re not in a wealthy country. In fact it makes it harder to understand why you’ve got no compassion for anyone else. Immigration doesn’t hurt you personally.

                Someone has taken you in with faux-leftist reactionary rhetoric, but it’s clear you don’t care to learn the reality, so I don’t see much point in carrying on talking to you.

                • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  3 days ago

                  I don’t care about the US. I’m not talking about the US.

                  I’m talking about my country. The US is not the whole world.

                  Mass inmigration have some negative impact to some workers. To all, bad impact workers on the origin country, on the destination country and for the migrant workers. Mass inmigration only helps capitalists, that’s why they defend it the most. That’s why the most capitalist country in the world (now I am indeed talking about the US) is incredibly open to immigrants. Massive immigration is great to increase shareholders profits. Not so good for everybody else, including migrants.

                  But if you somehow think that Spain was a imperialistic colonial superpower by 1975 is a waste of time trying to explain it. Talking about it rationally is against your dogma, your identity politics, and the anti-worker pseudoleft, so… No point.