Comment by aspenmayer 18 hours ago
If there are guilty parties, we ought to name them, not stay silent out of a misguided sense of justice simply because other guilty parties go unnamed. How is your comment indistinguishable from whataboutism?
I’m not saying your factors aren’t also present either, in addition to the ones I mentioned, but if your factors are present everywhere all the time, what’s the point in bringing them up in this thread?
Upstream someone was saying the problems in Africa are due to conquest, subjugation, colonization, etc. I'm saying just about every country of consequence experienced this over the last half dozen centuries so it's not attributable to that -that is it's too facile a response.
I wasn’t saying that all bad things were attributable to the colonial powers, but those powers orchestrated the spread of propaganda that led to the “mob rule” as a backlash against colonial meddling and empire. I agree it was a sweeping statement, and glosses over a lot of nuance. I don’t mean to minimize man’s inhumanity to man due to local innovations.
I’m saying it’s not a special case. It’s everyone’s history.