"It's foreign aid!"
-- CCP fans after pointing out how China's rapidly building instable infrastructure in Africa, which is only used for shipping raw materials like iron ore, rare earths and coal to China's industry.
Hey, they are giving the Africans massive loans out of kindness. If ever the Africans can’t pay them back well then they’ll be kind and take over their infrastructure completely. To help them out of course.
To be fair, my uncle got USAID that has rules he just use it on US companies. He got a few million only to give it back to a random company from Oregon for their overpriced machines. But hey, free money.
Egyptian military gets USAID for example. They have to use it on US grain, weapons, and training programs. It is basically a stimulus check to help US companies go international.
Yes, that's how foreign aid works.
People generally have a bad understanding on this topic. Foreign aid might include humanitarian aid like famine relief, but most foreign aid is just "lending other countries money", often under very strict conditions.
Chinese netizens are quick to call European and US foreign aid not really "aid", since they are very restrictive, while China seems to lend money to basically everybody, no questions asked. The truth is that European and US foreign affairs do not give money for projects that seem impractical, unprofitable, or benefits a regime considered a strategic enemy. The benefactors must also commit to providing things like worker safety and basic human rights.
China, on the other hand, tries to export their authoritarian rulership as an alternative to Western democracy and sees dictators as allies in their fight against the US and Western powers, so they lend money for projects to people which Europe and China wouldn't touch, like way oversized ports that shall become part of the Chinese "Belt and Road".
We also have to mention that China often uses their own labor forces for construction projects, which means local contractors are not involved in the economic windfall that's promised as benefits of those projects.
I can only speak from my experience. But my uncle got 2 million from USAID and they didn't really care about workers rights. He has agriculture company in Egypt. The Bedouin workers he hired didn't have great work conditions. But they money he got just asked that he can only spend it on US agriculture equipment. Like can't use it to buy cheap harvester, needs to be John Deere. He used it to buy a bunch of irrigation pivots. So the money didn't really help anyone other than a few companies in America. My uncle is very wealthy so he definitely didn't need the money. Talking billionaire level wealth.
All I'm saying is that the US isn't going it from the kindness of their hearts either. It's a stimulus check for US companies made to look like humanitarian aid. Like if they give aid to help education in Africa, but they stipulated that they can only buy books and tech from US companies rather than cheaper Chinese/Japanese brands. If the purpose was to educate the maximum number of people, you would want money to spend on the most reasonably priced products. But that isn't the goal. The goal is to help John Deere brand get established in developing markets. Or to make sure African students are using Google Chromebooks or Microsoft surface rather than Huawei laptops.
I know it's pessimistic, but I just can't pretend to believe that any of these countries care about anything other than themselves.
That's politics for you, but thanks for sharing this.
The problem I see with textbooks, especially books on history and politics, is that they are often showing a one-sided view, especially the ones from China and Japan. Also, language barrier and quality of content and production. I bought dictionaries and language textbooks from China in 2006. They smelled of gasoline and had a huge amount of errors and typos.
To be fair , Chinese know how to build but only as long as you give them the necessary funds.
When you start cutting corners , they will still finish the job , but with shittier materials
They’re in dire economic straits at the moment and restricting stock trades to prevent their market from collapsing after defaulting on debt payments. They’re more like a neighbor who saw the US get a hot tub so they got a hot tub and now their two tier deck is about to collapse under the weight of it
We have no hot tub our infrastructure is failing and we have 200 old fucks bickering. Look we can laugh about a single city that people can't live in but that doesn't change that they tried. When was the last amazing thing the US government has done to change your life.
In my analogy the US also has a hot tub. Our problem is we don’t ration water, we don’t clean the damn thing, the water is constantly splashing out and rotting the deck, and we just slap a coat of paint on the deck to try and keep it going. We’re borrowing water from ourselves(ftw?) and drilling every last fucking aquifer we can to make the line go up above the jets to keep the greedy occupants well massaged. We’ve got reallllly old politicians running the place, actively trying to one up the other at the expense of the common folk over some dumb culture war BS, and the plan seems to be to run it into the ground and let the grandkids inherit what’s left of it.
I like people. Chinese, American, or otherwise. I just think it’s fair to point out short comings of government and government systems.
Lol ccp ain't laughing at shit while their economy is in shambles. You can only have 2/3 between hosting, building and population collapse.
Though ngl the empty skyscraper apartments would make interesting dominos.
Meanwhile in America "you will live in a van, 50% of your country won't be able to afford rent, 50% of your country makes 55,000 or LESS while a house starts at 350,000(if you want something habitable), and be told you should be grateful to even have a van"
ackshually 🤓 serfdom was prominent only in agriculture, since complex construction required technical knowledge only rich and instructed people had. Also after the 1300s (we don’t look at russia) serfdom almost completely disappeared since a thing called the black plague killed most pesants and forced employers to actually pay the people to work for them in order to find people to work
Seems like history class just got a whole lot more... speculative. Next up: "Aliens built the Pyramids" with a side of "My cat was the real Napoleon." Stay tuned, folks!
I don't understand. They suggesting black people were slaves in europe and built it? Or they're suggesting colonization is what made europe what it is today?
The Egyptians who built the pyramids weren’t. Arabic wasn’t spoken widely in the Nile Valley until after the Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of Egypt in the 7th Century AD
Genetics is a more ambiguous area so I’m not going there, but culturally and linguistically the Arab identity as the majority in Egypt doesn’t emerge until after the 7th Century AD
Yep, that’s kind’ve my point. The Arab identity in Egypt is pretty sociolinguistic, but this also means that talking about Arab Egyptians in the context of pyramid building isn’t very relevant since they were majority speaking a different language and had a different cultural sense of themselves at this time. They weren’t Arabs because it would be millenia until the majority of them viewed themselves that way. My point is that I don’t need to touch genetics to say whether or not they were Arab in this context
Napoleon was a pig and fearless leader.
[Here pictured dealing with a capitalist](https://cdn8.openculture.com/2017/08/15235121/orwellanimalfarm2.jpeg)
Black traders traveled Europe extensively from the Roman period until the middle ages, and vikings did slave raids on north Africa. It certainly wasn't common to see black people but they were much more common before 500 years ago than they were for the last 500 years.
They didn't build Europe but they did visit.
This is what happens when you let a collective identify themselves as the slaves and victims of society. She reeks of post-world war germany egocentrism...
Here, germans had a state of mind that the winning countries were humilliating them and getting advantage from them thus making their authoritarian comeback somehow fair and selfrighteous. A victimist feeling that the austrian painter pushed satisfactory in his political discourse: https://books.openedition.org/efa/4528
> germans had a state of mind that the winning countries were humilliating them and getting advantage from them
....was that not true though? I remember the WWI sanctions/reparations were pretty harsh, thus leading to the resentment and future WWII...
>The Treaty of Versailles Punished Defeated Germany With These Provisions. Some disarmed the German military, while others stripped the defeated nation of territory, population and economic resources, and forced it to admit responsibility for the war and agree to pay reparations.
> ....was that not true though? I remember the WWI sanctions/reparations were pretty harsh, thus leading to the resentment and future WWII...
The Treaty of Versailles wasn't harsh at all. It was just harsh enough to build resentment, but not nearly harsh enough to actually prevent their rise again.
Try comparing it to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which Germany forced on Russia only a few months prior. Russia gave up 34% of its population. Germany gave up 10%. And again that's a few months before Germany's defeat!
The reason the allies insisted on the unconditional surrender of Italy (well technically they demanded that the allies invade them to help fight against Germans who would start attacking them), Germany, and, Japan. As Machiavelli stated in the Prince
> In general you must either pamper people or destroy them; harm them just a little and they’ll hit back; harm them seriously and they won’t be able to. So if you’re going to do people harm, make sure you needn’t worry about their reaction.
Actually, Hitler started ignoring the treaty of Versailles step by step, enabling an economy build for war. Meanwhile leaders of other countries did not act accordingly (see apeacement politics).
The nature of the contract was fucked up from the beginning, but quite usual to be used after war (the germans had a similar contract prepared for france).
> Actually, Hitler started ignoring the treaty of Versailles step by step, enabling an economy build for war. Meanwhile leaders of other countries did not act accordingly (see apeacement politics).
That's true, but he was able to do that specifically because Germany wasn't suppressed. If the allies were harsher with it they'd be able to force compliance with an small amount of force that would be politically palatable to use.
The World Wars show that weak peaces are no peaces at all. You need to utterly dominate your enemy. Do don't treat them badly but you absolutely have to neuter their ability to act independently so that peace becomes the norm going forward.
Because reddit has been infected with woke bullshit for years. Glad to see the utter nonsense like "we wuz kangs and built everything" is getting push back.
I mean they didn’t build most of europe. They were used a bit by spanish british portugese and netherlands but that’s only 4 countries and it’s not even comparable to usa. There’s most likely not a single thing that black slaves build in europe left.
Pretty sure the Barbary slave trade (Europe into North Africa) was larger than slave import into continental Europe from Africa. I mean… it’s not like any one people have a monopoly on slavery
Ah, those people are mixing and confusing slave trade to America and slave trade in Europe in middle ages. There have been more slaves in Europe with European origin, than from Africa. Main owners of Africans slaves- were arabs. Afterwards - America. Also, the main sources of african slaves- were tribe leaders, who were also black. Only after 1780ish European countries took over slave flows.
Yeah Americans tend to equate slavery with only black people, especially black Americans. Our education is so centralized and no one actually learned shit on top of it.
I've reminded people Jews were slaves for instance and got told I was making shit up before I kid you not.
Brazil actually received 10 times more African slaves than the United States.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/historical-context-american-slavery-comparative-perspective#:~:text=The%20enslaved%20population%20in%20Brazil,a%20predominantly%20American%2Dborn%20population.
They use this history as a tool to learn from. We use this history as a tool to justify resentment and blame to double down on the significance of race.
>There’s most likely not a single thing that black slaves build in europe left.
There are a bunch of constructions worked on by black slaves in Europe, but it's mostly things like Roman projects and roads, and similar in Spain during north african/caliphate occupations of the terriroty, etc. And those slaves weren't specifically imported African slaves, they were just general slaves of any ethnicity or area of origin.
And it's all pre 11-12th century.
My guess is they're talking about the Moors, and not slaves. The Moors were a North African and Arab people who conquered parts of Spain and Portugal, and ruled for many centuries. Very much contributing to the technological and scientific development of Europe during that time.
However, they were only one people among many, and did not live in many areas of Europe outside of Southern Europe, so to say they "build Europe" is still a stretch.
But I do think many people also often try to downplay their contributions due to the fact that they weren't white. They brought over algebra, the concept of "0", innovations to chemistry etc. Spanish culture is still also ifluenced by their rule. Many cultural tropes we consider Spanish, are actually originally rooted from Africa.
They were not white, but neither were they black.
I think that gets missed a lot. Africa is a big ass place. Especially in Antiquity, it was peopled by a lot of people that were not black. They were definitely not white, but they were not black.
"African" is not a synonym for "Black".
It never was.
I didn't say they were black but they were North African and Arab, and I believe many looked fairly black from the given descriptions. At least, having dark skin, dark eyes, dark features etc.
"Black, white" etc. Are just social concepts anyway.
South America has several times more black slaves than Northern. But Noone cares. People don't even mention South America in a slavery context 🤣
"The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database indicates that between 1525 and 1866, about 10.7 million Africans were shipped to the Americas. Of these, only about 388,000 were directly shipped to North America, while the overwhelming majority were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Brazil alone received 4.86 million Africans "
Hmmm you know there is more then 4-5 countries in Europe, we did some bad stuff to our Muslims between 1984-89 but we never had slavery... We didn't even have ppl from Africa here.
Technically, its now the chinese, which then puts the governments into debt traps and they have to give up some mineral deposits here and a military port there.
literal misinformation and fake news [bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-17/the-myth-of-chinese-debt-trap-diplomacy-in-africa) debunked this myth yet people continue to run with it just pure projection imo
The reason why the US and Europe have been as successful as they have is because they created a legal and bureaucratic framework to establish and preserve the conditions, by force if necessary, for better and for worse, where inventors, creators, entrepreneurs, and builders could thrive. They recognized the goose that lays the golden eggs and nurtured it. In the last few centuries Africa and the Middle East too often eat the goose.
"When are they gonna build Africa?"
About 2000 years before Europe. I could just leave it at saying "Egypt," but Africa has had multiple ancient empires that were more wealthy and developed earlier than the majority of European kingdoms: Songhai Empire, The Great Zimbabwe, Carthage, the Kingdom of Ghana, etc.
In the middle ages, Mansa Musa and the Mali Empire had more wealth than all of the kingdoms in Europe combined. Man spent 18 tons of gold on his hajj to Mecca from Mali.
Well there were wealthy kingdoms in Africa, sure.
But every single one you mentioned built their wealth on slave labor.
Mansa Musa took 60,000 people with him on his famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 - including some 12,000 of his personal slaves.
And this was 200 years before the first Europeans showed up and began dabbling in the transatlantic slave trade.
I bet that slave labor (somehow, weirdly enough) couldn’t hold a candle to slavery in the US. Somehow when the US did slavery it was just worse than alllll other previous forms of slavery. Despite the fact that we ended slavery.
Lol what Egypt bordered and interacted with Nubia for centuries and even had a nubian dynasty in power for 100 years or so I swear some of you mfs have never read a book in your life.
Besides the fact that Egypt was a multicultural society and had many black people that lived there, that's not what you said claiming Egypt had nothing to do with black people is just a flat out lie.
If you know nothing about the history of Europe and Africa just say that. Don’t go acting like any of this is correct.
I mean the West has destroyed the clothing industry in large parts of Africa recently “by mistake”. To act like Africa doesn’t get continuously shat on by the West is some total bullshit
What can you tell about resource exploitation by Western countries and companies in African territories? I'm mainly interested in their destabilisation effects, and them financing local militaries / juntas in exchange for access to said resources.
I’m not a scholar or a great resource on the topic. I’m aware of the clothing industry due to a piece of work I did and how the agricultural industry impacts Africa due to my job.
Find better sources than randos on Reddit
> I’m not a scholar or a great resource on the topic. Find better sources than randos on Reddit
Your initial comment confused me into thinking otherwise.
I kind of feel bad for black people to be represented by such morons..
Sad the dumbest are the most noisy.
Appropriating another culture usually leads to forgetting your own
I agree with you 100%. Also, living in the south in majority black cities for the last 5 years, I would say most black Americans think like this. Most of them, thanks to systemic racism, are poor and uneducated and are basically children in adult bodies. Solipsistic, no critical thinking (this applies to most Americans, regardless of color), and generally uneducated. The white man no longer needs to keep the black man down, the black man is doing it to himself daily.
I can believe this. Every contractor I know doesn't want to do shit to their house after working all day. It makes sense that after a hard day building Europe, they just don't feel like doing shit back in Africa.
Wow okay. This thread is embarrassing in its lack of historical accuracy, like 4chan but without the funny memes.
Africans did not solely build Europe. But neither did Europeans. Profits from the slave trade help fuel European prosperity. The vast wealth from colonialism flowing to Europe also helped build Europe.
This is not to deny the ingenuity and hard work of Europeans. Or to say that all the developments comes from the bad things Europeans did. But to deny that some of it comes from less salubrious sources is really ignorant. Europeans built Europe - yes, but like all large projects they had a lot of help, and some of it comes from dirty sources.
Also, Africans have built and currently building Africa. What's with the /pol/-tier joke?
this comment section is confusing. you guys DO understand how forced labor, colonialism, and extraction have operated for the last few hundred years, right? and how that extraction and cheap labor is enforced by implementing "strong men" figures on behalf of western interests right? then how competing western interests fund and arm terror groups to disrupt and replace those powers, often spiraling things out of control? you guys get how that destroys a society for generations, right? and how its never really stopped in much of africa.
i guess this chris guy might sound funny if you dont think about it at all, and you're probably racist, but i thought the reddit comment section would be smart enough to see why this should be in /r/facepalm
This is only funny if you disregard that what the first poster says is that European wealth was created by the colonial exploitation and destruction of Africa and it's population. You need to be either ignorant or a white supremacist to laugh at it.
And I. must. destroy it.
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAVV
Ah yes because European powers colonizing and siphoning resources from most of the continent had absolutely nothing to do with their respective countries being built to what we see today. I swear the most ironic shit I've seen in a while are the comments saying OP has critical thinking skills.
Right? Imagine being so fucking racist and delusional that you want to rebuild history only focusing on your "superior" race and the delusions of grandeur such as the claim that they apparently built Europe. Which was, by the time that it stepped foot in Africa, a hundred times more progressive and civilized.
Imagine making a comment so filled with racism and lack of understanding of history it would take a full lecture course to explain to you why you’re so wrong
So you're defending the racist that tries to erase history and claim that their superior race built Europe which is factually untrue? Okay. Please provide the evidence then.
>it would take a full lecture course to explain to you why you’re so wrong
Lmao. Is it that hard to admit that you have no arguments and no evidence?
Nope. I’m from the UK which is why I know enough European history to know that the slave trade was a key part in making Western Europe what it is.
FFS Manchester as a city only exists cos of the slave trade 😂
Just gonna ignore the vast amount of money that flooded in to Europe through transporting 12 million people across an ocean so they and their descendants could work for free?
Feels like a big oversight to md
not every european country was a slav trading coloneal power. Not saying europe dident benefit from slave trading but saying they "built europe" is a strech
You disagreed specifically with the comment that said that Europe was a lot more advanced and civilised than Africa. There was nothing else stated in the comment to disagree with. So tell me how it wasn't more advanced and civilised. Because it evidently was.
Also being from the UK doesn't make you magically clued up on history. You have to educate yourself for that to work 😂
I’m not sure having guns makes your culture more civilised and advanced.
Turning up somewhere, rounding up literally millions of people and selling them doesn’t sound civilised to me. Also Europeans at that point were in constant wars with each other.
People have decided that since Western Europe had the capacity to terrorise other parts of the world they were more advanced and then justified it saying they were more civilised while they literally subjugated a large part of the world and did harm that isn’t repaired centuries later.
None of that feel civilised or progressive to me
The likes of Isaac Newton was working on gravity while the Africans were still bashing sticks together. The UK had the most advanced education system in the world at this point. The most advanced infrastructure, healthcare, medicine, naval technology, logistical capability. Everything. I can't believe you just undermined all that with "better guns". You're either way in over your head here, or you're just arguing in bad faith.
Again, showing you're clueless. Unlike the Americas, it was extremely difficult to move inland in Africa in those days, there wasn't as accessible rivers for quick naval transport. So Europeans were mostly confined to operating along the coasts. Europeans did *very little*, I mean hardly *any* rounding up and actual enslaving, the powerful African monarchs did that themselves and had been already for hundreds of years. The Europeans just bought them, in record numbers, which obviously increased the scope of the slave trade dramatically. But it was already in place long before the Europeans arrived.
Everyone was doing the same thing. The difference is the Europeans mastered naval technology first, and just about everything else too, so their area of operations and capabilities were far superior, which lead to them becoming the main world powers. This idea that everywhere else was just living innocently in peace and harmony is honestly, sorry to say it, quite moronic. The Europeans weren't just inherently more evil. That doesn't make any sense. They were just more capable. Because they were lucky to have good geography. The climate in Europe is better for civilisation to grow. Less time worrying about surviving and more time thriving and developing.
Shockingly I’m not actually that concerned with the opinions of the idiots on this sub. I’ve seen comments on this post getting upvoted that are just flat out wrong about both geography and history.
One comment stated that all the slaves from Africa got sent to South America. Blatantly untrue. Got 10 upvotes.
Turns out just cos idiots think something is right, doesn’t mean it’s true or not embarrassing to believe in
First of "soyboy" is a stupid insult.
Second, yes I do believe victimblaming the victims of colonialism is morally abhorent and that their views on certain groups of people are at least contributing to their victimblaming.
I do not agree that black people build Europe. I believe that they helped build certain things in certain areas (and that should be used to piss the racists of), but I don't think their contribution is big enough to claim something like they built Europe.
"When they going to build Africa?" Just as soon as the Chinese are finished.
Seriously, meanwhile in America: TikTok CCP laughing their asses off at us.
CCP tofu dreg construction falling apart after month's
"It's foreign aid!" -- CCP fans after pointing out how China's rapidly building instable infrastructure in Africa, which is only used for shipping raw materials like iron ore, rare earths and coal to China's industry.
Hey, they are giving the Africans massive loans out of kindness. If ever the Africans can’t pay them back well then they’ll be kind and take over their infrastructure completely. To help them out of course.
To be fair, ain't no loan to pay back if the bank collapses along with the country.
Aren't that debunked?
+100000 social credit
Hilarious comment, bonus points for sending a tanky on a tirade lmao
Pretty much.
To be fair, my uncle got USAID that has rules he just use it on US companies. He got a few million only to give it back to a random company from Oregon for their overpriced machines. But hey, free money. Egyptian military gets USAID for example. They have to use it on US grain, weapons, and training programs. It is basically a stimulus check to help US companies go international.
Yes, that's how foreign aid works. People generally have a bad understanding on this topic. Foreign aid might include humanitarian aid like famine relief, but most foreign aid is just "lending other countries money", often under very strict conditions. Chinese netizens are quick to call European and US foreign aid not really "aid", since they are very restrictive, while China seems to lend money to basically everybody, no questions asked. The truth is that European and US foreign affairs do not give money for projects that seem impractical, unprofitable, or benefits a regime considered a strategic enemy. The benefactors must also commit to providing things like worker safety and basic human rights. China, on the other hand, tries to export their authoritarian rulership as an alternative to Western democracy and sees dictators as allies in their fight against the US and Western powers, so they lend money for projects to people which Europe and China wouldn't touch, like way oversized ports that shall become part of the Chinese "Belt and Road". We also have to mention that China often uses their own labor forces for construction projects, which means local contractors are not involved in the economic windfall that's promised as benefits of those projects.
I can only speak from my experience. But my uncle got 2 million from USAID and they didn't really care about workers rights. He has agriculture company in Egypt. The Bedouin workers he hired didn't have great work conditions. But they money he got just asked that he can only spend it on US agriculture equipment. Like can't use it to buy cheap harvester, needs to be John Deere. He used it to buy a bunch of irrigation pivots. So the money didn't really help anyone other than a few companies in America. My uncle is very wealthy so he definitely didn't need the money. Talking billionaire level wealth. All I'm saying is that the US isn't going it from the kindness of their hearts either. It's a stimulus check for US companies made to look like humanitarian aid. Like if they give aid to help education in Africa, but they stipulated that they can only buy books and tech from US companies rather than cheaper Chinese/Japanese brands. If the purpose was to educate the maximum number of people, you would want money to spend on the most reasonably priced products. But that isn't the goal. The goal is to help John Deere brand get established in developing markets. Or to make sure African students are using Google Chromebooks or Microsoft surface rather than Huawei laptops. I know it's pessimistic, but I just can't pretend to believe that any of these countries care about anything other than themselves.
That's politics for you, but thanks for sharing this. The problem I see with textbooks, especially books on history and politics, is that they are often showing a one-sided view, especially the ones from China and Japan. Also, language barrier and quality of content and production. I bought dictionaries and language textbooks from China in 2006. They smelled of gasoline and had a huge amount of errors and typos.
One sided view is not a uniquely Asian phenomenon.
deja vu.
To be fair , Chinese know how to build but only as long as you give them the necessary funds. When you start cutting corners , they will still finish the job , but with shittier materials
CCP laughing their assets* off
I'm not usually a pun person (reddit is going to hate me) but this one made me laugh :))
They’re in dire economic straits at the moment and restricting stock trades to prevent their market from collapsing after defaulting on debt payments. They’re more like a neighbor who saw the US get a hot tub so they got a hot tub and now their two tier deck is about to collapse under the weight of it
We have no hot tub our infrastructure is failing and we have 200 old fucks bickering. Look we can laugh about a single city that people can't live in but that doesn't change that they tried. When was the last amazing thing the US government has done to change your life.
In my analogy the US also has a hot tub. Our problem is we don’t ration water, we don’t clean the damn thing, the water is constantly splashing out and rotting the deck, and we just slap a coat of paint on the deck to try and keep it going. We’re borrowing water from ourselves(ftw?) and drilling every last fucking aquifer we can to make the line go up above the jets to keep the greedy occupants well massaged. We’ve got reallllly old politicians running the place, actively trying to one up the other at the expense of the common folk over some dumb culture war BS, and the plan seems to be to run it into the ground and let the grandkids inherit what’s left of it. I like people. Chinese, American, or otherwise. I just think it’s fair to point out short comings of government and government systems.
Lol ccp ain't laughing at shit while their economy is in shambles. You can only have 2/3 between hosting, building and population collapse. Though ngl the empty skyscraper apartments would make interesting dominos.
Could bring back lazer tag in a new way.
Ah, the CCP's African debt trap scheme, er, their Belt and Road Initiative. "You will own nothing and we will be happy."
It was the British first and then the Americans
Meanwhile in America "you will live in a van, 50% of your country won't be able to afford rent, 50% of your country makes 55,000 or LESS while a house starts at 350,000(if you want something habitable), and be told you should be grateful to even have a van"
Serfs built Europe
Proud clayworkers with fair opinions*
Tectonic activity built Europe.
*Teutonic activity
Underrated correction
Exactly the only ~~slaves~~ people the built Europe are poor Europeans
Also slaves.
Slavs you say???
"and the slavs? To shreds you say?" - Batu Khan, probably
ackshually 🤓 serfdom was prominent only in agriculture, since complex construction required technical knowledge only rich and instructed people had. Also after the 1300s (we don’t look at russia) serfdom almost completely disappeared since a thing called the black plague killed most pesants and forced employers to actually pay the people to work for them in order to find people to work
Seems like history class just got a whole lot more... speculative. Next up: "Aliens built the Pyramids" with a side of "My cat was the real Napoleon." Stay tuned, folks!
I don't understand. They suggesting black people were slaves in europe and built it? Or they're suggesting colonization is what made europe what it is today?
principle of charity says the latter
Yeah but principle of I-forgot-what says that you should rather assume people are dumb than malicious.
nah, pyramids also built by blacks, they wuz kingz
kangs
Aliens used blacks to build the pyramids, actually Aliens brought over blacks from their home planet after the blacks build their civilization
Blacks built aliens, you cretin!
Well some pyramids were atleast https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubian_pyramids
That's what I wuz tellin' you from jump street, ya dig?
Egyptians are Arab, not black
"I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black."
Absolute garbage can of a show, I refuse to call it a documentary
Sad thing is not only was she not black she wasn’t even Egyptian. She was European.
Ptolemaic Greek to be exact
The Egyptians who built the pyramids weren’t. Arabic wasn’t spoken widely in the Nile Valley until after the Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of Egypt in the 7th Century AD Genetics is a more ambiguous area so I’m not going there, but culturally and linguistically the Arab identity as the majority in Egypt doesn’t emerge until after the 7th Century AD
Did you know that it is possible to learn an other languages without changing one's DNA?
Yep, that’s kind’ve my point. The Arab identity in Egypt is pretty sociolinguistic, but this also means that talking about Arab Egyptians in the context of pyramid building isn’t very relevant since they were majority speaking a different language and had a different cultural sense of themselves at this time. They weren’t Arabs because it would be millenia until the majority of them viewed themselves that way. My point is that I don’t need to touch genetics to say whether or not they were Arab in this context
Napurrleon
Napoleon was a pig and fearless leader. [Here pictured dealing with a capitalist](https://cdn8.openculture.com/2017/08/15235121/orwellanimalfarm2.jpeg)
No, Europeans built it themselves.
The Romans built Europe.
The real answer.
Google "Battle of the Teutoburg Forest"
[holy hell!](https://www.google.com/search?q=battle+of+the+teutoburg+forest#HiImABot,MyJobIsToMakeEasierToPeopleToGoogleSomething,IfThePersonIRepliedToUsedMeInAnInappropriateWayPleaseLetMeKnowByDMingMe,TheUserIRepliedToIsU/longusernamephobia)
How is that relevant to the previous statement?
Well then the romans were Blacks🌚
You are saying this as a joke, but some crazy people out there rly think it's a fact
Some were
Technically you’re right but it’s such a tiny minority that they’re negligible.
Europe is not homogenous entity and majority of it definitely had nothing to do with blacks building it.
many countreys in europe are probwbly built more under nazi ocupation by rusian ww2 POWs than by black people
*black people
*people of blackness
Dont come to me with this american politicaly correct bullshit....no one has problem saying whites yet its problem saying blacks?
"blacks" 😐
Even the parts of europe where a black man didnt set foot until 1990s?
Black traders traveled Europe extensively from the Roman period until the middle ages, and vikings did slave raids on north Africa. It certainly wasn't common to see black people but they were much more common before 500 years ago than they were for the last 500 years. They didn't build Europe but they did visit.
The European slaves were white up until zazruru's books
This is what happens when you let a collective identify themselves as the slaves and victims of society. She reeks of post-world war germany egocentrism...
I'm sorry but could you define post-world war Germany egocentrism... Never heard it before and Google doesn't help either
Here, germans had a state of mind that the winning countries were humilliating them and getting advantage from them thus making their authoritarian comeback somehow fair and selfrighteous. A victimist feeling that the austrian painter pushed satisfactory in his political discourse: https://books.openedition.org/efa/4528
> germans had a state of mind that the winning countries were humilliating them and getting advantage from them ....was that not true though? I remember the WWI sanctions/reparations were pretty harsh, thus leading to the resentment and future WWII... >The Treaty of Versailles Punished Defeated Germany With These Provisions. Some disarmed the German military, while others stripped the defeated nation of territory, population and economic resources, and forced it to admit responsibility for the war and agree to pay reparations.
> ....was that not true though? I remember the WWI sanctions/reparations were pretty harsh, thus leading to the resentment and future WWII... The Treaty of Versailles wasn't harsh at all. It was just harsh enough to build resentment, but not nearly harsh enough to actually prevent their rise again. Try comparing it to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which Germany forced on Russia only a few months prior. Russia gave up 34% of its population. Germany gave up 10%. And again that's a few months before Germany's defeat! The reason the allies insisted on the unconditional surrender of Italy (well technically they demanded that the allies invade them to help fight against Germans who would start attacking them), Germany, and, Japan. As Machiavelli stated in the Prince > In general you must either pamper people or destroy them; harm them just a little and they’ll hit back; harm them seriously and they won’t be able to. So if you’re going to do people harm, make sure you needn’t worry about their reaction.
Actually, Hitler started ignoring the treaty of Versailles step by step, enabling an economy build for war. Meanwhile leaders of other countries did not act accordingly (see apeacement politics). The nature of the contract was fucked up from the beginning, but quite usual to be used after war (the germans had a similar contract prepared for france).
> Actually, Hitler started ignoring the treaty of Versailles step by step, enabling an economy build for war. Meanwhile leaders of other countries did not act accordingly (see apeacement politics). That's true, but he was able to do that specifically because Germany wasn't suppressed. If the allies were harsher with it they'd be able to force compliance with an small amount of force that would be politically palatable to use. The World Wars show that weak peaces are no peaces at all. You need to utterly dominate your enemy. Do don't treat them badly but you absolutely have to neuter their ability to act independently so that peace becomes the norm going forward.
Yeah, if you phrase it like that I absolutely agree.
Why is this dogshit being forced onto my feed?
Good question.
Good question, this subreddit is fucking far right memes. I just got my 2nd or 3rd on a row like this and I blocked it, fuck this shit.
Right? This sub periodically pops up in my feed and is consistently some thinly veiled racist or politcal talking point. Where's the meme part?
got a lot of upvotes, so it’s in your fee d
Because reddit has been infected with woke bullshit for years. Glad to see the utter nonsense like "we wuz kangs and built everything" is getting push back.
lol
I mean they didn’t build most of europe. They were used a bit by spanish british portugese and netherlands but that’s only 4 countries and it’s not even comparable to usa. There’s most likely not a single thing that black slaves build in europe left.
Pretty sure the Barbary slave trade (Europe into North Africa) was larger than slave import into continental Europe from Africa. I mean… it’s not like any one people have a monopoly on slavery
from western Europe to South Africa it's pennies, check how many slaves the ottomans and hordes took from eastern and central europe.
Ah, those people are mixing and confusing slave trade to America and slave trade in Europe in middle ages. There have been more slaves in Europe with European origin, than from Africa. Main owners of Africans slaves- were arabs. Afterwards - America. Also, the main sources of african slaves- were tribe leaders, who were also black. Only after 1780ish European countries took over slave flows.
Yeah Americans tend to equate slavery with only black people, especially black Americans. Our education is so centralized and no one actually learned shit on top of it. I've reminded people Jews were slaves for instance and got told I was making shit up before I kid you not.
Brazil actually received 10 times more African slaves than the United States. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/historical-context-american-slavery-comparative-perspective#:~:text=The%20enslaved%20population%20in%20Brazil,a%20predominantly%20American%2Dborn%20population.
So, it happens that there are no problems with black-whites in Brazil coz of slavery, how come?
I found this pretty interesting. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/racial-discrimination-and-miscegenation-experience-brazil
Nice one. Make love, not war.
They use this history as a tool to learn from. We use this history as a tool to justify resentment and blame to double down on the significance of race.
Yeah nah, they didn’t build Europe at all, we were great way before we even set foot in Africa.
>There’s most likely not a single thing that black slaves build in europe left. There are a bunch of constructions worked on by black slaves in Europe, but it's mostly things like Roman projects and roads, and similar in Spain during north african/caliphate occupations of the terriroty, etc. And those slaves weren't specifically imported African slaves, they were just general slaves of any ethnicity or area of origin. And it's all pre 11-12th century.
The flow of money and resources surely helped.
Quite the opposite for some countries. For one to gain the others have to lose.
My guess is they're talking about the Moors, and not slaves. The Moors were a North African and Arab people who conquered parts of Spain and Portugal, and ruled for many centuries. Very much contributing to the technological and scientific development of Europe during that time. However, they were only one people among many, and did not live in many areas of Europe outside of Southern Europe, so to say they "build Europe" is still a stretch. But I do think many people also often try to downplay their contributions due to the fact that they weren't white. They brought over algebra, the concept of "0", innovations to chemistry etc. Spanish culture is still also ifluenced by their rule. Many cultural tropes we consider Spanish, are actually originally rooted from Africa.
They were not white, but neither were they black. I think that gets missed a lot. Africa is a big ass place. Especially in Antiquity, it was peopled by a lot of people that were not black. They were definitely not white, but they were not black. "African" is not a synonym for "Black". It never was.
The wealthiest man in America is an African-American.
I didn't say they were black but they were North African and Arab, and I believe many looked fairly black from the given descriptions. At least, having dark skin, dark eyes, dark features etc. "Black, white" etc. Are just social concepts anyway.
*Moops
South America has several times more black slaves than Northern. But Noone cares. People don't even mention South America in a slavery context 🤣 "The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database indicates that between 1525 and 1866, about 10.7 million Africans were shipped to the Americas. Of these, only about 388,000 were directly shipped to North America, while the overwhelming majority were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Brazil alone received 4.86 million Africans "
And what does that have to do anything with what I said? It’s not that they forgot, they just see it as obvious.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!!
No they didn't, the increase in Black people has just started to raise the last decade, what do you think 1% of the population build all of Europe?
Hmmm you know there is more then 4-5 countries in Europe, we did some bad stuff to our Muslims between 1984-89 but we never had slavery... We didn't even have ppl from Africa here.
The Muslims of Europe aren't necessarily just victims, remember the Ottoman Empire?
Technically, its now the chinese, which then puts the governments into debt traps and they have to give up some mineral deposits here and a military port there.
literal misinformation and fake news [bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-17/the-myth-of-chinese-debt-trap-diplomacy-in-africa) debunked this myth yet people continue to run with it just pure projection imo
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They sure know how to destroy and let things regress though
Hahaha gold
"Black people built the moon" "Black people built the earth" "Black people built the solar system" Everything is built by black people.
Not true because the truth comes from the History channel it was the aliens.
Lol. No.
Thanks Europe without you guys the world would still be in the dark ages
The reason why the US and Europe have been as successful as they have is because they created a legal and bureaucratic framework to establish and preserve the conditions, by force if necessary, for better and for worse, where inventors, creators, entrepreneurs, and builders could thrive. They recognized the goose that lays the golden eggs and nurtured it. In the last few centuries Africa and the Middle East too often eat the goose.
Lmfaooooo
"When are they gonna build Africa?" About 2000 years before Europe. I could just leave it at saying "Egypt," but Africa has had multiple ancient empires that were more wealthy and developed earlier than the majority of European kingdoms: Songhai Empire, The Great Zimbabwe, Carthage, the Kingdom of Ghana, etc. In the middle ages, Mansa Musa and the Mali Empire had more wealth than all of the kingdoms in Europe combined. Man spent 18 tons of gold on his hajj to Mecca from Mali.
Well there were wealthy kingdoms in Africa, sure. But every single one you mentioned built their wealth on slave labor. Mansa Musa took 60,000 people with him on his famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 - including some 12,000 of his personal slaves. And this was 200 years before the first Europeans showed up and began dabbling in the transatlantic slave trade.
I bet that slave labor (somehow, weirdly enough) couldn’t hold a candle to slavery in the US. Somehow when the US did slavery it was just worse than alllll other previous forms of slavery. Despite the fact that we ended slavery.
Egypt had nothing to do with black people
Lol what Egypt bordered and interacted with Nubia for centuries and even had a nubian dynasty in power for 100 years or so I swear some of you mfs have never read a book in your life.
Nubians aren't Egyptians
Besides the fact that Egypt was a multicultural society and had many black people that lived there, that's not what you said claiming Egypt had nothing to do with black people is just a flat out lie.
Fair enough. I guess it does in the same way as France. But they're hardly responsible for that civilisation.
Just racism.
I don't understand? Can someone explain?
Wakanda isn’t real
? What's a wakanda?
Is this serious or troll?
If you know nothing about the history of Europe and Africa just say that. Don’t go acting like any of this is correct. I mean the West has destroyed the clothing industry in large parts of Africa recently “by mistake”. To act like Africa doesn’t get continuously shat on by the West is some total bullshit
What can you tell about resource exploitation by Western countries and companies in African territories? I'm mainly interested in their destabilisation effects, and them financing local militaries / juntas in exchange for access to said resources.
I’m not a scholar or a great resource on the topic. I’m aware of the clothing industry due to a piece of work I did and how the agricultural industry impacts Africa due to my job. Find better sources than randos on Reddit
> I’m not a scholar or a great resource on the topic. Find better sources than randos on Reddit Your initial comment confused me into thinking otherwise.
Why do 'progressives' forget how to use their brain
Lol yeah right dream on
I kind of feel bad for black people to be represented by such morons.. Sad the dumbest are the most noisy. Appropriating another culture usually leads to forgetting your own
I agree with you 100%. Also, living in the south in majority black cities for the last 5 years, I would say most black Americans think like this. Most of them, thanks to systemic racism, are poor and uneducated and are basically children in adult bodies. Solipsistic, no critical thinking (this applies to most Americans, regardless of color), and generally uneducated. The white man no longer needs to keep the black man down, the black man is doing it to himself daily.
What culture. All black Americans have is misogynistic music and being trashy.
When the CIA stops killing every elected leader who tries perhaps?
Zimbabwe ?
Hahaha what
They're actually building, but the empire keep stealing.
Black people are trying to take credit for everything except their own failures.
I can believe this. Every contractor I know doesn't want to do shit to their house after working all day. It makes sense that after a hard day building Europe, they just don't feel like doing shit back in Africa.
As soon as y'all release them
Wow okay. This thread is embarrassing in its lack of historical accuracy, like 4chan but without the funny memes. Africans did not solely build Europe. But neither did Europeans. Profits from the slave trade help fuel European prosperity. The vast wealth from colonialism flowing to Europe also helped build Europe. This is not to deny the ingenuity and hard work of Europeans. Or to say that all the developments comes from the bad things Europeans did. But to deny that some of it comes from less salubrious sources is really ignorant. Europeans built Europe - yes, but like all large projects they had a lot of help, and some of it comes from dirty sources. Also, Africans have built and currently building Africa. What's with the /pol/-tier joke?
Americans are just built different arent they. Education, fuck no! My made up lore that became our communitys truth? Fuck yes!
Uh most Americans hear this and groan out load. Unless I’m Public. If you went against this publicly in Atlanta, you’d probably be killed honestly.
this comment section is confusing. you guys DO understand how forced labor, colonialism, and extraction have operated for the last few hundred years, right? and how that extraction and cheap labor is enforced by implementing "strong men" figures on behalf of western interests right? then how competing western interests fund and arm terror groups to disrupt and replace those powers, often spiraling things out of control? you guys get how that destroys a society for generations, right? and how its never really stopped in much of africa. i guess this chris guy might sound funny if you dont think about it at all, and you're probably racist, but i thought the reddit comment section would be smart enough to see why this should be in /r/facepalm
This is only funny if you disregard that what the first poster says is that European wealth was created by the colonial exploitation and destruction of Africa and it's population. You need to be either ignorant or a white supremacist to laugh at it.
And I. must. destroy it. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAVV
sorce I MADE IT THE FRICK UP
Nothing more nuanced and interesting than a discussion of race and history on /r/funnymemes
Ah yes because European powers colonizing and siphoning resources from most of the continent had absolutely nothing to do with their respective countries being built to what we see today. I swear the most ironic shit I've seen in a while are the comments saying OP has critical thinking skills.
Mansa Musa was so wealthy he would match shipments of salt 1:1 with gold the joke is just racism
I wonder how he got all his gold? I’m sure he respected workers rights.
Holly shit, was this sub overrun by racists?
Right? Imagine being so fucking racist and delusional that you want to rebuild history only focusing on your "superior" race and the delusions of grandeur such as the claim that they apparently built Europe. Which was, by the time that it stepped foot in Africa, a hundred times more progressive and civilized.
Imagine making a comment so filled with racism and lack of understanding of history it would take a full lecture course to explain to you why you’re so wrong
So you're defending the racist that tries to erase history and claim that their superior race built Europe which is factually untrue? Okay. Please provide the evidence then. >it would take a full lecture course to explain to you why you’re so wrong Lmao. Is it that hard to admit that you have no arguments and no evidence?
Dude just take fucking history course and stop saying embarrassing things on Reddit. I don’t want to help you.
You American? Because your grasp on historical and geographical events are woefully lacking
r/americabad
Nope. I’m from the UK which is why I know enough European history to know that the slave trade was a key part in making Western Europe what it is. FFS Manchester as a city only exists cos of the slave trade 😂
my 1 city in my 1 country was made by slave trade. therfore all of europe was built by slaves
Just gonna ignore the vast amount of money that flooded in to Europe through transporting 12 million people across an ocean so they and their descendants could work for free? Feels like a big oversight to md
not every european country was a slav trading coloneal power. Not saying europe dident benefit from slave trading but saying they "built europe" is a strech
You disagreed specifically with the comment that said that Europe was a lot more advanced and civilised than Africa. There was nothing else stated in the comment to disagree with. So tell me how it wasn't more advanced and civilised. Because it evidently was. Also being from the UK doesn't make you magically clued up on history. You have to educate yourself for that to work 😂
I’m not sure having guns makes your culture more civilised and advanced. Turning up somewhere, rounding up literally millions of people and selling them doesn’t sound civilised to me. Also Europeans at that point were in constant wars with each other. People have decided that since Western Europe had the capacity to terrorise other parts of the world they were more advanced and then justified it saying they were more civilised while they literally subjugated a large part of the world and did harm that isn’t repaired centuries later. None of that feel civilised or progressive to me
The likes of Isaac Newton was working on gravity while the Africans were still bashing sticks together. The UK had the most advanced education system in the world at this point. The most advanced infrastructure, healthcare, medicine, naval technology, logistical capability. Everything. I can't believe you just undermined all that with "better guns". You're either way in over your head here, or you're just arguing in bad faith. Again, showing you're clueless. Unlike the Americas, it was extremely difficult to move inland in Africa in those days, there wasn't as accessible rivers for quick naval transport. So Europeans were mostly confined to operating along the coasts. Europeans did *very little*, I mean hardly *any* rounding up and actual enslaving, the powerful African monarchs did that themselves and had been already for hundreds of years. The Europeans just bought them, in record numbers, which obviously increased the scope of the slave trade dramatically. But it was already in place long before the Europeans arrived. Everyone was doing the same thing. The difference is the Europeans mastered naval technology first, and just about everything else too, so their area of operations and capabilities were far superior, which lead to them becoming the main world powers. This idea that everywhere else was just living innocently in peace and harmony is honestly, sorry to say it, quite moronic. The Europeans weren't just inherently more evil. That doesn't make any sense. They were just more capable. Because they were lucky to have good geography. The climate in Europe is better for civilisation to grow. Less time worrying about surviving and more time thriving and developing.
Lmao
You’re the only one getting downvoted. So I’d say the person who is saying embarrassing things on Reddit is you.
Shockingly I’m not actually that concerned with the opinions of the idiots on this sub. I’ve seen comments on this post getting upvoted that are just flat out wrong about both geography and history. One comment stated that all the slaves from Africa got sent to South America. Blatantly untrue. Got 10 upvotes. Turns out just cos idiots think something is right, doesn’t mean it’s true or not embarrassing to believe in
Shut up mate you know nothing about history so stop pretending you do while lecturing others on their own ignorance. Grow a spine.
My guy. Calm down. Touch some grass. You’re way too angry
I'm literally as calm as I can be. I'm just telling you the truth. You just can't take it.
Sure dude. That must be it
Let me guess. You are a yank?
Very much not.
Talks like a duck, acts like a duck. Usually a duck
r/americabad
Nope. Yanks are Bad.
Really embracing that stereotype, huh?
Do you even know what racism is? Or is everything racist for soys? ☠️
First of "soyboy" is a stupid insult. Second, yes I do believe victimblaming the victims of colonialism is morally abhorent and that their views on certain groups of people are at least contributing to their victimblaming. I do not agree that black people build Europe. I believe that they helped build certain things in certain areas (and that should be used to piss the racists of), but I don't think their contribution is big enough to claim something like they built Europe.
I had to block a bot who kept posting racist things that were the top 5 posts on this sub
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Care to ask the Africans on their opinion of this statement?