Comments by "Persona" (@ArawnOfAnnwn) on "Why Are Muslim Countries Poorer? - VisualEconomik EN" video.

"India was also a colony of Britain only until 50 years ago, but they didn't dwell on scapegoating the British" - I'm Indian, and what you call scapegoating, we call holding to account. We very much still hold Britain responsible for ruining our country. Don't even try using our success to wash your hands off of the damage you did. We can and do blame Britain while simultaneously doing our best to develop and repair the damage they did. The two are not mutually exclusive. You want everyone to just 'move on', which is really convenient for you.
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@kf8228 No. Shashi Tharoor actually suggested what Britain should do once at Oxford. Pay India 1 pound a year, not even adjusting for inflation, for the next 200 years. Just 200 bucks total, to make up for the $45 TRILLION it's estimated they stole from us. But with one CRUCIAL difference - the money would be marked as reparations, NOT aid. We don't care about the past, this is about the present. Around HALF of British think they did us a favor, and only a minority see their colonial past as having been bad. THAT is what matters, and why an explicit and lasting admission by the British govt. that colonialism was harmful, coupled with a yearly reminder of that fact, is what we'd like. It isn't about the British of the past, but those of the present and future. It's about breaking the giant ego that the west has built up as intrinsic to its identity over the course of the last half a millennium. We don't need the money, in fact we've already told the UK we don't even want their aid. But we do want their pride. We want them to admit, like the Germans were forced to after WW2, their myriad crimes and guilt. Ditto for all the other former colonial powers. The west needs to learn shame, and humility.
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@orboakin8074 You obviously don't know the difference between conquest and settlement, and colonialism. The Mughal empire was in India, that is VERY different from a colonial empire sucking wealth out for a distant homeland. Conquest is normal in history, colonies not so much. Mahmud of Ghazni is a better comparison to the British - he invaded India to loot it over a dozen times. And yes we see him as evil. By contrast the Mughal Empire at its height was prosperous - and that was OUR wealth. The Mughals enriching their empire meant enriching India simply cos the empire was IN India i.e. this was its home base. The British are more akin to Ghazni, except systematically so - they sucked wealth OUT of their colonies to enrich their little island.
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@e.t.291 You don't know the first thing about what colonialism even is. The Ottomans conquered and incorporated, like most empires, not colonized. That's why we can speak of their golden age to begin with. Conquest is common, colonialism is not. Most empires build after they conquer, colonizers just drain. Colonial holdings existed for the benefit of a distant home, the colonizers never made their conquests their home except in cases where they near fully displaced the local peoples (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, etc.). Unsurprisingly they did invest in those territories that they had come to settle in. The rest of the world they just drained.
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Excuse colonialism, because 'than' you don't have to take responsibility for your heinous past. And I don't even mean paying reparations, I mean even just admitting it and issuing a formal apology. Cos the west loves the giant ego colonialism gave it.
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@LiamtheBob69 Colonization is always bad. The only cases of colonization ever having turned out 'good' is in places where the colonizer population basically utterly replaced the indigenous peoples, leaving them a minority in their own lands. In the rest of the world, where indigenous people survived, colonialism was devastating for them.
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@linuxares All of those 'former colonies' were basically entirely replaced by the colonisers. The indigenous populations are a but a remnant of what they once were now. So there was no damage to rebuild and recover from, they just took over fully.
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@e.t.291 Do you think colonialism is peaceful? The difference between the two isn't how they come about but in how the empire is managed.
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@LaymansGnosis-kd8wy "rescued Australian Indigens" - lmao! Go tell them that. Seriously go try selling that idea to their community and see how it goes down.
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@hesperius1 Assuming you're referring to what I think you're referring to, you're misrepresenting the statistics. That was a comparison of countries under different colonial powers (French, English, Spanish, etc) and how they're doing today relative to each other, NOT a claim that colonialism was good for anyone. Even I will readily admit that the British colonies weren't as bad as the Congo Free State under King Leopold of Belgium, who single handedly saw to the deaths of an estimated HALF of the population in 2 decades. That's not saying much.
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@NNN1-. Yeah, nothing like people washing their hands off their crimes all the time either!
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@orboakin8074 Also the fact that simply saying sorry, albeit elaborately and publicly so, triggers you so much is itself telling. THAT is why we want it - precisely to get through that hubris and ego that you've built up and maintain right up to today. This is not an issue with central Asia. It's only the west that has this problem, and hence only the west that needs to atone and change. Except for Germany, who you lot forced to do it - for you. Which only further boosted your pride and egos.
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@ep5019 The millions of deaths, economic devastation, draining of wealth, manipulation of social divisions, asinine actual divisions (borders), etc. etc. Tens of millions of people forcibly moved across continents for labor, reducing one of the wealthiest nations on Earth from a quarter of world gdp to less than 1%, literally fighting wars against the other wealthiest nation on Earth just to push your interests as the largest drug lords in history, killing literally HALF the population of the Congo is as little as 2 decades, to name just a few examples. Not that I expect you lot to acknowledge your sins. You've had half a millennium spent building up the biggest ego on Earth, that won't go away. Ironically it's that very ego that's the reason why it matters that you do. As that isn't the past, but the present.
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@adrianvacarescu1698 All countries where the native peoples were near fully displaced, replaced by their colonisers, who went on to make it their home rather than just a colony to be sucked dry.
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@BS-cc4ks There's multiple things wrong here. Firstly, "If the only way a country can prosper is for anyone to take responsibility for victimizing them" - I don't see where I wrote that at all. This never had anything to do with 'unlocking' success for anyone. Hell in that case, I would just go the whole hog and expect reparations as well. Nowhere did I claim countries couldn't succeed until the west apologized - indeed my argument focused on the change doing so would have on the west itself, not its victim. That's why I used the word ego so much. Secondly, try using that argument on an actual victim rather than just in the abstract - for instance, a ra*e victim. Try telling them that they should just move on and not even expect an apology, let alone justice against their abuser. See how it goes. But perhaps they're not thinking rationally. Okay, try suggesting that to others then, when talking about the crime. Again, likely not gonna be accepted. Point being that this sagacious argument is only ever trotted out in a few cases, colonialism being one. Why is the west so gung-ho in supporting Israel now in its massive response to being briefly made a victim recently? Tell them to move on too. Why did the west itself launch two huge wars just to avenge a much smaller attack? And so on. The people spouting this nonsense don't even live by it themselves. Thirdly, you talk about folks supposedly reveling in 'blaming their ills on someone else'. This is just another version of ye olde 'the poor and/or miserable actually like being poor and/or miserable cos that absolves them of responsibility'. It's such a dumb take. Why? Cos what do you think being POOR and/or MISERABLE means?! You think the homeless dude sleeping on the street actually LIKES his life?! Being miserable feels, you know, MISERABLE! This silly take doesn't make sense even for individuals, let alone countries. No one ENJOYS being in a poor country, blaming someone else doesn't magically turn pain into pleasure. It's still a miserable life that you would rather not have and so desperately want to change. "blame all your ills" - do you know what 'ills' are?! You might as well claim that sick people like being sick. You know what's way better than blaming someone else? Not having said ills to blame others for in the first place. There's PLENTY of incentive to change things. Fourthly, you talk about 'bad incentives', but fail to recognise your own. Your 'bad incentive' for the victims I dealt with above, but there's also effects on the perpetrators too - which is the whole reason I stressed the importance of owning up to it, NOT to somehow change much for the victims. By ignoring, negating or denying their past crimes, people in the west today can just look at the state of their nations versus others around the world and draw the most favorable conclusion for themselves - that it speaks to their own innate superiority to everyone else. In other words, to feed their egos. Rich people do this all the time, so much so that even the word 'aristocracy' translates to 'rule of the BEST'. Not of the 'wealthy' or 'elite', but 'best'. It's very nice to be able to pat yourself on the back, whether you deserve it or not. Some are even trying to push for 'western civilization' courses to be taught in school or university, which is a ludicrous idea from an academic pov cos the west is not a monolith and there's already plenty taught about its various histories. The real purpose of such drives is to emphasise the separation of the 'west' from the 'rest'. Typically positively i.e. to show everyone how the west is best. This kind of ego-stroking is exactly what an admission of guilt and flaws most threatens, and hence why it's needed. And you can literally see examples of this above, as with ep5019. It was never for helping US, it was about how it would change YOU. The west looks at things from atop a pedestal it places itself on. The point is to knock them off of it and bring them back down to Earth.
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@mieliav OP wasn't referencing the video. They might not even have watched it. They just saw the title and decided to put words into their Muslim denizens mouths in order to make them seem lazy and irresponsible. Which is ironic considering that not properly watching and engaging with the video is itself being lazy and irresponsible. Denigrating comments like these are typical under a video on Muslims that is made and watched by westerners. Even more so had the video focused on Africans.
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@subliteral You seem to have reading comprehension problems, as I never said that. The apology isn't meant to change us at all to begin with, it's for changing YOU. Though I doubt it will anyway, as it'd likely be some meaningless official thing. But one can hope it represents an actual shift in societal attitudes, it did in Germany.
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@gramma677 "What's one country that got sucked dry" - India, by about $45 trillion dollars. Look it up. Congo, by about HALF its whole population dying. Look it up. Hell even China makes for an interesting case as you literally had wars fought for the sake of drug peddling, in stark contrast to today. And so on in every colonized region - all of them saw their economies plummet and their people wind up poorer than they were before. And it wasn't just natural resources either, but also manufactured goods - the imposition of unfair trade tariffs and taxes destroyed their economies while colonial economies built up their own. This is not something any conqueror would ever do, as it's detrimental to the worth of their own conquered territory. It makes sense only for a colonial economy to do so as to enrich the homeland while stifling competition.
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@watupppl3 Lol India became poorer under the British. It's life expectancy went down, economy went down, everything went down. Some 'building up' they did lol. At least they didn't ruin India as badly as Congo was ruined (which lost HALF its people in just 20 years, which was a tenth of the population of ALL Africa at the time) by their fellow Europeans, but that's not saying much.
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@getblacked1351 Did I say countries couldn't rebuild? No, I said they had to. Those countries were devastated by the west, and had to pick up the pieces themselves after. By your logic Poland wasn't a victim of Germany either, since it's recovered too. Recovery is a testament to the resilience of local peoples, it doesn't absolve you of your colonial sins. Those countries aren't rich either, cos they had to recover.
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On the flipside, the usual 'don't blame the west' narrative has the advantage of absolving your people from your own crimes. You say they're looking to scapegoat, meanwhile you yourself are looking to wash your hands off of any responsibility.
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@PedroOrtega1993 Yes I know my country's history better than some rando from halfway across the world. Nothing in our history compares to the collapse the British were responsible for.
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@dkf119 Thanks! 😊
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@ally4131 You really need to learn to read more. There is a huge difference between conquest and colonialism, as I've already explained above. Conquest doesn't usually impoverish, colonialism always does except in cases where the native population is completely wiped out or driven away. Conquest usually builds after (unless it's by nomadic raiders), colonialism drains away.
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@strangeman9362 What's pathetic is westerners refusing to acknowledge their actual legacy. And non-westerners sucking up to that. It's the equivalent of ignoring a ra**st just cos they're rich. Worse, one that actually pretends they did good. The victim may move on, but that doesn't change what was done. Or what it means to ignore it. That even something as light as an apology is too much for them, or you, to bear says a lot. About you both.
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@daintree98 Speaking for yourself I see. Taking a region from a quarter of the global economy to a hundredth of it, with MILLIONS of deaths and TRILLIONS of dollars of value drained says a lot.
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