I'm not sure how the path we are currently on is supposed to make everyone better in the next 20-100 years. If anything as resources and money start to dwindle there is going to be more anger and more division. Two sets of rules for 2 different sets of people will never end well. No matter what old treaties or case law says.
Not really different then any kind of generational wealth.
The fishing rights thing is unique, really the goal is to address conservation, if you kill all the animals there will be nothing left. Going forward, it does not matter which group is destroying the resource, it can’t continue.
Are the Masai given special permits to kill elephants in Kenya?
The RCMP should just be disbanded at this point, or only kept for ceremonial stuff. It's clear they don't do any actual policing, or when they do, they do it terribly.
FWIW in general the Treaties have enabled Canada's wealth by allowing access to Natural Resource development.
However, I feel as a white Canadian that 'our' side (the Crown) has not honoured the spirit of the Treaties from the very outset. And not realizing the epic socioeconomic headwinds that the enforcement of Treaties and the Indian Act created is a major problem to getting Canadians to a better place.
And in regards to the NS situation...look at the outrage over the miniscule resource use!
__________________
"WHAT HAVE WE EVER DONE TO DESERVE THIS??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH US????" -Oiler Fan
"It was a debacle of monumental proportions." -MacT
The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to Fozzie_DeBear For This Useful Post:
As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked. But white Christians—from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast—have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power, they have constructed and sustained a project of protecting white supremacy and opposing black equality that has framed the entire American story.
With his family’s 1815 Bible in one hand and contemporary public opinion surveys by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in the other, Robert P. Jones delivers a groundbreaking analysis of the repressed history of the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and white supremacy. White Too Long demonstrates how deeply racist attitudes have become embedded in the DNA of white Christian identity over time and calls for an honest reckoning with a complicated, painful, and even shameful past. Jones challenges white Christians to acknowledge that public apologies are not enough—accepting responsibility for the past requires work toward repair in the present.
White Too Long is not an appeal to altruism. Drawing on lessons gleaned from case studies of communities beginning to face these challenges, Jones argues that contemporary white Christians must confront these unsettling truths because this is the only way to salvage the integrity of their faith and their own identities. More broadly, it is no exaggeration to say that not just the future of white Christianity but the outcome of the American experiment is at stake.
I really like your thoughtful insightful post. Great stuff.
IMO, based on human history "colonialism" is not a Euro centric trait. Most recently obvious is Japan's attempt to take over China and surrounding Asian neighbors. It was really quite brutish. There are so many other examples, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Medes, the Mongols. I am pretty sure humans of all stripes are the same inside. and historically have tried to subdue their neighbors in order to gain power, land, wealth.
On a tangential note, I suspect there are as many nuances of "Africans" based on tribes then just saying 'black people." These differences resulted in unending tribal warfare, slave ownership and plundering. All of which seemed to occur in tribal cultures in pre Europe Africa and North America. (recent ex: Hutu's vs Tutsi)
Sadly I think deep down we are all savage.
Yes there was violence throughout but some places have a more frequent history of it (according to this historian):
Quote:
The rise of the West has played out in numerous different phases. In the first phase, the discovery of the Americas allowed Conquistadores from Spain, and then Portugal, to strip assets from Aztec and Incan populations. They then started the silver and gold mines that unleashed a mountain of capital and cash back in Europe.
That capital gave Europeans the ability to invest and take stakes in businesses that bought products from the east. It also spurred the same European countries to send enormous trade missions out to places like India, China and Japan. Suddenly, there was a surge in disposable wealth.
Violent, ultra-competitive innovators
Europe’s key competitive advantage since antiquity has been that, for whatever reason, it’s the one continent that has seen persistent violence among its inhabitants.
In 1500 there were 500 political units in Europe and by 1900, there were 25.
European history is defined by stories of the strong devouring the weak, and of constant conflicts that inevitably end with the strongest party left standing.
We can see this tendency emerging as far back as the Middle Ages, when a knight on a big white horse, fighting for his faith, became an era-defining image. The elision of nobility and the military has long been an important element of Europe’s identity.
Quote:
Looking back, the Europeans have been very good at mechanising violence and investing in better ways of fighting. We evolved castle designs that became almost impregnable, invented the machine gun and, eventually, the nuclear bomb.
It’s no coincidence that such scientific and military technologies have all come from the western world, rather than from places where that profile, that rhythm of violence, has been less of a defining characteristic.
A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is an important account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east.
Europe’s key competitive advantage since antiquity has been that, for whatever reason, it’s the one continent that has seen persistent violence among its inhabitants.
In 1500 there were 500 political units in Europe and by 1900, there were 25.
Another way of looking at it is that since the Romans, no one power was able to enforce hegemony over Europe - owing in large part to its geography as a peninsula split up by mountains and rivers flowing away from the centre. In contrast, Mesopotamia, China, and India (sometimes) had powerful centralized states that could enforce cultural and political hegemony.
The eternal conflict between European states meant they were violent, yes. But also diverse and innovative. Where kings and emperors elsewhere suppressed innovation as dangerous to the status quo, the European nobility of the late middle ages could not afford to fall behind their rivals by thwarting commercial and scientific energies.
And while that unbridled commercial avarice was the source of much brutality and exploitation, it's also a major reason why Western culture since the renaissance has fostered such unusual diversity, dissent, and cultural dynamism compared with the more stagnant and authoritarian cultures of Asia and the Near East. The Ottoman Empire was the richest and most technologically advanced in the world in the 16th century. By the 19th century it was sclerotic and poor.
Quote:
European history is defined by stories of the strong devouring the weak, and of constant conflicts that inevitably end with the strongest party left standing.
We can see this tendency emerging as far back as the Middle Ages, when a knight on a big white horse, fighting for his faith, became an era-defining image. The elision of nobility and the military has long been an important element of Europe’s identity.
That differs from other cultures how?
The nobility everywhere has always associated itself with martial virtues. The Arabs who those knights fought in the Crusades hewed to the same martial values. As did the Ottomans, Moghuls, Aztecs, Japanese, etc.
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by fotze
If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
Last edited by CliffFletcher; 10-18-2020 at 11:50 AM.
The Following User Says Thank You to CliffFletcher For This Useful Post:
It is the frequency of the violence - Frankopan states the historical records shows that with the civilizations of the east, after the violence there were prolonged (or longer in comparison to the western world) of peace. It's in his book - more examples and more explanation with citations so perhaps you would enjoy the read (and different perspective).
I believe his position can be summed up (I will not do a good job of this so apologies): In the East with the silk roads trade and exchange were carried out amongst differing cultures.
The west however would travel to a place and build a fort. Then they would essentially steal the riches - and this was enforced with violence and legitimated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
Quote:
Frankopan hardly downplays conflict and violence, but he argues that such was the commercial vitality of the Silk Roads that matters of faith were often shoved aside in the pursuit of riches. In another bit of provocative revisionism, Frankopan rescues the Mongols from the contempt of posterity. These notorious baddies were actually enlightened statesmen, Frankopan contends, who used violence selectively (and yes, brutally) to bring their subjects into line. Hardly barbarians, they were savvy in their business dealings and governing style.
The fiscal conservatives of their day, the Mongols did brisk business with traders from Genoa and Venice in the 13th century. “Sensitive pricing and a deliberate policy of keeping taxes low were symptomatic of the bureaucratic nous of the Mongol Empire, which gets too easily lost beneath the images of violence and wanton destruction. In fact, the Mongols success lay not in indiscriminate brutality but in their willingness to compromise and co-operate, thanks to the relentless effort to sustain a system that renewed central control.”
If forbearance (traffic in slavery aside) in the pursuit of riches was generally the rule in Central Asia, the same thing can’t be said about the European empires that rose in the 15th and 16th centuries. These seaborne ventures – first Portugal and Spain, then Great Britain – profoundly altered the balance of world power.
The silver flowing from the New World coursed through European capitals, as a powerful middle class with disposable income to spend and invest rose up. The coffers of the Ottoman Empire filled with revenue from trade. Frankopan highlights a golden age of Ottoman architecture and the triumphs of the Safavid dynasty in Persia. Isfahan became one the glories of the Muslim world, “like a paradise”, one observer who visited the city noted, “with charming buildings, parks in which the perfume of the flowers uplifted the spirit, and streams and gardens”. Yet, such cultural richness came at a price, as thousands of miles away, the Americas were stripped of its natural resources, its indigenous people wiped out or enslaved. Frankopan takes a dim view of the European colonial project and Europe in general. For much of the first half of his account, Europe is a backwater – it was the civilisations of the east that mattered. He contends that the rise of Europe was a disturbing phenomenon, because here was a continent that was almost pathologically violent, its constituent powers constantly at war with one another.
Of political philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his great work Leviathan, Frankopan remarks, “only a European author could have concluded that the natural state of man was to be in a constant state of violence; and only a European author would have been right”. This is fair enough, up to a point. But he does not dig deep enough. The last third of Frankopan’s otherwise stunning book flags a bit as he explains the decline of the civilisations of the Silk Roads. His research remains impeccable but his argument is not as sophisticated or supple as it is in his preceding sections.
-PS: those crusaders were not gallant knights fighting for their faith (as described) rather low lifes, that had no prospects and were looking for some redemption or getting absolved from their crimes. The carnage they wrought was unique.
Quote:
Using a wide range of primary sources, including several poorly exploited accounts in Arabic, Crowley paints a picture of a dysfunctional, argumentative, petty world that attracted fools, mercenaries, charlatans and — as the shocked Jacques de Vitry, the scholar and archbishop of Acre, put it — foreigners who had run away from their own lands because of “various appalling crimes”. Occasionally someone important and powerful would turn their attention to the east; but results were usually fleeting — sometimes even counter-productive.
I am not sure how similar the east coast fishery is to the west coast fishery, but I know on the west coast, there is often confusion because there are essentially two aboriginal fisheries. There is the food fishery and the commercial fishery.
The food fishery has slightly different rules regarding opening times and catch limits that do not adhere to the same conservation rules as the commercial fisheries (aboriginal and other). But the food fishery is also only a small a drop in the bucket. The problem is that many non-aboriginals do not realize that food fishery is separate and there is an assumption that the product from that is going into the commercial stockpile, which as far as know, is not the case. The laws regarding the aboriginal fisheries are restrictive to natives when looked at from a historical context. They aren't being granted special rights, but are rather being allowed to keep some rights which existed long before colonialism.
Again, I have no background on the east coast fishery, but in BC, it is a historical fact that aboriginals had a food and commercial fishery long before the British Crown came into the picture. In fact, salmon was used as a currency before colonialism and the product was traded and transported over a large part of the continent. The idea that all aboriginal people only tapped resources for food and basic survival is not accurate.
__________________
"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
