You are correct that every major capitalist state today has gained or consolidated its power through imperialism genocide and oppression. I suppose that means in your book that it’s right and that’s the best we can do, correct? If we continue on this path, we will slide into civil war and world war and we will destroy the rest of the ecosystem and we will all die.
As much as gaslighting and trolling is annoying, I can’t imagine that anyone on these boards would want the above.
Columbia University press recently published the most extensive study of the actual cost of imperialism. For example India by good estimates was responsible for 25% of global GDP at one point, which is why the British were so interested in controlling it, as well as in the century before the UK took over the first true corporate venture in history, the dutch east India company, which itself operated its own private mercenary army, the white west eliminated or preyed upon black and brown people all over the world.
yes, the roots of both the modern state and corporations are as brutal and bloody as imaginable, and they remain so today. We canning must do better or we truly are all doomed. And we need to provide compensation to the people who have been appropriated from either recently or historically because the extent of the inequality will only make certain mutually destructive and apocalyptic war.
I am not a utopian. I am a pragmatist. I can see very clearly that what we’ve done and what we continue to do is not just unsustainable, but sliding faster than I ever imagined towards general annihilation and ecocide.
And lied about it.
www.aljazeera.com