The Over Population Problem

FART, DUDE!!! Are you getting a little harsh there by assuming that he thinks he's more important?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Europeans really destroyed Africa?

It seems, at least on the surface, that the countries that are most stable in Africa are the ones with large caucasian populations. Am I wrong about that?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Not really, but the ones that are unstable were largely pillaged by Europeans and then abandoned.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Which ones, specifically? I know some are semi-stable, like Kenya or Ethiopia.
Uganda and Rwanda, on the other hand, have less happy histories. Were those the result of European meddlings?

 

I'd argue so, but I don't really know enough about individual countries to make a GOOD argument.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Arguing for the sake of it, then, are we???

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Caucasians can be blamed for almost all of the ills of any minority, I bet.

 

Most of European and US interaction with Africa, South and Central American has been very destructive to the native population. In the Bolivia, Peru and some others the daily caloric intake pre-Spanish conquest (under the Incas and Aztecs) was higher than it was afterwards, at least until circa 1960.
During his presidential election campaign Evo Morales publicly chewed coco leaves to show he was still a man of the people (all the native chew them to relive hunger pains) Currently many natives in Peru are rioting and some dying as the government wants to take oil and gas from their reservations.

About three hundred years ago there was a large mountain, in Peru as I recall, of very high grade copper ore. The simple framers and hunter natives were forced at gun point to build road thru the jungle to the mountain and then to live in the barracks the company built, eat in the company kitchen, work from sun rise to sun set for their food etc.

It took about 80 years to remove the mountain with horse drawn loads of ore to the ships waiting in the port. - That was at least three generations of slave miners, but eventually the ore was not worth the cost of taking it, so the company closed the kitchen and went away. The grandchildren and great grand children of the original self sustaining natives did not know how to hunt or farm so they starved to death. Eventually the jungle reclaimed the dirt road.

That may be an extreme case, but illustrates the typical pre-1900s interaction of the "civilized peoples" with the natives of South, & Central America and with Africans. -Destroy their culture, take their richest resources and make slaves of them.

During the peak of the cold war era, the US installed and supported dictators in almost all South American countries as they were tending to be "left leaning" in their voting. Chile's Allende was openly a communist when elected as president. The CIA supplied the local right wingers with the means to kill him in the presidential palace on 9/11 and them the helicopters that were used to drop students and other liberals into the sea a few miles off the coast. 50,000 were "disappeared." Still on Sundays a few old ladies, dressed in black, stand silently in the main plaza in silent memory and protest for their disappeared sons and daughters*. The mother of the current president of Chile was subjected to drugs and electric shock torture and her father died under torture by the US supported dictatorship. Given this history she is remarkable calm towards the USA.

I am sure that wiki has entries under "Allende" (Or Chile's history)** and "operation condor" (US coordinated the cooperation between the dictators of different countries) which returned the liberals wanting to restore democracy to the countries they had fled so they could be among the 50,000 killed. IMHO the US loss of less than 3000 on 9/11 had that date selected as every educated person in South American knows what the US did on 9/11/73 to actively destroy an elected democracy it did not like and put General Augusto Pinochet in control for decades.

--------------
*Many were of course repeately raped in prison. Their babies, if healty were taken and given to chldless couples well connect to the dictatorship. In recent years, via DNA testing, a several dozen middle aged adults have learned who their true families were.

**"...In September 1970, President Nixon informed the CIA that an Allende regime in Chile would not be acceptable and authorized $10 million to stop Allende from coming to power or unseat him[26]. The CIA's plans to impede Allende's investiture as President of Chile were known as "Track I" and "Track II"; Track I sought to prevent Allende from assuming power via so-called "parliamentary trickery", while under the Track II initiative, the CIA tried to convince key Chilean military officers to carry out a coup. ..."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende

SUMMARY: Ever since the Monroe doctrine, the US was in charge of the rape of South America, the suppression of its economic progress, and the control of its governments to serve US business interests (Read about United Fruit Company also). Fortunately this all changed with the Vietnam War as US was too focused on that problem to continue support of the dictators with old military equipment, water cannons and tear gas for crowd control, etc.

 

Sad, but true. The United States often acts like a big bully.
Actually, I would say it's power factions within the government and business sectors, not the country itself. These groups just have the means to hijack agencies and entities of the US to do their dirty work.

What about Africa?

 

look at what recently transpired in Peru:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7214633.stm

real news and not old wives tales and camp fire stories that old Billy rehashes.

 

The Monroe deal assigned responsibility to Europe for African rape and destruction. What was called the Belgium Congo was legally not even a colony. It was the personal property of the king of Belgium to do with as he pleased. When the French were forced to leave their African colonies, they took everything back to France, including all the telephones!

 

Sources? Were these people's personal belongings?

Was Algeria raped of its telephones as well?

 

That happened two decades ago. Now ex-Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori also had a Japanese pass port as his parents were Japanese. (Not sure but think he was born in Peru, so had both passports)

He fled to Japan and was safe there for many years. I forget if he willingly came back or was extradited. (I think it was willingly as he had political asperations still.)

There probably are some errors of details in my "old wives tales and camp fire stories" as I work from memory but do not think you can point to any significant distortion of the main facts or change the obvious conclusion to be drawn from them. If you can please do so - I do not intentionally miss lead and want to be corrected if I have done so.

 

I know all of that. And your memory is from crappy web sites and propaganda.

 

Source is my memory of news reports at the time. I think this can be confirmed with a little searching but I am too lazy to do it.

Algeria was not so abused as until roughly the end of Charles De Gaulle term, Algeria was a part of France. He was very proud and wanted France to be bigger and more important. The fact that everyone born there was a citizen of France, had a French passport, is the origin of many of France's civil problems today. - Recall hundreds of car were torched just a few years ago mainly by the French Algerians who did not like the discrimination they suffered - they were Citizens of France!

PS "All the telephones" is somewhat an exageration, only those in the city offices, factories and public buildings, not in private homes or rural areas, I think, were taken back to France.

 

Then please specifically correct my facts. Running my character down will not do that.

 

AFAIK, De Gaulle was one of the instrumental players in Algerian independence. That's why there was an attempted coup by the likes of Challe, Salan, et al.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_putsch_of_1961:

Three of the conspirators...

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

To Giambattista:

Thanks for the information and links. I did not know that De Gaulle switched to support the inevitable - I was only trying to remember approximately when Algeria ceased to be a part of France. I am pretty sure De Gaulle was the proud leader I described. Thus it is to his intellignece and wisdom that he switched to the independence for Algeria side. I.e. he was also a realists. I think he must have regretted than necessary diminution of France.

 

Oi.
De Gaulle was a francophile. He was French, afterall!!!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Not so sure how he felt about the loss of what was a sizable, and arguably the most valuable piece of colonial real estate they owned. They have almost a dozen billion barrels in petroleum reserves, and the eighth largest natural gas reserves.

 

I cannot find the photo I saw last week of oil coated swamp full of toxic wastes in Ecuador, but here is link to news about it:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=apAREiMquI5g

Big oil has, to generalize, put money into local leaders Swiss bank accounts and toxic wastes into the local lakes and rivers in much of Africa and South America until the bad PR and environmental movement cut profits more than they saved around circa 1990.

A low intensity civil war has been raging in Nigeria for a couple of decades because their oil is being taken with essentially no benefit to common Nigerians. Much of the oil is extracted a short distance from land or in the swampy costal land. One can only guess where the toxins are being dumped, but I do not recommend eating any fish that are caught near there.

The US has been losing the battle for "hearts and minds" in most of the world for some decades - perhaps Obama can reverse that?

 

Post #381 has a couple of screencaps of forums that did the only sensible thing with Pro.