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Prager Youth
(hexbear.net)
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
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i do admit, there's something amusingly mask-off and honest about admitting that slavery is "better than being killed." that is basically the accepted anthropological understanding of how slavery was historically justified: a military force is doing a mass atrocity and do a little slavery on the grounds that it's better than being dead. the common element of the enslaved is the social pressure that death is the alternative unless freedom can be purchased outright. david graeber discusses this at some length in Debt in his study of early historical debts and debt peonage slavery, presumably to dissuade readers of more sugar-coated beliefs about slavery throughout world history.
the obvious problem is the racism and genocidal intent of course, prageru is implying here that it would be fine to just start murdering west Africans en masse for no other reason than taking whatever is valuable to gained in the act of genocidal conquest.
Because they believe it to be so. They believe that if Native Americans didn't want their land stolen they should've won the war, and that given the opportunity, anyone would've done to Europeans what they did to the Global South.
I think it's silly to try to catch chuds in cognitive dissonance, because many of their beliefs are incompatible with each other, and they have no problem holding them, but this argument in particular is a natural consequence of the base belief the right-wing has in "might makes right"
yeah i'm not doing a gotcha, they're implying the violence because they believe in its justness, and this is the least they've ever bothered to try to dress it up for sale.
Oh yeah gotcha, agree. They're saying the quiet part out loud not because they're stupid or careless. It's because they feel emboldened and they're dabbing on anyone who disagrees.
I mean....
China had ocean going vessels and they could've genocided Oceania and the pacific but they chose not to. The ottoman empire, while not perfect by any means, didn't engage in the same genocidal and slave owning campaigns Europeans did in the americas and Africa. It's not that empire or colonization are exclusively European phenomena, but European colonization was particularly cruel and extractive.
Besides, this is a non-materialist hypothetical. The reason we criticize the heritage of European colonialism and imperialism it's because we live in its wake. The wrongs of that past and the wealth created from exploitation need to be made right and repaired. If Ethiopians or Khmer had done the same and now were the hegemony sitting on mountains of stolen wealth, the criticism wouldn't change.
Saying "b-b-but someone else would've done it to me if I hadn't done it first!" is literally a
point. And worthless in any conversation about european colonization.