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"I know some cultures don't value human life as high as we in the Western culture do." I'm sorry, I feel a general agreement with the rest of your post but thi

"I know some cultures don't value human life as high as we in the Western culture do." I'm sorry, I feel a general agreement with the rest of your post but this line is too much a false claim to ignore. If we're going to generalize on Western culture, I would say that that has a habit of only valuing lives that are Western or lives that are white. It took decades for there to be even mild acknowledgement that Thanksgiving celebrates the genocide of millions. You revere people like Churchill or Obama who are responsible for countless third world lives being lost. A single American dying somewhere warrants more attention in the West than a dozen brown lives. Had this American caused the death of 5-6 islanders with disease, I wonder whether it would be front page news. Please don't give me this claim that the West values life more. It is we in the East who suffer the bulk of the casualties of your Western wars.

smsm42 8y ago
> I would say that that has a habit of only valuing lives that are Western or lives that are white. That's obviously not true. Ever heard about abolitionist movement, for example? Are you claiming no Western culture persons supported movements like civil rights movement, BLM, etc.? This claim flies right in the face of obvious historical and present facts. It sounds like you are just parroting some fashionable overgeneralisations - which may be fine to shout on a protest, where the goal is to push your point and getting a little overboard is ok, but it can't be taken seriously as a logical argument. Surely, there are Western racists - as there are racists and xenophobes in very many cultures. But no guiding principle of modern Western culture claims that only lives of persons with pale pinkish skin are valuable. Don't confuse propaganda with facts. > It took decades for there to be even mild acknowledgement that Thanksgiving celebrates the genocide of millions Why acknowledge an obvious falsity? Literally nobody celebrating Thanksgiving is celebrating "genocide of millions" (ok, I don't know, maybe you personally know people that do, but nobody else does). Surely, events that gave birth to Thanksgiving also led to some very appalling atrocities (if you bother to dig, atrocities are buried in history of virtually every country, and certainly in the history of many indigenous American tribes as well - you don't think Europeans invented war for them and they never knew what it is before that, do you?). But that is decidedly not what is celebrated on Thanksgiving. So only a propagandist completely detached from the facts would claim that it is what is celebrated. > A single American dying somewhere warrants more attention in the West than a dozen brown lives. In US, yes. In UK, that would be single Briton. In Russia, single Russian. In Japan, single Japanese. In Philippines, single Phllippinian. Of course people care about people that are close to them more than they care about abstract people they never saw and have nothing in common with. This is common to virtually every culture on Earth - if there's a culture that cares absolutely equally about every single human, I've never heard about it. You neither, probably. > Had this American caused the death of 5-6 islanders with disease, But he hadn't. Instead, he was murdered. Yet you ignore what happened while concentrating on what hypothetically could happen. > Please don't give me this claim that the West values life more I will. If an person from that tribe comes to a Western country, maybe he wouldn't be treated nicely. Maybe he would not be even admitted (he probably has no papers and no visa). Maybe he would be subjected to a treatment much worse than a common Westerner. But he won't be murdered on sight. > It is we in the East who suffer the bulk of the casualties of your Western wars. If you talk about any wars before WWII, most of Western wars happened in the West, and thus West suffered most of the casualties, naturally. WWII is impossible to call a Western war, though, given what happened in the Pacific theater, for example.

smsm42 8y ago

> I would say that that has a habit of only valuing lives that are Western or lives that are white. That's obviously not true. Ever heard about abolitionist movement, for example? Are you claiming no Western culture persons supported movements like civil rights movement, BLM, etc.? This claim flies right in the face of obvious historical and present facts. It sounds like you are just parroting some fashionable overgeneralisations - which may be fine to shout on a protest, where the goal is to push your point and getting a little overboard is ok, but it can't be taken seriously as a logical argument. Surely, there are Western racists - as there are racists and xenophobes in very many cultures. But no guiding principle of modern Western culture claims that only lives of persons with pale pinkish skin are valuable. Don't confuse propaganda with facts. > It took decades for there to be even mild acknowledgement that Thanksgiving celebrates the genocide of millions Why acknowledge an obvious falsity? Literally nobody celebrating Thanksgiving is celebrating "genocide of millions" (ok, I don't know, maybe you personally know people that do, but nobody else does). Surely, events that gave birth to Thanksgiving also led to some very appalling atrocities (if you bother to dig, atrocities are buried in history of virtually every country, and certainly in the history of many indigenous American tribes as well - you don't think Europeans invented war for them and they never knew what it is before that, do you?). But that is decidedly not what is celebrated on Thanksgiving. So only a propagandist completely detached from the facts would claim that it is what is celebrated. > A single American dying somewhere warrants more attention in the West than a dozen brown lives. In US, yes. In UK, that would be single Briton. In Russia, single Russian. In Japan, single Japanese. In Philippines, single Phllippinian. Of course people care about people that are close to them more than they care about abstract people they never saw and have nothing in common with. This is common to virtually every culture on Earth - if there's a culture that cares absolutely equally about every single human, I've never heard about it. You neither, probably. > Had this American caused the death of 5-6 islanders with disease, But he hadn't. Instead, he was murdered. Yet you ignore what happened while concentrating on what hypothetically could happen. > Please don't give me this claim that the West values life more I will. If an person from that tribe comes to a Western country, maybe he wouldn't be treated nicely. Maybe he would not be even admitted (he probably has no papers and no visa). Maybe he would be subjected to a treatment much worse than a common Westerner. But he won't be murdered on sight. > It is we in the East who suffer the bulk of the casualties of your Western wars. If you talk about any wars before WWII, most of Western wars happened in the West, and thus West suffered most of the casualties, naturally. WWII is impossible to call a Western war, though, given what happened in the Pacific theater, for example.