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How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems? I always see colonialism or the “random” borders drawn by the Briti
by wil421 7y ago
How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems? I always see colonialism or the “random” borders drawn by the British being blamed for the problems today. It’s almost been 100 years (1932) since the kingdom was founded.
This isn’t a jab at your comment more of a question. Here’s an article that talks about Arab army’s inefficiencies and has a lot to do with the family holding power over others.[1]
[1] http://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2000/12/why-arabs-lose-wars-fighting-as-you-train-and-the-impact-of-culture-on-arab-military-effectiveness/ http://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2000/12/why-arabs-lose-...
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoThere's no real time limit on this stuff. For example I blame the mongols 800 years ago for China's current problems.
- imtringued 7y agoI blame the big bang for starting it at all.
- trequartista 7y ago“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
- jasonjayr 7y agoIf you got 20 minutes, "history of the entire world, i guess" sums it up pretty nicely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs
- jerf 7y agoAt some point, you're being insulting by implicitly stripping everyone of the agency to deal with their own lives and problems. I don't think the last people in China that have ever had agency were 800 years ago. I don't know where that line is, but ~40 generations is definitely on the other side of it. (Probably isn't a "line" anyhow.)
- chaostheory 7y agoMaybe he forgot to put /s. At least that’s how I read it
- kuschku 7y agoA person has agency. People don’t. Isaac Asimov’s concept of psychohistory isn’t as much fiction as it seems, groups of people have huge inertia. A lot of the borders, and consequently sociocultural issues in central europe today are caused by kingdoms a millenium ago.
- milesskorpen 7y agoGreat example in Portugal - election results predicted by the pace of the Reconquista: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1181292177130999808.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1181292177130999808.html
- jerf 7y agoYour counterargument proves too much; if "people" don't have agency then you can't blame anyone for anything, including being unable to blame the Mongols for anything about modern China. The concept of blame becomes entirely pointless. This may, in fact, be true. But in this specific context, it's an argument that proves too much.
- repolfx 7y agoPsychohistory is pure fiction. The closest real equivalent is economics and economic predictions are essentially always wrong. I don't remember where exactly, but I recall reading that someone had done a mass study on economic forecasts and discovered that the only time they're correct was when they were predicting a continuation of whatever the current trend line was. Forecasting never managed to predict an actual change to the status quo, making such forecasts useless. We can't even measure GDP accurately in quarters already passed, let alone predict what it will be in future, and surely predicting the movement of GDP is the most basic task a psychohistorian could possibly set themselves.
- 7y ago
- Leader2light 7y agoHonestly, that is just stupid. My mom always says you need to make your own way in life. Can't blame your parents or anyone else. At the end of the day, it won't do you any good anyway.
- Mirioron 7y agoBut at that point, can't we blame European colonialism on the Mongols too?
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoI think a lot of modern history could be blamed on the mongols yeah. But you can go further back too and blame the Yamnaya too.
- mschuster91 7y ago> How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems? The problems in the Middle East region need to be solved, and only then this will be possible. Almost everything - from the current state in the various dictatorships over Kurdistan to the Israel/Palestine conflict (and even much stuff in the Asian continent, like the Pakistan/India conflict!) can be traced to the disastrous end of the British colonial era.
- jayess 7y agoThe longer I live the more I realize that nothing is ever "solved."
- riffraff 7y agowhile that might be true, some things do get to a steady state that feels like a solution. For example, most europeans do not worry much about the next war between france/germany/italy/spain/austria. The "war is a constant between large powers in europe" issue appears to be solved enough, for now.
- wbl 7y agoUh, Syria was a French mandate.
- InitialLastName 7y agoBecause Sykes agreed to grant it to France.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoQuality organizations take time and many generations to build, as does raising children and families with the values one needs to make progress as a family/tribe/community/country/world. 100 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but unfortunately, it can all be undone quite quickly. When older generations sacrifice short term gains for long term security is when progress can happen. Unfortunately, I don’t see much appetite for that where I’m from (the US), and once a sufficient number of people choose to take more from the system than they give, it will start decaying.
- ethbro 7y agoAs a professor of political science once told our class... "How do you solve long-running civil war?" "Murder all the grandmothers." His point being that they were (a) the only ones who survived into old age (everyone else getting murdered) & (b) were thereby the ones educating a new generation in the hatreds of the old. He was only half-joking. But it really made me think about, as you say, just how long it takes for institutions to be built in a society. Which is order-of-"the time it takes for mindsets to change (usually via death) or new generations to rise into power (~40 years)". I'd never really thought about it that way before.
- danans 7y ago> unfortunately, it can all be undone quite quickly. Or put another way, it's easy to push systems towards increasing entropy, but hard to push them in the opposite direction. That's part of why terrorism (of any persuasion) often chooses targets of symbolic value, like social, political, and economic hubs. They are trying to push the target social system toward entropy.
- puranjay 7y agoI can't say about Saudi Arabia, but in general across the developing world, the people who inherited power from the colonial masters were either connected to or influenced by said colonists. There was no real dismantling of the old power structure; it only changed shape and character. Unless that original power structure is dismantled (a tough task since those in power entrench themselves against any insurrection), you can't fully say what a country's growth trajectory could have been. Botched though the surgery may be, the former colonies still seem to be connected to the colonists in some way.
- nl 7y agoApparently a long time - especially since the British were never in Saudi Arabia. They (Saudi Arabia) were a full participant in the partitioning of the Ottoman empire, and annexed much of the west side of the Gulf themselves.
- chungus_khan 7y agoNot directly, but the British and Americans were heavily supportive of the Saud dynasty, enough to have largely built for it its current place in the world. Aramco in fact originally stood for Arabian-American Oil Company, and was created by the Americans in order to work around the partitioning of middle eastern oil by Britain and France at San Remo. It wasn't even owned by the government until the 70s.
- nl 7y agoSure, but oil wasn't found in Saudi Arabia until 1936 just in time for WW2 to wipe out the British Empire. This was well after the San Remo agreement. The Saud dynasty did form an alliance with the US, but this wasn't until 1945. That's well after the what most people think of the colonial period, and the terms of the alliance were nothing like a colonial-style arrangement.
- chungus_khan 7y ago> Sure, but oil wasn't found in Saudi Arabia until 1936 just in time for WW2 to wipe out the British Empire. This was well after the San Remo agreement. The effects of the agreement didn't magically go away just because the British empire was failing 16 years later though. Being after the time people perceive as the colonial period isn't really relevant either, the arrangement is distinctly neocolonial rather than colonial and absolutely built the current strength of the Saudi regime. Of course that isn't to ascribe any unique evil to any of the players, the arrangement was very profitable for the Sauds and the Americans, and pursuit of profit, not geopolitical foresight is what drives any arrangement like this.
- 7y ago
- evrydayhustling 7y agoI think the best reason this keeps coming up is that entanglement with the West never stopped. Britain passed the economic and military reins to the states, but any useful summary of Saudi Arabia's economy/politics/culture today is going to have a disproportionate amount of text about Western relations (and where they come) compared to, say, popular opinions inside the country. Reducing that to a question of "blame" I would agree is kind of an irritant 80+ years on... but it does serve the purpose of challenging other even more oversimplified views, such as assuming that the culture is predisposed not to thrive.
- nl 7y agoentanglement with the West never stopped. But isn't that just because they are a single-resource export oriented economy? It's Dutch Disease[1], but hundreds of times larger? Britain passed the economic and military reins to the states Why are you bringing up Britain here? They weren't a colonial power in Saudi Arabia. The closest they came was Kuwait. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutchdisease.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutchdisease.asp
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThey had all the capital they needed to diversify their economy when it would have made a difference. Now it's too late and they will reap the consequences.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoIt's never too late, and they're working on it.
- ethbro 7y ago> Why are you bringing up Britain here? They weren't a colonial power in Saudi Arabia. Because I didn't know the history myself, tl;dr from Wikipedia: Ottoman empire controlled the entire area at the turn of the century, to various degrees at various time. Al Rashid family allied with Ottomans. Al Saud family, under Abdulaziz (later, simply Ibn Saud), fought Rashids in the Riyadh region. During WWI, pan-Arab revolt against Ottomans encouraged by British. Ibn Saud mostly avoided participating in revolt to focus on defeating the Rashids, with the help of Ikhwan (Wahhabist) forces. Pan-Arab revolt failed, but allies won, resulting in creation of independent Arab states. In years after the war, Saud and Ikhwan forces captured and most of modern day Saudi Arabia. In 1927, the Ikhwan forces attempted to expand farther afield, into British-administered Arab successor states (Transjordan, Iraq, Kuwait). Saud disagreed, and a two year war was fought for control of Saudi Arabia. Ikhwan forces lost, most of their leaders killed, and the Saud family rules to today.
- remotedeveloper 7y ago> How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems? Are we just going to pretend the UK hasn't almost incessantly meddled in the Middle East for the past 75 years?
- _jal 7y agoIf the goal is to actually understand the past's influence on the present, it is more useful to think in terms of cause and effect that 'blame'. Talking about blame is about status and power games right now. If you want to understand what happened, the changes colonialism caused cannot be reversed and first-order effects are still obvious today. If you want to blame people, well, people love to nurse their grievances.
- dashundchen 7y agoThe kingdom may have been founded 90 years ago and the sun set on the British empire, but you can't say other powers such as the US and Russia didn't take their place in the Middle East in another form. See also the overthrow of Iran, 2 invasions of Iraq, hundreds of billions of US arm sales to both Israel and Saudi Arabia, indirect involvement in the invasion of Yemen, the Russian/US/Iranian proxy war in Syria, I'm sure there's much more. I can't think of another region of the earth that has faced more foreign involvement in the past 50 years.
- apta 7y agoNot to mention the splitting up of the Levant into (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine), then taking Palestine and giving it to the Jews while kicking out the local populations.
- roywiggins 7y agoThe US more or less just slotted itself in as the successor to the British empire after WWII. I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, but the US (like the Brits) is a globe-spanning naval power not unlike the Brits were.
- FussyZeus 7y agoColonialism can be blamed for so much though. Long lasting and brutal effects on not just a geographic or economic area, but the emotional toll on the given people as well. I don't mean this personally against you, but people who tend to talk this way often don't understand the sheer magnitude of what colonialism wrought upon the world. And I understand why; it's downplayed in the history taught in the developed world, and generally only brought up where it resulted in more or less "okay" situations once it had more or less passed, like the founding of America. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Britain was perhaps the most prolific, but it was far from the only nation doing this shit. Belgium skull-fucked the Congo for nearly a century, and did pretty much every horrific thing they could think of: mass executions, cut off limbs when the people couldn't pay their taxes, bought "land rights" from the locals for gemstones not even remotely worth enough, murdered probably millions of men, women, and children. IIRC the last time I read about this, by the time they were done almost 2 in 3 Congolese people were dead or crippled beyond the ability to work. Those left had no leadership qualities or training, since leadership was always Belgian and they fucked off home. They didn't know how to do pretty much anything other than grunt labor, and suddenly when Belgium left, had to figure out how to assemble a Government. The kind of damage that does is incalculable. Not just the economic damage, not just the ecological damage from the mining and farming, not just the emotional toll left on the populace, etc. This sends shockwaves through history that will likely take centuries if not a millennium to fully dissipate. And then of course after Belgium left, giving the country back to it's populace, they started funding various tribes sitting on the natural resources they wanted, to start civil wars that would then last EVEN LONGER STILL, doing EVEN MORE DAMAGE. And this is what just one nation did to one other nation. Colonialism as a whole was a bunch of nations ripping up a sizable partition of the entire planet's worth of places and people, the effects of which, mainly cultural loss/damage, and the incredible wealth enjoyed by developed nations remain to this day and show no signs of slowing down, save for finally the topic of national reparations being on the table. Edit: And of course colonialist problems or ones that look a damn lot like colonialism continue to this day, from the ship-breaking beaches where workers are paid pennies a day to scrap ships from the developed world, sold to those firms because it's cheaper that disposing of them in an ecologically friendly way, to the exports of trash electronics to various nations where they demolish their environment to scrape out a meager living. People will look at these things and say "well why can't they just have eco regulation and proper laws, and just say no?" and the answer is that a shit job beats starvation, but the fact that those are their only options is itself a relic of colonialism.
- danharaj 7y agoColonial policy didn't stop.
- eternalban 7y ago> How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems? As long the English insist on sticking their noise -- and soldiers and arms and spooks -- in that area's business I would think.
- apta 7y ago> How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems? The Saudis (and other Middle Easterners) should own up to the issues challenging them, and work hard to overcome the colonialist past. That being said, colonialism continues to this day, just not in the outright visible way that happened previously. Just look at the West's interference in Middle Eastern politics.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoThe brits really really fucked things up (along with the other european countries drawing up the borders). That bad border drawing messed things up. Other countries mess things up too of course, including the us. For example, the us just caused major problems with suddenly moving out of the way of the turkey invasion to the kurds. Maybe the us declined to get in a war with turkey to stop it or whatever it was, but we fucked things up by moving out of the way.
- earthboundkid 7y ago100 years is not a long time. My grandfather just died at age 99. The reverberating effects of the Russian empire conquering Finland in 1809 are basically never going to stop affecting my family unless we decide to move back to Scandinavia once global warming has made it less cold. :-) It's reasonable to expect any major effect to take several generations to revert to mean. If the person who suffered the effect is alive and plays a part in raising a child, the effect will continue to reverberate.