Korean Job Discussion Forums

[igotthisguitar]

How about a world without AmeriKan "imperialism"?

[The_Conservative]

[quote="keane"]

[Pluto]

[dirty_scraps83]

Hehe, a NZer was the first to split the atom and now we don't want it. Clinton claimed that as American in a speech once, you should have seen the shitstorm that caused

[thepeel]

I tend to like most Americans, and I quite enjoy American popular culture. I also appreciate many of the products and services that have come from American firms and universities.

But the American federal government is the leading exporter of death, suffering and pain on our planet.

[Pluto]

[Sleepy in Seoul]

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

The nations with the worst human rights records for the most part are hostile to the US . It is no accident. The US has all the right enemies.

[Kuros]

[djsmnc]

If America had never been discovered, there would be a lot more spear-chuckers running around Africa, the US, South America, possibly Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Hell, if America had never been discovered, Europeans would have discovered America any way and called it something else.

Now, if America didn't even exist, Europe, Russia, and Asia would have developed more quickly and differently, human rights may not be considered as greatly, they all would have gone to war by now, and there'd be spearchuckers running rampant all over the place.

[happeningthang]

[Dome Vans]

Forget refrigerators and things like that. If America had never existed we would never have had the Simpsons, and how would our lives have been then? Case rested.

[Gopher]

Without the United States, world affairs would likely have unfolded as they did -- in broad strokes, of course.

Christianity, Islam, and the Crusades, the need for Western-Europeans to bypass the Med and get to the East by other means, the New World and the Columbian Exchange, the Atlantic economy, sugar, tobacco, cotton, and slavery, modern capitalism and the rise of centralized nation-states more or less between 1815 and 1848 along with British supremacy in world affairs from the Napoleonic Wars through approx. the 1920s, the Ottoman Empire's decline and fall and its consequences in the Middle East, the age of emancipation (far more relevant to East-European serfs than to American slaves, at least as far as numbers go), Japan's emergence as a serious challenger to European hegemony in East Asia, the so-called Scramble for Africa, the "unequal treaties" and spheres-of-influence in China, "the German Problem," Marxism, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the reactions this caused worldwide, decolonization crises throughout the Third-World...the list goes on.

The United States was never the decisive variable in any of these large-scale, structural, world-historical events. Indeed, such events shaped the United States more than the United States shaped them.

On the other hand, the United States has made specific and unique contributions -- some good, some not good, and some bad -- to world history. Some specific contributions in the peculiar way world history did in fact unfold include what Kuros refs, above: deciding the two world wars. And how about a document like the Declaration of Independence?

Nevertheless, people remain too U.S.-centric in their thinking, as if everything in the world hinged on what America did or did not do. This is misleading. The world would -- again, in broad strokes -- be more or less what it is today if the United States had never existed. Another scapegoat or other scapegoats would exist regards all the world's injustices, shortcomings, and failure to live up to Idealists' vision of how things should be -- hard to speculate who that might have been or why. Only certain thing is that Canadian nationalists would have to find another binary relationship so that they might define themselves and their nation...

And who knows? Had the United States not emerged in North America, North-American history would likely have developed differently as well. Perhaps the British would never have needed to create a Canadian nation-state had they remained in possession of all their colonies.

[vox]