re: #955 ggt

Life happens.

If Europe hadn’t gone thru her colonial phase, there would be no USA and know you and me.

I’m not going to second guess history—it happened. We are here.

Let’s try to deal with right now and OUR future.

People who pretend the past didn’t happen don’t deal with the future very well. That’s my issue with current-day Europe: there’s a whole lot of posturing going on that involves pretending that colonialism totally didn’t shape current issues and attitudes. The stuff I mentioned above isn’t hyperbole: the North Africans in France, the Turks in Germany, the Pakistanis and West Indians in England—the attitudes and issues these minorities face RIGHT NOW are built upon cultural conceits rooted in imperialism/colonialism and very distinct construct of bigotry—sort of cultural imperialism plus Social Darwinism. EDL dickheads aside, England is doing a lot better: France and Germany, though, still want to have a colonizer-colonized dynamic with their resident aliens, where they get to dictate the terms of assimilation yet keep the minority population at arm’s distance.