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Along the same lines, there’s also the short book “War is a racket”, by retired general Smedley Butler

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

> is never reported until decades later in books by academics.

Is never reported in the West until decades later. It's reported with extreme detail contemporaneously by local sources in an extremely easy to access format.

I remember after 9/11, reading accounts by cross Arab/Western people who were reporting in extreme detail, specific grievances that people across the Middle East had with American foreign policy in an attempt to explain but not justify the actions of OBL and all of it being shut down with an almost aggressive ignorance of "they just hate our freedoms" by virtually the entire intellectual spectrum in the US.

Like, you would expect pro-war hawks to simplify the issue but even anti-war bleeding heart liberals often seemed to have zero interest in engaging with criticisms from actual people who would be impacted vs the imaginary people they construct who are convenient to their argument.

Even to this day, if you ask people what was OBL's self-stated reason for 9/11, 99% of people would get it wrong despite this being a purely factual question for which the primary source is trivially available [1]. I bet you, the person reading this comment have a vague idea of what OBL said and your vague notion is pretty significantly wrong.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver

Is the term “global south” like the term “black and brown people?” A concept that lumps together huge swaths of the world’s population that have nothing to do with each other, and reduces them to subjects in a moralistic rant against Americans/Europeans/whites?

Broadly refers to countries with a history of being colonized rather than a history of being colonizers. There certainly was a racial aspect to colonialism, yes.

So England is part of the “global south” because it was colonized by the Romans? Is India part of the “global south” because it was colonized by Muslims, or only because it was colonized by the British? Is Thailand part of the “global south?”

You can Socrates this definition or you can recognize that it is a useful term for talking about global power imbalances from the latest wave of colonialism that resulted in the global order we see today. You do recognize and accept that such power relationships exist, yes?

I disagree that it's a useful term. It centers white people and Europeans to suggest commonality between myriad different groups of people who otherwise have nothing in common. Moreover, it falsely assumes that interactions between those countries and European powers "resulted in the global order we see today." That's backwards. Europeans were able to engage in colonialism because they were already ahead of those other countries. Just as the Romans were able to conquer Britain and Gaul for the same reason. Even with respect to European colonization, former colonies were left in vastly different circumstances. African countries colonized by the French are vastly differently situated than, say, Singapore or Hong Kong.

Not least of all, insofar as that view strongly suggests that white people and Europeans were the cause of current global power imbalances, they must be the solution. That is a dangerously counter-productive way to view the world. Even if we accept, for example, the theory that Great Britain transferred trillions of wealth from India to itself through colonization, it is a shadow of its former self and will never be able to meaningfully affect the future prospects of India.

I would posit that India should view British colonization the same way Great Britain views Norman colonization: something that shaped the country's past but something of only historical interest going forward. At least in my experience as a Bangladeshi, I think that's how most folks do view it. We don't think of ourselves as being defined by our colonial history. Indeed, my parents (who were born in what was then the British Dominion of Pakistan) have positive as well as negative things to say about colonialism.

I doubt people using the term global south generally believe that the west must be the solution to global power imbalances. At most they might believe their countries should stop meddling in the affairs of post-colonial countries and let them develop on their own without further wealth being extracted. Reparations would also presumably be on the table but that's really a pipe dream given the current state of the discourse, where your average american has zero understanding of how labor organizers halfway around the world being shot are connected to the wealth they see around them.

> I doubt people using the term global south generally believe that the west must be the solution to global power imbalances.

Then why do they use a term that centers the west in describing the majority of the world?

> At most they might believe their countries should stop meddling in the affairs of post-colonial countries and let them develop on their own without further wealth being extracted.

Is the west continuing to meddle in the affairs of India or Pakistan? If not, then what's the point of this term that encompasses them? If you want to talk about African countries dominated by European mining companies, just talk about them.

> Reparations would also presumably be on the table

That's what I'm talking about. Reparations is an incredibly toxic idea as applied to former colonies. As you observe, they will never happen. But they give political cover to bad leadership in developing countries, enabling them to avoid fixing their own problems.

Is that a question because it seems like you've already decided what it is.

Apparently history is anti-white rhetoric.

To hear white people tell history these days it certainly seems to be. Though ironically, in the process of doing that they center themselves in the narrative and reduce everyone else to mere foils to be juxtaposed against the moral failings of white people.

I don't agree with your views, but I do agree with this take.

I often hear people use the phrase: "especially effects under represented minorities", which robs those people of agency, portrays them ALL as being X (which is prejudice by definition).

Worst of all the phrase is trotted out like a weapon to accomplish some goal.

It's a shame because usually the people think they're helping

I don't doubt these folks are well intentioned. I think it's just human nature to have trouble seeing past the end of your own nose. The white people taking about "under represented minorities" probably isn't organically immersed in minority communities, but experience them mainly as subjects of their own political, academic, or charitable efforts. That naturally leads them to essentialize those minorities and lump them together.

Moreover, their limited exposure to minorities is often derivative of their interactions with other white people. E.g. someone who grows up in Wisconsin and has little exposure to Muslim immigrants other than as the subject of antagonism by Trump supporters, probably can't help but view those minorities except through the lens of their own opposition to other white people.

> It is scarcely an exaggeration to say the US successfully inflicted a fourth reich on the global south over the course of the 20th century. Any left-wing or labor movements were threatened or actually put down with shocking fascist violence so that the wealth could keep flowing out of the country to the US.

I don't know if it's the Chomsky talking but this kind of hyperbole taints your argument. While US involvement in Southeast Asia and South America are _far from_ perfect they're even farther from being like a "fourth reich".

The US funded, trained, armed, and supported with propaganda fascist elements in many countries that came to political power and committed mass murders, all for our benefit. Call it whatever you want. "Far from perfect", just lol.

I didn't deny that. I just said calling it the "fourth reich" is hyperbole. Do you honestly believe, without hyperbole, that these actions are on the same level as those committed by the Nazis while they were in power. You know they were responsible for the genocide of millions at an industrial scale, yes?

Millions of people died in Indonesia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. It is absolutely on the same order of magnitude.

Let's not forget about Ukraine too with the CIA training far-right paramilitaries to fight Russia...

https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-...

I wouldn't personally put that in the same category, but it does illustrate our comfort with arming & training nazis.

Also South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre

Yes

keep going bc you're on the right track.