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The United States is Falling Apart and the World is Taking Notice
(www.counterpunch.org)
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Probably from the moment of our emancipation from England. Occupied more territory than most European states ever had at that moment.
If you want to be pedantic about it how about when we occupied the width of an entire contenant? September 9th 1850
We didn't spring fully formed from Zeus's forehead to fund the destruction of the Reich.
I was asking from what year, decade even to what year. This is as vague as it gets. If I wanted to be pedantic I would ask what a "contenant" is. That date you mention is about California? I think you don't get what being an empire means. It's not having a really big country.
So you are unaware of the goings on in the year 1776?
How about you define empire? I'm sure Leopold II left lots of decorative plaques for you to learn about it on.
What? Do you think becoming independent makes you an empire? Jeez, I would say stay in school and learn some fundamentals, but then again you're in the US. This is pointless
Jeez I asked for a definition of empire. I'm sure that a resident of the most horrific colonial power in all history knows what it means. So tell me.
Edit: lol it just struck me how funny it is for a Belgian to say the USA's hegemony will be forgotten, most living humans couldn't even find you guys on a map.
He lives in Belgium? I thought that was a type of doughnut...?
It's basically a cocaine ring with a chocolatier influencer account and a trust fund.
And again, basic stuff. I'm not going to educate a child or someone that had education on a child's level. Who TF knows, maybe you've been thought creationism in your weirdo backward country.
Oh. Maybe you didn't know...
A Belgian lecturing about atrocities and empires being forgotten is particularly humorous.
Then again, I suppose the Congo Free State wasn't technically a genocide because it was economically motivated. Not based on national, ethnic, racial, or religious interests, just money.
God. That's like It not being technically murder because you kept them alive and in agony.
In one, a man sits on a low platform looking at a dismembered small foot and small hand. They belonged to his five-year-old daughter, who was later killed when her village did not produce sufficient rubber. She was not unique - chopping off the limbs of enslaved Congolese was a routine form of retribution when Leopold II's quotas were not met.
Colonial administrators also kidnapped orphaned children from communities and transported them to "child colonies" to work or train as soldiers. Estimates suggest more than 50% died there.
Killings, famine and disease combined to cause the deaths of perhaps 10 million people, though historians dispute the true number.
Leopold II may never have set foot there, but he poured the profits into Belgium and into his pockets.
He built the Africa Museum in the grounds of his palace at Tervuren, with a "human zoo" in the grounds featuring 267 Congolese people as exhibits.
Let's look through US history for our child slave soldier colonies.
But first modern Belgiums take on its past!
former Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel and the father of future prime minister Charles Michel, called Leopold "a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium".
In a TV debate this week, a former president of the Free University of Brussels, Hervé Hasquin, argued there were "positive aspects" to colonisation, listing the health system, infrastructure, and primary education he said Belgium brought to Central Africa
Whoops all quote