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Using peace as a metric of a societies "goodness" is misleading. (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net to c/history@hexbear.net

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You often see westaboos romanticising western civilizations by saying shit like "Before the Roman empire unified everyone all those places were warring with each other! Rome ushered in centuries of peace!"

Or similar shit about America or Africa "Those slur tribes were all fighting each other anyway! It became more peaceful under colonial rule!

Even ignoring how silly believing imperial propaganda about "barbarians" is, life under these so-called peace times was fucking horrible. Slavery, apartheid and exploitation, the fucking collesium??!?. A huge portion of the population were literally kept like cattle, whipped, brutalized and forced to do the hard labour.

Peaceful for who, exactly?

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[–] Dolores@hexbear.net 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

on a scale of actual war neither the Roman empire, or any of the periods modern Pinkerites talk about were actually peaceful. simply discriminatory of who is participating in and suffering from these conflicts

literally just Rome The City wasn't in a battle from like 201 bce to 408 ce. that's basically it. every province and most cities had battles and sieges and sacks at some point, whether against other romans or foreigners.

then the 'Western Hegemony is Peaceful' *only if you don't count any of the aggressive murderous wars the US has done as wars, or murder. most of europe and the continental united states weren't involved tho, so to an audience exclusively from there it gets claps

[–] Saeculum@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

province and most cities had battles and sieges and sacks at some point, whether against other romans or foreigners.

Sure, but plenty of those were hundreds of years apart. A battle in 1850 doesn't mean that now is violent or peaceful and for some of these places, these are the timescales we're talking about.

[–] Dolores@hexbear.net 3 points 1 year ago

there was like a 10% chance any given shithead with a military command would rise up yearly, look at this shit. and anywhere within ~100 miles of a border was seeing raiding/counter-raiding on the regular.

in some sense the scale of ancient/medieval warfare would be 'easy to ignore' for a lot of people due to slow communication and limited range/numbers of participants. but i feel like if we're trying to make a kind of judgement of the society we should be talking about the full picture, not the parochial views some individuals adopted during the period