LehmanB wrote:This is one thing I can blame the white colonialist of. The senile straight borders, splitting tribes, creating artifitial identities without geographic basis, and planting tyrants to govern them, is a major factor to many wars and conflicts in Africa and the middle east.
For the most part, whenever older borders existed, we used them. Whenever there was a well-established political organization, we preserved it and built upon it.
But in many places the borders were already arbitrary before us, the informal product of constant conflicts. In some others there were only little territories, too little for a modern nation. In some others there were only sparse and intertwined ethnic groups.
This is best understood as an identity problem. In the west the main identity is the nationality since a few centuries (before that it was the religion, the village, the county, the duchy). In Africa it was the ethnic group. But ethnic groups have no well defined borders, some are very large and diffused over many nations, some are large and more or less cohabit with accepted groups, some are tiny. Some of those groups equated to kingdoms but most of them only had looser judicial structures coexisting within greater foreign legal entities.
None of this was fit for the modern era. We had to create proper nations where there weren't. This could have been better. Sometimes we didn't even have good maps of the region to begin with. But for the most part it is not our fault. And the fact there have been so many territorial conflicts is not new, they existed before us.
Europeans still did commit crimes no matter how much you wash it.
* Like the vast majority of westerners I fully acknowledge our crimes.
* I do not acknowledge responsibility for things we did not cause in the first place even though you blame us for them.
* If Muslims could have a tenth of the western self-criticism, the world would be much better. The history of Islam is a horrible one, a tale of slaughters, conquests, slavery, obscurantism and religious oppression.