• simplymath@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Nah. monarchies were largely ended by the Napoleonic wars and world war 1. It’s ahistorical to say Democracy was earned through electoralism. It also just makes no sense.

    The Spanish revolution was definitely a bloody conflict. So was the foundation of Yugoslavia and it’s NATO backed dissolution. So was Finnish independence from Russia. Or Ukrainian. Or Polish. Or Estonian or Latvian.

    Switzerland was founded by war too. Germany’s democracy was imposed by an occupying force-- as was Japan’s.

    France murdered their entire royal family. British India faced a decades long insurgency and worker strikes. The Magna Carta was signed after the king was fucking kidnapped.

    America’s founding myth is centered on a symbolic action to destroy private property (the Boston tea party).

    The only country (that I can think of) that voted for it’s democracy was Canada and that was only after a genocide of the indigenous population and centuries of colonial rule.

    • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      I’m not talking about becoming a democracy, I’m talking about *improving *and modernizing their democracies. As well as, well, voting for and enacting all the policy examples you listed

        • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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          4 days ago

          And do you think it was the bombers that wrote this into law, or elected politicians?

          edit: and why did other countries manage to get it into law a lot faster than the US?

          • simplymath@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            Also, I need a source about other countries enacting this before the US. In the 1880s, there wasn’t exactly a plethora of Democratic governments anywhere. Germany was a brand new idea and so was Italy. France encompassed parts of Spain and Sweden, which was itself an empire with a military dictator. The UK is still a monarchy with colonies that want to secede (namely Jamaica) and the Netherlands is too. Swedish people didn’t have surnames yet–they adopted the last name of their employer.

            Eastern Europe had serfdom and antisemitic laws were the norm.

            I would totally believe the UK got it first, but not without a mass mobilization of working class people.

            Seriously, what are you talking about?

            • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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              4 days ago

              Well, the US only enacted it in 1937

              So I only have basically all of Europe off the top of my head

              • simplymath@lemmy.world
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                4 days ago

                Right. So it was a 50 year long struggle led by the working class and groups like the Wobblies and your solution is to vote harder?

                To what extent can we credit colonial nations like Portugal and the UK and the Netherlands for extending this right exclusively to white people with political capital?

                Is it really a “pass” if the comfort of the homeland was predicated on slavery and/or empire elsewhere?

                • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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                  4 days ago

                  Not ‘harder’. Smarter, better and more consistently.

                  And yeah the US is the only country that never meddled in or abused other countries for economic gain, or benefitted from slavery in any way, so that’s the only one in the world where workers’ rights really count. Right

                  • simplymath@lemmy.world
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                    4 days ago

                    I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that crediting the the UK for progressive politics while they enslaved half the world is a weird take.

                    I would make the exact same claim about the US, considering that neo-slavery (indentured servitude/whites only towns) wasn’t abolished until after world war 2.

                    In fact, one of the most violent events in US history was a white mob that murdered an entire town of black people for trying to unionize.

                    Those white folks sure understood the power of working class solidarity and it’s fundamental threat to capital.

                    That’s also probably why MLKJ was assassinated during the poor people’s campaign that sought to unite the grievances of the civil rights movement with the concerns of poor whites.

          • simplymath@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            I think the law is irrelevant without a mass movement. You simply won’t get the law without the mass movement.

            You can’t get from where we are to working class liberation without passing through working class struggle.

            • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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              4 days ago

              Sure. Mass movement, politicians, pen, paper, law

              Leave one of those out and it probably won’t work