When Nintendo first came out, or rather, when we first got a Nintendo, I noticed there weren’t many games that two people could play at the same time. You had the ability to take turns, but not really play with someone. As a result, people got good at certain games free of human competition and that kind of shaped how they viewed the system. When 2 player games became popular and we were able to get good against the computer then use those lessons learned against humans, things changed. I remember playing a game with my older cousin and he was losing. The response wasn’t good sportsmanship, he simply hit reset on the game and said I was cheating. When he was beating me, all was fair.
Not too long ago, an up and coming, 18-year-old rapper by the name of Lil Snupe was playing a video game with a grown man. This is decades after those early days of Tecmo Bowl, but the tendency of the power wielding person to bully the powerless was still in full effect. I wasn’t in the room, but I’ve been in rooms like this in my life. They were playing NBA 2K and given Lil Snupe’s lifestyle of being a kid with a job that only requires him to make songs, he probably got pretty good at NBA 2K, and trash talking is almost standard. This 36-year-old man with more responsibility but a love for the game decided to gamble on the outcome of their game. Somehow, an argument broke out and the grown man shot the kid in the abdomen twice leading to his death. Not solely because he couldn’t control his emotions, but also because he had the means of intimidation on his side, along with more power.
It’s not a game
European powers have played a game of world domination for centuries now, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. The British Empire was enormous, and remnants of their control are still present from India to Hong Kong. Many European settlers made the “New World” into what it currently is by displacing millions of the indigenous people and erasing their culture. Savagely so, despite what the revisionists at Prager University are saying these days. They called anything they didn’t understand primitive, uncivilized or barbaric. As if slaughtering people, raping their women and destroying their history was better. Spain, France, and the UK all played a major hand in the destruction of the “new to them” world from modern day Canada to the southernmost point in Chile. They bought and stole people from Africa to cultivate the land for free and built major empires on this cruelty. Then, when. The deck was stacked beyond recovery they became peace advocates and proponents of “picking oneself up by the bootstraps”. The nerve of these folks right!
The people the land was stolen from had no rights, the stolen people forced to work had no rights, unless they were needed to protect the interests of the colonizers. World War I and II came and went, and in an effort to further rig this colonial powers game, they created the United Nations as a result. In theory this was to protect the world from aggressive regimes going forward, as long as those regimes were not the Soviet Union/Russia, USA, UK, France, or China. Those countries are seemingly able to move as they wish, whether people like it or not. My own curiosity led me to see if and when South Africa was allowed into the UN. Wouldn’t you know, they were in from the beginning! This is only important to note, when we talk about the value of this organization.
Jim Crow/Apartheid
South Africa was admitted into the UN in November of 1945, 3 years later, the system of Apartheid was instituted and brutally carried out for the next 42 years. Jim Crow existed before the UN, but with this supposed focus on humanitarianism, isn’t it a bit against the playbook to treat Blacks and Africans in the manner they did during Jim Crow and Apartheid? Black men fought in World War II only to return to a place that still hated them. European Jews were given land in Palestine…with no concern for Palestinians at all. The Israeli government then went on their Zionist push to enact many of the same horrors on the Palestinians as the Nazi’s inflicted on them. They established Israel and shortly thereafter their version of apartheid/Jim Crow came to prominence. The UN has seemingly been silent on all of this hatred and human rights abuses that our respective powers fought against.
Jim Crow wasn’t legally abolished until 1965 and we’re still waiting on that Jim Crow feel to fully be eradicated from the South and rural parts of the North and West. Apartheid was abolished in 1990, and there is still healing going on there 33 years later, although they have made significantly more progress than the United States. Meanwhile, in Israel, they are teaching their kids as early as Kindergarten that Arabs and Palestinians should be “exterminated”. They cry foul when they get punched back and use it as a rallying cry for other colonial powers to support their efforts to carry out ethnic cleansing in this land gifted to them by people lacking the right to give it in the first place. Amazing how the visitors become the originals when the guns come out.
Real power shouldn’t power trip
I’ve watched, just as you have, this double standard playing out year after year. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s well hidden. The obvious ones are the issues the United States got into with Afghanistan and Iraq. The smacks that the U.S. doled out in the name of catching Bin Laden BEFORE 9/11 are largely unknown to the masses. What is known is the Al Qaeda response to those smacks which is 9/11. That response was used to justify a 20-year war in the region creating more instability and making the world less safe in the process. Yes, our President and Vice President at the time had economic interests in this war and thousands of Americans, Afghan’s, and Iraqi’s lost their lives and/or way of life to pad their pockets in a silly revenge plot.
We have witnessed European powers steal, and destroy territories, never admit they were wrong for doing it, but then preach to and sometimes violently reprimand smaller countries seeking to do anything similar…they find the diplomacy when it’s another world power though. Much like my cousin and the killer of Lil Snupe, the world powers abuse their power and influence to protect only their selfish interests. If anyone challenges them at the game, they simply get upset, and press reset to ensure they are now starting in their favor. The world structure is suffering at this point, and the so-called world authority is allowing it to happen because their friends are doing the destroying. The mission of the UN is noble when fairly observed, but the issue is they lack the capacity to observe fairly.