Mirabile Dictu! An Actor Who Understands What He's Portraying!

[Sea Change]

In post 20673, Pip!Squeak sez:

[huge snip by Sea Change]

Whereas the Western civilisation thinks that 'a good idea is a good
idea, wherever it came from.' And it thinks that you can always
improve things. That's what its history tells it. It really doesn't
understand the mindset of 'we already have a better system, and we
don't need any ideas from any one else.'

[remainder of post snipped by Sea Change]



Sea Change replies:

Er, we really *do* understand societies that think this way. It's very
rare that western civilization is able to come up with a happy way of
co-existing with them, though.

We beat them up or pen them in, or both.  The USofA is still full of
'dependent nations' of our aboriginal peoples.  My experience building
a church on one such reservation demonstrated to me that they still
(with much reason, even today!) hate us.  China was segmented. After
centuries of humiliation from trying to overcome its oppressors with
the tools available to its own culture, it decided that Mao's
communism (a western idea) was preferable to republicanism of Sun Yat
Sen (largely also, a western idea). Japan was intimidated and then
occupied.  All of these peoples had something we wanted economically
intensely, so they got exposed to us first.

Many countries in Middle East actually have a history of secular
western governments imposed on them, especially post WWI.  The need
for oil in such quantities is modern, so this is truly our first
attempt to peacefully deal.