That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich.
While African-American GI's fought against the disfranchisement of European Jews, their own home country still had racial segregation laws in place for decades after WWII.
One could easily fathom an alternate reality where the Third Reich didn't happen/didn't turn out as extreme and as a result, racial segregation and bigotry would still be a "global standard" because humanity didn't see the worst and most extreme outcomes of it.
Who knows, a couple of decades from now the US might serve as yet another negative example for one of humanities many follies.
These "values" existed all over the world back then, driven by a scientific movement we aptly named "scientific racism" these days. You know, a whole section of science busy trying to explain why some humans are just so much "better" than other humans based on their skin color, size of the head or other arbitrary physical attributes. This followed right on the tail of an era of colonialization which was also fueled by the racial stigma of "We gotta civilize those heathen savages by enslaving them and taking their lands".
It's exactly those values being so widespread and accepted which lead to the Nazis taking the "next step", which wasn't a really big one. The difference between treating a whole group of people as "lesser humans" by law, having them act as a slave class, and "exterminating" these very same people because there are supposedly too many of them, isn't that big of a difference.
The "values" behind these two approaches are exactly the same, labeling a whole group of people as "lesser humans", the difference was only a matter of execution in how to deal with those people. The US commercialized this behavior by using the slave force, putting a price on people like they are property. Similarly, forced labor drove large parts of the Third Reich's war machine and economic progress.
This might sound cold-hearted or like I'm trying to excuse the crimes of the Third Reich, none of this is my intention, my intention merely to point out how whole nations can be hypocrites about their own moral position because they didn't kill disfranchised people on a supposedly "industrialized scale", but "only" on a commercialized one.
The idea of world peace and equality in general was laughable until nuclear proliferation made total war among the world powers suicidal somewhere around the mid 20th century.
Which was exactly my point, it was the de-facto standard for the longest time and one of the major factors for colonialization, that went on until the Third Reich and at that point, most of humanity decided: "Nope, don't want anything like that anymore".
That still didn't excuse the Third Reich or their crimes, it still serves as a "negative example" and will most likely do so for the foreseeable future. In that regard you are vastly underestimating the importance of the Nürnberg trials in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its influence on the world community.
> The idea of world peace and equality in general was laughable until nuclear proliferation made total war among the world powers suicidal somewhere around the mid 20th century.
Nuclear proliferation mostly impacts governments behavior imho you are overestimating its impact on social progress and people generally becoming more accepting.
Factors like globalization and the Internet play a way bigger role in facilitating understanding between different people, it's also helpful to have a generally accepted standard of "Universal human rights", applying to every human being regardless of ethnicity or nationality.
MAD, with it's attached red scare, only generated generations of paranoid and distrustful people whos paranoid fear rules most of their worldviews, in some cases to this day.
It's a terrible habit we have as a nation. We are happy to forgive or excuse our sins but hold others to theirs.
If people in this thread were being honest they'd be well aware that this particularly American flaw isn't so specific to the US.
Sure. It's probably a human trait. But I'm not japanese or belgian or german so I wouldn't know.
But I'm responding to a comment which "excused" our sins and I'm an american so that's why I made the comment.
If it is a human trait, so be it. But the fact that you are pointing to the sins of others kinda proves my point doesn't it?
Okay. I can see you are passionate about this but you need to calm down. The guy offered his opinion. It wasn't a tirade.
> Who established the Atlantic slave trade if not Europeans?
Sure. And britain was the largest slave trading nation and they were the largest world economy, until the US took over. I don't think anyone is denying that it was the europeans who created the atlantic slave trade.
> Only pointing out the sins of others because some dick decided to turn a fun historical thread into smug hate the US thread.
There is really no need for this. You are better than this.
I can see this is getting a bit too heated so I'll just end it here. You are entitled to your opinion and the op is entitled to his. No need to attack people or use vulgur ad hominems.
Just because they don't use words like dick doesn't mean they aren't using vulgar ad hominems. The mistake is believing that people can distort history but as long as they're being nice about it, it's cool. The US is no more the beneficiary than any other country, so acting like the US is what it is only because of 400 years of loot and plunder (OP's phrasing) is ignoring that the Germans, French, and Russians would have looted and plundered each other and others (and did) for centuries. Therefore, the loot and plunder can't be the sole or even main reason behind American success, which is what the article was talking about.
If an African-American was to wander into a thread with similar sentiments about African-Americans, it'd be recognized for the prejudice it is, and ironically most of the posters here would recognize it there, too.
annual average temperature about 23 °F vs Average temperature: 55.7°F
Also, completely different time frame and technology standard.
Sibera might have given russia some value, but not remotely on the same scale as north america gave to the USA.
Could there be other things at play, like absolute autocracy dominating the Russian state even today? The Germans had plenty of space and resources had they not lost it trying to dominate their neighbors.
You are kind of proving his point.
He made a valid criticism of the US and its people's tendency to excuse their own bad behaviour, while noting that it is likely a common thing across most nations, and you get really defensive and angry because he had the audacity to do so.
That's the American exceptionalism thing we all know and love. You interpret criticism as a smug US hate thread which is fucking ridiculous and only serves to kill any debate.
stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe
Exaggerated bullshit.
Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder
Where's the jingoism in that article? The thread was a good excuse to get the hate on. If the OP would like to make accurate and measured claims, then we could have a discussion.
Ain't that a tad bit thin-skinned? If you consider this "hate" then boy ain't you lucky that you are no German. As a German, the only thing most people know about the country or culture pretty much boils down to "Oh Hitler and you killed millions of Jews!" maybe throw in some "beer/sausage/sauerkraut" for good measure.
No nation is perfect, pretty much every nation has some "ugly spots" in their past, the difference being in how nations treat these ugly spots. Imho that is where the US, as a nation, has been failing and keeps on failing because it considers itself so "exceptional" that even morals don't apply and as such it supposedly did never do anything wrong at all. A very one-sided narrative, a view of human history like it's all just a comic book story about the "good guys fighting the bad guys" where the good guys could never do wrong because for them the ends of "beating evil" always justify the means, it's like a "Hollywood reality".
This isn't meant as an attack on the country or the people, but merely as an outside observation: The US pretending to be "the good guys", regardless of what kind of methods they use or motivations they have, is one of the reasons why so many people around the world consider the US a nation of hypocrites and the biggest and most dangerous "rogue nation" on this planet.
Yes, this also exists in other countries, but no other country has such a global cultural/military reach and influence as the US does, so it sticks out the most and ends up influencing world affairs the most.
Again: This is not "hate", it's an observation from an outside-the-US PoV that's merely meant to inform.
If the US was really such an intolerant and unrepentant place, you wouldn't even have a debate about race. By and large we are a society that acknowledges wrongs and tries to fix them, even if it take decades to do so. I believe that's because the US is really not a singular culture but a mix of many, which ends up being a great advantage.
If it appears from the outside that the US sees itself in Hollywood good vs evil terms, everyone does. I guarantee you Merkel believes she is on the right side of history and a lot of Germans that they are culturally superior to others (you can observe it in this thread; maybe they have good reason). Yeah, US media promulgates a biased message, but that's Hollywood, US media at the same time is very ready to criticize such absurdities (see World Police, or modern political humor which is huge worldwide - Stewart, Colbert, Oliver).
It's just annoying to hear people from outside cultures try and shrink down a nation of 50 mini-nations and 300 million people into some kind of comprehensive worldview. It's not reality.
I assume other countries aren't perfect places, but I'm not on French and German message boards telling Germans how they're just thieves and murderers and that's why they have been successful. If you'll reread some of the comments in this thread, that sentiment is barely hidden.
That's because it's about more than merely "being aware", it's also about taking responsibility and learning a lesson and sadly it looks like that hasn't really happened in the US yet, exemplified by statements like this one:
> If the US was really such an intolerant and unrepentant place, you wouldn't even have a debate about race.
It's funny how you think that's something positive when it's anything but. It's the year 2017, that's probably a couple of decades too late for a "race debate" which isn't even a debate at all.
What happened in Charlottesville wasn't a "debate", it was a show of force by the US American far-right, which only acts so emboldened because the US never really dealt with its race issues besides "being aware" of them and acting decades too late, Charlottesville was the result of this half-arsed behavior and I fear it won't be the only nor the last one.
> If it appears from the outside that the US sees itself in Hollywood good vs evil terms, everyone does.
The difference being that the US has such a massive and far-reaching cultural influence that the "good guy" tale ain't only influencing US Americans in their patriotism, it basically ends up brainwashing large parts of foreign populations.
Of course, Merkel believes she is on the right side, so did Hitler, so did Raegan, so did Stalin. The difference being: Merkel is at least aware that this ain't always true, due to cultural history, the same doesn't apply to the US to the same degree if at all.
The US, as a country, never has acknowledged or atoned for any "national shame", that's why "US patriots" feel so comfortable bathing in their ultra-nationalism while being hilariously unaware of how fanatic it makes them.
Yes, there are Germans who consider their own culture superior to others, the difference being: It's not socially accepted in Germany at all, people like that are usually considered bigots. This is because we Germans are not only aware of our past mistakes, we take responsibility by trying not to repeat them.
And one of the mistakes Germans made was following unfettered fanatism in the form of patriotism. Patriotism and national pride had both been major driving elements for the Nazis taking over power and being able to commit their crimes.
In that regard, the US shares many similarities with the Third Reich, more than most people would like to admit. Way too many US Americans are complicit in their countries crimes as they rather indulge in their patriotism about being "Number One" in "everything".
> US media at the same time is very ready to criticize such absurdities (see World Police, or modern political humor which is huge worldwide - Stewart, Colbert, Oliver).
I'm sure Colbert and Oliver have just as much international reach and influence as Hollywood blockbuster movies like Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, Top Gun or even Casablanca, which have been shaping world opinions about the US for decades.
> It's just annoying to hear people from outside cultures try and shrink down a nation of 50 mini-nations and 300 million people into some kind of comprehensive worldview. It's not reality.
The US ain't "50 mini-nations", the cultural, linguistical and geographical differences just don't support a statement like that. There's also a reason these states are United because they share "some kind of comprehensive worldview", which at its most basic level starts with the "American Dream" and at the extreme ends results with "America Number 1, America First" fanatics.
> I assume other countries aren't perfect places, but I'm not on French and German message boards telling Germans how they're just thieves and murderers and that's why they have been successful.
Excuse my naivety, but to me, this ain't a "US American message board", I rarely think in such terms when I'm surfing online, to me, it's foremost an English language message board devoid of any national connection. There are lots of international topics and people around here, just because somebody speaks English, or a board uses it as its language, does not make them US American.
I'm not happy with everything my country does, I'm not happy with everything they've done. There's a lot of progress that needs to be made but at the same time progress is being made and has been made. There are horrific as well as laudable things my native culture/country has done. We have a lot to teach others as well as learn from others, and we as a culture would do well to find respectful ways to interact with other cultures in the world, because ultimately we're human and we have shared interests.
That's what I believe generally, and I believe that above statement is true or should be true of every culture. You're free to disagree.
Sadly that might be true to a certain extent, but that shouldn't stop us from still trying to understand each other. Imho we've managed, at least, a little bit of that, have a good one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
It took a long time, and a lot of treaties and individual countries to act to abolish slavery.
(Referring to parent of this comment chain.) Something Zizek himself says is evil is not what makes bad people do bad things, but instead what makes good people do bad things. People doing something 'evil' will typically be distressed about it personally. But they would always see it like "I must be fully willing to destroy my own humanity so that I can protect the humanity of my people". They preserve their efficiency and ruthlessness in spite of the further fragmentation of their psyche and conscience.
Brutality relies upon limiting the aesthetic dissonance between the aesthetics of the greater good and the ugliness of violence.
> "In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared [Beethoven's Ode To Joy] to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.
> In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood." [0]
But what is there even to conclude from this?
Suppose we are 100% aware that we actively cause harm to people but our moral calculus says we must do it because it is for "the greater good". The more we are uncertain about the uncertainty of net social gain, the more we have reason to avoid doing it.
But this is the opposite of the commonly held belief. People say "we can't judge the people in the past, it's too easy to be certain an idea that was defeated was evil when looking from the future. Before it was defeated they could not have known that the pain they (knew they) were causing for the sake of helping out their own people, wouldn't have triumphed and raised real total benefit instead -- so that it hypothetically was moral".
Here I disagree vehemently. We must, in the strongest terms, condemn any rationalization of the actions of a gambler who bets he'll reach the greater good if he puts his children up for collateral.
edit: forgot link
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?mcubz...
It's what you do with the stuff that matters.
If what was done in the U.S. is plunder, then what is it that you say is happening in "the Middle East, Latin America and Africa"? Be consistent.
Ideas matter.
It's a remarkable achievement to maintain a united, democratic, mostly peaceful nation for 70 years straight (and counting). Most former colonies collapsed into destructive civil war, then military rule, within decades of independence. India has so far avoided that fate. Heck, most developed European countries have barely managed to avoid it in the past century.
India has as much (probably more than) linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious variety as the European continent, far lower levels of education, absurd amounts of competition for resources, education, and jobs due to population pressure. All of those things are potential triggers for conflict and civil war.
I can't comment about other countries that may or may not have lived up to their economic potential (Brazil, Argentina, Russia etc) because I know next to nothing about them. But India is doing terrifically well, considering the hand we were dealt.
The Dominions were built for settlement, so they were sustainable states. India and other Asian colonies already had their own very established cultures and civilizations, and hence fared much better.
Pretty remarkable India hasn't exploded into separatism due to resource pressure, but I don't know how sustainable that is given that the population is still increasing
And it's growing quite fast nowadays.
But in the time since independence it's hardly done very well at all -- certainly not in relation to its full potential!
Japan post-war still had the relative advantages of having been an advanced industrial nation pre-war, with all that that entails: educated population, knowledge of how to run industry and finance, culture of industrial entrepreneurship etc. Plus it got tons of help from the US getting back to its feet. Ditto for South Korea; US help to keep them from falling over to the Communists. Both nations are also relatively homogenous ethnically, religiously, and culturally.
Singapore is tiny: a city-state. It's half the population of metropolitan Mumbai and has 1/3rd higher GDP. If Mumbai was an independent city-state with immigration controls, we'd likely be talking about it as an up-and-coming Asian tiger.
I'm not downplaying any of these countries' achievements. They are tremendous and they've done very well for themselves. I'm just pointing out the context of their achievements and how that doesn't apply to India.
I think it's impossible to say India hasn't lived up to its full potential because we can't run history backward and forward like a simulation, change a thing here (eg. make India a liberal free-market economy in the 60s instead of a closed, socialist one) and see the difference. China is doing great now but they had to go through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on the way there. India is doing not-as-well but at least millions didn't die.
China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.
Stop making excuses.
Incidentally, Argentina is a hugely important case-study. It was never really plundered. Its history has tremendous parallels to the United States', oddly enough. It had a tremendous growth between the 1880s and the Great Depression, and grew to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world at the time of WWII. Yet somehow it has missed out on decades of growth potential, and is now full of shanty towns, with a huge proportion of the population in true poverty (not what we call poverty in the U.S.). HOW IN THE WORLD DID THAT HAPPEN?! There were no significant wars in Argentina since its peak. There has been no foreign power plunder in Argentina in that time. The make-up of the population didn't change much. So what happened?? Well, it's easy to see what happened there: bad ideas.
"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.
It's really isn't. "Colonial plunder" isn't a horde of soldiers rampaging through your country taking your gold and women. Colonial plunder is generations upon generations of domestic industry killed by high taxes to favor imports from the ruling country, turning peasants into serfs bonded to the land to pay taxes, exploiting and inflaming pre-existing class, caste, and religious differences time and time again to keep the people from uniting against the rulers. People (at large; there are outliers) stop getting an education or starting any business larger than a shop because what's the point? The financial system doesn't grow beyond small moneylenders. People become bitter and try to keep the little they have from their grasping neighbors, everyone fighting over the few crumbs the ruling country throws you. For hundreds of years.
> A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.
As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?
> China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.
Incontestably true; India hasn't done as well as China. China still isn't quite a developed country yet and India is maybe 20 years behind China. I don't think it's a great shame to come second to China. Their political system has always optimized for getting things done no matter the cost. India went a different, maybe softer, way. Probably not even deliberately, I'll admit.
To this day it saddens me when middle-class, educated, relatively well-off Indians say things like "I wish we had a government like China's so our roads won't have potholes anymore".
You're not entirely wrong about the impact of plunder being many generations-long, because, for example, Paraguay's bad performance almost certainly goes back (at least in part) to the ruinous Triple Alliance War, way, way back in the 1870s (in that war Paraguay lost almost all its males aged 12-60). But it doesn't have to be like that, and it isn't always. If it had to be like that then Europe might never have risen again after WWI or WWII, yet there it is. South Korea wouldn't have risen after Japan's occupation of it. China wouldn't either after the Japanese war, or the Opium wars.
> > A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.
> As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?
Sure. I mentioned Argentina in another post, which grew fabulously fast between the 1880s and the Great Depression. China, of course, I mentioned above. Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Japan, Japan and Germany again, South Korea, China. I'm probably missing a few. Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).
As for China, it's certainly on the cusp of first-world status. They have... a lot of bad ideas weighing them down though. The SOEs, for example, and the state-owned banks and their terrible lending practices, financial repression, unbelievable malinvestment following the 2008 crisis, unresponsive government, corruption, pollution, and so on. These bad ideas could easily sink China just as a very different set of bad ideas sank Argentina.
My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit. Peronism (Argentina) falls into the 'bad' category, while Maoism (China) falls into the 'terrible' category. Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either (please don't blame Belgium's genocides in Congo on capitalism; that's a very lame and boring argument).
To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed. The difference between Mao's and Xiaoping's China is so stark that it is impossible not to see it as the difference between awful ideas on one hand and at-least-OKish ideas on the other.
The Argentina/China examples cannot be explained otherwise than above, or at least I've not seen alternative explanations -- none! not even unbelievable ones, or at least I don't recall any. China is certainly a counter-example to the plunder-explains-it-all theory. Though I expect that you'll tell me that the plunder of China was minimal in proportion to its population (but recall that the famines of the Great Leap Forward were not minimal that way!). At the end of the day, good ideas can lift a nation from a poor history, or they can sink it from a great history -- this much should be clear, and if that's true, then plunder is no excuse, or not enough of an excuse anyways.
This debate about the impact of plunder reminds me too of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Prussia won that, and imposed what it thought would be crushing reparations on France, which it intended to use to improve the wealth of the German people. But it didn't work. France managed to borrow what it needed to pay those reparations, underwent very fast growth, and paid off its debt in just a few years, all the while Germany under-performed. One might call what Prussia did "plunder" (is it not?), yet it failed, just as the Versailles reparations in the other direction after WWI had the same exact effect, but reversed because the reparations direction reversed too. Plunder is not the explanation that you think it is -- it can be in specific cases, but may not even be a good rule of thumb.
Well they're not exactly poor either. They're still considered first-world, advanced nations. And they've had some "bad ideas" like, military rule, since the end of colonialism. Seems like their past plunder has insulated them somewhat from these missteps.
> Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina...Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).
Right but the thing all these countries have in common: they weren't under the colonial yoke during the Industrial Revolution like India was (Argentina attained independence in 1816, for example). India wasn't allowed to have an Industrial Revolution; it was suppressed by British tax and trade policies. Don't you think that's at least a partial explanation for why India's behind today?
Post WW2 Japan, Germany don't count: they still had most of their pre-war population and memory of being a prosperous society. South Korea benefited from generous US aid (and still does, in terms of military aid). The US was highly incentivized to help SK as much as possible because they feared it turning communist. India, at the time of Independence, hadn't been a prosperous nation for at least 200 years; the educated, skilled class was tiny.
> Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either
I'm with you all the way there. I never contested the benefits of capitalism for a country; it has a much better track record than Peronism or Maoism. The evidence shows it's been great for poverty reduction. But, and I keep coming back to this, India didn't have the opportunity to determine its own economic policy until only 70 years ago. And we ended up with a socialist for our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Arguably he earned the right to be the Prime Minister by being the most prominent freedom struggle leader after Mahatma Gandhi and he was accordingly popular, no matter his economic policies. You can't legislate for randomness like that.
> My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit.
To me it seems like there's two ways for good ideas to take hold: the people have the freedom to choose their leaders, can recognize good ideas and choose accordingly, or the government isn't democratic but the leadership is "enlightened" and focused on national development over personal enrichment (or at least makes development a priority).
In India's case it had a government focused on enriching Britain till 1947. Afterwards voters simply voted for the most popular guy (sort of like George Washington) who happened to be a socialist who espoused five-year plans and centrally-planned growth. Remember, at the time, those ideas hadn't been completely discredited. And this may be slightly controversial but, lacking any sort of democratic or political culture, and having a low level of education on average, voters may simply not have known "good" ideas from "bad". As a counterpoint, he US didn't initially have universal suffrage: only white property-owning males could vote. This, while unfair, ensured that voters were educated, somewhat prosperous, and invested in growth rather than populist handouts. Whereas by the time India attained independence, universal suffrage was expected of any democracy.
Also an important factor: the nation isn't acted upon by negative external forces. Chile, Argentina, Guatemala (to name just 3 South American underachievers) have suffered from foreign countries (I won't name which ones but it's easy to find on Wikipedia) financing military coups and assassinations against socialist leaders and socialist governments. You can argue all you want that a socialist government isn't good for growth but any democratically-elected government has more legitimacy than a military junta.
There's so many factors that can blunt the impact of good ideas or ensure they never take root.
> To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed.
And what I'm saying is history is far more random than that. What if Mao had been replaced by someone with even worse ideas? What if they'd gone to a liberal democracy immediately rather than a government laser-focused on development at the cost of everything else?
Not exactly great examples. All three contain excellent natural resources, ports on major trading routes, that drive or drove their economy.
Lots of other countries have strategic trading locations: Malaysia, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Argentina (well, not since the Panama canal, I guess), Egypt, Saudi, Iran, and so on.
Maybe, just maybe, ideas matter?
"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.
Not really, being the easternmost port on the Mediterranean and southernmost point of Asia are fairly special things. Add in the almost city-state nature of those examples, and they do noting to prove your point.
Just because world history is symbolic, does not mean millions of people's duties do not depend upon which symbols are present.
It is fine to condemn it if you want, we definitely don't want to repeat it, but if you think any culture really has the moral high ground on this, you should look deeper.
The two perspectives aren't even very different.
The "world history is just how the circle of life turns round" stance is to the moral high ground stance what a sitcom with canned laughter is to a comedy without a laugh track: with the canned laugh track, you aren't even expected to bring the laughter. To forget your dilemmas, all that is expected of you is just to stare at the screen.
I get that Nazism is a topic people tend to be skeptical of the possibility of using examples in discussions both honestly and seriously. Not only does it flare emotions, it also makes it more likely that discussion will just split around calling the opponent a Hitler-sympathizer/trying to distance oneself from the cultural taboo "evil is a subset of 'the set of Hitlers'" (which is not the same as "Hitler is a singleton subset of the set of evils".
The evergreen task is finding the deficiencies of historical signifiers we used to use, both the ones that brought the most prosperity, and the ones that brought the most ruin.
There was no comparison to Hitler
god forbid people bring up hitler in a thread about history/world politics
In fact, let's just scrub history of any references to Germany so we can make internet threads marginally less annoying
From Wikipedia;
Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. Similar criticisms of the "law" (or "at least the distorted version which purports to prohibit all comparisons to German crimes") have been made by the American lawyer, journalist, and author Glenn Greenwald.
In December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made by several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying: "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician."
On August 13, 2017, Godwin made similar remarks on social networking websites Facebook and Twitter with respect to the two previous days' Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, endorsing and encouraging efforts to compare its alt-right organizers to Nazis.
There is a difference when drawing a comparison about something entirely unrelated, but when you're talking about topics involving wiping out a people, claiming Godwin's law is silly.
I always oppose their situation to Europe where many similarly large countries were shoulder to shoulder.
Uh they did.
"The Mughal Empire began a period of proto-industrialization, and Mughal India became the world's largest economic power, with 24.4% of world GDP, and the world leader in manufacturing, producing 25% of global industrial output up until the 18th century. The Mughal Empire is considered "India's last golden age" and one of the three Islamic Gunpowder Empires (along with the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia)." [1]
Can't find a similar citation for China but before colonialism, India and China were the world's two largest economies. It's telling that European explorers were searching for a sea route to India and not the other way around. Europeans wanted silk and spices from India and China. But Europe had nothing India or China wanted. Or at least, knew they wanted. Arguably they could've used the superior maritime knowledge[2] and gun manufacturing techniques Europeans possessed.
I guess if there's anything that history teaches us, it's that attaining a lead is no guarantee of maintaining it.
There's a whole Wikipedia article exploring why these two nations fell behind the Western World in the 18th and 19th centuries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#Possible_fact...) I'd argue that colonialism was certainly a major factor for India. Being treated for 150+ years as a source of cheap raw materials and captive market for exports will do terrible things to a country's industry and economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington#White_Ho...
A storm intervened on behalf of USA.
Sure, they burned the White House [battle won], but lost the war.
By the time the US became a country, the indigenous peoples had access to firearms, certainly every one the US Army would have been fighting. It's also worth pointing out that the US bordered an English colony to the north and a mestizo former Spanish colony to the south.
I don't know for certain, but I assume that the land was harder to make arable, the weather was less forgiving, the rainforests brought additional problems (like persistence of mosquitos and ticks). Plus South America didn't unify like the USA did, which might have presented an obstacle.
I think I once heard a statistic like at the height of slavery 50% of the USA's exports were cotton. The industrial revolution was a great driver of the demand for America's cotton.
"The American South is known for its long, hot summers, and rich soils in river valleys making it an ideal location for growing cotton. By 1860, Southern plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton, with shipments from Houston, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, and a few other ports.
The insatiable European demand for cotton was a result of the Industrial Revolution which created the machinery and factories to process raw cotton into clothing that was better and cheaper than hand-made product." [0]
It might be the case that this prosperity didn't happen in South America because they were not strategically fulfilling cotton demand of the industrial revolution. The reason that the conquistadors had started slaving was to fulfill a "gold revolution"; and they did at least gain prosperity in doing so. But the demand of the "gold revolution" for their monarchies was much smaller than the demand of the industrial revolution.
However, Egypt and India also had significant exports of cotton. The effect that did happen is that the Civil War led to great increases of prosperity due to cotton exports for those countries [0][1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton
[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-war...
Brazil had a higher slave-to-free ratio than the US, and imported more slaves than any other colony/country in the Americas (it was also the last country to ban slavery). Actually, the US was never a major slave importer--the US and Canada combined imported only about 4-5% of the total Atlantic slave trade, and the highest slave ratio in the US was only 57% (South Carolina), both of which are outdone by individual Caribbean islands. It's also worth pointing out that the truly productive gold and silver minds were in South America--Cerro Rico may have produced 60% of the world's silver at its height.
Put another way, South America was where it was, in fact, possible to have slaves dig free money out of the ground for you and do all of your hard labor, whereas this wasn't really possible in North America (at least not until after the invention of the cotton gin around 1800 and the discovery of highly productive mines in the late 1800s).
rich soils in river valleys
Argentina had a good run, but internal politics have shit the bed in that country for a good century
I don't think we'd likely have a single continent spanning country ran by the many different nations that were there before. It'd be much more likely that colonialism that divided Africa and South America would be passed around North America, and there wouldn't have been any country to balance the European powers that continually fought each other in the 20th century or for Russia, Japan and China in the second half of that century.
You can acknowledge the wrongs that America took, but you also have to accept that it's mostly been a force for good, even today.
Slavery and a stolen continent are horrible, but they don't explain what happened economically.
The slaveowners made profits for nearly no work, and the banks made plenty of profit by giving out loans to the slaveowners to buy more slaves, too. It's hard to look for causality, but this seems like an obvious source of far-removed consolidation of capital that would last over time.
How on earth can you describe a landmass as stolen or a continent as usurped?
Pretty straight forward.
You can do what you like but the continental plate it was performed on wont give a fuck. You could even destroy that continental plate or even the whole shebang but it will still not give a fuck.
Landmasses and continents don't give a fuck - they really don't.
Do you stop at "first to call the area by its modern name" or do you go back through say first hominids?
Perhaps we should go back further, say "recognisable single cell organism"
There's some speculation of earlier migrations:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-evidence-hu...
In any case, humans had been living here for several thousand years before Columbus arrived 500 years ago. Is it so difficult to see a distinction between millions of people with hundreds of years of history and thousands of people arriving on ships?
(Estimates of the total population vary quite a lot; millions is quite a safe claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno... )
They didn't kill first
As for a “usurped continent”, the land was very sparsely populated by the natives compared to the people who came in, and disease cleared out more of them making a vast underpopulation. It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first. Also I would guess you are a liberal from your comments, and therefore likely support legalizing undocumented immigrants. According to your logic, undocumented immigrants are “usurping” America, which is quite unpopular among liberals today.
America committed plenty of evils, but that’s not what made America great. In addition to many bad things, the USA did a lot of things right. I believe the USA had a lot of benefits from geography, but the real thing that made the country great was recognizing the rights of the individual. It has been demonstrated over and over again that egalitarianism yields big dividends in groups. Because the USA had such an emphasis on equality (declaration of independence), innovation occurred on an incredible level. It took a long time for that equality to spread to blacks, but the very idea of even equality of whites was unheard of at the time of the USA founding.
Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.
- "collective pre-existing rights became held in abeyance because so many rightsholders died" -- This assumes the living natives were not the owners of what was still there, either because they were propertyless, or the dead rightsholders didn't have a way to transfer property rights - which they would necessarily, historically have had for rights to have been a pre-existing Native American cultural notion - at the very instant they met the explorers.
- "the natives didn't have a notion of property rights, but the explorers did. the explorers were able to respect property rights, so it was best and fair that they acquired as much as they could" -- If anything this suggests that the explorers had great disrespect or didn't even understand property themselves. It was peak hypocrisy to violate the Native American population's property rights -- that were still their rights even if they were unaware of them. You cannot steal something from someone else if you think they don't know it is theirs. I have a suspicion that this idea I keep hearing "natives didn't have the concept of property" is really just false and veiled racism.
- "even if natives did have property rights nevertheless the invading explorers had a different concept of property rights" -- yes, the explorers had the same idea of fair property rights as someone going into a convenience store and shouting "nobody move, this is a stickup!"
Property rights don't actually exist. The idea of property rights is a way nations like to explain the division of property they allocate to their citizens. In reality, there is very little earth that needs to be divided among all. A small group cannot claim an unfairly large portion, no matter how long they've lived there, nor what means they used to claim it.
By that argument, it's just not right to say that multi-millionaires should control so much wealth just because they were born into privileged conditions. Wouldn't fairness require a forced redistribution of those resources?
There is a limit in either case. Nobody would say one person should be allowed to control all global wealth, or that one person should be assigned all of North America. It's just a matter how where you draw your line.
I feel for you. Those evil slaves didn't work hard enough till their deaths to make their rightful masters win.
>>It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.
This is so Winston Churchill'esque, dog in the manger analogy where there are some superior people who have rights to exterminate existing people, and those existing people are evil for even resisting.
>>Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.
The USA is the most successful imperialistic project executed by the western civilization ever. To separate the US from Europe is simply splitting hairs.
The same could have happened to the Indian subcontinent. But there were too many people to kill and the British got caught up in a few wars. Else Mr Churchill had pretty great genocidal plans. He even got along and executed a small project where he killed a few million people(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943).
He did no such thing. He was simply protecting the United Kingdom from getting invaded by Germany. As far as political ideologies are concerned, Britain was no saint. They had their own 'We are superior to other races' projects going on in other parts of the globe.
>>you're going to blame him for a famine halfway around the globe?
Yes, because he was responsible for it.
When Churchill actively refused to allow food aid to come from external sources during the war, yes, he and his government bear an even greater portion of responsibility than the colonization of India, in the "you break it, you bought it" sense of responsibility, already merited. Similarly, Churchill's galloping racism and his government's nastiness spread similar misery elsewhere: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest...
And this is not a new happening for Britain, either; they did the same thing to the Irish during the famines. The Sultan of Turkey wanted to send ten times the money more money than the Queen of Great Britain and two ships of food; the British consul in Istanbul said that to send more aid than the Queen had herself allotted would be seen as diplomatically insulting. All the while, Irish shipments of food to England continued unabated.
I have had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat to India from Australia….We have the wheat (in Australia) but we lack the ships. I have resisted for some time the Viceroy’s request that I should ask you for your help, but… I am no longer justified in not asking for your help." -Churchill to FDR
War is hell. Thank goodness we had leaders like Churchill. And thank goodness the Allied forces won.
Source: https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/did-churchill-cause-t...
>>Thank goodness we had leaders like Churchill
Thank him for him for considering the entire Indian subcontinent as some kind of lesser people and race compared to whites? What exactly is the difference between this and the race superiority theories of Adolf Hitler?
>>And thank goodness the Allied forces won.
Oh please. Europe created an untenable political situation in Germany by imposing upon them harsh punishment in forms of war reparations of WW1. Then you create a vacuum for a dangerous political ideology to rise, and then try to stop their imperialistic ambitions.
Beyond all this, why does Churchill expect Indian people pay the price for whatever political blunders any party in Europe had committed.
The difference between Churchill and Hitler is that Churchill didn't slaughter millions of people and subvert half the globe to totalitarian dictatorship. That supplies and shipments are limited under dire circumstances should come as no surprise to any student of historical warfare.
He did precisely that. Britain has inflicted more damage to humanity, with its imperialistic policies than even a fraction of Nazism did. Britain was for all practical purposes was a far more evil force than Nazism would have ever been.
>>That supplies and shipments are limited under dire circumstances should come as no surprise to any student of historical warfare.
It comes as a surprise to us because Britain invaded India, stole and plundered the country.
If you don't want people to call you bad names, stop doing bad things.
I would chose neither. Why are you assuming the Indian people chose a european power over them?
That logic could still be applied today. Asia and Arica combined are over 5.5 billion people. I bet a lot of those people would be more than happy to emigrate to the US. Why should so few (merely 300-400 million Americans and Canadians) control entire continent just because they got there earlier?
The Civil War economically devastated and flattened the southern states. It's hard to see how the later wealth of the US economy was based on that.
According to your logic integrating successfully into a different society and culture, is the same as arriving with superior weaponry and slaughtering the natives over 149 years. (1775-1924)
Your attempt at comparison and equivalence is pitiful and cruel.
So, it's hard to really feel sorry for them, especially because Europeans put the land to much more productive use per acre than Native Americans did.
You sound defensive. Why should there need to be a sinless society before you'll entertain someone's thoughts on the relationship between your sins and your success.
What I object to is someone who's bitter because he's not American launching into an irrelevant tirade and acting like they are somehow better when 60 years ago Europeans were exterminating each other. It's pretty dishonest and it shows some hate and/or immaturity when a bunch of people have upvoted said tirade because of their own biases.
75 years ago Europeans were exterminating each other. Today, they are united and peaceful for the most part, and their union is one of the largest and most successful economies in the world.
75 years ago America entered World War 2 and helped defeat the Nazis. Today Nazis are openly marching in the streets and running over counterprotesters with cars, and the President suggests that "both sides" have "very fine people".
Perspective is a hell of a thing, isn't it?
I think it's delusional to believe that the prejudices that led to literal genocide in Europe within living memory (more recent than that even, see the Balkans) have faded more than the prejudices of slavery in the US which show up at events like Charlottesville. The hatred is alive and well in European societies like it is anywhere else. You're citing a single counterprotester getting run over (horrible, yes) when in the Ukraine there is an ongoing invasion and throughout Europe, Islamic terrorism (due to divided societies) will last for a generation.
Your perspective (which sees as a vice the suggestion that both sides of any conflict might have some realistic grievances) is a myopic, tribal one which too often parades around in places like HN and sees itself as diverse and open minded when it is anything but. You don't realize how: "Today, they are united and peaceful for the most part, and their union is one of the largest and most successful economies in the world." is just as applicable to the US and such an optimistic view of Europe is an incomplete portrayal. If that's not how you intend for it to come off, I apologize, but it has a very strong undercurrent of bias.
All I'm saying is Americans are humans, descendants of the same Europeans, Africans, Asians, and native Americans that came before them, so it's not shocking that we'd have the same flaws as every other society, and in fact, historically, the actions of the US have at times been no more or less deplorable or laudable than any other people.
Ta for the heads up 8)
The Minoans
The minotaur was invented by the Greeks that were jealous of Minosse's SWAG :)
Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.