> The vast landscape in between Berlin and Moscow would become Germany’s equivalent of the American west, filled with German homesteaders living comfortably on land and labor appropriated from conquered peoples—a nightmare parody of the American experience with which to challenge American power.
Er, the American push westwards was quite nightmarish and genocidal, and US homesteaders appropriated land much like Hitler planned to do.
Supposedly, 95% of Americans were killed by diseases, so it didn't feel as bad. Especially if your perspective on the matter was (and it really was) that "God has given America to us and the proof is that he is is killing the Indians to make room for us"
Say, why is the population of Andean countries (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolovia) so high in natives and 'mestizos' compared with North American countries?
The disease hypothesis puzzles me because it cannot explain the reality of such countries, where I come from.
Moreover, I'd argue that a factor was the idea that English settlers came as families instead of as unmarried men, like the Spaniards.
At any rate, I am not saying you are wrong. The evidence seems to point towards a different idea, but it is possible that I am wrong or stuff.
Not only that, 60 percent of Mexicans are mestizos and millions more are pure blooded indegenous people. Truth is that American's ancestors where quite genocidal among other things. To the point of almost exterminating most of North America's population. Just like the Buffalo. It really is quite a sad tale. That in itself tells you that there is no God. And if there is then he might as well not exist.
About the buffalo. First nations really think it's funny (patronizing) when some whites think FNs were all about peace and understanding. It makes them out to be emasculated. No, they say, we killed way more buffalo than whites ever did. Colonialists killed buffalo as a proxy siege warfare b/c buffalo were a vital natural resource for many FNs.
I think the Spaniards (or Iberians), given their religion, were way more accepting of other peoples and readily mixed --which is why you end up with so many meztizos in LAm --whereas initial NA settlers were less likely to reproduce with FN peoples.
> No, they say, we killed way more buffalo than whites ever did.
Ah, but the official mythology is that they used every part.
Sure. They herded massive groups of buffalo off buffalo jumps, which are essentially small cliffs, so that they'd fall and crush each other when they went off the edge, and they'd use every part of all of the hundreds of full-grown buffalo they killed.
But everyone knows the White Man invented waste. Thus it was, thus it must ever be.
The greatest respect one can offer another society is to treat them as being the same kind of humans as ourselves -raw, opportunistic, realists who would go to similar lengths as ourselves to achieve goals, not the fake respectful nonsense people project onto them to subvert them.
Isn't it a little disingenious to only present these two things, and not the larger issue that matters more?
I, for one, disagree with the idea that the "buffalo jump" was all that prevalent and had a measurable impact, compared to the whites driving the buffalos to what they are now....
You are claiming that indigenous peoples killed more buffalo than "the whites." If this is true, then you are claiming that the indigenous peoples are the ones that drove the buffalo to near-extinction. I disagree with this assertion.
To my understanding the main economic motivator for hunting the buffalo in massive scale was the fact that their leather was fantastic for various belts and straps used for power transport in industrial engines.
That may or may not be true, but it's not the substance. The point was that FNs resent being caricatured into something they aren't. They are normal human beings capable of the same things (good and horrible) as any other human being, as an individual and society.
Fair point, I was being pernickety. I was not meaning it in terms of the Europeans being less moral, just that the Europeans had more effective tools for bison slaughter and when it got competitive, well, the results speak for themselves. - http://webs.anokaramsey.edu/waite/environmental/untitled.jpg
>Truth is that American's ancestors where quite genocidal among other things. To the point of almost exterminating most of North America's population. Just like the Buffalo.
If the point about the buffalo is correct, then how does this post otherwise misrepresent Native Americans? It seems like you latched onto this mention of buffalo to make a completely unrelated point about Native Americans.
Latin and South America were far more developed than North America when the Westerners arrived. There were a lot more natives in those areas; nothing near the size and population of something like Tenochtitlan existed in NA. We're talking estimates of ~37 million in Latin America versus ~7 million in North America.
Civilizations south of the modern day U.S. were far larger. That means more people to begin with, but also there is a theory that their immune systems were better prepared to deal with European diseases because they lived in large cities like Europeans.
The US WAS ABOUT segregation seperation of race, no race mixing. These adean countries were about integration, intermarriage , in effect classism. Intergration in South America was about bettering your family and childrens future by lightening your race. In other words race mixing was allowed. Not like the Jim Crow laws in the US.
But 95% of natives didn't die of disease. Unless you are saying white men are a disease. We had to cull the indians like we culled the bison, deer, wolves, bears, etc. It was the most successful genocidal campaign in human history. It was also one of the most successful clearing the land of all life period.
Settlers were paid for each indian scalp they got. Indian men, women and children were hunted and slaughtered wholesale.
Idiots like Jared Diamond might try to absolve our sins by lying about how the indians died. But the truth of how the west was won is no so convenient. It was brutal and rapacious.
I mean, we didn't even push the natives past the appalachian mountains until the 1760s and that idiot jared diamond wants us to believe the natives essentially died off in the 1500s.
But let's not romanticize Native American culture either. The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times. There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture. It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves. We simply don't have the context to judge them. It was what it was.
You can also look north the the Thule (Inuit) and Dorset cultures. The Thule expanded to Canada and Greenland in the middle ages, and in a very short time they completely wiped out the dominant Dorset culture that had existed for thousands of years.
The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
> The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
Highly doubtful. The Dorset culture probably died off due to change in climate and their failure to adapt rather than inuits traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to kill the dorset.
Not to mention that these dorset was a tiny population already in significant decline.
There is a world of difference between the inuits and dorsets. Hell the norse and europeans were in contact with dorset long before the inuit. Perhaps it was european "disease" or raids that wipe them out...
Nobody really knows. But what we know is that they were a dying peoples long before the inuits came around.
The Dorset culture was spread all across Northern Canada and parts of Greenland. It was found in widely divergent latitudes, with different climates.
It's simply not plausible that such a widely dispersed culture would disappear in such a short time due to climate change.
Disease transmitted from Norse settlers/traders being the cause is also not plausible, as the Dorset disappeared first in the Western stretch of Northern N. America, where the Thule were expanding from, rather than the East, where they would
have first had contact with the Norse. Competition from an invasive culture, the Thule, is the likely cause.
I think is horrible you are making excuses. I hope next time somebody does something evil to you nobody makes excuses for the doer. Just imagine how rape victims feel when people make excuses for the rapist. You are a horrible person.
> But let's not romanticize Native American culture either.
Absolutely. But lets also not pretend that the natives were racially motivated genocidal maniacs either.
> The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times.
Sure. But they need to do so in order to survive. And lets not forget that we hunted the comanche like animals and wiped them out. Settlers were encouraged to hunt indians and bring their scalps in exchange of money.
> There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture.
Even if they were the most peaceful buddhists, they would have been wiped out. We wanted their land and they simply had no choice. It's pretty idiotic to blame the comanches for fighting back.
> It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves.
It was wrong no matter what century you are in.
> We simply don't have the context to judge them.
If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
What happened to the natives was the greatest extermination campaign in history. The holocaust was a joke compared to what happened to the natives.
To emphasize this point, there are more jews in the US than there are natives...
> If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
All the rest are good points, but this is an emotional non-sequitur. The reason we don't have context to judge is because we live lives of comfort today, we have no idea what it was like to move into the Wild West and the danger and hardship that entailed.
Of course I agree genocide is bad, that doesn't make me equipped to judge people who lived 200 years ago based on hazy historical generalities.
Okay, let's just sit here and impotently judge and condemn them to satisfy our own sense of moral superiority. I'm sure there will be no shortage of moral condemnation of our current worldview in another 200 years.
Do you have any sources for that. The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
Yes, it called history and biology. Disease doesn't work that way and history proves it didn't work that way.
> The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
Sure, but jared diamond's silly book is what made it mainstream. No serious historian takes that theory serious because science and history says that didn't happen.
> It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
North American civilization didn't get completely destroyed until well after the civil war when mass european migration and the invention of machine guns, the expansion of railroads, etc gave american settlers a huge advantage.
> Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
And like I said, the border that the colonists and the indians drew in 1763 was the appalachian mountains. The colonists were confined to a tiny sliver of land on the eastern seaboard. If disease wiped out the natives, why would the colonists take so little land? Why would the border between "america" and indian lands be divided in such a manner.
So what Kept the Bolsheviks from becoming an economic empire, after all it was the same land Germany would try to use for its economic powerhouse. I mean very productive land, lots of mineral resources... obviously the Germans saw it that way. Still to this day, Russia underdelivers, given its vast resources --natural and human/intellectual.
Well, it's probable that, Hitler being Hitler, his plan wouldn't have worked in reality. So long as Britain controlled the sea, a "super-Germany" would have been at a serious disadvantage relative to the historical US, which did a lot of trade by sea.
As for why the USSR didn't turn into the US, it's probably related to poor economic organization, too much resources put into the military, too little international trade, and a dependency on primary resources like oil, with all those factors and others interacting in fun ways.
The trade is a big one - one of the reasons for the recent annexation of Crimea by Russia is to give Russia another deep-water port. They have surprisingly little viable coastline given their size.
The other thing is that the US sits on very wealthy land that's in the temperate zone. Large amounts of Russia is difficult to access and the viable parts spend more of the year affected by bad weather. You can even see it in the national stereotypes - the US citizen wears a t-shirt and jeans, the Russian citizen wears an ushanka and heavy coat.
Similarly, once the US conquered the west, it was in a situation where there was no real credible military threat bordering it - it could afford to shift more defence spending to power projection rather than home defence. It's not to say political ideologies had nothing to do with the differences in success stories, just that ideology alone is not responsible.
> I mean very productive land, lots of mineral resources...
It wasn't productive like the US territory was. It was mostly inhospitable tundra. The bolsheviks weren't an economic superpower for the same reason the canadians aren't.
> Still to this day, Russia underdelivers, given its vast resources --natural and human/intellectual.
Japan, SKorea, Taiwan and the UK have the benefit of living in pax americana and being an ally of america. It has access to all the resources they need...
Russia's problem is that their vast territory is also their achilles heel. They stole land from japan and skorea and every other nation on its border. China, germany, turkey, ukraine, iran, mongolia, etc...
Their land is a blessing AND a curse. Russia can't fully trade with china or japan because of territorial issues. So they didn't fully capitalize on japan's economic miracle. And now they aren't fully capitalizing on china's economic miracle.
Politics and power are an unforgiving discipline. If russia keeps missing out on opportunities and keeps falling behind, the russian empire is going to collapse. Doesn't matter how many nukes they have or now powerful they think they are.
What separates the US and russia is this. After ww2, russia stole a bunch of islands from japan and annexed it. That's why japan and russia still haven't signed a peace treaty. The US returned okinawa. We didn't steal it so we can have normal relations with japan.
I don't know. Some of those countries have minimal natural resources and small fractions of the pop of Russia yet, they enjoy relatively disproportionate economic success.
Maybe you have a point, but it's not the whole point. I think they wear a heavy shackle of ancient culture. One which has acclimatized them over centuries to a serf-state mindset they have not broken out of. It's very patriarchal (or statist). The state is their master in more ways than one. It'll take a cultural shift in the newer generations to shake it and allow them to achieve their potential.
> Still to this day, Russia underdelivers, given its vast resources --natural and human/intellectual.
That makes it sound as if Russia and the former USSR are one and the same. They're not.
A better way to restate that sentence is, "The USSR under delivered, in spite of its vast resources - natural and human/intellectual."
And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. In an atmosphere where fear and uncertainty rules, individual and group creativity suffers.
Russia is doing better in that area, though there's still a lot of room for improvement. But it is a young country. Some old habits from the former USSR still lingers, which is expected given that most of the current leadership grew up in the former USSR. It take at least one generation to shake bad habits.
"In an atmosphere where fear and uncertainty rules, individual and group creativity suffers."
Some would suggest it was the lack of incentives to independently pursue success. There's little point in working hard to get ahead if it is going to be taken from you.
Present day Russia is very much a laissez faire capitalist society. Money and power are pretty liquid, taxes are low, and self-interest is everybody's assumed motive. Perfect system of incentives, no?
(This is why the political scene is so hard to decipher, nobody in russia pays any attention to the stated aims or motives and conspiracy theories are the default mindset)
No independent court system, no independent media, no freedom of expression, completely corrupt police force, extreme alcoholism...these are disincentives
Without an effective police and judiciary, you can't be secure in your person or property, and end up paying an informal tax to organized criminal elements and corrupt police, so no, Russia is still not laissez faire.
I think you might be misinterpreting it. Yes, there was conquest and genocide, but mere conquest and genocide weren't the reason the US became a superpower.
> On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed.
Well, it depends on whether you're looking at what Hitler & co. wanted versus what actually happened. In the alternate reality the Nazi leadership lived in, they could have made peace with Britain and restored the sea trade vital to Germany's economy. Of course, that was a complete fantasy, as was the idea that they could conquer the USSR and hold it.
The US didn't become a superpower only because of its natural resources and immense territory, yes, but I think it may have played a part.
> But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy.
I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence, the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by slave labor.
Even modern, industrial economies of today are in a sense powered by slave labor. Visit the sweatshops in the Brooklyn and Queens boroughs of NYC to see first-hand what slave labor is like. I've not visited Bangladesh or China, but I can imagine what the sweatshops in those places are like.
> I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence,
> the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that
> the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by
> slave labor.
True, but the industrial section of the US was not in the slave states, it was in the Northeast. The majority of industrial labor was free men. I would imagine working conditions varied greatly, but interpreting things through a modern lens is fraught with problems.
I do think people overlook the importance of the Mississippi in the growth of the US. It is an amazing route for goods right in the middle of the country. Even today, barge traffic is a huge driver of export goods.
// on a side note - I am pretty sure I will disagree with this book if the article is any indication, although I will have to read the book first. The 1800s (laws & transportation) were very important for the US and it could be said the early 1900s did a number on economic freedom. The one line in the article can be argued. Also, 1945 was not as important as 1946-48 for the baby boom.
"I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence, the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by slave labor."
The US cotton plantations were part of a primarily agricultural economy, which is arguably a different thing than an industrial economy. There was industry, but it was mostly not slave based.
Agriculture is just as industrial as the next... industry - you may have stepped into the fallacy known as "physiocracy". It's an easy thing to do.
Cotton, Antebellum cotton, was the - the feedstock for the British textile portion of the Industrial Revolution - which was in Britain, the main event. Cotton went "offline" during the American Civil War so the Brits simply found other sources elsewhere in the Empire.
IMO, we can view American chattel slavery as in an intermediate state between Mercantilist ... modes and Capitalist modes. Once a royal patent on a trade system was granted, it was very difficult for a king to control the patent holder. See also Adam Smith...
Once (proto) capitalism began in earnest in the U.S., slavery presented challenges to the establishment of law that proved insurmountable. Free labor in the North also saw fit to take up arms against slavery. Lincoln saw this clearly and it's worth taking him both metaphorically/poetically as well as literally.
There are clearly ways in which agricultural production differs from other kinds of production. Whether you call it "not industry" depends on what lines you've chosen to draw, which is why I said "arguably a different thing". If you don't want to draw those lines, fine - but the economy of the US South in that time was clearly dominated specifically by agriculture.
But you do have to agree that that agricultural economy made other industries possible. The agricultural part formed the base of a pyramidal industrial setup.
Slavery still seems more of a colonial (hence Mercantilist) feature than an industrial (hence Capitalist) feature - to me, anyway. Michener's excellent "Caribbean" discusses this in some detail.
As simple as that question seems, I'm sorta unsure how to answer it. Cotton was a boom crop that had huge demand in the textile mills. Tobacco preceded it, and for all I know, with tobacco farming, slavery would have ended on its own. Tobacco is much higher-skill than cotton, and that could easily have led to a much gentler slope out of slavery.
It's all a tangled mess of counterfactuals. The aristocrats in the South were definitely riding the tiger, and could not afford to compromise on the Peculiar Institution.
I think the definition for slave labour is that the labourer is forced to work under a real threat of violence - coercion or just being taken advantage of is not sufficient.
The threat of losing your job if you don't work under stipulated conditions, especially when those conditions are live threatening, creates a slave-labor condition.
Sure, you could quit, but you've got bills to pay and mouths to feed, so you slave on.
Take what's happening to foreign workers in Qatar, for example. There's really no direct threat of violence, but workers die daily because the working conditions are that dangerous.
It's the correct definition of slavery. If I were to arbitrarily stretch the definition of words, I could find a way to define your style of communication as a form of slavery, to malign you, as you are doing to low wage free labour.
Great, so they were nomads, so the whites just pushed them out of the way... and into the way of other nomadic tribes, sparking chains of dislocation-driven conflicts... and when they fought back they were slaughtered, and they kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing... until the whites met the Spanish (also fresh from crushing "nomads" beneath their boots.) At which point all of the millions of "nomads" had either been killed off or imprisoned in scraps of worthless land. No, not a nightmare at all, I'm sure the "nomads" loved every second.
Because when Americans do it, it's forgivable, inconsequential, wholesome, even valiant, but when Germans do it, it's monstrous.
If there was a genocidal nightmare in America, the German version was much more explicitly ... distilled. Various Midwestern doctor-phrenologists wrote treatises on whether or not freed blacks-former slaves-were human; Der Paperhanger and others read this tripe. Science!
The American version was also very slow-motion and not all that universal. If you take the tack of "We Shall Remain", that part of Manifest Destiny looks cast around the time of King Phillip's War. Throw in Jackson's denial of Worcester v. Georgia...
Various figures treated the Amerind at least as distinctly human, just ... unfortunately placed. General George Crook seems to be one of the more sympathetic. I'm also biased by Daniel Goldhagen's work in what he calls "eliminationism" and it's not clear that the... management of the Amerind qualifies, by his own words. IMO, Goldhagen clarifies many of the touchy rough edges of "genocide" in an attempt to make it distinct from plain old warfare.
Er, the American push westwards was quite nightmarish and genocidal, and US homesteaders appropriated land much like Hitler planned to do.
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