> 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.
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.
The US was an APEX power and had been for a long time. Nobody could conquer it. To claim the US was a nobody is a laughable.
> It was still undergoing the post-Civil War recovery
After the civil war, the US fielded the greatest army in the world and it's economy was growing because it was shifting to westward expansion. We took over territory bigger than western europe. Not only that, the US was the largest producer of oil BY FAR at that time.
> the Industrial Revolution JUST arrived on the continent.
It just arrived in european mainland as well relatively speaking...
> No European nation was interested in conquering the largely agrarian society.
No european nation could. Let's stop pretending any european country had any hope.
A european country conquering the US in the 1800s is like costa rica conquering the US today. It's laughable.
During the civil war, the US developed much of the military technology that was used in the first world war a few decades later.
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.
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.
> 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...
> 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.
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.
Russia is the 8th largest economy in the world.