[zizek23]

Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe. The consequence is predictable.

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.

[thesmallestcat]

The sweet smell of presentism. You can perhaps fault the US for the interlude between British outlawing of slavery and the civil war/abolition, which covers a few decades. But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries. It certainly wasn't "unlimited." Onto the next bit, "stolen...IP from Europe" is a modern characterization of what was in fact a healthy exchange of research and invention between the Old and New World. Much perceived "theft" was fueled by reactionary governments making the US a more appealing locale for the learned.

[freeflight]

> But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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.

[chrisco255]

"Disenfranchisement" is an understatement at best. They were being exterminated. However, I don't think the world was entirely aware of just how bad it was. Information travels much much faster nowadays. At any rate, there is no other nation or point in time prior to the 20th century that you can pretend those values even exist. Even "equality" itself is a Western value. Every nation in human history has spilt blood, has violated basic human rights, and has been tribalistic in it's treatment of outsiders at various points in history. We could all be living under a North Korean-like regime right now, but instead we live in a privileged Western society that loves to loathe itself.

[freeflight]

> At any rate, there is no other nation or point in time prior to the 20th century that you can pretend those values even exist.

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.

[chrisco255]

Do you know how scathingly critical the French and English were of each other for centuries? At one point, France and England participated in a hundred year war. Europe was engaged in intra-racial international war for hundreds if not thousands of years. Nations and tribes on every continent battled each other with fierce brutality. Look at how the Japanese conquered the Chinese during WWII. When I look at world history, I just see ugly bitter wars and disputes going back to the stone age punctured by precious few moments of relative peace.

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.

[freeflight]

> Do you know how scathingly critical the French and English were of each other for centuries?

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.

[eighthnate]

> 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.

It's a terrible habit we have as a nation. We are happy to forgive or excuse our sins but hold others to theirs.

[aaron-lebo]

How exactly do you determine the habit of 300 million people? How do you differentiate that habit from the Japanese who refuse to officially recognize war crimes in China or the Belgians and Germans whose grandparents wre killing Congolese and Jews respectively?

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.

[eighthnate]

> 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?

[gilleain]

Not to disagree with you, but I found this timeline of abolition very interesting:

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.

[pizza]

Retroactively arbiting "crimes against modernity" - if computed with modern measurement devices/standards - can be hypocritical. That's because calling the villain evil might ignore the fact that their behavior, being relitigated as evil in the present, did in a fundamental way depend upon their belief that they were doing something ethical in the first place. It is not sadism but sadomasochism; they are especially pained at their awareness of the pain they cause, but they see it as their duty - and the symbols of the time is what mediates their gap between their imagined duty and the reality they operate in.

(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...

[cryptonector]

Other resource-rich countries haven't fared as well. Indeed, it is a truism that the more natural resources, the worse a country performs economically. Some of the wealthiest countries are deprived of natural resources (Israel, Singapore, Monaco, and others) while a bunch of resource-rich countries have done poorly or terribly (Brazil, Argentina, all of Africa, India, Russia, and others).

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.

[HumbleGamer]

Well, should we consider some of the underlying factors for why African nations in particular are doing terribly? Seems the 1885 Berlin treaty set that continent back for at least a few centuries, the effects of which are still causing havok to this day.

[cryptonector]

See my replies below. There are certainly countries that did well in spite of plunder. And countries that reverted from wealthy to poverty with no plunder in sight.

Ideas matter.

[jalayir]

India is hardly resource rich. Especially not per-capita.

[jogjayr]

And, all things considered, India's hardly done "terribly".

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.

[notfromhere]

The colonies that fell apart we're ones where there wasn't much organization and what organization existed was for resource extraction.

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

[cryptonector]

India has done very well in one sense: it's still a democracy!

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!

[jogjayr]

It's hard to compare India to any other country except for China. No other nation is of a comparable size. It's all well and good to say "well Japan, South Korea, Singapore did great after being devastated by war and depression and famine". Just like software, scale matters for national development.

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.

[manojlds]

And in context of parent comment, India was plundered by the British.

[cryptonector]

Plunder is a silly excuse. Whatever plunder, it's been over for a long time. A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea. Argentina (then reverted -- what foreign power plundered them from the 50s onward, eh?!). The U.S., naturally. And others.

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.

[jogjayr]

> Plunder is a silly excuse.

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".

[cryptonector]

I don't think colonial plunder remotely explains Latin America. Also, why aren't plunderer Spain and Portugal super-wealthy? (Incidentally, the degree of "colonial plunder" in Latin America varies a great deal, from genocidal in Mexico, to practically none in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, but economic performance of the entire region has been lackluster, with the exception of Argentina between the 1880s and the 1930s.)

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.

[boomboomsubban]

>Some of the wealthiest countries are deprived of natural resources (Israel, Singapore, Monaco, and others)

Not exactly great examples. All three contain excellent natural resources, ports on major trading routes, that drive or drove their economy.

[cryptonector]

That's not oil, land, water, etc. By your definition almost every country has tons of natural resources, and yet results are so disparate.

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.

[boomboomsubban]

>By your definition alm every country has tons of natural resources, and yet results are so disparate.

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

Aren't you just describing world history, where tribes/peoples have replaced other ones many many times over?

[pizza]

Yes, but as an example (whose effect is only stark because of our present world history), the Nuremberg trials were also a replacement of world history. Many people on trial said "I was just following orders"; mere world history.

Just because world history is symbolic, does not mean millions of people's duties do not depend upon which symbols are present.

[seanmcdirmid]

We hit Hitler comparisons fast on this thread, eh?

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.

[pizza]

The looking deeper is exactly not defaulting to moral relativism AND not defaulting to the belief that universal goods, as defined by one culture, are universal simply because any culture says so.

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.

[walterstucco]

> We hit Hitler comparisons fast on this thread, eh?

There was no comparison to Hitler

[nebabyte]

> We hit Hitler comparisons fast on this thread, eh

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

[seanmcdirmid]

You probably know as well as I do that Godwin's law is almost as old as the internet itself.

[ionised]

Godwin's law is not a law of nature, and Godwin himself stated that it is being abused to stifle debate;

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.

[nebabyte]

Hackneyed phrases are as old as time, kid; doesn't mean you have a point.

[megous]

Sure, but it's not a reason to ignore it or brush it over.

[agumonkey]

tbh, and not trying to dismiss USA in anyway. I find their situation in time and space pretty exceptional. They had no aggressive neighbors and half a continent. At a time where new knowledge was popping out, having such a playground was very timely.

[seanmcdirmid]

The North American tribes had plenty of warfare and territory turn overs long before the Europeans arrived. The isolation of the americas did prevent diffusion of technology, but we also saw the same thing happen in Africa and even Asia to similar extents. It wasn't very unique.

[agumonkey]

Sorry I meant after the United states formed. They became the only player on that area weren't they ?

I always oppose their situation to Europe where many similarly large countries were shoulder to shoulder.

[chrisco255]

Then why did the U.S. fare so well compared with Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, etc. India, Russia and China had close to the same landmass for several hundred to thousand years prior but they didn't achieve what U.S. did despite a huge head start.

[jogjayr]

> India, Russia and China had close to the same landmass for several hundred to thousand years prior but they didn't achieve what U.S. did despite a huge head start.

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_do_mar

[chrisco255]

U.S. had wars with Mexico, Canada, itself, Spain, plenty of war happened in the 19th century.

[agumonkey]

Except maybe for Canada, these weren't invasion though. I have to admit there were lot more conflicts I knew about. We shouldn't learn history focused around our own country only .. it makes us foolish about the rest of the world.

[ransom1538]

Sort of. The big advantage the US had was OCEANS on both sides and only stone age peoples to the south. Attacking the US on it's own soil has been a suicide mission for hundreds of years. Counties in order to attack the US would need to pile men on ships travel for a month(s) then attempt to skirmish on the beaches. On the other hand attacking Poland /Korea/China/Spain/Italy/Egypt is a matter of walking. Once ships were powered/quick enough to transfer men in mass it was too late -- the repeating rifle had been invented.

[maxerickson]

The British stole the president's dinner and burned the White House during the war of 1812:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington#White_Ho...

A storm intervened on behalf of USA.

[ransom1538]

"One force [British] burned Washington but failed to capture Baltimore, and sailed away when its commander was killed. In northern New York State, 10,000 British veterans were marching south until a decisive defeat at the Battle of Plattsburgh forced them back to Canada.[b] Nothing was known of the fate of the third large invasion force aimed at capturing New Orleans and southwest. The Prime Minister wanted the Duke of Wellington to command in Canada and take control of the Great Lakes." [i]

Sure, they burned the White House [battle won], but lost the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

[jcranmer]

> Sort of. The big advantage the US had was OCEANS on both sides and only stone age peoples to the south.

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.

[chrisco255]

And the French controlled half the continent too before they gave it up for peanuts.

[jcranmer]

Nominally, yes. In practice, the control in most of that region didn't really extend outside of the presence of a few trading posts. (It should also be noted that Mexican control of Alta California outside of the coastal region was similarly nominal)

[jackbravo]

stone age people to the south? Didn't Spaniards and Englishmen had the same technology?

[kryptiskt]

So why didn't it happen in South America?

[pizza]

The settlers who went to South America with the dreams of plucking gold bars out of the fruit trees and using an enslaved population to make hard farm work a breeze met a harsher reality.

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...

[jcranmer]

> The settlers who went to South America with the dreams of plucking gold bars out of the fruit trees and using an enslaved population to make hard farm work a breeze met a harsher reality.

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).

[pizza]

TIL. thanks

[sremani]

Geography happened to South America, unlike North America, connecting the Atlantic Coast with Pacific Coast in South America is not easy and most of their navigation/transportation is along coastal roads.

[DrScump]

  rich soils in river valleys

Before artificial soil fertilization was practiced (and the importance of nitrogen was understood), lands in the Eastern seaboard used for tobacco and cotton were quickly depleted. This helped accelerate the push westwards.

[ghaff]

Doesn't really explain Argentina to nearly the same degree as e.g. Brazil-/which The Economist has written about at length over the past couple of years.

[thesmallestcat]

Argentina is a great place for ranching and certain crops, but it has very little mineral wealth. I would hazard that the two most likely reasons for South America's slow progress are that its colonies were attached to ailing empires, and that a rugged and challenging geography made unification difficult to unimaginable. American history has no analog to the horrific War of Triple Alliance, a historical microcosm of the continent's diplomatic challenges.

[Apocryphon]

Not to mention that Argentina was doing quite well for itself at the onset of the 20th century- unfortunately political instability and other challenges hamstrung it since then. If some rolls of the dice had gone differently, it would be solidly in first place status by now, same as Chile.

[ghaff]

That was my main point. Given different political culture and other factors along those lines, southern South America may not have the great resources and land mass that the US did and does, but you can't really write them off for geographical determinism reasons. Were those countries really in a worse position with respect to resources, climate, etc. than, say, Australia?

[notfromhere]

Argentina's economic miracle fell apart due to constant shift in power between the agrarian landowners and the urban workers.

[michalskop]

One possible explanation is in the popular book Las Venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) by Eduardo Galeano.

[agumonkey]

Climate is different for once. I'm curious about the parallel history lines though.

[notfromhere]

Niall Ferguson had an interesting thesis on property rights and the style of colonial gov't is what made all the difference.

Argentina had a good run, but internal politics have shit the bed in that country for a good century

[dboreham]

Catholicism

[x0054]

Let me guess, you didn't actually bother to read the book. It's kind of sad that this comment is the top comment.

[nikdaheratik]

So you want to argue that America shouldn't exist in a just world, but what exactly would be in its place?

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.

[irrational]

But didn't the European countries usurp the entire continent of Africa, a giant fertile landmass rich in resources that was stolen along with unlimited slave labour? The land the USA encompasses is tiny compared to Africa (http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/18/true-size-of-africa/). Europe African colonialism was horrifying, but it should have resulted in a economy much larger the that of the USA. Someone screwed the pooch.

[627467]

"Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen" for a moment I though you were talking about this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas

[mynameishere]

The entire planet was usurped. Over and over and over again.

[thedevil]

Slavery hasn't been a factor for a century and a half. Natural resources play a meaningful role, but there's plenty of poor countries with resources. And the indigenous people before didn't have a juggernaut economy from those resources.

Slavery and a stolen continent are horrible, but they don't explain what happened economically.

[pizza]

In a goldrush, sell the pickaxes. Black men and women picked the cotton for free in captivitiy. Cotton fueled the textile industry. The textile industry blew up because of the industrial revolution. It's just rent-seeking by threat of murder. No, it doesn't explain who had what before this happened, but this is the clearest 'difference that made a difference' to me w.r.t. why America became rich in a very noticeable way while this was occurring.

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.

[gerdesj]

(No idea what the article says - I've apparently reached my article limit)

How on earth can you describe a landmass as stolen or a continent as usurped?

[ratacat]

It's kind of like, I come over to your house for dinner... Murder your family members, and sell you to a slaver, then your house is mine.

Pretty straight forward.

[gerdesj]

A landmass and a continent: which bit of bloody great chunks of rock, soil, stuff etc are you having problems with?

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.

[erikpukinskis]

I wouldn't break it down by landmass. I would break it down by watershed. Watersheds most definitely "give a fuck".

[pizza]

So then "property is theft" is what you're arguing?

[alex_anglin]

Killing the natives?

[gerdesj]

Who are the "natives"?

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"

[maxerickson]

Humans are likely the first hominids to occupy the Americas.

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... )

[walterstucco]

The natives are those that were killed because they opposed to the plans other had for those lands were they lived for centuries

They didn't kill first

[erikpukinskis]

Was there some point to this question?

[newsmania]

Slavery actually held the USA back. It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized. Furthermore, the civil war was incredibly destructive and without slavery would not have occurred. Lastly the USA was not the biggest economy in 1850.

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.

[pizza]

I'm skeptical of the idea that the tragedy of the unintended epidemic resulted, fairly, in property rights for the invaders. It means that either:

- "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!"

[syrrim]

It means merely that there were very few people laying claim to a very large piece of land. That they were killed by disease means that they weren't killed intentionally in order to take the land.

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.

[pizza]

Yes, I agree property rights are not physical law. That said, who determines what is fairly or unfairly allocated is never who is most sanctimonious but who is holding the gun.

[greedy_buffer]

Your second paragraph makes it seem like those weren't really humans - "cleared out", really? And having been decimated by plague diseases makes shooting the survivors equivalent to crossing a border illegally so you can work a better job? Maybe my knowledge of American history and politics is poor but those do not seem like the same thing at all.

[phugoid]

> It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.

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?

[Banthum]

That's why we have such massive forced redistribution of those resources (e.g. progressive income taxes), yes.

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.

[sk5t]

One might consider that the fortunes and income of the very wealthy are, for the most part, not subject to income tax, nor progressive taxes of any other sort of which I am aware. Dividends, capital gains, etc.

[kamaal]

>>It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized.

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).

[chrisco255]

Dude, Churchill was fighting the most horrific forces of fascism and evil that the planet has ever seen, a war in which nearly all of Europe fell to the Nazis and nearly all of Asia fell to the Japanese empire... London was enduring daily bombings and you're going to blame him for a famine halfway around the globe?

[kamaal]

>>Dude, Churchill was fighting the most horrific forces of fascism and evil that the planet has ever seen

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.

[eropple]

"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits."

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.

[churchill1944]

"I am seriously concerned about the food situation in India….Last year we had a grievous famine in Bengal through which at least 700,000 people died. This year there is a good crop of rice, but we are faced with an acute shortage of wheat, aggravated by unprecedented storms….By cutting down military shipments and other means, I have been able to arrange for 350,000 tons of wheat to be shipped to India from Australia during the first nine months of 1944. This is the shortest haul. I cannot see how to do more.

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...

[kamaal]

Yeah, Britain did want to feed a few farmers and peasants, that is because they wanted the next generation of slave labor to be ready from whom they could grow, snatch and tax heavily to build awesome infrastructure and quality of life for people in Britain. So please this whole facade of a benevolent imperialistic power is just pointless.

>>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.

[taway_1212]

> It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.

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?

[WalterBright]

You're correct that slavery held the country back. The Confederacy could not even produce shoes for their soldiers. The reason Lee was in Gettysburg was he was after the shoe factory in nearby Harrisburg.

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.

[Mithaldu]

> According to your logic, undocumented immigrants are “usurping” America

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.

[aaron-lebo]

The immigrants over the course of 149 years weren't offloading from the boats with rifles in their hands The vast majority of them faced major discrimination themselves. That's why their descendants (who often are also the descendants of natives) object to such biased portrayals.

[Mithaldu]

Individual people may not be guilty of this, and even major parts of the USA may not have been guilty of it, but as an entity, this is what "the USA" did. If that makes people angry, they should search themselves to see where such anger should be directed.

[plandis]

I'd love to hear your take on how Bill Gates owes his success solely to slavery?

[Mithaldu]

The modern form of it, which is having businesses with practically no worker protections (right-to-work, the health care situation) compared to other european countries.

[oh_sigh]

If the US was stolen, then the Native American tribes were also stealing it from previous occupants. Heck, there are tribes in the southwest which only got to the southwest by conquering other Native American tribes after Europeans were already roaming around here.

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.

[ionised]

So genocide is excusable provided the excuse is productivity?

[oh_sigh]

No, because it was par for the course at that point in history and the people who were genocided were themselves genociding other people simultaneously, and only came to live on the given land because they enslaved, pillaged, raped, and killed the previous native americans who were living on the land.

[aaron-lebo]

You sound bitter. Find a society without historical sin and then we can talk. You went off on some tangent about jingoism without explaining where the book supports that. Did you read the book or the review or did you just want to rant?

[erikpukinskis]

> You sound bitter. Find a society without historical sin and then we can talk.

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.

[aaron-lebo]

Don't get me wrong, like every American interested in history, I'm well aware of the sins of the United States. Hell, Texas was colonized by slaveholders who were illegal immigrants before it was stolen from Mexico. On the other hand, Mexico itself is a land full of people who are the offspring of the conquerors and the conquered. There's really no winning and nobody with a clean record.

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.

[enraged_camel]

>>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.

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?

[aaron-lebo]

If we want to talk about perspective, it's ironic that "zizek" is very possibly Russian or Eastern European, and if so lives in a country that has a far bigger issue with Neo-Nazis than the US, they just don't have the same media exposure.

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.

[erikpukinskis]

You're shadow boxing. I didn't say those things.

[tmax6]

It sounds like he/she just read “A People's History of the United States.”

[gerdesj]

I have just read the Amazon puff on that beast (never heard of it before - being British.) I suspect I wont be adding it to my must read list.

Ta for the heads up 8)

[walterstucco]

> Find a society without historical sin

The Minoans

[labster]

Didn't they trap young people in a giant maze with minotaurs? I'm pretty sure minotaurs are specifically forbidden under the Geneva Convention.

[walterstucco]

Non exactly

The minotaur was invented by the Greeks that were jealous of Minosse's SWAG :)