[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.

[chrisco255]

I'm no fan of imperialism. However, I think trying to paint Churchill as an evil man rather than an elected PM who inherited a half-millenia of imperial legacy at one of the most pivotal moments in human history is a long shot at best. You can believe what you want about the predictability of WWII. From an armchair in 2017, it's easy to predict how things play out from 1919 onward.

The difference between Churchill and Hitler is that Churchill didn't slaughter millions of people and subvert half the globe to totalitarian dictatorship. That supplies and shipments are limited under dire circumstances should come as no surprise to any student of historical warfare.

[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.