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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

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.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
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?
- tmax6 9y ago
  It sounds like he/she just read “A People's History of the United States.”
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    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 9y ago
  > Find a society without historical sin The Minoans
  - labster 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Non exactly The minotaur was invented by the Greeks that were jealous of Minosse's SWAG :)
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- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      >>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 9y ago
        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.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Aren't you just describing world history, where tribes/peoples have replaced other ones many many times over?
- megous 9y ago
  Sure, but it's not a reason to ignore it or brush it over.
- pizza 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - nebabyte 9y ago
      > 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 9y ago
        You probably know as well as I do that Godwin's law is almost as old as the internet itself.
        deleted 9y ago
kryptiskt 9y ago
So why didn't it happen in South America?
- deleted 9y ago
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- agumonkey 9y ago
  Climate is different for once. I'm curious about the parallel history lines though.
- michalskop 9y ago
  One possible explanation is in the popular book Las Venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) by Eduardo Galeano.
- pizza 9y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-war-built-egypts-vaunted-cotton-industry-and-changed-country-forever-180959967/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-war...
thesmallestcat 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
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- gilleain 9y ago
  Not to disagree with you, but I found this timeline of abolition very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom 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 9y ago
  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=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?mcubz...
x0054 9y ago
Let me guess, you didn't actually bother to read the book. It's kind of sad that this comment is the top comment.
gerdesj 9y ago
(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?
- alex_anglin 9y ago
  Killing the natives?
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - gerdesj 9y ago
    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"
    - walterstucco 9y ago
      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
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      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-human-activity-north-america-130000-years-ago-180963046/ 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_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno... )
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
newsmania 9y ago
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.
- phugoid 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    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.
cryptonector 9y ago
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.
- jalayir 9y ago
  India is hardly resource rich. Especially not per-capita.
  - jogjayr 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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
thedevil 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
ransom1538 9y ago
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.
- jackbravo 9y ago
  stone age people to the south? Didn't Spaniards and Englishmen had the same technology?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  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_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington#White_Ho... A storm intervened on behalf of USA.
  - ransom1538 9y ago
    "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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812
- jcranmer 9y ago
  > 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.
plandis 9y ago
I'd love to hear your take on how Bill Gates owes his success solely to slavery?
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  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.
mynameishere 9y ago
The entire planet was usurped. Over and over and over again.
crpatino 9y ago
Don't forget how the other nascient world power of the times, Germany, managed to self destruct while taking down most of the incumbent empires of the previous age, with Russia/USSR left as the exception the conveniently play the role of the external enemy to rally your own people against. It was exceedingly convenient for the US economy to have all of Europe's infrastructure shred to pieces. Both the competition gone and a huge rebuilding market to dump your excess industrial output.
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oh_sigh 9y ago
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 9y ago
  So genocide is excusable provided the excuse is productivity?
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    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.
irrational 9y ago
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/ 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.
nikdaheratik 9y ago
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.
627467 9y ago
"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas

aaron-lebo 9y ago

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?

tmax6 9y ago
It sounds like he/she just read “A People's History of the United States.”
- gerdesj 9y ago
  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 9y ago
> Find a society without historical sin The Minoans
- labster 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Non exactly The minotaur was invented by the Greeks that were jealous of Minosse's SWAG :)
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erikpukinskis 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    >>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 9y ago
      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.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

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

megous 9y ago
Sure, but it's not a reason to ignore it or brush it over.
pizza 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - nebabyte 9y ago
    > 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 9y ago
      You probably know as well as I do that Godwin's law is almost as old as the internet itself.
      - deleted 9y ago

kryptiskt 9y ago

So why didn't it happen in South America?

deleted 9y ago
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agumonkey 9y ago
Climate is different for once. I'm curious about the parallel history lines though.
michalskop 9y ago
One possible explanation is in the popular book Las Venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) by Eduardo Galeano.
pizza 9y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-war-built-egypts-vaunted-cotton-industry-and-changed-country-forever-180959967/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-war...

thesmallestcat 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
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gilleain 9y ago
Not to disagree with you, but I found this timeline of abolition very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom 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 9y ago
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=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?mcubz...

x0054 9y ago

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

gerdesj 9y ago

(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?

alex_anglin 9y ago
Killing the natives?
- deleted 9y ago
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- gerdesj 9y ago
  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"
  - walterstucco 9y ago
    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
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    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-human-activity-north-america-130000-years-ago-180963046/ 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_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno... )
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago

newsmania 9y ago

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.

phugoid 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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.

cryptonector 9y ago

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.

jalayir 9y ago
India is hardly resource rich. Especially not per-capita.
- jogjayr 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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

thedevil 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

ransom1538 9y ago

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.

jackbravo 9y ago
stone age people to the south? Didn't Spaniards and Englishmen had the same technology?
maxerickson 9y ago
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_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington#White_Ho... A storm intervened on behalf of USA.
- ransom1538 9y ago
  "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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812
jcranmer 9y ago
> 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.

plandis 9y ago

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

Mithaldu 9y ago
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.

mynameishere 9y ago

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

crpatino 9y ago

Don't forget how the other nascient world power of the times, Germany, managed to self destruct while taking down most of the incumbent empires of the previous age, with Russia/USSR left as the exception the conveniently play the role of the external enemy to rally your own people against. It was exceedingly convenient for the US economy to have all of Europe's infrastructure shred to pieces. Both the competition gone and a huge rebuilding market to dump your excess industrial output.

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oh_sigh 9y ago

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 9y ago
So genocide is excusable provided the excuse is productivity?
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  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.

irrational 9y ago

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/ 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.

nikdaheratik 9y ago

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.

627467 9y ago

"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas