68 ms·

> The vast landscape in between Berlin and Moscow would become Germany’s equivalent of the American west, filled with German homesteaders living comfortably on

by alricb 12y ago

> The vast landscape in between Berlin and Moscow would become Germany’s equivalent of the American west, filled with German homesteaders living comfortably on land and labor appropriated from conquered peoples—a nightmare parody of the American experience with which to challenge American power. Er, the American push westwards was quite nightmarish and genocidal, and US homesteaders appropriated land much like Hitler planned to do.

elberto34 12y ago
that is subject to interpretation
gahahaha 12y ago
Supposedly, 95% of Americans were killed by diseases, so it didn't feel as bad. Especially if your perspective on the matter was (and it really was) that "God has given America to us and the proof is that he is is killing the Indians to make room for us"
- ldd 12y ago
  Say, why is the population of Andean countries (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolovia) so high in natives and 'mestizos' compared with North American countries? The disease hypothesis puzzles me because it cannot explain the reality of such countries, where I come from. Moreover, I'd argue that a factor was the idea that English settlers came as families instead of as unmarried men, like the Spaniards. At any rate, I am not saying you are wrong. The evidence seems to point towards a different idea, but it is possible that I am wrong or stuff.
  - lamuerteflaca 12y ago
    Not only that, 60 percent of Mexicans are mestizos and millions more are pure blooded indegenous people. Truth is that American's ancestors where quite genocidal among other things. To the point of almost exterminating most of North America's population. Just like the Buffalo. It really is quite a sad tale. That in itself tells you that there is no God. And if there is then he might as well not exist.
    - mc32 12y ago
      About the buffalo. First nations really think it's funny (patronizing) when some whites think FNs were all about peace and understanding. It makes them out to be emasculated. No, they say, we killed way more buffalo than whites ever did. Colonialists killed buffalo as a proxy siege warfare b/c buffalo were a vital natural resource for many FNs. I think the Spaniards (or Iberians), given their religion, were way more accepting of other peoples and readily mixed --which is why you end up with so many meztizos in LAm --whereas initial NA settlers were less likely to reproduce with FN peoples.
      - cbd1984 12y ago
        > No, they say, we killed way more buffalo than whites ever did. Ah, but the official mythology is that they used every part. Sure. They herded massive groups of buffalo off buffalo jumps, which are essentially small cliffs, so that they'd fall and crush each other when they went off the edge, and they'd use every part of all of the hundreds of full-grown buffalo they killed. But everyone knows the White Man invented waste. Thus it was, thus it must ever be.
        mc32 12y ago
        The greatest respect one can offer another society is to treat them as being the same kind of humans as ourselves -raw, opportunistic, realists who would go to similar lengths as ourselves to achieve goals, not the fake respectful nonsense people project onto them to subvert them.
        pyre 12y ago
        I somehow doubt that the indigenous peoples killed this many buffalo: http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/7/37/7377f4d1d8add3298c08c9d8cff15046-orig http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/7/37/7377f4d1d8add3298c08c... But I'm open to the idea if you have more than just hand-waving to offer.
        cbd1984 12y ago
        What, exactly, are you disagreeing with? The idea of a buffalo jump or my doubts that they used every part?
  - AngrySkillzz 12y ago
    Latin and South America were far more developed than North America when the Westerners arrived. There were a lot more natives in those areas; nothing near the size and population of something like Tenochtitlan existed in NA. We're talking estimates of ~37 million in Latin America versus ~7 million in North America.
  - iaejpiejf23 12y ago
    > The disease hypothesis puzzles me because it cannot explain the reality of such countries The disease hypothesis is bullshit. Some retard wrote a silly book about it and nytimes pushed it like it was gospel. The royal proclamation of 1763 set the border between the colonists and the indians at the appalachian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763 Even after disease supposedly wiped out the indians, we could only push the indians past the appalachians in the 1760s.
  - learc83 12y ago
    Civilizations south of the modern day U.S. were far larger. That means more people to begin with, but also there is a theory that their immune systems were better prepared to deal with European diseases because they lived in large cities like Europeans.
  - tarollins 12y ago
    The US WAS ABOUT segregation seperation of race, no race mixing. These adean countries were about integration, intermarriage , in effect classism. Intergration in South America was about bettering your family and childrens future by lightening your race. In other words race mixing was allowed. Not like the Jim Crow laws in the US.
- iaejpiejf23 12y ago
  But 95% of natives didn't die of disease. Unless you are saying white men are a disease. We had to cull the indians like we culled the bison, deer, wolves, bears, etc. It was the most successful genocidal campaign in human history. It was also one of the most successful clearing the land of all life period. Settlers were paid for each indian scalp they got. Indian men, women and children were hunted and slaughtered wholesale. Idiots like Jared Diamond might try to absolve our sins by lying about how the indians died. But the truth of how the west was won is no so convenient. It was brutal and rapacious. I mean, we didn't even push the natives past the appalachian mountains until the 1760s and that idiot jared diamond wants us to believe the natives essentially died off in the 1500s.
  - dasil003 12y ago
    But let's not romanticize Native American culture either. The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times. There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture. It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves. We simply don't have the context to judge them. It was what it was.
    - learc83 12y ago
      You can also look north the the Thule (Inuit) and Dorset cultures. The Thule expanded to Canada and Greenland in the middle ages, and in a very short time they completely wiped out the dominant Dorset culture that had existed for thousands of years. The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
      - lamuerteflaca 12y ago
        And I'm sure that if there were any Dorset left they too would still be cursing them for wiping them out.
mc32 12y ago
So what Kept the Bolsheviks from becoming an economic empire, after all it was the same land Germany would try to use for its economic powerhouse. I mean very productive land, lots of mineral resources... obviously the Germans saw it that way. Still to this day, Russia underdelivers, given its vast resources --natural and human/intellectual.
- TheCoelacanth 12y ago
  Decades of trying to keep up with the US militarily at the expense of everything else.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- alricb 12y ago
  Well, it's probable that, Hitler being Hitler, his plan wouldn't have worked in reality. So long as Britain controlled the sea, a "super-Germany" would have been at a serious disadvantage relative to the historical US, which did a lot of trade by sea. As for why the USSR didn't turn into the US, it's probably related to poor economic organization, too much resources put into the military, too little international trade, and a dependency on primary resources like oil, with all those factors and others interacting in fun ways.
  - vacri 12y ago
    The trade is a big one - one of the reasons for the recent annexation of Crimea by Russia is to give Russia another deep-water port. They have surprisingly little viable coastline given their size. The other thing is that the US sits on very wealthy land that's in the temperate zone. Large amounts of Russia is difficult to access and the viable parts spend more of the year affected by bad weather. You can even see it in the national stereotypes - the US citizen wears a t-shirt and jeans, the Russian citizen wears an ushanka and heavy coat. Similarly, once the US conquered the west, it was in a situation where there was no real credible military threat bordering it - it could afford to shift more defence spending to power projection rather than home defence. It's not to say political ideologies had nothing to do with the differences in success stories, just that ideology alone is not responsible.
nandemo 12y ago
I think you might be misinterpreting it. Yes, there was conquest and genocide, but mere conquest and genocide weren't the reason the US became a superpower. > On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed.
- alricb 12y ago
  Well, it depends on whether you're looking at what Hitler & co. wanted versus what actually happened. In the alternate reality the Nazi leadership lived in, they could have made peace with Britain and restored the sea trade vital to Germany's economy. Of course, that was a complete fantasy, as was the idea that they could conquer the USSR and hold it. The US didn't become a superpower only because of its natural resources and immense territory, yes, but I think it may have played a part.
- finid 12y ago
  > But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence, the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by slave labor. Even modern, industrial economies of today are in a sense powered by slave labor. Visit the sweatshops in the Brooklyn and Queens boroughs of NYC to see first-hand what slave labor is like. I've not visited Bangladesh or China, but I can imagine what the sweatshops in those places are like.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    > I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence, > the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that > the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by > slave labor. True, but the industrial section of the US was not in the slave states, it was in the Northeast. The majority of industrial labor was free men. I would imagine working conditions varied greatly, but interpreting things through a modern lens is fraught with problems. I do think people overlook the importance of the Mississippi in the growth of the US. It is an amazing route for goods right in the middle of the country. Even today, barge traffic is a huge driver of export goods. // on a side note - I am pretty sure I will disagree with this book if the article is any indication, although I will have to read the book first. The 1800s (laws & transportation) were very important for the US and it could be said the early 1900s did a number on economic freedom. The one line in the article can be argued. Also, 1945 was not as important as 1946-48 for the baby boom.
happyscrappy 12y ago
It was a nightmare parody because unlike the Russians the Native Americans were nomadic.
- jasonisalive 12y ago
  Great, so they were nomads, so the whites just pushed them out of the way... and into the way of other nomadic tribes, sparking chains of dislocation-driven conflicts... and when they fought back they were slaughtered, and they kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing... until the whites met the Spanish (also fresh from crushing "nomads" beneath their boots.) At which point all of the millions of "nomads" had either been killed off or imprisoned in scraps of worthless land. No, not a nightmare at all, I'm sure the "nomads" loved every second. Because when Americans do it, it's forgivable, inconsequential, wholesome, even valiant, but when Germans do it, it's monstrous.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    I read it as when he said nightmare he meant for the Germans as compared to the Americans, obviously it was a nightmare for the people being invaded.
ArkyBeagle 12y ago
If there was a genocidal nightmare in America, the German version was much more explicitly ... distilled. Various Midwestern doctor-phrenologists wrote treatises on whether or not freed blacks-former slaves-were human; Der Paperhanger and others read this tripe. Science! The American version was also very slow-motion and not all that universal. If you take the tack of "We Shall Remain", that part of Manifest Destiny looks cast around the time of King Phillip's War. Throw in Jackson's denial of Worcester v. Georgia... Various figures treated the Amerind at least as distinctly human, just ... unfortunately placed. General George Crook seems to be one of the more sympathetic. I'm also biased by Daniel Goldhagen's work in what he calls "eliminationism" and it's not clear that the... management of the Amerind qualifies, by his own words. IMO, Goldhagen clarifies many of the touchy rough edges of "genocide" in an attempt to make it distinct from plain old warfare.

by alricb 12y ago

elberto34 12y ago

that is subject to interpretation

gahahaha 12y ago

Supposedly, 95% of Americans were killed by diseases, so it didn't feel as bad. Especially if your perspective on the matter was (and it really was) that "God has given America to us and the proof is that he is is killing the Indians to make room for us"

ldd 12y ago
Say, why is the population of Andean countries (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolovia) so high in natives and 'mestizos' compared with North American countries? The disease hypothesis puzzles me because it cannot explain the reality of such countries, where I come from. Moreover, I'd argue that a factor was the idea that English settlers came as families instead of as unmarried men, like the Spaniards. At any rate, I am not saying you are wrong. The evidence seems to point towards a different idea, but it is possible that I am wrong or stuff.
- lamuerteflaca 12y ago
  Not only that, 60 percent of Mexicans are mestizos and millions more are pure blooded indegenous people. Truth is that American's ancestors where quite genocidal among other things. To the point of almost exterminating most of North America's population. Just like the Buffalo. It really is quite a sad tale. That in itself tells you that there is no God. And if there is then he might as well not exist.
  - mc32 12y ago
    About the buffalo. First nations really think it's funny (patronizing) when some whites think FNs were all about peace and understanding. It makes them out to be emasculated. No, they say, we killed way more buffalo than whites ever did. Colonialists killed buffalo as a proxy siege warfare b/c buffalo were a vital natural resource for many FNs. I think the Spaniards (or Iberians), given their religion, were way more accepting of other peoples and readily mixed --which is why you end up with so many meztizos in LAm --whereas initial NA settlers were less likely to reproduce with FN peoples.
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      > No, they say, we killed way more buffalo than whites ever did. Ah, but the official mythology is that they used every part. Sure. They herded massive groups of buffalo off buffalo jumps, which are essentially small cliffs, so that they'd fall and crush each other when they went off the edge, and they'd use every part of all of the hundreds of full-grown buffalo they killed. But everyone knows the White Man invented waste. Thus it was, thus it must ever be.
      - mc32 12y ago
        The greatest respect one can offer another society is to treat them as being the same kind of humans as ourselves -raw, opportunistic, realists who would go to similar lengths as ourselves to achieve goals, not the fake respectful nonsense people project onto them to subvert them.
      - pyre 12y ago
        I somehow doubt that the indigenous peoples killed this many buffalo: http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/7/37/7377f4d1d8add3298c08c9d8cff15046-orig http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/7/37/7377f4d1d8add3298c08c... But I'm open to the idea if you have more than just hand-waving to offer.
        cbd1984 12y ago
        What, exactly, are you disagreeing with? The idea of a buffalo jump or my doubts that they used every part?
- AngrySkillzz 12y ago
  Latin and South America were far more developed than North America when the Westerners arrived. There were a lot more natives in those areas; nothing near the size and population of something like Tenochtitlan existed in NA. We're talking estimates of ~37 million in Latin America versus ~7 million in North America.
- iaejpiejf23 12y ago
  > The disease hypothesis puzzles me because it cannot explain the reality of such countries The disease hypothesis is bullshit. Some retard wrote a silly book about it and nytimes pushed it like it was gospel. The royal proclamation of 1763 set the border between the colonists and the indians at the appalachian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763 Even after disease supposedly wiped out the indians, we could only push the indians past the appalachians in the 1760s.
- learc83 12y ago
  Civilizations south of the modern day U.S. were far larger. That means more people to begin with, but also there is a theory that their immune systems were better prepared to deal with European diseases because they lived in large cities like Europeans.
- tarollins 12y ago
  The US WAS ABOUT segregation seperation of race, no race mixing. These adean countries were about integration, intermarriage , in effect classism. Intergration in South America was about bettering your family and childrens future by lightening your race. In other words race mixing was allowed. Not like the Jim Crow laws in the US.
iaejpiejf23 12y ago
But 95% of natives didn't die of disease. Unless you are saying white men are a disease. We had to cull the indians like we culled the bison, deer, wolves, bears, etc. It was the most successful genocidal campaign in human history. It was also one of the most successful clearing the land of all life period. Settlers were paid for each indian scalp they got. Indian men, women and children were hunted and slaughtered wholesale. Idiots like Jared Diamond might try to absolve our sins by lying about how the indians died. But the truth of how the west was won is no so convenient. It was brutal and rapacious. I mean, we didn't even push the natives past the appalachian mountains until the 1760s and that idiot jared diamond wants us to believe the natives essentially died off in the 1500s.
- dasil003 12y ago
  But let's not romanticize Native American culture either. The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times. There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture. It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves. We simply don't have the context to judge them. It was what it was.
  - learc83 12y ago
    You can also look north the the Thule (Inuit) and Dorset cultures. The Thule expanded to Canada and Greenland in the middle ages, and in a very short time they completely wiped out the dominant Dorset culture that had existed for thousands of years. The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
    - lamuerteflaca 12y ago
      And I'm sure that if there were any Dorset left they too would still be cursing them for wiping them out.

mc32 12y ago

So what Kept the Bolsheviks from becoming an economic empire, after all it was the same land Germany would try to use for its economic powerhouse. I mean very productive land, lots of mineral resources... obviously the Germans saw it that way. Still to this day, Russia underdelivers, given its vast resources --natural and human/intellectual.

TheCoelacanth 12y ago
Decades of trying to keep up with the US militarily at the expense of everything else.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
alricb 12y ago
Well, it's probable that, Hitler being Hitler, his plan wouldn't have worked in reality. So long as Britain controlled the sea, a "super-Germany" would have been at a serious disadvantage relative to the historical US, which did a lot of trade by sea. As for why the USSR didn't turn into the US, it's probably related to poor economic organization, too much resources put into the military, too little international trade, and a dependency on primary resources like oil, with all those factors and others interacting in fun ways.
- vacri 12y ago
  The trade is a big one - one of the reasons for the recent annexation of Crimea by Russia is to give Russia another deep-water port. They have surprisingly little viable coastline given their size. The other thing is that the US sits on very wealthy land that's in the temperate zone. Large amounts of Russia is difficult to access and the viable parts spend more of the year affected by bad weather. You can even see it in the national stereotypes - the US citizen wears a t-shirt and jeans, the Russian citizen wears an ushanka and heavy coat. Similarly, once the US conquered the west, it was in a situation where there was no real credible military threat bordering it - it could afford to shift more defence spending to power projection rather than home defence. It's not to say political ideologies had nothing to do with the differences in success stories, just that ideology alone is not responsible.

nandemo 12y ago

I think you might be misinterpreting it. Yes, there was conquest and genocide, but mere conquest and genocide weren't the reason the US became a superpower. > On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed.

alricb 12y ago
Well, it depends on whether you're looking at what Hitler & co. wanted versus what actually happened. In the alternate reality the Nazi leadership lived in, they could have made peace with Britain and restored the sea trade vital to Germany's economy. Of course, that was a complete fantasy, as was the idea that they could conquer the USSR and hold it. The US didn't become a superpower only because of its natural resources and immense territory, yes, but I think it may have played a part.
finid 12y ago
> But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence, the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by slave labor. Even modern, industrial economies of today are in a sense powered by slave labor. Visit the sweatshops in the Brooklyn and Queens boroughs of NYC to see first-hand what slave labor is like. I've not visited Bangladesh or China, but I can imagine what the sweatshops in those places are like.
- protomyth 12y ago
  > I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence, > the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that > the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by > slave labor. True, but the industrial section of the US was not in the slave states, it was in the Northeast. The majority of industrial labor was free men. I would imagine working conditions varied greatly, but interpreting things through a modern lens is fraught with problems. I do think people overlook the importance of the Mississippi in the growth of the US. It is an amazing route for goods right in the middle of the country. Even today, barge traffic is a huge driver of export goods. // on a side note - I am pretty sure I will disagree with this book if the article is any indication, although I will have to read the book first. The 1800s (laws & transportation) were very important for the US and it could be said the early 1900s did a number on economic freedom. The one line in the article can be argued. Also, 1945 was not as important as 1946-48 for the baby boom.

happyscrappy 12y ago

It was a nightmare parody because unlike the Russians the Native Americans were nomadic.

jasonisalive 12y ago
Great, so they were nomads, so the whites just pushed them out of the way... and into the way of other nomadic tribes, sparking chains of dislocation-driven conflicts... and when they fought back they were slaughtered, and they kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing... until the whites met the Spanish (also fresh from crushing "nomads" beneath their boots.) At which point all of the millions of "nomads" had either been killed off or imprisoned in scraps of worthless land. No, not a nightmare at all, I'm sure the "nomads" loved every second. Because when Americans do it, it's forgivable, inconsequential, wholesome, even valiant, but when Germans do it, it's monstrous.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  I read it as when he said nightmare he meant for the Germans as compared to the Americans, obviously it was a nightmare for the people being invaded.

ArkyBeagle 12y ago

If there was a genocidal nightmare in America, the German version was much more explicitly ... distilled. Various Midwestern doctor-phrenologists wrote treatises on whether or not freed blacks-former slaves-were human; Der Paperhanger and others read this tripe. Science! The American version was also very slow-motion and not all that universal. If you take the tack of "We Shall Remain", that part of Manifest Destiny looks cast around the time of King Phillip's War. Throw in Jackson's denial of Worcester v. Georgia... Various figures treated the Amerind at least as distinctly human, just ... unfortunately placed. General George Crook seems to be one of the more sympathetic. I'm also biased by Daniel Goldhagen's work in what he calls "eliminationism" and it's not clear that the... management of the Amerind qualifies, by his own words. IMO, Goldhagen clarifies many of the touchy rough edges of "genocide" in an attempt to make it distinct from plain old warfare.