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That still holds. The problem is that it's been taken to its logical conclusion: all dysfunctional countries have been conquered by their competent neighbors, which means that there are large landmasses that contain exclusively competent nations (North America, Europe, Australia/Oceania, and soon Asia) and large landmasses that contain exclusively dysfunctional ones (Africa, Arabia, and South America).

There are natural barriers that prevent competent but distant nations from conquering dysfunctional ones. Colonialism was an attempt to ignore those, until people realized that it cost far more than it was worth to the colonizers.

I should probably mention that much of the reasoning behind the Bush invasion of Iraq was along these lines. It was hoped that Iraq would become a "beacon of democracy" in the Mideast. Then, all of its neighbors would either adopt Western institutions to maintain their relative positions, or they would be conquered by a U.S-supported Iraq.

Somebody forgot to factor in the effect of an 8000-mile supply line, or the reluctance of a people to give up deeply-entrenched customs.

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Somebody forgot to factor in the effect of an 8000-mile supply line, or the reluctance of a people to give up deeply-entrenched customs.

That's not the problem. Britain ruled Egypt for many decades using only 5,000 soldiers and actually turned a profit. Egypt at the time had 9 million people. Back in 1900, logistics were even more difficult, and Britain's technological edge was actually much less.

The core problem is the the U.S. cultural DNA is anti-imperialist. No one in state department or DOD has actually read the memoirs from the British empire about how they did it. Nor is the U.S. willing to use imperialist tactics. For instance, if you're doing imperialism you need to have a native army reporting directly to the ruling officer class. Instead, the U.S. is trying to police every street with American soldiers. Second, instead of encouraging political parties and democracy, an imperialist needs to prevent them. Political parties incite people to action by blaming other ethnic groups for problems, and they spend all their time worrying about grabbing their peace of the pie. It's very easy for political parties to turn into actual gangs. Third, you cannot be afraid to issue the entire population ID cards, have curfews, checkpoints, population control, etc, until the region is pacified.

Do the above three things, and imperialism is easy. You can do it with 5,000 troops and turn a profit. But do it American style, where you are doing imperialism without admitting it, and you get disaster.

What does your (and the GP's) definition of "competent" mean, "imperialistic"? Were the native Americans less competent because they weren't always trying to expand and conquer? Looking at today's rat race, I don't think it's conclusive that we did a better job than they would have. Sure, it seems likely that we ended up with better medicine than they would have had by now, but the rest of it?

"I should probably mention that much of the reasoning behind the Bush invasion of Iraq was along these lines."

This statement seems extraordinarily naive to me. What is it based on?

Which native Americans? The Yaqui? Or the Iroquois, pre-league or post-league? Or the Chiricahua Apaches? Or the Pequot?

Each of those had their own unique culture, their own identity, their own language, their own technology. Some were cruel to their captives and in times of war; others were not. Some wanted to expand their territory and conquer lands and other tribes, while others had found territory to settle in and had no desire to expand, while still others were purely nomadic.

If you have any love at all for history, stop referring to all those pre-colonial nations under a single name and title. Doing so is a vestigial prejudice in our culture, and worst of all, it's completely destroying any chance we have of learning what they were actually like.

As to relative "competence" -- well, we've begun exploring space. So, I guess it all depends on what you consider to be important.

Any of them. They were all steam rolled by us.

>Some were cruel to their captives and in times of war; others were not.

What bearing does this have on anything? Most of the bad things we hear about were learned from someone else (e.g. scalping from the French).

>Some wanted to expand their territory and conquer lands and other tribes,

There was in-fighting between certain groups, but obviously none had the same appetite we did.

>If you have any love at all for history, stop referring to all those pre-colonial nations under a single name and title.

You seem to have an axe to grind. In normal usage, one provides as much detail as is relevant. If I were talking about people of earth in relation to some other alien race I would most likely say "humans" unless there was a real reason to be more specific.

So, if some alien race conquered our planet, destroyed nearly all of human culture -- and thus human history -- if not our species altogether, and then other members of that alien race said things like:

It's such a shame. Humans were so peaceful, so quaint. We could have learned so much from them, because all humans lived in great harmony with each-other and with their environment...

...Your reaction would be, "Well, that's about as much detail as is relevant, sure"?

Mine would be, "You're completely ignorant of human history, and that should change."

Scalping is a popular subject to bring up, because it's so simple, so easy to understand. It's not like all of the other varied forms of torture, which have to be described and require a certain amount of attention to discuss; instead, you just say, "...scalping...", and everybody goes, "Ohhhh yeah, that horrible thing that whites taught the innocent natives."

...but then, what were the French doing in South Dakota in 1350? [1]

Yes, I certainly do have an axe to grind, and it is this: history is rich, and amazing, and valuable, and I wish it to be taught and revered, and not swept under the Rug Of Oversimplification with statements like, "the Roman Empire was grand", and "native Americans were beautiful".

[1]: http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/paleopathology/crowcreek/vignet...

>It's such a shame. Humans were so peaceful, so quaint. We could have learned so much from them, because all humans lived in great harmony with each-other and with their environment...

>...Your reaction would be, "Well, that's about as much detail as is relevant, sure"?

No. In that case, they are making a blanket statement that all humans were peaceful, etc. In this case I was suggestion that the native Americans who were here before us were not necessarily inferior or incompetent. I think that statement stands for most any specific native American group, if not all.

>Yes, I certainly do have an axe to grind, and it is this: history is rich, and amazing, and valuable, and I wish it to be taught and revered, and not swept under the Rug Of Oversimplification with statements like, "the Roman Empire was grand", and "native Americans were beautiful".

Fair enough, but comments get long enough on their own without having to completely qualify every part of every point ever made.

The romanticized Indians where the victims bent, is a little old. The fact of the matter is the Indians (all distinctive cultures) where the looser in a bitter battle between two cultures. Both where right and both where wrong. Both committed atrocities that are appealing by today's standards. The white apologist thing is just neo-trendy but true history does not support your conclusion.

The fact of the matter is, for better or worse European and Asian cultures with the help at times from middle eastern cultures have bettered the human condition and history clearly supports that conclusion.

The grandparent post is right, society has congealed into functional and dysfunctional land masses. I would go so far as to state that it is a gradient, where land masses like the middle east are somewhere in between. Now we can stick our head and the sand and say it is not true and continue with the standard kumbaya, everybody is a winner, Disney movie observations, that it is not the case or we can accept that either culturally, geographically, racially, nutritionally or via some other unknown, there are regions that are prone to violence, rampant corruption, less innovation and political abuse / instability.

We will be none the better, until we come to that acceptance and formulate real solutions that address the real issue and not just band-aiding it with aid and dictator coddling. That just furthers the problem.

>The white apologist thing is just neo-trendy but true history does not support your conclusion.

History doesn't support my conclusion? We invaded some else's land and nearly wiped them out. Now what remains are spread out on reservations, little crops of land that had no value to us. You assertion that "Both where right and both were wrong" is nonsense. If some other country invaded the US today and started having that kind of "success" would you feel the same? American citizens would just be the losers in a bitter battle between two cultures? Somehow I don't think so.

>The grandparent post is right, society has congealed into functional and dysfunctional land masses.

No, you and the GGP both confuse what we have now for success. We don't have "functional and dysfunctional land masses", we have the land of the empires who were always conquering and the land of those who weren't as aggressive. As is usually the case; the first one to strike wins. That doesn't mean he is better or has more potential, just that he won. We can't know what would have happened otherwise. Perhaps we've ended up in the best situation we could have, or perhaps we could have reached a much higher level of enlightenment.

There is no way to know, but I find the framing of what happened as the best possible outcome (and by extension, everything that was done was correct) arrogant.

> We invaded some else's land and nearly wiped them out.

Wow, really? I though that new land was discovered and pilgrims from the English and dutch settled it, that there was a general cohabitation period and then the whites did not like the godless heathens and the godless heathens where stealing and raping women. So the whites decided to kill the infidels and the infidels decided to kill the whites. I don't remember where the Normandy style invasion happened perhaps you could point me to that in your revisionist history books? I suggest you go back and read some simple child history books like the story of Captain John Smith and how he was ambushed and almost executed. Or of the reason that the Dunmore's War was started.

>Wow, really? I though that new land was discovered and pilgrims from the English and dutch settled it

The pilgrims "discovered" land people were already living in. Does it occur to you that the country you live in might wish to paint themselves to be victims (or even noble!) regardless of what really happened?

>the godless heathens where stealing and raping women

Good thing it's so black and white! It would be less convenient if awful things were happening from both sides. Then it wouldn't be so obvious which side was good and which side was evil.

yes they discovered land just like the illegal Mexicans are discovering land, that affords them better opportunities. And to answer you question no I don't blame them, I would try to go somewhere that where more prosperous if I could. But just like the Indians tempers are starting to flair, it would only take a few incident to light that match and atrocities would be committed on both sides. Are the Mexicans the victims? They are the ones moving in. If the white man looses was he the peaceful victim?

The reason I being up the Mexicans is because we see this occurrence happen through history and it usually ends up in a violent confrontation that both parties excite. The Indians and white settlers are no exception to the same occurrences we see in modern history. If you think the Indians where sitting around baking bread and then all of the sudden for no reason whitey started killing them then you have a very warped sense of revisionist history.

Just read the story of Daniel Boone's son and how they butchered (and when I say butchered I mean butchered) him and it will give you some perspective as to why the pilgrims started to war with the Indians. I mean everyone wants to make whitey the baby killers and here we are with documented accounts of multiple occasions of Indians butchering men's entire families (even the little babies) as revenge and intimidation tactics.

I we did the same to some illegal Mexicans you could be sure that they would want revenge for such atrocities. And once a populist attitude of indiference ot another race or culture has set in it is verry hard to reverse course, whch eventual leads to the total destruction of one of the two cometing cultures.

Israel and the middle east is a good example of this unrepentant attitude. As ws Kosovo, this is history as usual so please don't try to rewrite it to fit you own world view. It is as it is, human nature is as it is and you just have to accept it, until you and others do you are doing everyone a disservice, as solutions need to be derived from real problems and not once idea of what the problem should have been. You are denying the Indians their history and their plight for survival by making them wimps that where just the victims.

I'm a little amused by this exchange, since ideologically I'm probably somewhere between the two of you. There was indeed a wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the native populations in America during the 1800s, and by today's standards, much of it would be considered unconscionable.

But mostly, I'm interested in the facts of history, so I should point out that the "illegal" Mexicans are "discovering" land which used to be theirs in the first place. The current United States western and southwestern were already occupied by Mexico, up until the Mexican-American War, which ended with the United States forcibly buying the land from Mexico for a rather cheap sum.

It's also worth pointing out that the United States government probably already had an inkling of the natural value of California; the great California gold rush began less than a year later, and had that territory still been occupied by Mexico, it would have dramatically changed the balance of power in the Americas.

My point was that settling for prosperity as well as refugees was natural part of human history and that usually when two cultures clash it is not a peaceful event.

If one would not blame the Mexicans today for their peaceful search for a better life (which could latter turn violent on both sides), then why would they blame the pilgrims? Just because they are white?

When the story is told by someone whit a bent the white man had murderous intent from the second he set out from Europe and that is the furthest from the truth. The fact of the matter is that most where refugees and the impoverished looking for a better life, in a land that (to them) had a lot of vacant space.

My point is not that the Indians where the devil and that White man where saints, it has been that history is history and it has no room for revision and when you see someone taking different views for the same event with different parties being the actors, you can be sure that they have an agenda. A very popular one is the white man butchered the Indians and robbed them of their land. While also being a supporter of the Mexican migration.

The Mexicans may have not been the best example, as they would be an example of someone who has a more legitimate gripe about white Americans than the Indians.

> "Appealing" by today's standards.

Amusing slip, but the sad thing is some people would agree with this statement.

yes that was supposed to be appalling. I will leave it as is so that your comment stands.

For "competent", I think an adequate definition would be "Having the institutions in place that encourage technological innovation and then allow the fruits of that innovation to spread freely through the population."

Happiness is a funny thing, because it tends to depend more on relative status than on absolute standard of living. We can look back now and say those people were so primitive and boy am I glad I live today (well, except you ;-)), but that doesn't really the fact that we murdered a few million people who were probably quite happy with their life the way it was. It'd probably be morally unacceptable today, but it happened.

I'm not trying to make a moral judgment here. My comment is an argument based on facts - "this is what happened, this is how things tend to work extrapolating from what happened, and here is why it is still relevant today." If you want to make a morality play out of it, go for it - I don't exactly think that the native American genocide or Bush's justification for Iraq was a particularly nice thing to do either. But I think a debate on how things work is a bit more productive than a debate on how things should work.

"This statement seems extraordinarily naive to me. What is it based on?"

It's based largely on personal memory of a lot of the things said during the lead-up to the invasion. "Beacon of democracy" was used several times in his press releases to drum up support for the war. The "domino theory" of liberalization was discussed in my International Relations course. In both the Bush and Kerry campaigns, there were widespread discussions about how to "win the peace".

This is an extreme nitpick, but the American Indians (most American Indians prefer this name over "Native American," but see Wikipedia for more details on the name question) weren't entirely happy with how they were living, as of the time of the European colonization... So they fixed it.

The parts of the Jesuit Relations dealing with the Jesuits' first missionary work among the Hurons relates how the Hurons weren't particularly interested in accepting or rejecting the Jesuits' religious message; what they were interested in was how to build French-style houses. The Cherokee tribe took this even further than the Hurons, developing a syllabic script, and assimilating completely to the norms of the American South (even to the point of owning African slaves, unfortunately).

Personally, my complaint about the wars with the American Indians is not that the United States all but annihilated deadly enemies like the Iroquois and the Sioux (although coexistence with them would have been better, and we're doing a little better that way at present); my objection is that the United States all but annihilated peoples like the Cherokee, who were better Europeans than most of the American frontiersmen who wanted them displaced. Like the American Indian casinos, I try to avoid twenty-dollar bills.

>(well, except you ;-)

Don't get me wrong; I love my mac book pro, my smart phone, playing silly RPG games, watching movies and so on.

I'm simply not prepared to claim that having these things makes me superior to other ways of life. It's different, but it's hard to say superior when a pie chart of how my life is spent would be made up mostly of work and sleep.

>It's based largely on personal memory of a lot of the things said during the lead-up to the invasion. "Beacon of democracy" was used several times in his press releases to drum up support for the war. The "domino theory" of liberalization was discussed in my International Relations course. In both the Bush and Kerry campaigns, there were widespread discussions about how to "win the peace".

I would recommend to you the BBC film "The power of nightmares". I do believe actual terrorists are responsible for 9/11, but I think nearly everything else we've seen or heard (Al Quieda and so on) is very much exaggerated or lied about (I don't buy this "we need a beacon of freedom" at all). As far as I can tell, the biggest thing that has actually happened from the Iraq war is a lot of tax payer money being transfered into the pockets of companies owned by people in Bush's staff.

Oh, I don't doubt that nearly everything we've seen or heard is exaggerated.

I make a claim about what the Bush administration's rationale for going to war was, not whether I believe that rationale is justified. To my knowledge, it's a factual and at least partially correct claim.

maybe one of you could show at least one example of a "competent" nation conquering disfunctional ones before building your complete world view on it.

The first that comes to mind is the Ottoman empire. World power in the 1600-1700s, but it failed to develop the institutions mentioned in this article and fell to Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Britain over the latter half of the 1800s.

Lithuania. Largest country in Europe in the 14th century. Lost large sections of its territory to Sweden and Russia in the late 1600s and 1700s.

All of the Native American nations that were swept aside by the United States. Much of that was because of disease, but a lot was also because the U.S. was better organized and could pick off individual tribes one-by-one.

Mongolia. Genghis Khan's empire, once one of the largest on earth. Great fighters, poor administrators. Eventually overshadowed by China.

Agree with you on all but the last example; I think the Mongol Empire was one of the marvels of human history, in terms of sheer size and coordination. It succeeded in uniting friendly tribes and warring tribes alike by allowing them to retain their cultural traditions and self-administrate, so long as it didn't violate Mongol law.

Unfortunately, the government that developed was mostly a dictatorship, and as usual it was relatively short-lived once some key family members died off and left an opportunity for others to squabble.

I think the other thing is that governments rot: almost every state begins cohesive and ends decadent. The Mongols went from cohesive to decadent in less than a generation; the North African groups that ibn Khaldun lived among tended to last 2-3 generations; the western Roman Empire lasted somewhere around 1400 years.

The history of the rulers of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul also illustrates this cycle. The Byzantines began dynamic and powerful, then they became self-seeking and were conquered by the fiercely cohesive Ottoman Turks (omitting the history of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, which went through this cycle almost as quickly as the Mongols did), then the Ottoman Turks went from fiercely cohesive to fiercely self-interested (look up the Auspicious Incident) and collapsed in turn.

Now, the collapse part of the cycle is slowed down by a world peace that will last until/unless the United States disintegrates (and it's in trouble; look at the self-serving corruption of groups as unlike each other as the Pentagon and the labor unions) -- but I discussed both the merits and the problems of this situation in another post on this subject.

Roman Empire? Pretty much all empires through history? Of course "competent" can be interpreted a lot of different ways.

It's not always fun to have a competent foreign power administrating your country...

> maybe one of you could show at least one example of a "competent" nation conquering disfunctional ones before building your complete world view on it.

Countries with a mix of a stable economy, advanced technology, and organized military regularly conquered their neighbors that didn't have those things. Countries with the tech/military but not the stable economy (USSR, for instance) could have a brief go at it, but inevitably came down upon themselves.

What sort of examples were you looking for? Nations with the combination advanced technology relative to their neighbors and a well organized military have done a lot of conquering throughout history, and those with stable economies held onto their new possessions. There's so many examples I wouldn't know where to start. Rome and all of its possessions would be a decent place, or one of the many functional or dysfunctional Russian Empires, or the Unification of Japan under the Oda, Toyotomi, and Tokugawa daimyos, or Manifest Destiny in the United States...

Those are just a few to come to mind with the economy/tech/military edges, but there's quite literally hundreds, from little tiny islands taking over other little tiny islands in Oceania to the various international powers/empires. Maybe the question is with the word competent? You do need a healthy economy, advanced technology, and stable military, which in turn requires some sort of decent courts, checks and balances on military rule, some science and production happening, and so on. Complicated question - could probably go on more if you clarified a bit.

I don't think it holds anymore - people of successful countries have really soured on the whole conquest idea after WW2. Which is why I think these handicapped countries still exist and will continue to exist.

Some haven't and are engaged in it outright or through proxy. China claims all of the South China Sea (and islands) to be theirs. Ethiopia, I personally believe, is just still playing with the idea of taking parts of Somalia. This would be done already if their government wasn't already corrupt. And Morocco still claims Western Sahara, a quasi independent nation with no formal government.

And don't even get me start on Israel and the west bank.

They also forgot the conquering usually also involved intentional, thorough genocide (as opposed to picking people off piecemeal, as they are now) and/or enslavement of the conquered people.

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