Er, the American push westwards was quite nightmarish and genocidal, and US homesteaders appropriated land much like Hitler planned to do.
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.
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.
It wasn't productive like the US territory was. It was mostly inhospitable tundra. The bolsheviks weren't an economic superpower for the same reason the canadians aren't.
> Still to this day, Russia underdelivers, given its vast resources --natural and human/intellectual.
Russia is the 8th largest economy in the world.
Russia's problem is that their vast territory is also their achilles heel. They stole land from japan and skorea and every other nation on its border. China, germany, turkey, ukraine, iran, mongolia, etc...
Their land is a blessing AND a curse. Russia can't fully trade with china or japan because of territorial issues. So they didn't fully capitalize on japan's economic miracle. And now they aren't fully capitalizing on china's economic miracle.
Politics and power are an unforgiving discipline. If russia keeps missing out on opportunities and keeps falling behind, the russian empire is going to collapse. Doesn't matter how many nukes they have or now powerful they think they are.
What separates the US and russia is this. After ww2, russia stole a bunch of islands from japan and annexed it. That's why japan and russia still haven't signed a peace treaty. The US returned okinawa. We didn't steal it so we can have normal relations with japan.
Maybe you have a point, but it's not the whole point. I think they wear a heavy shackle of ancient culture. One which has acclimatized them over centuries to a serf-state mindset they have not broken out of. It's very patriarchal (or statist). The state is their master in more ways than one. It'll take a cultural shift in the newer generations to shake it and allow them to achieve their potential.
That makes it sound as if Russia and the former USSR are one and the same. They're not.
A better way to restate that sentence is, "The USSR under delivered, in spite of its vast resources - natural and human/intellectual."
And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. In an atmosphere where fear and uncertainty rules, individual and group creativity suffers.
Russia is doing better in that area, though there's still a lot of room for improvement. But it is a young country. Some old habits from the former USSR still lingers, which is expected given that most of the current leadership grew up in the former USSR. It take at least one generation to shake bad habits.
Some would suggest it was the lack of incentives to independently pursue success. There's little point in working hard to get ahead if it is going to be taken from you.
(This is why the political scene is so hard to decipher, nobody in russia pays any attention to the stated aims or motives and conspiracy theories are the default mindset)
Think about eminent domain and how it has and can be used against those with a property that the ruling class needs to have.
That might seem like a stretch, but not if you're at the receiving end.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/20/business/east-germany-s-ec...
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.
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.
But I'm open to the idea if you have more than just hand-waving to offer.
I, for one, disagree with the idea that the "buffalo jump" was all that prevalent and had a measurable impact, compared to the whites driving the buffalos to what they are now....
I lived next to one. Try again.
So? That doesn't make it "prevalent", and even less makes it important next to white era's extinction of buffalo.
The only thing "I lived next to one" proves is that at least one existed. And we knew that already -- we also knew a lot more than one existed.
I am not.
No, he just took it 3-4 orders of magnitude higher.
(And even as a white man, I see some racism in your comment).
In total over time, maybe. However, it is pretty clear who got the number of bison to less than 600 in the 19th century.
>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.
If the point about the buffalo is correct, then how does this post otherwise misrepresent Native Americans? It seems like you latched onto this mention of buffalo to make a completely unrelated point about Native Americans.
Of course they are.
We shouldn't use this to neutralize who did the really horrible things to whom though. They were the victims here.
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
Even after disease supposedly wiped out the indians, we could only push the indians past the appalachians in the 1760s.
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.
The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
Highly doubtful. The Dorset culture probably died off due to change in climate and their failure to adapt rather than inuits traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to kill the dorset.
Not to mention that these dorset was a tiny population already in significant decline.
There is a world of difference between the inuits and dorsets. Hell the norse and europeans were in contact with dorset long before the inuit. Perhaps it was european "disease" or raids that wipe them out...
Nobody really knows. But what we know is that they were a dying peoples long before the inuits came around.
It's simply not plausible that such a widely dispersed culture would disappear in such a short time due to climate change.
Disease transmitted from Norse settlers/traders being the cause is also not plausible, as the Dorset disappeared first in the Western stretch of Northern N. America, where the Thule were expanding from, rather than the East, where they would have first had contact with the Norse. Competition from an invasive culture, the Thule, is the likely cause.
Absolutely. But lets also not pretend that the natives were racially motivated genocidal maniacs 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.
Sure. But they need to do so in order to survive. And lets not forget that we hunted the comanche like animals and wiped them out. Settlers were encouraged to hunt indians and bring their scalps in exchange of money.
> There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture.
Even if they were the most peaceful buddhists, they would have been wiped out. We wanted their land and they simply had no choice. It's pretty idiotic to blame the comanches for fighting back.
> 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.
It was wrong no matter what century you are in.
> We simply don't have the context to judge them.
If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
What happened to the natives was the greatest extermination campaign in history. The holocaust was a joke compared to what happened to the natives.
To emphasize this point, there are more jews in the US than there are natives...
All the rest are good points, but this is an emotional non-sequitur. The reason we don't have context to judge is because we live lives of comfort today, we have no idea what it was like to move into the Wild West and the danger and hardship that entailed.
Of course I agree genocide is bad, that doesn't make me equipped to judge people who lived 200 years ago based on hazy historical generalities.
Do you have any sources for that. The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
Yes, it called history and biology. Disease doesn't work that way and history proves it didn't work that way.
> The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
Sure, but jared diamond's silly book is what made it mainstream. No serious historian takes that theory serious because science and history says that didn't happen.
> It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
North American civilization didn't get completely destroyed until well after the civil war when mass european migration and the invention of machine guns, the expansion of railroads, etc gave american settlers a huge advantage.
> Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
And like I said, the border that the colonists and the indians drew in 1763 was the appalachian mountains. The colonists were confined to a tiny sliver of land on the eastern seaboard. If disease wiped out the natives, why would the colonists take so little land? Why would the border between "america" and indian lands be divided in such a manner.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The US cotton plantations were part of a primarily agricultural economy, which is arguably a different thing than an industrial economy. There was industry, but it was mostly not slave based.
Cotton, Antebellum cotton, was the - the feedstock for the British textile portion of the Industrial Revolution - which was in Britain, the main event. Cotton went "offline" during the American Civil War so the Brits simply found other sources elsewhere in the Empire.
IMO, we can view American chattel slavery as in an intermediate state between Mercantilist ... modes and Capitalist modes. Once a royal patent on a trade system was granted, it was very difficult for a king to control the patent holder. See also Adam Smith...
Once (proto) capitalism began in earnest in the U.S., slavery presented challenges to the establishment of law that proved insurmountable. Free labor in the North also saw fit to take up arms against slavery. Lincoln saw this clearly and it's worth taking him both metaphorically/poetically as well as literally.
It's all a tangled mess of counterfactuals. The aristocrats in the South were definitely riding the tiger, and could not afford to compromise on the Peculiar Institution.
The threat of losing your job if you don't work under stipulated conditions, especially when those conditions are live threatening, creates a slave-labor condition.
Sure, you could quit, but you've got bills to pay and mouths to feed, so you slave on.
Take what's happening to foreign workers in Qatar, for example. There's really no direct threat of violence, but workers die daily because the working conditions are that dangerous.
Because when Americans do it, it's forgivable, inconsequential, wholesome, even valiant, but when Germans do it, it's monstrous.