Guns Germs and "Caucasians"

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Guns, Germs, and Steel, is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

Jared Diamond puts a fairly positive spin on his apologetics for European conquest and generally puts the blame on diseases and the domestic cow. I'm not one for apologetics but I do believe in getting the story straight and/or tell the whole story.



Here's a point I think he missed but it's been a while since I read the book:

Imperialist cultures grow in populated areas usually in confined geography like peninsulas or narrow "land bridges". These cultures are forced into arms races against other men. The conquered cultures and intrepid peoples historically and respectively retreated and moved into empty geography and they spent centuries where they only had an arms race against animals where spear and arrows sufficed. Hence, the arms gap between conquered and conquerors. It's not intellectual as he admits. But it's not due to agriculture or the common cow.

These two extreme cultures also have a psychological difference based on the same "geographical and physiological" backgrounds.

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Here's a quote from Wikipedia (Guns, Germs and Steel) which details Jared Diamond's theories most closely resembling what I'm talking about.

Diamond also proposes geographical explanations for why western European societies, rather than other Eurasian powers such as China, have been the dominant colonizers, claiming Europe's geography favored balkanization into smaller, closer, nation-states, bordered by natural barriers of mountains, rivers, and coastline. Threats posed by immediate neighbours ensured governments that suppressed economic and technological progress soon corrected their mistakes or were outcompeted relatively quickly, whilst the region's leading powers changed over time. Other advanced cultures developed in areas whose geography was conducive to large, monolithic, isolated empires, without competitors that might have forced the nation to reverse mistaken policies such as China banning the building of ocean-going ships.

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Okay from my research, it seems the Americas were well settled by 1000 BC and well populated by 1300 compared to Europe. Maybe 100 million in Europe and maybe 50-100 million in the Americas. So the First Nations people weren't still just moving into empty geograph. But the area of the Americas is four times that of Europe so the population density would be over four times higher in Europe.


Jared Diamond's geographic profile does make the difference. But I don't think he mentions the psychological differences effected by the geography of balkanization and the internal strife. Just because someone has an advantage doesn't mean he has to go and use that advantage against someone. That goes back to psychology. Unless you want to say both cultures had the same psychology and the First Nations would have done the same thing under the same circumstances.

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We now know where the advantage came from and it was centuries of close-quarters brutality.

There was obviously a race to dominate the coming age of "wonders and technology". But the question is whether every nationality or race of people would go beyond self preservation alone and venture into the quest for world domination. Would they see themselves as divine, chosen, special, superior, or simply competitive or as the greater good or a lesser evil?

Not every culture would even want to dominate a world of technology or engage in the means necessary to do so.

In the final analysis, there should be no reason to engage in apologetics for wholesale genocide that explain the evils away as if they were the inevitable result of circumstances imposed by chance on naive people giving them unconscious advantages they were compelled to use "unwittingly" against an opponent without the same advantages.

[Panth]

Everyone’s following the white blueprint (white print). No way whites should be decrying any type of violence. I won’t decry theirs if they don’t.

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You're right, Panth. It's unseemly. Historically hypocritical.

They think they've overcome. Meanwhile, they overcame once they got where they needed to get. It's what got them there physically and every other way. Even mentally. 

The same methods are still being used in inner cities, consciously or not. And around the world. You can't build a country with people from conflict zones without having conflict zones.