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Phanatic posted:Pulsejets: not just for dropping on London anymore. I am...not entirely sure I'd be comfortable next to a giant tube of metal glowing red that close to me. I'm not sure if the fact that it's releasing the FART OF THE MACHINE GODS makes it more or less terrifying.
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Mar 8, 2020 10:43
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Splode posted:edit: an even briefer summary. This argument claims "if the british hadn't shown up, they'd still be subsistence farmers" even though in every situation I can think of, the countries that didn't get colonised still immediately saw poo poo like trains and tractors and went "holy poo poo I want one of those!" Even into the 1880s and 90s, in the leadup to the First Sino-Japanese war, most decision makers in China (Li Hongzhang and his clique being the peculiar outliers) were just uninterested or plain committed against trying to modernize their economies. They bought the ships and guns and ammunition for the Beiyang Fleet from Europe, but what they had natively built for artillery and small arms was still old, either in how it was made or when it was made. And that was just part of a tapestry of opposition to industrialization. It wasn't out of stupidity - a westernized military (which was always the first thing to be westernized) would have been a direct threat to the dynasty, and as it turned out that exactly happened in 1911. And even after the humiliations of the 1890s, the Hundred Days Reform is attacked by members of the bureaucracy before Cixi cuts it down. In Japan, decision makers in the early Meiji government saw the opportunities that industrialization offered, but there it led to a lot of social turmoil, first from the samurai class and then from the peasantry as land consolidated under huge estates. It was only with the dramatic victories over China in the Sino-Japanese war that the government demonstrated "Look! This huge, traumatic transformation we've taken benefited us all!" and everyone decided it was necessary. So just seeing an ironclad wasn't enough for everyone to decide "oh, time to throw out a tried and tested ideological framework because there's this new stuff foreigners say is the bee's knees."
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Mar 8, 2020 12:04
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Schadenboner posted:I mean, AGAB*, but I also imagine the fact that the German Navy had a literal communist rebellion at the end of WWI might play a part in deciding which branch any aspiring leftists go into.
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Mar 8, 2020 13:00
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used to say he had a Nazi Air Force, a Conservative Army, and a Communist Navy and what discussion of it I’ve seen (which consists exclusively of whatever they covered in the Third Reich Trilogy) largely bears this out (for other ranks, obviously: naval officers were probably just as nobby as those from any other branch?).
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Splode posted:After all, there are plenty of countries that avoided being colonised and just built railroads by hiring experts and buying engines. Hiring experts and buying engines and rather more importantly laying track is expensive, though. Britain and France could afford to make that up front investment if the returns from doing so were sufficiently lucrative in the long run, and their investment was less because they already had the expertise to build and run a railway without needing to hire it in. Independent dirt poor African countries don't, and therefore have to partner with someone else, and that someone else will then extract some or all of the profit in exchange for their investment. That's western businesses in post-colonial Africa in the 20th century, and increasingly China in the 21st.
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Mar 8, 2020 13:04
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Radio Free Kobold posted:no no, AGAB is correct. it's only a matter of time until they ruin europe yet again. All Goons Are Bastards?
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Mar 8, 2020 13:44
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All Grognards Are Bastards
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Mar 8, 2020 13:55
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MikeCrotch posted:I also imagine the fact that the German Navy had a literal communist rebellion at the end of WWI might play a part in deciding which branch any aspiring leftists go into. Might also play a part in deciding which branch the authories decide to enforce ideological conformity in, though, too.
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Mar 8, 2020 14:37
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Schadenboner posted:both homoerotic and proletarian? "Exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish" --Maxim Gorky, 1934
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Mar 8, 2020 14:56
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MikeCrotch posted:I also imagine the fact that the German Navy had a literal communist rebellion at the end of WWI might play a part in deciding which branch any aspiring leftists go into. And didn't the Luftwaffe get its start masquerading as a Hitler Youth glider program to get around the Versailles Treaty restrictions, meaning you had to be a Nazi in order to be a pilot? And the Army being conservatives is kind of well established, to explain the adage. Maybe there's something about navies/sailors in general that gave them an image of being leftists, battleship Potemkin, Kronstadt sailors, the mutinies of the HSF etc.
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Mar 8, 2020 15:33
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Grimnarsson posted:And didn't the Luftwaffe get its start masquerading as a Hitler Youth glider program to get around the Versailles Treaty restrictions, meaning you had to be a Nazi in order to be a pilot? And the Army being conservatives is kind of well established, to explain the adage. Throughout history sailors have been treated like utter dogshit so them being on the left seems rather natural. It's wonder more officers didnt disappear over the side on moonless nights.
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Mar 8, 2020 15:54
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HEY GUNS posted:at the time, Communism would have been virulently opposed to any queer stuff, which was also officially "fascist." Barring the early decriminalization in Russia which was officially sidelined and some very late East Germans who learned West Germany was somewhat homophobic and attempted to launch official pro-gay attitudes, assuming communism was pro-gay is a twenty-first century reading. How'd they come to the conclusion that queer stuff was "fascist"?
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Mar 8, 2020 16:00
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MikeCrotch posted:I also imagine the fact that the German Navy had a literal communist rebellion at the end of WWI might play a part in deciding which branch any aspiring leftists go into. Aspiring leftists went into exile or the concentration camps, comrade.
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Mar 8, 2020 16:24
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Squalid posted:That doesn't really debunk your point, since it's rather hard to argue the south would have been better off with no railroads, assuming you keep everything else the same. As far as I've looked into it all the evidence supports that colonial era investment in places like Africa continue to pay dividends to this day. There was one survey of French West Africa I looked at which found even something as small as constructing a single maternity ward in 1900 is still associated with better health today in the local region. I want to preface this by saying that you're not wrong, that those colonial era improvements did have some long term benefits, but there are a few other things that need to be taken into account. A lot of those improvements have also caused lasting damage. The best example of this is the interconnections (or lack thereof) between African states and, more importantly, African economies today. All of that infrastructure was built with purely the extractive needs of the colonial power in mind. Railroads, for example, pretty much only ran from major ports into the interior.  Note by the way that different colonial powers used different rail gauges and standards. Even if you interconnected all that tomorrow you're not going to be able to travel seamlessly from one end to the other. This is fine if you want to make sure that rubber (or ivory, or gold, or whatever) gets from a few hundred miles inside the continent to a port and thence to Britain or France. It does gently caress all, however, for tying together Africa itself. To this day it is much easier to travel from, say, Lagos to Paris than Lagos to Monrovia, despite the latter pair being relatively close to each other compared to Paris. Air travel is a big part of this, but it's worth noting that even air networks inside africa can be affected by this. There are many more Africa -> Europe air routes than air routes connecting major african cities. There are no direct flights, for example, between Lagos and Kinshasa. That would be like if there was no way to go directly from LA to Chicago. It's kind of bonkers. Flights inside africa also tend to be more expensive and take longer. This can also be seen in terms of exports. Cameroon is a pretty typical, moderately successful economy that still exports a lot of resources and commodities. Rather than trade with its neighbors, though, the majority of its goods go to either the EU or China.  It sends about as much to France as it does the rest of the continent it's on. Part of this, of course, also comes down to how the colonial powers invested in their colonies. You didn't see much investment in actual manufacturing, which meant that after independence they were still very much dependent economically on outside countries. Importantly this is true for the continent, so you don't even see raw materials being sent to neighbors for refining and manufacture. Compare this to a smallish European country, the Netherlands. Their exports go largely to other European countries, with their nearest neighbors being their largest trade partners.  Germany is probably to be expected given the size of its economy, but Belgium-Luxembourg accounts for almost as much. That's something you SHOULD be seeing with Cameroon, but the poo poo connections to its neighbors make that much more difficult. Finally, the argument about what colonialism gave the colonies presupposes that they wouldn't have developed anything on their own. The educational systems in the colonies is a pretty good way to eyeball that. To put it simply, the lack of local experts educated in anything beyond colonial administration was a huge drag on the economies of these places after independence. You point to the example of a clinic improving health to this day, but who is to say that left to their own devices and without European powers dictating their political and economic development for north of a hundred years they wouldn't have educated their own doctors and built their own clinics? A lot of this gets really dependent on local context. Who are the local leaders, how are they going to rule, etc. But, for ever example of a country where terrible leadership never invested and they lagged behind the rest of the world, others can be found where staying away from foreign influence allowed them to really jump start their own development. Maybe you have some African Afghanistans, but maybe you also have some African Japans.
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Mar 8, 2020 16:31
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Dance Officer posted:Aspiring leftists went into exile or the concentration camps, comrade. Aspiring? I don't know about that. The people you see going into the camps or into exile tend to be the already established people taking political action in the early 30s. The KPD got 15% of the vote in 1932, and the SPD got 21%. Setting aside the question of whether the KPD considered the SPD leftists, the Nazis of the time targeted SPD leaders, many of whom went into exile and some into the camps - same as KPD leadership. In total that's over a third of voters who pulled the lever for what the Nazis at least considered leftist parties, and nothing close to a third of the population went into exile or was put into camps. The vast, vast majority of leftists who weren't leadership just kept their heads down and tried to survive the next decade.
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Mar 8, 2020 16:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:Aspiring? I don't know about that. The people you see going into the camps or into exile tend to be the already established people taking political action in the early 30s. The KPD got 15% of the vote in 1932, and the SPD got 21%. Setting aside the question of whether the KPD considered the SPD leftists, the Nazis of the time targeted SPD leaders, many of whom went into exile and some into the camps - same as KPD leadership. In total that's over a third of voters who pulled the lever for what the Nazis at least considered leftist parties, and nothing close to a third of the population went into exile or was put into camps. There were actually attempts by the Nazis to reach out to rank and file Socialists and Communists (as opposed to the leaders and activists, who they violently suppressed), and before the Nazis came to power, the SA worked hard in trying to bring over Communists. The idea of Socialists and Communists switching to the Nazis got to be so common that some Nazis coined the derogatory term "Beefsteak Nazis" to describe them....brown on the outside, red on the inside. xthetenth posted:How'd they come to the conclusion that queer stuff was "fascist"? A lot of it was just that the Soviet Union linked everything they didn't like to fascism. Gorky's essay, though, which came out when homosexuality was recriminalized, and was probably written with the help of Stalin, said that, basically. the difference between the Soviet Union and the west was that the Russian soul is elemental and primal, and that Communism was harnessing this basic strength of the Russian people into intellectual and technological achievements, while the capitalist west was "overcivilized" and decadent. Capitalism used fascism to organize and mobilize the physically and morally depraved into positions of power...alcoholics, syphilitics, the hysterical, the mentally ill, in contrast to Communism, which is building the perfect man. Among the disgusting features of fascism is homosexuality, which is depraved and corrupting. So, in a good Communist society, homosexuality is criminalized, because it destroys and corrupts the nation's youth, whereas in societies like German, it's encouraged, and thereby trains youth in sadism, cynicism, and murder. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Mar 8, 2020 |
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Mar 8, 2020 17:04
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Epicurius posted:"Beefsteak Nazis" to describe them....brown on the outside, red on the inside. Lol I hadn't head of that one.
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Mar 8, 2020 17:09
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xthetenth posted:How'd they come to the conclusion that queer stuff was "fascist"? Ernst Roehm I guess? I'd have expected more 'decadent capitalist' myself, though.
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Mar 8, 2020 17:28
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Epicurius posted:A lot of it was just that the Soviet Union linked everything they didn't like to fascism. Gorky's essay, though, which came out when homosexuality was recriminalized, and was probably written with the help of Stalin, said that, basically. the difference between the Soviet Union and the west was that the Russian soul is elemental and primal, and that Communism was harnessing this basic strength of the Russian people into intellectual and technological achievements, while the capitalist west was "overcivilized" and decadent. Capitalism used fascism to organize and mobilize the physically and morally depraved into positions of power...alcoholics, syphilitics, the hysterical, the mentally ill, in contrast to Communism, which is building the perfect man. Among the disgusting features of fascism is homosexuality, which is depraved and corrupting. So, in a good Communist society, homosexuality is criminalized, because it destroys and corrupts the nation's youth, whereas in societies like German, it's encouraged, and thereby trains youth in sadism, cynicism, and murder. The insane thing is, if you swap Communism and Fascism in your description, you could get something Hitler would say. At the extreme ends, Communism and Fascism seemingly are mirrors of each other.
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Mar 8, 2020 17:35
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Libluini posted:The insane thing is, if you swap Communism and Fascism in your description, you could get something Hitler would say. At the extreme ends, Communism and Fascism seemingly are mirrors of each other. Something something horseshoe theory. Theres kind of an important difference between the two if you happen to be eg Jewish though, Doctors' Plot notwithstanding.
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Mar 8, 2020 17:45
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Epicurius posted:Beefstake Nazis I'm going to sort of ramble fairly unrelatedly here but: Contemporary rightists having latched onto the "Socialist" part of "National Socialism" and going all  on it is unfortunate because there really are some interesting threads to pull in the enormous and terrible ball of string that was fin de siècle/interwar mass political consciousness in Europe. Industrialization creating new class-based solidarities didn't magically make old religious/ethnic/regional based solidarities disappear and there really were right-wing socialisms (in a very different sense than the Stalinites used the term, obvs.) who truly conceived of themselves as socialist (or at least "anti-capitalist" which can sometimes have a different meaning in a society like Europe where there actually was a pre-Capitalist past versus America where it's always been more-or-less the dominant economic structure). They constructed their system with dual sources of valence for solidarity: nationalism and class and generally identified capitalism as an invention or tool of "World Jewry" (one of the easiest ways to distinguish right wing socialisms is their common term "Finance Capitalism" since Jews were historically prominent in European banking for reasons mostly revolving around money lending).You're Hans the Steel-Pouring-Guy and the factory owner is a Jew. One day he's a bit of a poo poo to you, that night while you're screaming about it your girlfriend who works in the front office said Inga (one of the other gals in the typing pool) said he made an importune suggestion towards her, you've got 2000 years of accumulated European religious and secular culture telling you about the well known clannishness and mendacity of the Christ-killing Jews, your grandfather (whenever he was deep enough in the brandy, which was most of the time) used to rant about how the Jew agricultural buyers all conspired together to pay the local farmers less than their milk was worth and how that was why your father had to move to the city and send money home, you start putting it all together: you finally get around to reading those pamphlets your buddy Fritz keeps giving you about the coming German Workers Revolution (and everyone knows Jews aren't Germans: in fact, back during the Great War, they all shirked front-fighting service and slunk around behind the lines*). Next thing you know you're at some meeting wearing a poo poo-colored shirt, today there's a guest speaker from Britain: a fat guy in black shorts who keeps going on about the importance of bicycles and umbrellas and root vegetables.  This having been said,  was supremely cynical in his use of socialist rhetoric and was funded from day one by the German Army and then by German Capitalists, he was never going to implement pro-worker policies, when the Nazis rose to power they ruthlessly coordinated working class organizations (for example, unions) and Nazi socialists that weren't already gone generally got shot and buried in forests on the Night of Long Knives.Operationally if someone comes at you with that "Nazis were the real socialists!11!!!" poo poo it's almost certain they don't actually know anything about Strasser or Third Positionism and they aren't interested in teasing out with you what Marx meant when he called antisemitism the socialism of fools. They're arguing from mendacity not from a desire to get a better peek at Clio's tiddies and should be dealt with in a manner appropriate for rightists but pre-WW2 working class intellectual/ideological history is loving fascinating (the only specifically German stuff I know is from the first two books of the Third Reich Trilogy (pre-1933 and pre-1939) but I'd love to read more). *: Even in a farrago of bullshit I feel it's necessary to point out that this was manifestly untrue: the "Jewish Census" commissioned by rightist elements in the Imperial German Army (and talk about a set within a set) in 1916 found that Jews were wildly over-represented in combat arms. Of course the rightist elements were men of honor and Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Mar 8, 2020 |
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Mar 8, 2020 18:14
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Cyrano4747 posted:I want to preface this by saying that you're not wrong, that those colonial era improvements did have some long term benefits, but there are a few other things that need to be taken into account. A lot of those improvements have also caused lasting damage. That's not a unique colonial problem though is it? That's just the way that 19th century railroads tended to be. There was a lack of consideration for very long distance travel, and between immediate practicality of a gauge for individual areas as well as competition between different industrialists meant a bunch of different gauges got adopted, and would later have to be ripped out if you wanted to connect places more effectively. Just look at the guage variation within the US (which you can also say demonstrates just how much less investment there was in Africa from the sheer density).  Africa never "fixed" their rail disparity between their lack of wealth to invest with and the fact that they're not even necessarily motivated to help their neighbors or build closer connections with them, since in many ways they're rivals. I know that there's a lot of war in that part the world still, are there any wars of conquest or neighbors supporting local rebels to sabotage eachother? Although it is a definite fact that colonization still left Europeans with a foot in the door for later corporate domination. Not just infrastructure, but leaving behind people who spoke European languages for future interactions. Cyrano4747 posted:Finally, the argument about what colonialism gave the colonies presupposes that they wouldn't have developed anything on their own. The educational systems in the colonies is a pretty good way to eyeball that. To put it simply, the lack of local experts educated in anything beyond colonial administration was a huge drag on the economies of these places after independence. You point to the example of a clinic improving health to this day, but who is to say that left to their own devices and without European powers dictating their political and economic development for north of a hundred years they wouldn't have educated their own doctors and built their own clinics? A lot of this gets really dependent on local context. Who are the local leaders, how are they going to rule, etc. But, for ever example of a country where terrible leadership never invested and they lagged behind the rest of the world, others can be found where staying away from foreign influence allowed them to really jump start their own development. Maybe you have some African Afghanistans, but maybe you also have some African Japans. That's a great statement, and it's near-impossible to figure what colonized areas could've been if they managed to muster local innovation rather than being dominated and westernized by force. I have no doubt that there were inefficiencies involved in cultural differences that led to not utilizing people to their full potential, between racism that would leave laborers doing less-skilled jobs and not being paid enough to stimulate local economies or ignorance of local knowledge or intentionally suppressing local academics or y'know, the lives lost and suffering caused. There's also a number of different sociological or administrative structures that could've been formed or invented if Europe hadn't just forced its own onto locals that have their own theoretical potential. But it's entirely uncertain whether they would've been able to muster local innovations and reforms from within to deal with the outside world and overcome their local stagnancy, and as the power disparity grows between them and the developing-faster world, they become riper and riper targets. This was a world where colonizers were not only feasting upon the wealth of peoples in distant lands, they were constantly angling to squeeze in a war with their neighbors to gain advantage over them and feast on their wealth. I'm given to believe that much of the pre-colonized world was also engaged in similar maneuvering with their neighbors; Europeans didn't do naval invasions just conquering everywhere they could march, there was a whole series of joining X people against Y people using local conflicts and native allies to gain footholds and eventually expand colonial control. I have trouble sometimes figuring how I should feel about the morality of colonization relative to the morality of all the other conquest and wars and blood and death that the world we live in has been built on.
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Mar 8, 2020 18:24
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feedmegin posted:Something something horseshoe theory. Theres kind of an important difference between the two if you happen to be eg Jewish though, Doctors' Plot notwithstanding. That's so obvious it really doesn't need to be mentioned. My point was, if you're gay or mentally ill, the difference disappears because both sides want to final solution you.
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Mar 8, 2020 18:33
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Libluini posted:That's so obvious it really doesn't need to be mentioned. My point was, if you're gay or mentally ill, the difference disappears because both sides want to final solution you. No? Only one of those two had literal extermination camps. Also check out eg 50s West Germany's attitude to gay people. Horseshoe theory tends to sound great to Sensible Centrists but it doesn't actually hold up.
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Mar 8, 2020 18:59
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feedmegin posted:No? Only one of those two had literal extermination camps. Also check out eg 50s West Germany's attitude to gay people. Horseshoe theory tends to sound great to Sensible Centrists but it doesn't actually hold up. Horseshoe theory is overly simplistic, but not every right wing fascist government was Nazi Germany and not every left wing one was Stalin (or the Khmer Rouge if you want to use an example that actually did have extermination camps). Franco's Spain didn't have the best attitudes about gay people, but then again neither did Castro's Cuba. Frankly, the real issue isn't even where on the political spectrum various regimes sit, but how authoritarian they are or aren't. Total control over the levers of power can let the people in charge do some really lovely things based on their existing prejudices. Stalin and Hitler hating gay people has less to do with their opinions about private property and everything to do with the prejudices they absorbed growing up in their respective cultures when they did. Schadenboner posted:I'm going to sort of ramble fairly unrelatedly here but: Yeah, this is well said. Most historians today look at the post-WW1 political clusterfuck as a rejection of capitalist modernity. Communism and Fascism aren't 180 degree opposites of each other, sitting on the far ends of some political spectrum so much as they are very different approaches to rejecting the changes that happened with industrialization and internationalization. They both look at the first twenty years of the 20th century, say "this is hosed up," and then try to create new conceptual communities to stand against that. It's a big part of why trying to put Fascists in the old right/left spectrum falls apart. Hitler isn't just a more extreme form of the conservative catholic banker, he's a totally different animal. In the same vein it's a bit much to try and put the Mau Maus and Shining Path into the same political/economic framework as Russian communists or European Social Democrats. There ARE relationships there, but it's not just a specturm. Really the biggest problem with horseshoe theory is that it keeps operating on that very linear left <-----> right framework.
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Mar 8, 2020 19:19
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SlothfulCobra posted:That's not a unique colonial problem though is it? That's just the way that 19th century railroads tended to be. There was a lack of consideration for very long distance travel, and between immediate practicality of a gauge for individual areas as well as competition between different industrialists meant a bunch of different gauges got adopted, and would later have to be ripped out if you wanted to connect places more effectively. Just look at the guage variation within the US (which you can also say demonstrates just how much less investment there was in Africa from the sheer density). The key thing here is note that these rail networks actually function as networks. There are interconnections and transfers to be made. Also, if you look at the US rail system twenty years after that image, it's a very different story. Basically the US rail system at least makes travel from Ohio to Georgia theoretically possible, it's not just a poo poo ton of parallel systems that rarely cross each other as they all funnel to the ports. One of the interesting bits in that image, though, is that you do see the African problem in the coastal south. Note that in Virgina and the Carolinas in particular you have the same pattern of the railroads more or less just reaching from the interior to the coasts, with fairly limited connections between them. The rail network looks like a fan that funnels towards a single point, rather than a net. It's a symptom of under-industrialization and a reliance on exporting raw materials. SlothfulCobra posted:
No more warlike and unable to cooperate than Europeans. Here is a map of Western European rail in the 1880s, about half way between all the Europeans trying to kill each other in the Napoleonic wars and them doing it again in WW1. Just a couple of years after Germany went to war with all its neighbors, including overrunning France. Wars of conquest and high stakes diplomacy between countries that considered each other natural enemies and rivals left and right: 
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Mar 8, 2020 19:28
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Schadenboner posted:Industrialization creating new class-based solidarities didn't magically make old religious/ethnic/regional based solidarities disappear Yeah it's this exactly. I get the same vibe with the Soviet love for secret police; it's hardly surprising the USSR leaned into that given how much the Tsars loved their police state.
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Mar 8, 2020 19:30
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I feel I should emphasize that this isn't the result of some grand plot on the part of imperialist europeans to gently caress over Africa. It's a by product of economic policies that made the colonies the producers of inputs that were funneled towards the manufacturing center. If all of Africa had been owned by, say England chances are it wouldn't look so dire, because it would be in their interest to have a bunch of ports working and have the ability to move goods laterally inside it. Likewise, a system where there is no colonial overloard is going to see more connections made with neighbors for the simple reason that people try to make money, even if it means selling to those bastards over the hill. Again, look at all the trade between nations in Europe in the 19th century.
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Mar 8, 2020 19:33
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Cyrano4747 posted:The key thing here is note that these rail networks actually function as networks. There are interconnections and transfers to be made. Also, if you look at the US rail system twenty years after that image, it's a very different story. Basically the US rail system at least makes travel from Ohio to Georgia theoretically possible, it's not just a poo poo ton of parallel systems that rarely cross each other as they all funnel to the ports. This made me wonder if you could just view the antebellum South (and, let's be honest here: the postbellum South too, even unto extremely recent times) as being essentially colonies that just happened to have grown their Imperialist overlords locally?
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Mar 8, 2020 19:41
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Schadenboner posted:This made me wonder if you could just view the antebellum South (and, let's be honest here: the postbellum South too, even unto extremely recent times) as being essentially colonies that just happened to have grown their Imperialist overlords locally? Yeah, I'm not really up to date on the literature or anything, but that's a comparison people have made in the past. Basically it comes down to what the economic underpinnings of an area are. The south was all about growing raw materials and shipping most of it off to either the North or Europe (mostly England) to be processed into finished products. That requires an entirely different sort of infrastructure than one where you're moving goods around for internal markets. Another thing I haven't mentioned is how exposure to those manufacturing hubs in turn retards the growth of the domestic manufacturing that might spur those internal transportation networks. Part of why the South never industrialized as much as the north before the ACW was that it was just cheaper to buy your stuff from a factory in New York or England that was already tooled up and working efficiently. Same story with a lot of other places, and it's a big part of why a lot of nationalist leaders made a big point of tooling up their own industries, even if they ended up being kinda poo poo. Argentina's car industry is a good example of that iirc. The issue is that some of this is just economic specialization, which is a pretty normal thing. Where it gets hosed is when that specialization happens because you were forcibly made dependent on that manufacturing center. Before England took over India it was one of the world leaders in textile manufacturing, especially cotton. If you were buying cotton clothes in Europe in the 17th century chances are it came from India. Then the British take over and that industry dies out, in part because of a lack of industrialization under British rule. The exact hows and whys of this are all still hotly contested. Still, under-development in colonized areas and subsequent competitive advantages in teh old colonial metropole centuries later is a pretty hard to ignore pattern.
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Mar 8, 2020 19:55
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=562nQKR3_3M Steve ate another museum piece, although this one was only 114 years old.
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Mar 8, 2020 20:04
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That man has an ironclad stomach.
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Mar 8, 2020 20:06
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=562nQKR3_3M Did an officer tell him it was ok? 
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Mar 8, 2020 20:30
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I'm not too clear on the particulars of how most colonies were structured, but surely the way that the south wound up as more of an aristocratic collection of wealthy landowners controlling everything with a combination of forced labor and elaborate legal/social systems of oppression seems like it would mirror a lot of colonial administration. There were even more native nations lingering longer in the south before getting forced further away. I really don't know much about what life was like for poorer whites though, or how/if the wealthy maintained the social order among whites. Except I don't think the South's landed aristocracy would've been constantly scooting up to New York to vie for status like colonial elites wind up doing. They just had the economic wealth extraction of the south, not the political/social domination. There were no northern appointees to office (aside from during the civil war and reconstruction). It's probably more like modern corporate imperialism than 19th century colonialism. Cyrano4747 posted:The key thing here is note that these rail networks actually function as networks. There are interconnections and transfers to be made. Also, if you look at the US rail system twenty years after that image, it's a very different story. Basically the US rail system at least makes travel from Ohio to Georgia theoretically possible, it's not just a poo poo ton of parallel systems that rarely cross each other as they all funnel to the ports. Oh sure, I thought you were just talking gauges there. It was definitely consistent for the colonial powers' mercantilist beliefs for none of them to connect their colonies with eachothers' colonies, especially with the piano key colonies along the gulf coast. I do think that the issues with Africa's rail does represent some of Africa's later failings like their inability to further invest in their own infrastructure after being left very poor post-decolonization. I wonder if the availability of other forms of transit like cars and planes also make rail lines less of a worthwhile investment than they used to be as well.
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Mar 8, 2020 20:46
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feedmegin posted:No? Only one of those two had literal extermination camps. Also check out eg 50s West Germany's attitude to gay people. Horseshoe theory tends to sound great to Sensible Centrists but it doesn't actually hold up. Scroll back up and read again. The discussion was about what actual real communists said and that stuff sounds exactly like what actual Nazis said, you can scream Horsehoe theory until you drop dead from asphyxiation, that fact doesn't change.
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Mar 8, 2020 21:00
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Cyrano4747 posted:Finally, the argument about what colonialism gave the colonies i think you raised some good points. However I want to highlight this statement and take the moment to emphasize that I don't want to make an argument in defense of colonialism, nor about what ex-colonies owe their former masters. Rather what I think are worth defending are the trains and roads themselves. Looking over your post again I feel like you were more addressing the crowd and taking the opportunity to make general points rather than addressing something I said. Still it highlights the awkwardness of this subject. It's hard to divorce the virtues of colonialism from some of their products. Still this is a point I think is worth continuing to emphasize. In the immediate post-colonial period, dependency theory and other economic narratives that cast these investments as simple tools to funnel wealth out of colonies and back home became popular. To counter this perceived pernicious effect, many countries adopted policies which limited foreign investment and ownership of assets and businesses, and sought to develop autarky and national self-sufficiency. However to be blunt, these policies were almost universally disastrous failures. As you mentioned with the case of Argentina, many of the locally developed industries performed terribly, and many countries just couldn't supply enough capital locally to meet investment needs. They didn't even escape falling into debt with foreign banks, as many governments tried to step into the gap left by private investors and ended up owing huge sums to the same western governments they were trying to gain economic independence from. This issue reminds me of something Polyakov once posted about Britain investing huge sums in US industry during the 19th century. Rather than a drain on America, European investment was a vital component of the country's industrialization. For example, the DuPont corporation was founded in 1801 with $36,000 in financing from French investors. In the mid 20th century, many countries intentionally made such investments impossible.
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Mar 8, 2020 21:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:I feel I should emphasize that this isn't the result of some grand plot on the part of imperialist europeans to gently caress over Africa. It's a by product of economic policies that made the colonies the producers of inputs that were funneled towards the manufacturing center. If all of Africa had been owned by, say England chances are it wouldn't look so dire, because it would be in their interest to have a bunch of ports working and have the ability to move goods laterally inside it. Likewise, a system where there is no colonial overloard is going to see more connections made with neighbors for the simple reason that people try to make money, even if it means selling to those bastards over the hill. Again, look at all the trade between nations in Europe in the 19th century. And you can see this in the Indian rail network as left at the end of British rule. India was a large, geographically distinct subcontinent with a much larger population and population density than the colonies in Africa, and at the time the Raj got going had something resembling a modern economy. India wasn't just a raw material source to be stripped and the results shipped to the nearest port from the interior - of course that was what underpinned most of British economic activity because that's what colonialism is for, but the railway also had to move internal traffic between population/economic centres, provide communication across the span of the country. The original Great Indian Peninsula Railway - the first in the country - was planned to run right across from Mumbai to Madras, not merely to collect goods from the hinterland. If you look at a rail network map of India from the 1920s it mostly resembles a true network or web (especially in the north), like a rail system in Europe or the northeast US in the Civil War period. It's also overwhelmingly used by Indians and Indian businesses, and is also moving people in and out of city suburbs on dense inter-urban systems rather than being mostly port-orientated single paths. During the 20th century the big ambition of the colonial government was to complete a rail link across Bengal and Burma, connecting with the railways in Siam and then on through French Indo-China to link with the Chinese railways, thus potentially linking Hong Kong and Singapore to India by rail, and allowing goods and materials to flow both ways between the Indian and Chinese markets. It never happened, although ironically the key link between Thailand and Burma was built by the Japanese in the form of the infamous 'Death Railway' during WW2. You can see similar development in Argentina, where British owned and operated railway companies initially set up just to move beef, grain and fruit to the River Plate more efficiently but, without a literal colonial presence and Argentina's economic growth in the 19th century, ended up following commercial incentive and ending up with a comprehensive system which, while it fanned out from Buenos Aires, had plenty of cross-country routes and regional hubs in it too.
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Mar 8, 2020 22:06
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SlothfulCobra posted:But it's entirely uncertain whether they would've been able to muster local innovations and reforms from within to deal with the outside world and overcome their local stagnancy... I mean I agree that it's uncertain, and yeah there surely are lots of cases where they wouldn't have modernized regardless of the geopolitical situation, but I think that this is just the default assumption in so many of these conversations is something that needs changing. I can't tell you how many times I've seen later Korea's success being predicated on Japanese reforms during colonization, as though there was just no possibility of them importing modernized agricultural practices and medicine by themselves, or that the fact they hadn't managed to fully implement sweeping modernizations in two short decades between contact and coming under Japanese influence meant that they never would. Maybe it is true, and Korea (or Taiwan or Singapore and so on) wouldn't be remotely where they are now economically; or, maybe they would be, and they wouldn't have had to endure the countless deaths and systematic destruction of their culture to get there. I think long the term effects surrounding colonization is an extremely important conversation, and the benefits from it is definitely part of that too -- but I don't think the assumption that those benefits are inextricably tied to having also been colonized is necessary.
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Mar 8, 2020 22:16
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Libluini posted:Scroll back up and read again. The discussion was about what actual real communists said and that stuff sounds exactly like what actual Nazis said, you can scream Horsehoe theory until you drop dead from asphyxiation, that fact doesn't change.  Einstein said something like "We should only prohibit homosexuality in cases where it endangers children" which is a fascinating statement because it meant that these two practices were commonly understood to be linked to an extent that while expressing tolerance for the activity involving consenting adults he felt he had to specify "no, I'm not cool with prostitots". From this (and other similar expressions) I suspect in a lot of cases the primary experiences of a lot of non-upper class people involving nonstandard sexualities may well have been slumming nobs trying to hire prostitutes or just abducting and raping (counting on the illicit nature of the acts themselves to prevent the victim from speaking out, beyond the already large taboos against victims of sexual violence doing so). That doesn't excuse these attitudes (indeed, it's not our place to "excuse" historical actors, even if we had the power to do so, which we don't) but they emerge from a cultural context where the popular understanding of nonstandard sexual behaviors was probably of them as a form of decadent upper-class leisure-consumption, one closely tied to criminality, exploitation, and harm suffered by the lower-class recipients of these affections. Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Mar 8, 2020 |
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Mar 8, 2020 22:23
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I'd say that there's a weird line you have to walk when trying to develop local industries, and while protectionism can be disastrous, there are some cases of protected industries managing to successfully leverage their protections to build up and become viable for competing on the international market. It's just that so often protectionism is just a shield for fat and useless companies trying to cover their asses instead of compete. There's also a complex question of where the line is between mutually beneficial foreign investment and, well, modern imperialism. If you stay too protected, your standard of living is going to fall, but if you let too much investment go unchecked, you may find that you can no longer ask your investors to leave, and they're the ones telling you what to do. The value of sovereignty is something that can't really be calculated in economics, but it can translate into being unable to make any of that industry into tax revenue to build infrastructure with, or leaving you unable to do things like forcing foreign factories to reduce their pollution. It's hard to say for certain what matters most, since everybody is going to have their own values as to what's best for a nation. Koramei posted:I mean I agree that it's uncertain, and yeah there surely are lots of cases where they wouldn't have modernized regardless of the geopolitical situation, but I think that this is just the default assumption in so many of these conversations is something that needs changing. Honestly at that point when I was writing the post, my brain was kinda drifting and I had to work hard to figure out what I was trying to say by the end of it. I think what I was trying to get at was that some people's idea of history is a line always going forward and improving, but it's not impossible to manage to get stuck in some kind of stasis that you'd need some kind of external shock to break out of. I think Japan had its own shock when America opened its ports by force, and it lucked out that nobody had any designs on its conquest at the time. It's hard to say what could've been if something else hadn't happened since we only have what did happen as a dataset. Maybe it's France who we had the right idea in trying to directly mitigate any potential positives from colonization by making former colonies pay out the nose to keep their infrastructure after decolonization. No moral ambiguity there. 
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Mar 8, 2020 22:37
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This subject reminds me of a book I read on the Mongol empire back in high school:  I don't really remember a lot of specifics anymore, but my take away was that it was a revisionist history of the Mongols, which instead of emphasizing the destructiveness of the Mongol conquests instead focused on the way the Mongols helped build a highly interconnected world that allowed people like Marco Polo to cross continents in relative speed an safety, and helped trade and ideas flourish. But if doing those things was good, is that a justification for turning whole cities into pyramids of skulls? Obviously not. But we have to be able to talk about both the benefits of trade and the negatives of skull piles, without always conflating the two. One of my motivations for making this argument is I've seen a lot of the same arguments people used in places like Argentina in the fifties and sixties trotted out again and used against China's Belt and Road Initiative recently. They have not aged well. When you look at publications from the World Bank or similar orgs on the subject they tend to say western countries concerned with the implications with growing Chinese influence should simply seek to offer better deals, rather than criticize the fact of the investments themselves. I also read a contrarian essay which was critical of some of the common narratives regarding the effects of British textile exports on the Indian economy. Unfortunately I have lost it and don't feel confident paraphrasing, but there are controversial elements to this story. One final point, looking at the railroad map I noticed rail in Ethiopia, famously uncolonized, followed the same pattern as the rest of subsaharan Africa. Googling a bit and that big line from the coast to the interior was apparently built in 1917 by a Franco-British consortium for the Ethiopian King. This suggests to me that the pattern of rail lines is at least to some extent simply a practical matter of economics, and we may have seen a similar spread of infrastructure from entrepots to the hinterlands across the continent regardless of if it was directed by locals or colonial authorities.
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Mar 8, 2020 23:19
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