No, I am criticizing them for being Nazi collaborators. I'm more than a little shocked at the angry denial of complicity in Nazi war crimes in this thread. Add to it words that could have been written by Trump, and I think I've had enough internet for the day. I'm gonna go outside and walk in the park.
Roosevelt was doing everything he could to get a war started. There was an undeclared war in the Atlantic. The American people had fled Europe, and were deeply suspicious of getting involved in the old country's problems. What more did you want him to do? He cut Japan off from its oil supplies and boxed them in to declaring war.
At least several dozen, probably several hundred.
Five. As opposed to the Scandinavians who happily volunteered to fill up entire SS divisions. SS Division Wiking, SS Division Nordland, you get the idea.
That was literally western neoliberal ideology. Actual, physical US economists were living in the Kremlin guiding the drunk Yeltsin to destroy Russia and kill millions of Russians through economic collapse at the behest of Western oligarchs who got in bed with Russia's organized criminals.
Add the neoliberal shock therapy economics. Ended up crashing the economy, leaving more in poverty then before, securing Putin as a savior to Russians when he reversed it, and soured the Russian opinion to the US freshly after resetting it with a new government.
He sat and watched as they rigged their primary and lost the election to Trump because of it. They literally chose the only candidate that could lose to him. And he just smiled and endorsed Hillary. In 2020 they did it again and he handed the people's money over to the DNC.
At the official Democratic National Committee store at the 2016 Democratic convention in Philadelphia, the only piece of Bernie Sanders merchandise available was a t-shirt that depicted Senator Sanders in a racist manner. The caricature of his face is strongly reminiscent of Nazi propaganda which likened Jewish people to rats. Images are available here: http://imgur.com/a/3gVio and a video is available here: http://youtu.be/zd5OUVUQpz0
"It is simply not fair to expect the College to continue to carry the burden of the expenses associated with housing both your population and ours."
-- Jane Sanders, after buying a property for her college that housed the infirm.
Get the hell out of there already. While they still allow people to leave. The smart people left Germany in the 1930s when the writing was on the wall.
Why's it so hard to condemn Nazi collaborators? I had no idea so many users were so defensive about their history. I would think that condemning them would be second nature, but no. You bring up American slavery all the time; how is this any different?
You’re also conveniently leaving out the resistance movements
Our resistance movement was called the Union Army and we had a civil war in which hundreds of thousands of us died to put an end to slavery. How's that compare?
using that scandinavia used to be part of the nazi empire
No, no, no. I said they were Nazi collaborators. I don't get why this simple concept is getting such tremendous pushback. The fact that it's in the past has nothing to do with it. America doesn't get a break from slavery because it was in the past. Therefore the same applies to Scandinavia.
Oh, you don't like your crimes being brought up? Hmm, what a fascinating concept.
And just so you know, the idea that Germans will happily go back to Nazism is behind the vehement suppression of the far right in Germany. AfD is frozen out of the government, and for good reason. Germans are just champing at the bit to go back to Nazism. If you don't believe me, just ask one of them. Heck, Trump withdrawing US troops was seen as a threatening gesture, one likely to release the Germans from under the American thumb to become a threat to all Europe once again.
literally nobody alive from the time of US slavery is around anymore lmao, you gonna get mad at what the Romans did to Carthage next?
You see how that doesn't work? America doesn't get to dodge its responsibility for slavery, and Scandinavia doesn't get to dodge its responsibility for collaboration with the Nazis.
And we don't mean soup nazis. Not spelling nazis. Not neo-nazis. We mean actual Nazis. The real deal, Scandinavians were no bullshit, assist the war machine to murder Jews and communists, collaborators.
Get over yourself. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers don’t deserve compassion. If you want compassion from the world learn how to put it into the world. If you can’t, you can’t expect it.
It looks like you are talking about the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommend the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply was written.
Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
In academic history there isn't such thing as one definitive authority or work on things. There are often others who research the same subjects and people that dive into work of others to build on it or to see if it indeed holds up. This being critical of your sources and not relying on one source is actually a very important skill in studying history often lacking when dozens of people just spam the same work over and over again as a definite guide and answer to "everything".
There are a good amount of modern historians and anthropologists who are quite critical of Guns, Germs, and Steel and there are some very real issues with Diamond's work. These issues are often overlooked or not noticed by the people reading his book. Which is understandable, given the fact that for many it will be their first exposure to the subject. Considering the popularity of the book it is also the reason that we felt it was needed to create this response.
In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case, we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it. This is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced. It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't the same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of their core skill set and key in doing good research.
Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject. Further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues
In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest
Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
The construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically one step behind.
To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as somehow naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. This while they did often did fare much better than the book (and the sources it tends to cite) suggest, they often did mount successful resistance, were quick to adapt to new military technologies, build sprawling cities and much more. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
Further reading
If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
No, I am criticizing them for being Nazi collaborators. I'm more than a little shocked at the angry denial of complicity in Nazi war crimes in this thread. Add to it words that could have been written by Trump, and I think I've had enough internet for the day. I'm gonna go outside and walk in the park.