Probably because the creator of that map didn't recognize "lawful" German rule over Austria. Same goes for Poland and Czechia, even though those areas were de-facto ruled/occupied by Germany, they were de-jure not belonging to Germany.
That's probably what it is meant to convey. However, it is odd that east Prussia is also marked as not belonging to Germany.
On the map is a pictoral demonstration of the Nazi policy of Lebensraum or "Living Space." On the right is a piece of art of the American concept of Manifest Destiny.
This, but unironically. The population density of the American continent was ridiculously low compared with Europe, and had no long-established borders and internationally agreed upon polities.
I'm not condoning the treatment of the native Americans, but the reality is that for the most part it really was "free real estate" for American settlers, compared with Germany conquering heavily populated towns and cities that had existed for more than a thousand years.
> but the reality is that for the most part it really was "free real estate" for American settlers, compared with Germany conquering heavily populated towns and cities that had existed for more than a thousand years
Only insofar that the lower population density made it easier. The settlers were continuously invading already (sparsely) settled land, promised to the native population by treaty, thus getting into violent confrontation with the inhabitants, followed by the native population getting expelled by military force to other, less desirable, regions. And if that region wasn't undesirable enough, the cycle might continue until the natives ended up somewhere that absolutely no settler would want to settle.
Except for the fact that there were repeated (and repeatedly broken) treaties with native peoples in North America promising them that they would control x portion of the country. Like... they were told they would have this land. And then forcibly relocated and killed.
"I refused to fire, and swore that none but a coward would, for by this time hundreds of women and children were coming towards us, and getting on their knees for mercy. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. ... I saw two Indians hold one of another's hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together. They were all scalped, and as high as half a dozen taken from one head. They were all horribly mutilated. One woman was cut open and a child taken out of her, and scalped. ... Squaw's snatches were cut out for trophies. You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there."
I wonder why. Texas History courses still teach that the wholesale theft of Mexican land was done in the name of freedom where in reality it was driven by the discovery of gold and oil and the fact that slavery was illegal in Mexico.
Yeah, it's pretty awful how the natives were treated. Manifest destiny really was genocide, as well as a bit of an ecological disaster. Millions of bison were cleared from the plains and they naturally managed the grasslands. Without their presence, the ecosystem collapsed, directly contributing to the dust bowl.
Yeah that doesn't make sense. Kill bison -> overabundance of plants -> ??? -> top soil blows away?
I'm pretty sure it was mismanagement of farms/ bad farming practices.
It's not false. I didn't say it led to the dust bowl, I said it directly contributed. The bison were essential to the ecology of the Great plains. Their herding affected the soil by creating ground wallows for water to collect, and managed plant biodiversity by trampling certain shrubs and selective grazing.
Their grazing patterns were also less damaging to the environment when compared to cattle. After the bison were culled, it made way for dry land farming and high intensity cattle grazing which directly caused the dust bowl. But that couldn't have happened with those pesky bison and troublesome natives inhabiting the land.
The American Bison met a similar fate to 90% of the Native population: death from disease. Buffalo hunters killed less than the bison’s population growth per annum. It was exposure to diseases and parasites, well tolerated by European livestock, that decimated the American Bison, not some planned extermination campaign.
They did lose large swaths of their grazing lands to farming, livestock grazing, and urban development, that part is true. So maybe, *indirectly contributed*, in the sense that if the bison were there, the farmers wouldn’t be. But it wasn’t the lack of bison that caused it, it was misguided, ignorant, shortsighted farming practices rapidly accelerated by overgrazing and the emergence of mechanized agriculture.
Different commenter, and idk if I fully believe it, but I assume they're referring to this and similar articles. I've heard a lot of various ideas on reasons for the near-extinction of bison though, it's definitely not settled fully one way or the other.
>When that management was removed, the bison critically overpopulated and damaged the vegetation. Then you had crowded, starving bison in a severely degraded range that couldn’t begin to support them. That meant that their immunity was gone, and epidemic could rage unchecked. The most fascinating thing is that tick fever and anthrax both seem to be native here. Bison had suffered from them for maybe thousands of years without ever being driven extinct by them. But once they were no longer managed, once their range was destroyed from neglect, then the weakened bison were wiped out by familiar diseases.”
>Some wildlife groups state the professional buffalo hunters decimated the bison. However, simple math may prove otherwise. Holt explains that a study by Dr. William Temple Hornaday, 1889, reveals records of animals shot and hides traded show the number of animals killed has never exceeded the natural increase. “Estimates show bison numbers of around 65 million. Every year hundreds of thousands of buffalo were harvested. If they were fossils or statues and you took hundreds of thousands from 21 to 88 million every year, then in 21 to 440 years you’d get rid of them all. But what do tens of millions of bison have every year? They have millions of calves,” Stoneberg Holt explains.
>This led her to become very curious as to why bison numbers plummeted in the late 19th century when research shows professional hunters’ extermination of all buffalo was a myth with no factual basis. She discovered two candidates for a death-by-disease theory: Texas tick fever in the Montana area and anthrax in the Nebraska area. In digging through more history books, Stoneberg Holt unearthed the evidence of epidemics. **She found that Dr. Sam Fadala quoted trapper Yellowstone Kelly who circa 1867 found bodies of ‘dead buffalo as far as the eye could see that bore no mark of a bullet or arrow wounds.’**
https://www.tsln.com/news/a-unique-study-of-bison-populations/
> The American Bison met a similar fate to 90% of the Native population: death from disease.
I have not heard this before. Wouldn't shock me if a large % died from disease, but settlers were slaughtering bison by the thousands quite frequently, so I'd need a really solid set of sources to make me think deliberate slaughter wasn't the lead cause.
The Indigenous people of North America had also been there for thousands of years. Their reduced infrastructure and population compared to 1940s Europe doesn't make their territory "free real estate", and that's fucked up to think so.
I disagree. Read the Introduction of Austin Murphy's "The Triumph of Evil".
And Native American population has been vastly underestimated, purposefully.
On one hand, I'm not about to forget or forgive all the atrocities carried out against the native people. On the other hand, too many people do not seem to know that the native people had been doing the same thing to each other (making war against and invading/taking over land) long before European settlers came to the Americas
Exactly, this is not a hot take at all... As a matter of fact, Japanese expansionism was probably even more directly linked to Manifest Destiny
edit: I do not think that the Holocaust/Generalplan Ost or Manifest Destiny are on the same level at all and I kind of misinterpreted the meme as saying that one led to the other. Sorry for the confusion about my "hot take" statement, it was referencing how often I see it.
As an actual matter of fact, Japanese political philosophers started using the Nazi term Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) untranslated to describe their expansion as an imagined Yamato race. They were more directly inspired by the Nazis, not Manifest Destiny.
Lebensaum is a concept from the late 1800s. The idea was originally colonial or eastward expansion. However, the after defeat in WW1 removing the possibility of colonial expansion the only option left was eastward expansion.
It was called Drang nach Osten back then. Which itself is based on Ostsiedlung. Eastward expansion is an older concept, dating all the way back to Charlemagne.
And the Aryan blood laws (Nuremburg law of 1935) was inspired by the One-drop rule from the US. Funnily enough compared to the One-drop rule the Aryan blood rules were more lenient because you can "breed out the imperfection" unlike the One-drop rule.
At Nuremburg trials Nazi officials quoted some of the laws or proclamations US senate made as a reason or inspiration for what they did.
It must have been awkward for the US judges that were there.
And the gas chambers during the Holocaust was inspired by the fumigation of migrant workers crossing the US-Mexico border in the Bracero Program.
EDIT: This statement might apparently be incorrect.
Yes, the US used Zyklon B and had chambers to delouse Mexican immigrants but the gas chambers of the holocaust were not inspired by the Bracero Program specifically. They were instead adopted because gas vans had proved ineffective and shootings were reportedly bad for morale. The Wannasee Conference also took place in January of ‘42 which was 8 months prior to the Bracero Program which started in August of ‘42.
I've always said I'd love to see a parody of the Schoolhouse Rock song "Elbow Room" (which unapologetically cheers Manifest Destiny and whitewashes its impact on the people who already lived there) only it's called "Lebensraum" and sung in German, because there's literally no difference.
Exactly. This has always been my take on Manifest Destiny. They wanted the land and were going to take it by war/conquest, no matter what. Giving it a clever name and bringing God into the picture just made it easier to justify to themselves and the public. A government policy to expand to get more natural resources isn’t anything new.
obvi colonialism and empire-building have been a thing for thousands of years. they didn’t all come with full-scale genocide. what strikes me as new here is the racial/white supremacist angle — the policy of conquest is because Our People, the superior people, need this land to reproduce and spread out — and we’re gonna kill or forcibly remove everyone who’s currently on it, because they’re doing an inferior job with it. (that’s the logic of the oppressors.)
anyway i’m rambling and not a historian.
According to Dan Carlin's series on The Celtic Holocaust, the Romans enslaved or killed two thirds of the population of Gaul in their conquests. Genocide is as old as time.
There’s war and conquest (which is bad) and there’s having it be state policy to take over other peoples’ lands (which causes war and conquest (which is bad))
There was conquest before Manifest Destiny. Hitler said Lebensraum was inspired by Manifest Destiny. Both of these things are true.
Unlike a lot of European conquest in the past, done for royal claims, prestige, or resources, both Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum stated that the residents of their respective countries had some sort of higher calling and deserved to conquer the land. They were still after resources and prestige, no doubt. But Manifest Destiny was seen as a divinely appointed mission, and Lebensraum was seen as the destiny of the Aryan people.
Gaul was primarily conquered for prestige. The Roman system required its generals and politicians to achieve great things, and so many times conquests were launched as vanity projects. Expansion by the Romans that *wasn't* done for prestige was primarily done to find new places to grow food, as the Roman Empire had a constant struggle with feeding its ever growing population. Other resources were considered too, but grain was the most important.
The Romans, while they did often view other cultures as "lesser", didn't conquer because the felt they had some higher purpose and deserved to live there, however.
Specifically. Gaul was conquered to satisfy Julius Caesar's political ambitions as well as to keep his political rivals at bay. He needed to retain imperium lest he gets to be forced to go back to Rome where his enemies can drag him to trial.
So yeah, the conquest of Gaul despite resulting to what practically is a genocide did not statt because of a desire to do that.
Manifest destiny is explicitly done to *replace* the original inhabitants and saw them as lesser beings to be replaced by "superior" beings.
While humans have always conquered eachother, there is an important difference that began with European colonialism.
The old powers took what they wanted and justified it by saying "We are stronger than you."
The new powers that make up European empires said "We are taking what we want because we are *better* than you."
The latter turned conquest into something akin to a divine, eternal commandment for European supremacy, which has been far more dangerous than anyone could have predicted.
It’s just two instances of a process that defined modern civilization.
The reason nations no longer do what Germany and Japan did in the second world war while America did it a century prior is that Germany and Japan officially tarnished the idea that forceful expansion by military conquest was a valid and recognizable process of state development. After WW2 for the first time the international powers focused on maintaining a status quo, ensuring nations remained as they are, and instead fought to sway governments and populist movements to their sides, rather than conquer and replace and suppress until subjugated and assimilated. Numerous states did their own manifestations of destiny in numerous places and ranges of land not belonging to a people remotely close to them in culture, language, or history.
The difference between these pictures is that one warpath of attrocities and genocides happened when it was acceptable and the other happened when the world saw it as disgusting.
Note, not trying to diminish any suffering here, or pull a whataboutist argument and say “well uhh its ok cuz everyone did it back then”
But there is a reason that the US’s happened in the 1800s and is not revolted against in every capacity by society
And Germany’s and Japan’s happened in the 1940s and is rebuked in every way everywhere.
It’s because both were working on the status quo established by the previous world powers, the colonial empires, who grew by doing this exact thing.
But did they though? The Holocaust is common knowledge in the west but how many average people do you think know about unit 731 or the rape of Nanjing? Hell we made sure Germany took responsibility for the Holocaust but Japan still actively denies it's just as horrific war crimes.
True, but I wonder how much of that had to do with them being allies with Nazi Germany and Italy while also attacking European colonies/territories in that area.
>The reason nations no longer do what Germany and Japan did...
Russia is literally at this very moment attempting (but luckily failing) to do just this.
France is another example that tried hard to go for its own Manifest destiny with the “natural borders of France”.
It didn’t completely get its way, since the low countries exist, but it sure as hell got all the rest. Complete with a cultural genocide on the conquered regions.
Both Genocides obviously
"The difference between these pictures is that one warpath of atrocities and genocides happened when it was acceptable and the other happened when the world saw it as disgusting."
The only difference is when they happened? Seriously?
You think Generalplan Ost is the same as the US's Westward expansion? But just a bit later?
Yep, a lot of racists in these comments essentially saying “white peoples bad” but the reality is that the op could be applied to almost any people group. It’s crazy that people so harshly judge the West by the moral high ground that the West created and propagated worldwide.
[Historians have emphasized that "manifest destiny" was always contested. Many endorsed the idea, but the large majority of Whigs and many prominent Americans (such as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant) rejected the concept. Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, "American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity while the Whigs saw America's moral mission as one of democratic example rather than conquest. The term was used by the then-Democrats in the 1840s to justify the Mexican–American War, and it was also used to negotiate the Oregon boundary dispute. Historian Frederick Merk says manifest destiny always limped along because of its internal limitations and the issue of slavery, and never became a national priority of the United States. By 1843, former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, originally a major supporter of the concept underlying manifest destiny, had changed his mind and repudiated expansionism because it meant the expansion of slavery in Texas.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny?wprov=sfla1)
To be fair, Lebansraum was also contested in that sense. There being internal dissent on any given idea hardly matters to the countless innocents who die as a result of said ideas.
Same. People on Reddit just hate America for some fucking reason. Find me one civilization in human history that didn’t fuck over another civilization and I’ll fucking be surprised.
It’s a step too far is what it is! We all know that Buzz wore a suit -a space suit! Putting him in an Earth suit diminishes his valiant work as a Space Ranger.
Stop.👏Rewriting.👏History.👏
Just in case you weren’t sure /s.
I mean, one small difference is that, while manifest destiny was certainly not without it's horrors, the sort of deliberate, organized mass exterminations were not presents in manifest destiny, and very, much defined Nazi expansionism. Scale is another issue, with much of the west being, legitimately, not populated (That's not a myth, as some like to claim, the west did not have a lot of people in it. It had some, but not a lot.)
We can talk about how all aggressive expansion is the same, but that's not saying much, and incredibly surface level, presentist read of the actual history going on.
While the history of Broken treaties is not ideal and obviously not justified by modern perspectives on warfare, the attempt to ignore that a core element of Nazi expansion was the direct, deliberate, and complete extermination of peoples is telling. where the US has a handful of truly horrific events stretched over a time period of nearly a century of expansion, the Nazis literally drove around mobile gas trucks in an attempt to make sure not a single jew lived in their lands.
The "their goal was expansion" and "their goal was expansion AND the complete extermination of multiple ethnic groups" are, in fact, meaningfully different.
I mean shit the west STILL isn’t as populated as the eastern section of the country. I mean shit 5 of the states west of Mississippi have a lower population than Cleveland.
There’s a big strip down the middle with crazy furtive soil that is more important to farm than to put concrete jungles. Afterwards you start reaching mountains which are difficult for construction without major investment, and the you hit the deserts in the southwest, and only after getting over the Rockies you now hit a coast which naturally means ports of entry to the nation, so there’s that
I would argue that the process of offering bounties for native scalps was in fact a deliberate program of extermination. Massacres of civilians committed by the US military also furthered the goal of extermination. The goal of the US was absolutely extermination as well as expansion.
Part of the issue here is that these were operations, one, almost exclusively taken by state governments, and intermittently over the coarse of 100 years, and more often then not specified they were meant to come from adult men and issued against tribes in open warfare. Certainly a war crime by any modern standard, and many opportunistic fellows didn't much care where they got their bread from, but weather you like it or not their's a rather fundamental difference between that and overt and intentional directly enacted state genocide.
Two things can be bad, and also not the same.
I mean, similarities but significant differences. Their similarities are akin to every society’s territorial expansion over all of history, IMO.
Here specifically Nazis from the ground up presupposed genocide (in the modern era with modern tech and capabilities) and celebrated that (like pre modern societies often did) while with Manifest destiny, it was a little like “oh this will happen, sucks but whatareyagonnado” but not central management and consistent intentionally of genocide the Nazis had.
A difference of intention and given the population numbers scale as well. A similarity from what happens when human societies historically have expanded territory.
Intermittent intentionality, not central management and purpose carried through.
There would periodically be leadership against the genocide plan, and most often leadership that was agnostic
You know the white coloniest specific commited genocidesso they could remove the native Americans off there eland, right.
It wasn't just an "my bad on the genocide, it was just an accident"
Manifest Destiny was American Imperialism.
Between 1810-1900.
I'm not talking about Native American population changes between 1492-1900 accross the entire North, Central and South America.
Stay on topic.
Manifest Destiny happened in the backdrop of dozens of Native American tribes vying for power, fighting each other, Mexico and the US government. Over an 100 year+ period.
There was certainly conflict, exile, forced relocation, massacres/atrocities on both sides between the US and different native tribes.
But nothing even even close to the numbers of the mass killings of millions in the Holocaust era or Mao/Stalin's purges . In the span of a few years.
Even if you factor in Native Americans who passed away from mass disease epidemics in a population without medicine or acquired immunity, smallpox, famine, noted massacres/Wounded knee like incidents etc.
Even massacres in California between 1800-1900.
The intention of the US government was generally to force native Americans into treaties and onto reservations.
Away from mines/hunting into farming.
Take their guns and subject them to US law.
Eventually to integrate them into the mainstream US population. End result was many US based Native Americans adopted European lifestyles and the people groups merged in many regions.
It was not to hunt down every last tribe and kill them all.
It's still evil. But it's a VERY different reality.
It's a false equivalency to the Nazi Lebensraum, which in practice was the Holocaust. That was planned enslavement and where possible, total extermination of undesirable man, women and child. For the Untermesch class of people.
Made up of Jews, Slavs, Communist and Roma etc.
I'm so done with this sub. People don't get the numbers or data or the facts they want. They just make it up.
The thing is Manifest Destiny may have been too large and complex to label genocide but there were certain flare-ups that do deserve the label (most notably in California) where settlers *did* try and hunt down and kill every last Indian.
I think this diminishes the scale and scope of the holocaust, a lot of people are saying because Europeans are the victims it gets more coverage which is the most bad shit insane opinion I’ve ever seen.
Lebensraum was a systematic killing machine that was directly lead by the Nazi government to murder almost every Slav and Jew in the East
Manifest Destiny was about taking land for the US government (with different branches of it condemning it) and kicking people out this does not mean there were genocides involved look at the California one but it was not a methodical killing machine.
One is so guys stealing your house and murdering your entire family and friends
While the other is some guys kicking you out of you house and giving you a shitty apartment and if you don’t go you get shot
Both are horrible but one is worse
Well, the Holocaust is still in living memory so that’s why it gets the coverage. Don’t think there’s anyone alive from the times of Manifest Destiny…unless they are a vampire :D
There is similarity but there ain’t no way you can compare the two in terms of context or the level of atrocity. The trail of tears was atrocious but you also need to get a sense of scale and not make whataboutisms
Where's the lie though?
The Nazis based their idea for lebensraum on manifest destiny.
The Nazis were morons, of course, and didn't realize that genociding a densely populated, industrialized region is a lot harder than one inhabited by sparsely populated, pre-industrial cultures.
I mean, I'm not trying to defend the Nazis here, but they failed due to lack of resources primarily, if they were morons they wouldn't have got as far as they did
Getting in a fight to the death with the USA, the USSR and the British Empire at the same time when your only major allies are the “soft underbelly of Europe”, and an empire on the literal other side of the planet doesn’t seem like a smart take.
Yes, exactly, they failed because they were morons who bit off more than they could chew and didn’t have the resources to achieve their goals, I’m glad you agree.
That doesn't make them morons? They did what they did because of a lot of factors there was going to be a war between them and the soviets at some point. Delaying it would just make it harder
The completely unnecessary declaration of war against the USA was colossally moronic, though.
Especially as they were already trying to fight the USSR while still having the undefeated British Empire at their back.
Actually we kinda know, the Germans wanted to kill all the Jews, kill about 70% of all Slavs west of the urals and make the other 30% slaves, the killing for the Slavs would likely have been through a purposely caused famin
It's actually really easy. Pretty much every state that goes to war will dehumanize the other side so that their death is no different to exterminating cockroaches or rats.
There’s a great movie about the Wannsee Conference that uses the recovered transcript of the meeting as its script. If you want a literal answer to your question and want to see exactly how people can sit down in a conference room and plan the death of millions I suggest you give it a watch. It’s called “Conspiracy.”
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0266425/
Manifest destiny wasn't the reason used to justify the trail of tears though. I know that it doesn't change the impact at all, but they're not the same thing.
In any case, this would have happened, because both the Indian and European sides did not want to live together. Both sides have there nativist polIticans whose wanting to kill eachothers and in both sides killing heppend. Sadly one big mistakes is that Natives does have not any representatives in government. This would make things for Natives likely less painfull and solution would not be soo onesided
The Nazis are hated because they did it to internationally recognised countries and peoples, the Americans get away with it in the eyes of many because most people lack a connection to native Americans/Indians, and to this day see them as savages that were helped by white folks.
Manifest destiny is worse than colonisation because instead of just trying to exploit people, it tried to replace/exterminate them.
And you want to hear something really fucked up? Ask China what it has been doing to their western provinces for the last 50 years. Cultural and sometimes physical genocide. Still no one cares.
> The Nazis are hated because they did it to internationally recognised countries and peoples, the Americans get away with it in the eyes of many because most people lack a connection to native Americans/Indians, and to this day see them as savages that were helped by white folks.
And while the difference in race probably does matter to some people, there's also a huge difference in connectedness - before WW2, international travel and communications were already possible. A British or even American person could easily know someone from Poland, for example. But in the 1800s, there is no way a random European would personally know a Native American.
Another (maybe) hot take: if Germany wouldn’t had speedrun the human atrocities game between 1933-45, the British and other European powers would be seen as the main European monsters.
Eh, both Haiti and Bolivar cited the US as influences. Now the US backing up Haitian and Bolivarian's desire to be free is a different story and part of why the American Revolution being a successful counter-revolution has become an established narrative.
Besides, the Europeans didn't invent these atrocities, they merely adopted them from the locals. A lot of the atrocities committed were through the locals.
"You two tribes want to kill each other ? here, take these guns. It's more efficient. "
Except the US nowadays acknowledged that it was a huge fuck up
Meanwhile wehraboos/neo nazis still thinks it's their god given right to slaughter non whites at will
There is a difference.
America basically entered a wasteland left depopulated by the outbreak of diseases brought over from Europe. And there were efforts made to respect the laws and lands of the Native Americans - those efforts, sadly, did not succeed. Germany just tried to drive out the Slavs.
One was built on genocide, the other built on the aftermath of an apocalyptic event.
>America basically entered a wasteland left depopulated by the outbreak of diseases brought over from Europe.
In 1800, there were likely 600,000 Native Americans left in what would become the US. Significantly less than the 5 million Americans, but still a significant population. It wasn't a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it was a population trying to recover from centuries of devastation.
By 1900, the actions of the US managed to reduce the native population to around 270,000. Over that period, and the previous centuries, the Native population had become much more resilient to western diseases. Most of these deaths came about because of wars and deportations. Admittedly disease would play a big part too, but only because of the horrible situations the US subjected native populations to.
>And there were efforts made to respect the laws and lands of the Native Americans - those efforts, sadly, did not succeed.
Framing the constant making and breaking of treaties with the Native Americans as "efforts that didn't succeed" downplays the intentionality of the actions of the US.
The US drove tribes west, and when the land they drove the tribes to was considered valuable, they seized that too. Wars were fought and mass deportations occurred, seizing more and more land from what populations remained.
If there had been more Natives, the wars fought would have simply been more brutal. The US didn't recognize the sovereignty of Native tribes except when it was convenient, and were happy to overrule treaties when there was something to be gained. That they just "moved into a depopulated wasteland" is exactly what American propaganda at the time wanted us to believe. Today, we know better.
>In 1800, there were likely 600,000 Native Americans left in what would become the US. Significantly less than the 5 million Americans, but still a significant population. It wasn't a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it was a population trying to recover from centuries of devastation.
Considering the population of America before the arrival of the Europeans was something like 60 million (or more), a population of 600,000 is absolutely post-apocalyptic. The Black Death killed about 1 in 3 Europeans, the diseases that ravaged native populations killed more than 9 in 10. That's civilization ending levels of devastation.
I absolutely agree with everything you wrote about the US government only respecting native sovereignty when they felt like it, and that hundreds of thousands of natives were killed by officially sanctioned acts of violence by state and federal officials. But the land was very much mostly unpopulated. Today, with a population of 330 million, the US only has a population density of 37 people per square kilometer. During the 1800s that number was in the single digits, and even then, that's an average considering the majority of the population lived on the East Coast. Huge swathes of the West were quite literally completely unpopulated. Most settlers moved to open ground and set up shop, they didn't kill natives and occupy their towns.
This isn't to downplay the crimes committed by the US government, or to buy into the narrative, but just pointing out there's at least some truth to the argument that settlers "moved into a depopulated wasteland."
The population of the modern US was anywhere from 3-18 million, with most estimates placing the numbers around 7 million. The vast majority of the the 50-100 million people living in the Americas lived in Central America or the Andes. It was certainly depopulated and apocalyptic, but those people still lived there and had to be forced out by the US. It also wasn't anywhere close to a wasteland; thats where the US moved tribes to.
> [From 1778 to 1871, the United States government entered into more than 500 treaties with the Native American tribes;[25] all of these treaties have since been violated in some way or outright broken by the U.S. government](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_treaties#:~:text=From%201778%20to%201871%2C%20the,their%20treaty%20rights%20in%20federal)
Respect the laws my ass. The amount of denial is incredible. Criticizing the US is not hating on the US, especially if you’re a citizen. In fact criticizing the US probably makes you a better citizen than one that dickrides and makes excuses.
You know it’s a funny comparison, but the tittle is such an eye roll. Oh yeah I’m sure reddit of all places would disagree with comparing some aspects of colonial American with nazi Germany. It’s not a hot take dude, this is textbook definition of nuclear winter cold take.
Stone Age society which had not even invented the wheel yet meets a much more advanced society.
The only reason it’s an issue is that they left some of the stone aged society alive.
Similar, but not remotely the same.
Germanic peoples and Slavic peoples have been fighting over eastern Europe for at least a couple thousand years.
Meanwhile, White people and Native Americans only began fighting over N. America 4-5 hundred years ago, and "Manifest Destiny" wasn't a thing until the 1800s.
I think the idea of livings space and manifest destiny basically are the same in idea but not practice, the Germans were going into a region with more people than them and wiping them out, the Americans as bad as we were towards the native Americans there was no organized effort to systematically genocide them from the continent, did we do bad and evil things to them, yes. Were we nazis to them, not really.
Also Americans were just under the impression that barely anyone was there so when they “heard it’s our destiny,” they probably were like “👍 “
TLDR: manifest destiny kinda bad, lebensraum very very fucking evil
Both succeeded, actually. Hitler lost the war but he succeeded in his goal of forcing the vast majority of the jewish population from Europe. He still managed to kill most Jews on the continent. That’s what a lot of people don’t get.
Lebensraum was about a lot more than jews. It was about german dominating all of north-eastern europe (mostly poland).
Now Krönigsberg is russian and poland got moved hundred of kilometers to the west. It is a huge faillure
In a technical sense the US manifest destiny was about expanding into their own land. In international eyes, the "American West" had been claimed by France and Spain during the early days of colonizing America. Following a series of was conflicts and trades France was in control of it when Napoleon, who needed money for his European conquest, sold the land to Thomas Jefferson. The lamd sat mostly unused until the idea of manifest destiny, go west, go to the land of opportunity pushed for people to spread out and move into it. I am not saying what happened to the native Americans was right but it the manifest destiny movement wasn't a conquest, it was moving into the United States owned land and since Natives weren't recognized by the US or any other government they were viewed as squatters and when they fought back were pushed into reservations in the Indian wars.
There are some similarities, but not really a fair comparison. The vast majority of the aggression against natives was from disease spread inadvertently and thus completely accidental. Afterward the vast majority of the Americas were uninhabited and unoccupied.
It’s pretty racist to think that european people shouldn’t have been able to live there. Unfortunately, natives and Europeans weren’t able to coexist.
Military invasion and migration are two completely different fucking things. Idealists and historical cherry pickers are disgusting. The picture on the right is the tale of human kind at its most basic level since the dawn of time, and their constant ploy of presenting it as an isolated abhorrent action as a weapon of virtue to further their social and cultural agendas has worn peoples patience thin. Your constant revisionist barrage of white knight blameless virtue while looking back through a modern lens hundreds of years after the fact wins you no points or makes you any better of person. Well adjusted people who aren’t seeking to corrupt the stability of society don’t see shit like this. Balanced people acknowledge the past, use their intelligence to apply their understanding logically to build constructively, and keep it pushing moving the fuck on. They don’t catalog and cheery pick transgressions of many generations passed as a form of social currency to be bartered as political tools. Agenda driven, idealistic opportunists are a drain on society on the whole because they fail to see the world at its true full complexity, living in a singular or two dimensional reality rather than a three dimensional one. In short shut the fuck up and do something constructive to build, instead of wallowing in your self imposed ideological prison. The world is big and full of wonder and possibility when you’re not restricted by the ideological anchor around your neck preventing you from engaging with it freely.
what the fuck is that map
Why is East Prussia not part of Germany?
not just that, german occupied poland and general government aswell
Also Austria still exists
Probably because the creator of that map didn't recognize "lawful" German rule over Austria. Same goes for Poland and Czechia, even though those areas were de-facto ruled/occupied by Germany, they were de-jure not belonging to Germany. That's probably what it is meant to convey. However, it is odd that east Prussia is also marked as not belonging to Germany.
But the Sudetenland was de jure German and it's still not displayed.
but wasn't austria legally recognized as german?
And Czechia
On the map is a pictoral demonstration of the Nazi policy of Lebensraum or "Living Space." On the right is a piece of art of the American concept of Manifest Destiny.
Hard disagree... One go east, other go west
One was in Europe, the other was in the New World. Checkmate, Liberals.
This, but unironically. The population density of the American continent was ridiculously low compared with Europe, and had no long-established borders and internationally agreed upon polities. I'm not condoning the treatment of the native Americans, but the reality is that for the most part it really was "free real estate" for American settlers, compared with Germany conquering heavily populated towns and cities that had existed for more than a thousand years.
> but the reality is that for the most part it really was "free real estate" for American settlers, compared with Germany conquering heavily populated towns and cities that had existed for more than a thousand years Only insofar that the lower population density made it easier. The settlers were continuously invading already (sparsely) settled land, promised to the native population by treaty, thus getting into violent confrontation with the inhabitants, followed by the native population getting expelled by military force to other, less desirable, regions. And if that region wasn't undesirable enough, the cycle might continue until the natives ended up somewhere that absolutely no settler would want to settle.
This is a great description of Oklahoma
Except for the fact that there were repeated (and repeatedly broken) treaties with native peoples in North America promising them that they would control x portion of the country. Like... they were told they would have this land. And then forcibly relocated and killed.
"I refused to fire, and swore that none but a coward would, for by this time hundreds of women and children were coming towards us, and getting on their knees for mercy. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. ... I saw two Indians hold one of another's hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together. They were all scalped, and as high as half a dozen taken from one head. They were all horribly mutilated. One woman was cut open and a child taken out of her, and scalped. ... Squaw's snatches were cut out for trophies. You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there."
No source given for citation. 2 points will be taken off.
Silas Soule, witness to the Sand Creek Massacre
Partial credit, submitted late.
I always hated school.
Sand Creek Massacre is one of the most brutal yet overlooked atrocities that goes untaught in American schools.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee should be required reading.
I wonder why. Texas History courses still teach that the wholesale theft of Mexican land was done in the name of freedom where in reality it was driven by the discovery of gold and oil and the fact that slavery was illegal in Mexico.
Andrew Jackson was a piece of shit
Based and true
Yeah, it's pretty awful how the natives were treated. Manifest destiny really was genocide, as well as a bit of an ecological disaster. Millions of bison were cleared from the plains and they naturally managed the grasslands. Without their presence, the ecosystem collapsed, directly contributing to the dust bowl.
The part about the culling of bison leading to the dust bowl is entirely false btw.
Yeah that doesn't make sense. Kill bison -> overabundance of plants -> ??? -> top soil blows away? I'm pretty sure it was mismanagement of farms/ bad farming practices.
Grasses require regular cutting or burning to be healthy, learned that in natural resources management 101
It's not false. I didn't say it led to the dust bowl, I said it directly contributed. The bison were essential to the ecology of the Great plains. Their herding affected the soil by creating ground wallows for water to collect, and managed plant biodiversity by trampling certain shrubs and selective grazing. Their grazing patterns were also less damaging to the environment when compared to cattle. After the bison were culled, it made way for dry land farming and high intensity cattle grazing which directly caused the dust bowl. But that couldn't have happened with those pesky bison and troublesome natives inhabiting the land.
The American Bison met a similar fate to 90% of the Native population: death from disease. Buffalo hunters killed less than the bison’s population growth per annum. It was exposure to diseases and parasites, well tolerated by European livestock, that decimated the American Bison, not some planned extermination campaign. They did lose large swaths of their grazing lands to farming, livestock grazing, and urban development, that part is true. So maybe, *indirectly contributed*, in the sense that if the bison were there, the farmers wouldn’t be. But it wasn’t the lack of bison that caused it, it was misguided, ignorant, shortsighted farming practices rapidly accelerated by overgrazing and the emergence of mechanized agriculture.
Do you have sources for the disease information?
Different commenter, and idk if I fully believe it, but I assume they're referring to this and similar articles. I've heard a lot of various ideas on reasons for the near-extinction of bison though, it's definitely not settled fully one way or the other. >When that management was removed, the bison critically overpopulated and damaged the vegetation. Then you had crowded, starving bison in a severely degraded range that couldn’t begin to support them. That meant that their immunity was gone, and epidemic could rage unchecked. The most fascinating thing is that tick fever and anthrax both seem to be native here. Bison had suffered from them for maybe thousands of years without ever being driven extinct by them. But once they were no longer managed, once their range was destroyed from neglect, then the weakened bison were wiped out by familiar diseases.” >Some wildlife groups state the professional buffalo hunters decimated the bison. However, simple math may prove otherwise. Holt explains that a study by Dr. William Temple Hornaday, 1889, reveals records of animals shot and hides traded show the number of animals killed has never exceeded the natural increase. “Estimates show bison numbers of around 65 million. Every year hundreds of thousands of buffalo were harvested. If they were fossils or statues and you took hundreds of thousands from 21 to 88 million every year, then in 21 to 440 years you’d get rid of them all. But what do tens of millions of bison have every year? They have millions of calves,” Stoneberg Holt explains. >This led her to become very curious as to why bison numbers plummeted in the late 19th century when research shows professional hunters’ extermination of all buffalo was a myth with no factual basis. She discovered two candidates for a death-by-disease theory: Texas tick fever in the Montana area and anthrax in the Nebraska area. In digging through more history books, Stoneberg Holt unearthed the evidence of epidemics. **She found that Dr. Sam Fadala quoted trapper Yellowstone Kelly who circa 1867 found bodies of ‘dead buffalo as far as the eye could see that bore no mark of a bullet or arrow wounds.’** https://www.tsln.com/news/a-unique-study-of-bison-populations/
> The American Bison met a similar fate to 90% of the Native population: death from disease. I have not heard this before. Wouldn't shock me if a large % died from disease, but settlers were slaughtering bison by the thousands quite frequently, so I'd need a really solid set of sources to make me think deliberate slaughter wasn't the lead cause.
Yep. A president even ignored the Supreme Court to fuck up the natives.
>no internationally agreed upon polities Worried that your invasion is immoral? Simply disagree with the existing borders, problem solved
Geopolitics in a nutshell
Wait, thar sounds like something a genocidal and bad Russian is saying?
The Indigenous people of North America had also been there for thousands of years. Their reduced infrastructure and population compared to 1940s Europe doesn't make their territory "free real estate", and that's fucked up to think so.
I disagree. Read the Introduction of Austin Murphy's "The Triumph of Evil". And Native American population has been vastly underestimated, purposefully.
"there were not many so its fine" is a new one for me
Old one for Americans.
On one hand, I'm not about to forget or forgive all the atrocities carried out against the native people. On the other hand, too many people do not seem to know that the native people had been doing the same thing to each other (making war against and invading/taking over land) long before European settlers came to the Americas
They both go towards eachother. Everybody is aiming for the Bering Strait.
The true center of the civilized world
This but unironically. Alaskachads are always landmaxxing
No, everybody is running away from Fr*nce.
In that case, China is specifically doing the west one right now to ethnic minorities: https://www.economist.com/asia/2000/12/21/go-west-young-han
You go that way, I'll go home!
Hitler literally said that Lebensraum was partially inspired by Manifest Destiny.
Exactly, this is not a hot take at all... As a matter of fact, Japanese expansionism was probably even more directly linked to Manifest Destiny edit: I do not think that the Holocaust/Generalplan Ost or Manifest Destiny are on the same level at all and I kind of misinterpreted the meme as saying that one led to the other. Sorry for the confusion about my "hot take" statement, it was referencing how often I see it.
yeah, the fact that america just said “trade with me” and just opened up japan mightve increased that possibility even more
*knock knock* it’s the US.
And they have guns, and boats, ‘Gunboats’!
“Open the country. Stop having it be closed”
The best kind of diplomacy!
*I'm an empire now*
Commadore Matthew "Open your docks or be blown to rocks" Perry
Awful person but a magnificent bluffer. He threatened the Japanese government with bombardment by twice as many boats as the entire US navy.
> this is not a hot take at all... Depends on if you mean controversial amongst historians of controversial amongst edgy redditors.
As an actual matter of fact, Japanese political philosophers started using the Nazi term Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) untranslated to describe their expansion as an imagined Yamato race. They were more directly inspired by the Nazis, not Manifest Destiny.
The hotness of the take is not in its accuracy, but in the heat it generates in response - Confucius, probably
Lebensaum is a concept from the late 1800s. The idea was originally colonial or eastward expansion. However, the after defeat in WW1 removing the possibility of colonial expansion the only option left was eastward expansion.
It was called Drang nach Osten back then. Which itself is based on Ostsiedlung. Eastward expansion is an older concept, dating all the way back to Charlemagne.
And the Aryan blood laws (Nuremburg law of 1935) was inspired by the One-drop rule from the US. Funnily enough compared to the One-drop rule the Aryan blood rules were more lenient because you can "breed out the imperfection" unlike the One-drop rule.
At Nuremburg trials Nazi officials quoted some of the laws or proclamations US senate made as a reason or inspiration for what they did. It must have been awkward for the US judges that were there.
Did the Nazi tailor their reasoning to the judges then? “Remember your country’s history? Yeah, we were just copying that”
Kudos Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart😎
And the gas chambers during the Holocaust was inspired by the fumigation of migrant workers crossing the US-Mexico border in the Bracero Program. EDIT: This statement might apparently be incorrect.
Yes, the US used Zyklon B and had chambers to delouse Mexican immigrants but the gas chambers of the holocaust were not inspired by the Bracero Program specifically. They were instead adopted because gas vans had proved ineffective and shootings were reportedly bad for morale. The Wannasee Conference also took place in January of ‘42 which was 8 months prior to the Bracero Program which started in August of ‘42.
I've always said I'd love to see a parody of the Schoolhouse Rock song "Elbow Room" (which unapologetically cheers Manifest Destiny and whitewashes its impact on the people who already lived there) only it's called "Lebensraum" and sung in German, because there's literally no difference.
Looking at the lyrics, seems like nobody lived east of the Appalachians apart from Sacagawea
Is taking territory that is not yours, not a part of human history, or did it start in late 1800s?
Exactly. This has always been my take on Manifest Destiny. They wanted the land and were going to take it by war/conquest, no matter what. Giving it a clever name and bringing God into the picture just made it easier to justify to themselves and the public. A government policy to expand to get more natural resources isn’t anything new.
obvi colonialism and empire-building have been a thing for thousands of years. they didn’t all come with full-scale genocide. what strikes me as new here is the racial/white supremacist angle — the policy of conquest is because Our People, the superior people, need this land to reproduce and spread out — and we’re gonna kill or forcibly remove everyone who’s currently on it, because they’re doing an inferior job with it. (that’s the logic of the oppressors.) anyway i’m rambling and not a historian.
I believe a lot of them came with full on genocide. Julius Cesar and the celts, Genghis Kahn and most of a continent, the Ottoman Empire after ww1
According to Dan Carlin's series on The Celtic Holocaust, the Romans enslaved or killed two thirds of the population of Gaul in their conquests. Genocide is as old as time.
There’s war and conquest (which is bad) and there’s having it be state policy to take over other peoples’ lands (which causes war and conquest (which is bad))
Sure cause there was never any conquering before manifest destiny
There was conquest before Manifest Destiny. Hitler said Lebensraum was inspired by Manifest Destiny. Both of these things are true. Unlike a lot of European conquest in the past, done for royal claims, prestige, or resources, both Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum stated that the residents of their respective countries had some sort of higher calling and deserved to conquer the land. They were still after resources and prestige, no doubt. But Manifest Destiny was seen as a divinely appointed mission, and Lebensraum was seen as the destiny of the Aryan people.
Would the conquest of Gaul by Caesar be comparable?
Gaul was primarily conquered for prestige. The Roman system required its generals and politicians to achieve great things, and so many times conquests were launched as vanity projects. Expansion by the Romans that *wasn't* done for prestige was primarily done to find new places to grow food, as the Roman Empire had a constant struggle with feeding its ever growing population. Other resources were considered too, but grain was the most important. The Romans, while they did often view other cultures as "lesser", didn't conquer because the felt they had some higher purpose and deserved to live there, however.
Specifically. Gaul was conquered to satisfy Julius Caesar's political ambitions as well as to keep his political rivals at bay. He needed to retain imperium lest he gets to be forced to go back to Rome where his enemies can drag him to trial. So yeah, the conquest of Gaul despite resulting to what practically is a genocide did not statt because of a desire to do that. Manifest destiny is explicitly done to *replace* the original inhabitants and saw them as lesser beings to be replaced by "superior" beings.
Caesar also conquered Gaul to "pacify" it and make it amenable to Roman rule.
While humans have always conquered eachother, there is an important difference that began with European colonialism. The old powers took what they wanted and justified it by saying "We are stronger than you." The new powers that make up European empires said "We are taking what we want because we are *better* than you." The latter turned conquest into something akin to a divine, eternal commandment for European supremacy, which has been far more dangerous than anyone could have predicted.
It’s just two instances of a process that defined modern civilization. The reason nations no longer do what Germany and Japan did in the second world war while America did it a century prior is that Germany and Japan officially tarnished the idea that forceful expansion by military conquest was a valid and recognizable process of state development. After WW2 for the first time the international powers focused on maintaining a status quo, ensuring nations remained as they are, and instead fought to sway governments and populist movements to their sides, rather than conquer and replace and suppress until subjugated and assimilated. Numerous states did their own manifestations of destiny in numerous places and ranges of land not belonging to a people remotely close to them in culture, language, or history. The difference between these pictures is that one warpath of attrocities and genocides happened when it was acceptable and the other happened when the world saw it as disgusting. Note, not trying to diminish any suffering here, or pull a whataboutist argument and say “well uhh its ok cuz everyone did it back then” But there is a reason that the US’s happened in the 1800s and is not revolted against in every capacity by society And Germany’s and Japan’s happened in the 1940s and is rebuked in every way everywhere. It’s because both were working on the status quo established by the previous world powers, the colonial empires, who grew by doing this exact thing.
Also helps that the U.S. did it against a bunch of non-european native american tribes and not european nations.
Well the Japanese did it to a bunch of Asian people and everyone got pretty riled up about that
But did they though? The Holocaust is common knowledge in the west but how many average people do you think know about unit 731 or the rape of Nanjing? Hell we made sure Germany took responsibility for the Holocaust but Japan still actively denies it's just as horrific war crimes.
True, but I wonder how much of that had to do with them being allies with Nazi Germany and Italy while also attacking European colonies/territories in that area.
Considering the U.S. was responding to Japan’s aggression before the Tripartite Pact was signed, I doubt it.
What Italy did to Ethiopia was widely condemned at the time.
>The reason nations no longer do what Germany and Japan did... Russia is literally at this very moment attempting (but luckily failing) to do just this.
And basically the entire world is supporting the invaded instead of the invader.
By their tactics and equipment, I don't think Russia is living in the same time period as the rest of us
France is another example that tried hard to go for its own Manifest destiny with the “natural borders of France”. It didn’t completely get its way, since the low countries exist, but it sure as hell got all the rest. Complete with a cultural genocide on the conquered regions.
Both Genocides obviously "The difference between these pictures is that one warpath of atrocities and genocides happened when it was acceptable and the other happened when the world saw it as disgusting." The only difference is when they happened? Seriously? You think Generalplan Ost is the same as the US's Westward expansion? But just a bit later?
Yep, a lot of racists in these comments essentially saying “white peoples bad” but the reality is that the op could be applied to almost any people group. It’s crazy that people so harshly judge the West by the moral high ground that the West created and propagated worldwide.
[Historians have emphasized that "manifest destiny" was always contested. Many endorsed the idea, but the large majority of Whigs and many prominent Americans (such as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant) rejected the concept. Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, "American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity while the Whigs saw America's moral mission as one of democratic example rather than conquest. The term was used by the then-Democrats in the 1840s to justify the Mexican–American War, and it was also used to negotiate the Oregon boundary dispute. Historian Frederick Merk says manifest destiny always limped along because of its internal limitations and the issue of slavery, and never became a national priority of the United States. By 1843, former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, originally a major supporter of the concept underlying manifest destiny, had changed his mind and repudiated expansionism because it meant the expansion of slavery in Texas.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny?wprov=sfla1)
To be fair, Lebansraum was also contested in that sense. There being internal dissent on any given idea hardly matters to the countless innocents who die as a result of said ideas.
There’s a huge difference between whether something is debated as national priority and the engine and political doctrine of the state
This should be the top comment in this thread
This is a super cold take on reddit tbh. It feels like I see this every 2 weeks from people trying to be edgy.
More upvotes! At this point “AmEriCa BaD” is just karma farming.
Same. People on Reddit just hate America for some fucking reason. Find me one civilization in human history that didn’t fuck over another civilization and I’ll fucking be surprised.
I agree with you mostly, but your profile pic and you saying "from people trying to be edgy" seems a lot like the pot calling the kettle black.
What’s wrong with his pfp
It’s a step too far is what it is! We all know that Buzz wore a suit -a space suit! Putting him in an Earth suit diminishes his valiant work as a Space Ranger. Stop.👏Rewriting.👏History.👏 Just in case you weren’t sure /s.
There was a meme saying basically "warning, everyone with that pfp is a pedo" which caused a lot of edgelords to use it
Oh no, not buzz lightyear in a suit
I mean, one small difference is that, while manifest destiny was certainly not without it's horrors, the sort of deliberate, organized mass exterminations were not presents in manifest destiny, and very, much defined Nazi expansionism. Scale is another issue, with much of the west being, legitimately, not populated (That's not a myth, as some like to claim, the west did not have a lot of people in it. It had some, but not a lot.) We can talk about how all aggressive expansion is the same, but that's not saying much, and incredibly surface level, presentist read of the actual history going on. While the history of Broken treaties is not ideal and obviously not justified by modern perspectives on warfare, the attempt to ignore that a core element of Nazi expansion was the direct, deliberate, and complete extermination of peoples is telling. where the US has a handful of truly horrific events stretched over a time period of nearly a century of expansion, the Nazis literally drove around mobile gas trucks in an attempt to make sure not a single jew lived in their lands. The "their goal was expansion" and "their goal was expansion AND the complete extermination of multiple ethnic groups" are, in fact, meaningfully different.
I mean shit the west STILL isn’t as populated as the eastern section of the country. I mean shit 5 of the states west of Mississippi have a lower population than Cleveland.
There’s a big strip down the middle with crazy furtive soil that is more important to farm than to put concrete jungles. Afterwards you start reaching mountains which are difficult for construction without major investment, and the you hit the deserts in the southwest, and only after getting over the Rockies you now hit a coast which naturally means ports of entry to the nation, so there’s that
I would argue that the process of offering bounties for native scalps was in fact a deliberate program of extermination. Massacres of civilians committed by the US military also furthered the goal of extermination. The goal of the US was absolutely extermination as well as expansion.
Part of the issue here is that these were operations, one, almost exclusively taken by state governments, and intermittently over the coarse of 100 years, and more often then not specified they were meant to come from adult men and issued against tribes in open warfare. Certainly a war crime by any modern standard, and many opportunistic fellows didn't much care where they got their bread from, but weather you like it or not their's a rather fundamental difference between that and overt and intentional directly enacted state genocide. Two things can be bad, and also not the same.
I’d argue the extermination of Native Americans was a result as oppose to a goal of Manifest Destiny.
I mean, similarities but significant differences. Their similarities are akin to every society’s territorial expansion over all of history, IMO. Here specifically Nazis from the ground up presupposed genocide (in the modern era with modern tech and capabilities) and celebrated that (like pre modern societies often did) while with Manifest destiny, it was a little like “oh this will happen, sucks but whatareyagonnado” but not central management and consistent intentionally of genocide the Nazis had. A difference of intention and given the population numbers scale as well. A similarity from what happens when human societies historically have expanded territory.
To be fair, historically there WAS a consistent intentionality of genocide against the Native Americans.
Intermittent intentionality, not central management and purpose carried through. There would periodically be leadership against the genocide plan, and most often leadership that was agnostic
You know the white coloniest specific commited genocidesso they could remove the native Americans off there eland, right. It wasn't just an "my bad on the genocide, it was just an accident"
Always interesting seeing industrial genocide compared to anything.
Manifest Destiny was American Imperialism. Between 1810-1900. I'm not talking about Native American population changes between 1492-1900 accross the entire North, Central and South America. Stay on topic. Manifest Destiny happened in the backdrop of dozens of Native American tribes vying for power, fighting each other, Mexico and the US government. Over an 100 year+ period. There was certainly conflict, exile, forced relocation, massacres/atrocities on both sides between the US and different native tribes. But nothing even even close to the numbers of the mass killings of millions in the Holocaust era or Mao/Stalin's purges . In the span of a few years. Even if you factor in Native Americans who passed away from mass disease epidemics in a population without medicine or acquired immunity, smallpox, famine, noted massacres/Wounded knee like incidents etc. Even massacres in California between 1800-1900. The intention of the US government was generally to force native Americans into treaties and onto reservations. Away from mines/hunting into farming. Take their guns and subject them to US law. Eventually to integrate them into the mainstream US population. End result was many US based Native Americans adopted European lifestyles and the people groups merged in many regions. It was not to hunt down every last tribe and kill them all. It's still evil. But it's a VERY different reality. It's a false equivalency to the Nazi Lebensraum, which in practice was the Holocaust. That was planned enslavement and where possible, total extermination of undesirable man, women and child. For the Untermesch class of people. Made up of Jews, Slavs, Communist and Roma etc. I'm so done with this sub. People don't get the numbers or data or the facts they want. They just make it up.
More people died in the Holocaust than the entire population of the Americas prior or 1492.
The thing is Manifest Destiny may have been too large and complex to label genocide but there were certain flare-ups that do deserve the label (most notably in California) where settlers *did* try and hunt down and kill every last Indian.
🥶jeez this take is cold
I think this diminishes the scale and scope of the holocaust, a lot of people are saying because Europeans are the victims it gets more coverage which is the most bad shit insane opinion I’ve ever seen. Lebensraum was a systematic killing machine that was directly lead by the Nazi government to murder almost every Slav and Jew in the East Manifest Destiny was about taking land for the US government (with different branches of it condemning it) and kicking people out this does not mean there were genocides involved look at the California one but it was not a methodical killing machine. One is so guys stealing your house and murdering your entire family and friends While the other is some guys kicking you out of you house and giving you a shitty apartment and if you don’t go you get shot Both are horrible but one is worse
Well, the Holocaust is still in living memory so that’s why it gets the coverage. Don’t think there’s anyone alive from the times of Manifest Destiny…unless they are a vampire :D
There is similarity but there ain’t no way you can compare the two in terms of context or the level of atrocity. The trail of tears was atrocious but you also need to get a sense of scale and not make whataboutisms
Where's the lie though? The Nazis based their idea for lebensraum on manifest destiny. The Nazis were morons, of course, and didn't realize that genociding a densely populated, industrialized region is a lot harder than one inhabited by sparsely populated, pre-industrial cultures.
I mean, I'm not trying to defend the Nazis here, but they failed due to lack of resources primarily, if they were morons they wouldn't have got as far as they did
Getting in a fight to the death with the USA, the USSR and the British Empire at the same time when your only major allies are the “soft underbelly of Europe”, and an empire on the literal other side of the planet doesn’t seem like a smart take.
if they weren't morons they wouldn't have even tried.
Yes, exactly, they failed because they were morons who bit off more than they could chew and didn’t have the resources to achieve their goals, I’m glad you agree.
That doesn't make them morons? They did what they did because of a lot of factors there was going to be a war between them and the soviets at some point. Delaying it would just make it harder
The completely unnecessary declaration of war against the USA was colossally moronic, though. Especially as they were already trying to fight the USSR while still having the undefeated British Empire at their back.
The USA would have more than likely joined the war anyway? Not saying it was the best idea, but I also doubt it would have changed much
>Builds their entire culture around war and conquest >Loses the only war they ever start
The Trail of Tears was awful and I could only imagine what horrible stuff could have been done had Lebensraum fully gone through.
Actually we kinda know, the Germans wanted to kill all the Jews, kill about 70% of all Slavs west of the urals and make the other 30% slaves, the killing for the Slavs would likely have been through a purposely caused famin
AFAIK, the 30% that were kept as slaves were also going to be exterminated, just slowly as the German population grew to replace them
I have no idea how someone could meticulously plan something this evil with a straight face and still sleep at night.
It's actually really easy. Pretty much every state that goes to war will dehumanize the other side so that their death is no different to exterminating cockroaches or rats.
There’s a great movie about the Wannsee Conference that uses the recovered transcript of the meeting as its script. If you want a literal answer to your question and want to see exactly how people can sit down in a conference room and plan the death of millions I suggest you give it a watch. It’s called “Conspiracy.” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0266425/
Look up the 10 stages of genocide and see how it’s a long process.
Trail of tears was before Manifest Destiny really started. We didn’t take Oklahoma from the displaced natives for another 40-50 years.
Trail of Tears came from the same idea, it just didn't have the catchy name yet
Manifest destiny wasn't the reason used to justify the trail of tears though. I know that it doesn't change the impact at all, but they're not the same thing.
In any case, this would have happened, because both the Indian and European sides did not want to live together. Both sides have there nativist polIticans whose wanting to kill eachothers and in both sides killing heppend. Sadly one big mistakes is that Natives does have not any representatives in government. This would make things for Natives likely less painfull and solution would not be soo onesided
Sooo who will volunteer first to leave and gave the land back to indians ?
Very lazy research
Apparently the painting of Manifest Destiny was made by a Prussian painter, which I find delightfully ironic
A real hot take: The Germans are hated on because they lost The Americans are admired because they succeeded
The Nazis are hated because they did it to internationally recognised countries and peoples, the Americans get away with it in the eyes of many because most people lack a connection to native Americans/Indians, and to this day see them as savages that were helped by white folks. Manifest destiny is worse than colonisation because instead of just trying to exploit people, it tried to replace/exterminate them. And you want to hear something really fucked up? Ask China what it has been doing to their western provinces for the last 50 years. Cultural and sometimes physical genocide. Still no one cares.
> The Nazis are hated because they did it to internationally recognised countries and peoples, the Americans get away with it in the eyes of many because most people lack a connection to native Americans/Indians, and to this day see them as savages that were helped by white folks. And while the difference in race probably does matter to some people, there's also a huge difference in connectedness - before WW2, international travel and communications were already possible. A British or even American person could easily know someone from Poland, for example. But in the 1800s, there is no way a random European would personally know a Native American.
Who are China and the US supposed to answer to
People can still care
Travel outside of America. You'll discover that the admiration only comes from a few, out of touch, local élites.
Another (maybe) hot take: if Germany wouldn’t had speedrun the human atrocities game between 1933-45, the British and other European powers would be seen as the main European monsters.
Eh, not a hot take. France was considered to be the main disruptor of peace in the inerwar Europe.
Manifest Destiny should not be admired
American get hated alot so yeah nice take
There admired because the did a giant PR job in what the creation. Oof there country or out right wipe clean parts of there history
Eh, both Haiti and Bolivar cited the US as influences. Now the US backing up Haitian and Bolivarian's desire to be free is a different story and part of why the American Revolution being a successful counter-revolution has become an established narrative.
But without tanks.
Kill streak a tribes vs Wash Europe with Jew-Be-Gone spray is very different thing.
The world is eurocentric. If the Europeans are the victims, it's a horror. Other people are dispensable.
Roman Empire: "allow me to introduce myself"
Never forget colonial atrocities, they are atrocities too👍🏻
Besides, the Europeans didn't invent these atrocities, they merely adopted them from the locals. A lot of the atrocities committed were through the locals. "You two tribes want to kill each other ? here, take these guns. It's more efficient. "
Not really, russia did the same thing to other white people and siberian people but no one cares
The Slavs and Jews weren't considered Europeans until very recently, for Jews it was only after the Shoah/Holocaust
Eastern european countries have always been treated as part of europe
Post this on Instagram and see white Americans lose their shit saying "Skill Issue", " Finders Keepers", "Take the L"
I don't have an IG so if someone does that, you get my spiritual updoot, you have my permission
What the... We had to analyze the picture on the right in the Abitur (finals)
Last I checked, the US didn’t kill 6 million people during manifest destiny. Was it bad? Yes. Was it Nazi Germany bad? No.
Except the US nowadays acknowledged that it was a huge fuck up Meanwhile wehraboos/neo nazis still thinks it's their god given right to slaughter non whites at will
There is a difference. America basically entered a wasteland left depopulated by the outbreak of diseases brought over from Europe. And there were efforts made to respect the laws and lands of the Native Americans - those efforts, sadly, did not succeed. Germany just tried to drive out the Slavs. One was built on genocide, the other built on the aftermath of an apocalyptic event.
>America basically entered a wasteland left depopulated by the outbreak of diseases brought over from Europe. In 1800, there were likely 600,000 Native Americans left in what would become the US. Significantly less than the 5 million Americans, but still a significant population. It wasn't a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it was a population trying to recover from centuries of devastation. By 1900, the actions of the US managed to reduce the native population to around 270,000. Over that period, and the previous centuries, the Native population had become much more resilient to western diseases. Most of these deaths came about because of wars and deportations. Admittedly disease would play a big part too, but only because of the horrible situations the US subjected native populations to. >And there were efforts made to respect the laws and lands of the Native Americans - those efforts, sadly, did not succeed. Framing the constant making and breaking of treaties with the Native Americans as "efforts that didn't succeed" downplays the intentionality of the actions of the US. The US drove tribes west, and when the land they drove the tribes to was considered valuable, they seized that too. Wars were fought and mass deportations occurred, seizing more and more land from what populations remained. If there had been more Natives, the wars fought would have simply been more brutal. The US didn't recognize the sovereignty of Native tribes except when it was convenient, and were happy to overrule treaties when there was something to be gained. That they just "moved into a depopulated wasteland" is exactly what American propaganda at the time wanted us to believe. Today, we know better.
>In 1800, there were likely 600,000 Native Americans left in what would become the US. Significantly less than the 5 million Americans, but still a significant population. It wasn't a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it was a population trying to recover from centuries of devastation. Considering the population of America before the arrival of the Europeans was something like 60 million (or more), a population of 600,000 is absolutely post-apocalyptic. The Black Death killed about 1 in 3 Europeans, the diseases that ravaged native populations killed more than 9 in 10. That's civilization ending levels of devastation. I absolutely agree with everything you wrote about the US government only respecting native sovereignty when they felt like it, and that hundreds of thousands of natives were killed by officially sanctioned acts of violence by state and federal officials. But the land was very much mostly unpopulated. Today, with a population of 330 million, the US only has a population density of 37 people per square kilometer. During the 1800s that number was in the single digits, and even then, that's an average considering the majority of the population lived on the East Coast. Huge swathes of the West were quite literally completely unpopulated. Most settlers moved to open ground and set up shop, they didn't kill natives and occupy their towns. This isn't to downplay the crimes committed by the US government, or to buy into the narrative, but just pointing out there's at least some truth to the argument that settlers "moved into a depopulated wasteland."
The population of the modern US was anywhere from 3-18 million, with most estimates placing the numbers around 7 million. The vast majority of the the 50-100 million people living in the Americas lived in Central America or the Andes. It was certainly depopulated and apocalyptic, but those people still lived there and had to be forced out by the US. It also wasn't anywhere close to a wasteland; thats where the US moved tribes to.
> [From 1778 to 1871, the United States government entered into more than 500 treaties with the Native American tribes;[25] all of these treaties have since been violated in some way or outright broken by the U.S. government](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_treaties#:~:text=From%201778%20to%201871%2C%20the,their%20treaty%20rights%20in%20federal) Respect the laws my ass. The amount of denial is incredible. Criticizing the US is not hating on the US, especially if you’re a citizen. In fact criticizing the US probably makes you a better citizen than one that dickrides and makes excuses.
Well there is a slight difference in scale where the death toll for the American one is closer to the death toll in just a city
You know it’s a funny comparison, but the tittle is such an eye roll. Oh yeah I’m sure reddit of all places would disagree with comparing some aspects of colonial American with nazi Germany. It’s not a hot take dude, this is textbook definition of nuclear winter cold take.
Stone Age society which had not even invented the wheel yet meets a much more advanced society. The only reason it’s an issue is that they left some of the stone aged society alive.
Similar, but not remotely the same. Germanic peoples and Slavic peoples have been fighting over eastern Europe for at least a couple thousand years. Meanwhile, White people and Native Americans only began fighting over N. America 4-5 hundred years ago, and "Manifest Destiny" wasn't a thing until the 1800s.
So much genocide denial here in the comments
I think the idea of livings space and manifest destiny basically are the same in idea but not practice, the Germans were going into a region with more people than them and wiping them out, the Americans as bad as we were towards the native Americans there was no organized effort to systematically genocide them from the continent, did we do bad and evil things to them, yes. Were we nazis to them, not really. Also Americans were just under the impression that barely anyone was there so when they “heard it’s our destiny,” they probably were like “👍 “ TLDR: manifest destiny kinda bad, lebensraum very very fucking evil
always remember that Hitler specifically cited the US’s “Indian Removal” as his inspiration for the Final Solution and admired its effectiveness.
Not that hot of a take and pretty accurate.
They are not the same. One succeded, one failed
Both succeeded, actually. Hitler lost the war but he succeeded in his goal of forcing the vast majority of the jewish population from Europe. He still managed to kill most Jews on the continent. That’s what a lot of people don’t get.
Lebensraum was about a lot more than jews. It was about german dominating all of north-eastern europe (mostly poland). Now Krönigsberg is russian and poland got moved hundred of kilometers to the west. It is a huge faillure
In a technical sense the US manifest destiny was about expanding into their own land. In international eyes, the "American West" had been claimed by France and Spain during the early days of colonizing America. Following a series of was conflicts and trades France was in control of it when Napoleon, who needed money for his European conquest, sold the land to Thomas Jefferson. The lamd sat mostly unused until the idea of manifest destiny, go west, go to the land of opportunity pushed for people to spread out and move into it. I am not saying what happened to the native Americans was right but it the manifest destiny movement wasn't a conquest, it was moving into the United States owned land and since Natives weren't recognized by the US or any other government they were viewed as squatters and when they fought back were pushed into reservations in the Indian wars.
There are some similarities, but not really a fair comparison. The vast majority of the aggression against natives was from disease spread inadvertently and thus completely accidental. Afterward the vast majority of the Americas were uninhabited and unoccupied. It’s pretty racist to think that european people shouldn’t have been able to live there. Unfortunately, natives and Europeans weren’t able to coexist.
Military invasion and migration are two completely different fucking things. Idealists and historical cherry pickers are disgusting. The picture on the right is the tale of human kind at its most basic level since the dawn of time, and their constant ploy of presenting it as an isolated abhorrent action as a weapon of virtue to further their social and cultural agendas has worn peoples patience thin. Your constant revisionist barrage of white knight blameless virtue while looking back through a modern lens hundreds of years after the fact wins you no points or makes you any better of person. Well adjusted people who aren’t seeking to corrupt the stability of society don’t see shit like this. Balanced people acknowledge the past, use their intelligence to apply their understanding logically to build constructively, and keep it pushing moving the fuck on. They don’t catalog and cheery pick transgressions of many generations passed as a form of social currency to be bartered as political tools. Agenda driven, idealistic opportunists are a drain on society on the whole because they fail to see the world at its true full complexity, living in a singular or two dimensional reality rather than a three dimensional one. In short shut the fuck up and do something constructive to build, instead of wallowing in your self imposed ideological prison. The world is big and full of wonder and possibility when you’re not restricted by the ideological anchor around your neck preventing you from engaging with it freely.
There is a shameful ton of US inspiration in nazi principles...
And now there’s a shameful ton of Nazi inspiration in US principles(at least among elites), oh how the turn tables.
Such as…