Quote: (01-23-2012 03:33 PM)ElJefe Wrote:
Dude, your examples are... strange.
You'd think differently if you knew more about them.
I can list many more if you'd like.
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Greece a super-power? What? Cultural super-power, yes... but they fell apart as soon as they got big.
This isn't debatable. Alexander's Greece was the most powerful military force of its day-this was proven after it simply laid waste to the only other polities at the time that could quite conceivable lay claim to that title (most notably, Persia) before building one of the largest empires Earth has ever seen and laying the foundation for an entirely new, widespread, and long lasting (the influence persists heavily to this very day) cultural age.
Greece was only a cultural super power because of its status as a military superpower-it was conquest that brought about the Hellenistic Age, however short (roughly two centuries) that was.
This was obviously the zenith of Greek power-its modern equivalent is a shadow of this.
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Those Native American civlizations were wiped out by European powers and small-pox. They never had a chance.
You don't know anything about Native American history-I can already tell.
Your conclusion is inaccurate for all of the examples I listed. American Indian history is VASTLY more complicated than this, and it includes many diplomatic, political, economic and social shifts in power between Native American groups and European powers, as well as between different Native American groups themselves.
There is much more to it all than "Smallpox ---> Indians had no chance!". Anyone with a background in this subject would know that.
Books:
Colin Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Boston-New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012).
Timothy Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Penguin , 2008).
Pekka Hemalainen, The Apache Empire.
These three books should do for a start-read them, and get back to me. While you're at it, read up on Cahokia as well.
If you insist on calling me out as you've done and getting into a debate such as this, then make sure you have an intellectual leg to stand on.
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Seriously, anybody could go on TV and say Empires rise and fall.. it's the one thing ANYONE can say with absolute certainty. This back and forth thing you indicate by writing "balancing" doesn't fit. Big general statements are hopelessly inaccurate like that... you'd want to take a look at each situation.
You read into it a lot more than I did.
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As for the blog - I'm not so sure. If Chinese intentions are pure, why do they keep supporting bloody-minded dictators in the UN or North Korea?
They aren't pure-they're economically expedient. China's model is designed to benefit itself economically.
It just so happens that China's way of things benefits Africans more than the Western way. This isn't because the Chinese love Africans and hold a moral supremacy over Westerners. It is because the interests of the two sides just happen to align quite closely (at least, relatively more so than other relationships have in the past).
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I think Chinese foreign police is malignant, as far as the West is concerned, and has a long-term goal of securing Chinese hegemony and world domination - political and economic.
For the west, perhaps.
For much of the developing world, maybe not.
Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time.