Jared Diamond and Black Africa

[Fade the Butcher]

Jared Diamond doesn't know what he is talking about. He made a big fuss about how nonwhites did not possess large domesticated mammals. This isn't true. The Afro-Islamic states actively traded gold for horses. Sub-Saharan blacks were herding cattle as far south as Namibia when the Portuguese first arrived there. The Congolese had plenty of cattle. They simply preferred to eat other human beings because they believed consuming human flesh gave them magical powers. The ancient Greeks and Romans, however, did not eat much beef. They associated herding cattle with barbarism. So much for that lie. Europeans didn't even eat much meat until well into the modern age. Diamond forgot to mention that.

Diamond's geographical determinism is also simplistic and ahistorical. In fact, Europeans and East Asians had little contact with each other until well into the Late Middle Ages. The Chinese had no knowledge of Euclid, Plato, or Archimedes. The printing press originated in China, but was independently reinvented in the West. The Islamic world had access to the printing press early on but banned its use until well into the modern era because of hostility to graven images. In the West, the Orient was a magical land ruled by a King David of India and the legendary Prester John. The Portuguese arrived in India looking for both only to find neither. The latter was even confused with Genghis Khan for years (who was supposed to march to the Holy Land during the Crusades).

In reality, Sub-Saharan blacks had more contact with the outside world than Western Europe did during the Middle Ages. The Chinese even sailed down the coast of east Africa during the fifteenth century. They never went to Western Europe, but they went to Australia. Trade across the Indian Ocean had been going on since ancient times. The east coast of Africa was known as the land of Zanj and was settled by merchants from Yemen, Arabia, and Persia. Much of the local population there still speaks Swahili, a Bantu dialect heavily influenced by Arabic. Madagascar was colonized by Malays during Antiquity.

West Africa was no different. The Afro-Islamic states south of the Sahara engaged in extensive international trade; far more so than Western Europe until the rise of the Italian city states. The slave trade across the Sahara had been flourishing for centuries before Europeans showed up. The Portuguese had long known about this and sent ships down the west coast of Africa because they knew about the gold mines there. West Africans had full access to the accumulated knowledge of the Islamic world (which was ideally suited to be a conduit of such information). Yeah. The Sahara was really such an impenetrable barrier. Whatever. Caravans of camels had been crossing it to engage in trade since the time of the Carthaginians.

And southern Africa? The Afrocentrists and antiracists want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to say the region is backward because it was so isolated from the other major centers of civilization. Yet at the same time they gleefully point to Great Zimbabwe. Great Zimbabwe was a shortlived trading state that arose due to the natural mineral wealth of the area. Gold was mined there and transported to ports on the Indian where it was exchanged for the commodities of merchants: silk from Persia, porcelain from China, textiles from India etc. I suppose they just weren't selling Confucius.

Take a look at Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia today. The inhabitants of these countries are amongst the most dirt poor people in Africa (and, by extension, the world). Yet their ancestors lived in close proximity to ancient Egypt, the Persian Empire, the Hellenistic world, the Roman Empire, the Caliphate etc. They traded with the Greeks, Arabs, Romans, Phoenicians, Persians, Indians and so on. Ethiopia was a Christian state centuries before Norway and Sweden converted. The geographical axis of Africa prevented their development, obviously. Whatever.

Sub-Saharan Africa has such a poor climate. This is true in some cases. Let's grant that civilization could not arise in places like the Sahara and Kalahari deserts. This is an irrelevancy, however, as few Africans live in these places in the first place. Diamond makes a huge fuss about the food crops indigenous to Africa in order to confuse his lay readers. Black Africans could not sustain a civilization because the foods available to them were of inferior quality. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa was supporting a population of anywhere between thirty to sixty million people by the sixteenth century (which is why African slaves were so readily available). The environment of black Africa was so poor that it was able to support a population equivilant to that of contemporary Western Europe with vastly inferior technology and agricultural methods.

Natural resources? Black Africans had them in abundance and still do today. Africa probably has more mineral wealth than any other continent and fuels resource wars across the continent to this day. What Western European country has the oil of Nigeria and Angola, the gold of South Africa, the diamonds of the Sierra Leone, the uranium of Niger? The Congo alone has one fifth of the world's potential hydroelectric power. Guinea has 25% of the world's high grade bauxite ore. Some of the richest farmland in the world is found in the Great Lakes region of Africa and the Zimbabwe plateau.

Colonialism demostrated that there is nothing inherent in the environment of Sub-Saharan Africa preventing development. Famine was largely elimated in black Africa under European administration. Black Africa was for several decades a net exporter of food. Diseases like malaria went into remission, as they did in Cuba after the Spanish-American War. Railroads, hospitals, universities, public schools and so on were built all across the continent. The wars that rage across the region today had become a thing of the past by the 1950s. Black Africa was making such rapid socioeconomic progress that Europeans simply assumed that it was taken for granted that it would continue upon independence.
Africa is backward because Africans live there and run the show. The enormous potential of the region has been utterly squandered by one corrupt African despot after another, from Mobutu Sese Seko to Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe and South Africa are just the two latest examples of prosperous states created by Europeans that have been ruined by black incompetance, corruption, and financial mismangement. Ghana was the first.

No other explanation will suffice. Some will blame globalization, but Africa doesn't engage in much international trade. Some will blame colonialism, but the region was never more civilized prosperous than it was under colonialism. Some will blame slavery, but the poorest areas in Africa never participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Some will blame lack of international aid, but Africa has received the equivilant of over five Marshall Plans. Jared Diamond blames geography and the African climate, not Africans themselves. We can dispense with that explanation in light of the reasons given above.

[Petyr Baelish]

Great Zimbabwe was a shortlived trading state that arose due to the natural mineral wealth of the area. Gold was mined there and transported to ports on the Indian where it was exchanged for the commodities of merchants: silk from Persia, porcelain from China, textiles from India etc.

As far as I am aware, Great Zimbabwe was an Arab slave-trading fort...

[Fade the Butcher]

As far as I am aware, Great Zimbabwe was an Arab slave-trading fort...And gold and ivory.

[Thomas777]

That is an erudite critique, Fade...but we don't even need to go that far to refute Diamond's position.

Diamond's Geographical Determinism does not take into account the effect that environmental variables have upon insular human populations overtime...in other words, he does not account for evolutionary "feedback loops" that ultimately shape the intelligence and behavioral phenotypes of populations.

Suppose I accept Diamond's thesis...that thesis being: Europe was endowed with rich resources and herding animals...Africa was devoid of these resources. Hence, the Europeans were able to develop and master technologies that were unavailable to the Black Africans. My answer to this thesis is: That may be the case...but the existence of the former gave rise to inventions/technologies which created complex, well-ordered societies...societies in which only relatively intelligent, skilled, robust individuals possessing great foresight could survive and thrive. The status of the latter caused stagnation, which in turn favored brute instincts within the dwelling population.

[Fade the Butcher]

Diamond says virtually nothing about the topic of racial differences in his book. He just dismisses them as superfluous. He also dwells upon the Americas, Africa, and Australia while ignoring the historical development of Western Europe. This makes little sense if he is to explain the retardation of these areas through comparative history.

Disease is one of Diamond's big themes and he makes a few valid points. The population of the New World was largely wiped out by European diseases. Then again, the Black Death took out about one of every three Europeans in the fourteenth century and would recur periodically for hundreds of years. The Great Famine of 1315-1322 just a few decades before had taken out one of every ten. Europeans also had to cope with syphilis (which probably came from the New World), smallpox, plague, typhus etc. I am not aware of any such epidemics to kill similiar numbers of black Africans. AIDS isn't even that destructive. Did they not possess an advantage over Europeans in this respect?

Isolation can be a good thing too. The Chinese built the Great Wall of China to keep out northern barbarians. Isolation fosters independent development. Western Europe was relatively isolated from the Islamic world and that explains a lot of its success. Institutions like the university and the corporation could never have evolved under Islamic law. Byzantium, in contrast, ossified into a stagnant militarized society in large part because it was constantly at war with its neighbors: Ostrogoths, Bulgars, Slavs, Turks, Persians, Arabs and so on. Sub-Saharan Africa was a lot like Western Europe in this respect. It was close enough to the major centers of civilization to benefit from such interaction (the introduction of iron working by the Carthaginians is one example) yet isolated enough to develop along its own lines. The Mongols sacked Baghdad, but left Timbuktu alone.

[Fade the Butcher]

I suppose I will continue this later.

Sub-Saharan Africans today have access to the most sophisticated technology in the world. They have access to the cumulitive knowledge of countless generations of humanity's best minds. It's only a few mouse clicks away. They are showered with billions upon billions of dollars of American and European largess. Their region is endowed with mineral wealth most European nations could only dream of possessing. They are protected from foreign invasion by international law.

And what have they done with it? Almost every single country in sub-Saharan Africa is worse off today than they were fifty years ago. The region is a cesspool of starvation, corruption, poverty, genocide, and tyranny. There has been a revival of slavery and cannibalism. Meanwhile, African dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko live in lavish luxury in mansions on the French Riveria and fleece their countries of billions of dollars. They give themselves titles like "Father of the Nation" and "The Messiah" as they run their nations into the toilet.

[Professor John Frink]

That is an erudite critique, Fade...but we don't even need to go that far to refute Diamond's position.

Diamond's Geographical Determinism does not take into account the effect that environmental variables have upon insular human populations overtime...in other words, he does not account for evolutionary "feedback loops" that ultimately shape the intelligence and behavioral phenotypes of populations.


That's correct:

This analysis suggested that around 1800 genes, or roughly 7% of the total in the human genome, have changed under the influence of natural selection within the past 50,000 years. A second analysis using a second SNP database gave similar results. That is roughly the same proportion of genes that were altered in maize when humans domesticated it from its wild ancestors.

“Domesticated” humans

Moyzis speculates that we may have similarly “domesticated” ourselves with the emergence of modern civilisation.

“One of the major things that has happened in the last 50,000 years is the development of culture,” he says. “By so radically and rapidly changing our environment through our culture, we’ve put new kinds of selection [pressures] on ourselves.”


source: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8483
study: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0509691102v1.pdf

[Fade the Butcher]

Stupid Afrocentrists.

Our whole system of Algerbra is named after the Arabic mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (786-833). Al-Khwarizmi wasn't an Arab. He was a Persian mathematician who was born in what is now Uzbekistan. Notice his striking African features.

http://www.astromia.com/biografias/fotos/alkhwarizmi.jpg

[Anima Eternae]

Who says Arabs are African?

[Fade the Butcher]

Ouch.

I called France a backwater compared to the Mali and Ghanan empires purely based on each nation's wealth, education level, and standard of living. Medieval Islamic kingdoms were simply more advanced than Medieval European kingdoms, and that goes across the board. I didn't know that, but here is what we will do. I will put forth the accomplishments of the following medieval Europeans in their respective fields. You give us the names of their superior contemporaries in the medieval Afro-Islamic states.

Giotto (1267-1337), Gaddi (1300-1366), and Cimabue (1240-1302) in painting; Petrach (1304-1374) and Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) in poetry and literature; Boccaccio (1313-1375) and Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) in literature; St. Francis (1182-1226), St. Dominic (1170-1221), and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) in spirituality; Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), Raymond Lully (1235-1315), and William of Ockham (1285-1349) in natural philosophy; St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), Alexander of Hales, and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) in theology; John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) and Peter Abelard (1079-1142) in logic; Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) in chemistry and botany; Frederick II (1194-1250) in zoology; Roger Bacon (1214-1294) in optics and natural philosophy; Petrus Peregrinus in magnetism; Jean Buridan (1300-1358) in physics; Thomas Bradwardine (1290-1349), Richard Swineshead, and John Dumbleton in kinematics and dynamics; the Notre Dame School of Polyphony (1170-1250), Franco of Cologne, and Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) in music; Adam de la Halle (1237-1288) in theater; Leonardo of Pisa in mathematics; Gratian in law; and the Gothic style in architecture.

Tell me the names of the Sub-Saharan African institutions of higher learning that rival the likes of the University of Paris, University of Bologna, University of Salerno, and Oxford University during the Middle Ages. Show me equivilant of the Arthur Legend in England, El Cid in Spain, the Eddas of Scandinavia, the Nibelungen Lied of Germany, Dante's Divine Comedy in Italy, or the Troubadour poems of France. Show me the Sub-Saharan accomplishments in legal theory like the Magna Carta of England or the Canon Law of Gratian.

LOL . . . more advanced across the board.

[Kodos]

Byzantium, in contrast, ossified into a stagnant militarized society in large part because it was constantly at war with its neighbors

I thought it was that way because it inherited the culture of the degenerate late Roman Empire... and never really broke off of it even when they switched to Greek as their official language.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Thanks that Byzantium stopped Islam in Anatolia for over 700 years western europe is what it is today.

[Fade the Butcher]

I thought it was that way because it inherited the culture of the degenerate late Roman Empire... and never really broke off of it even when they switched to Greek as their official language.So did the West. Byzantium wasn't always stagnant. There were some Byzantine accomplishments in philosophy (a few late Neoplatonic thinkers), law (Justinian Code), and architecture (Hagia Sophia). There was also something of a revival under the Macedonian emperors.

[Kodos]

Thanks that Byzantium stopped Islam in Anatolia for over 700 years western europe is what it is today.

I agree, but I thought that had more to do with superior cavalry organization already developed by the Illyrian Emperors( Cladius II and especially Aurelian) that saved the empire from falling way back in the 3rd century and the fact that until the Turks brought up heavy cannons( and had a spy open the gates to the final inner walls) every attempt to breach the triple walls ended in failure.

[Kodos]

So did the West. Byzantium wasn't always stagnant. There were some Byzantine accomplishments in philosophy (a few late Neoplatonic thinkers), law (Justinian Code), and architecture (Hagia Sophia). There was also something of a revival under the Macedonian emperors.

The west didn't inherit that because the culture of the west after the fall was that of the Germanic barbarians( brutish but not stagnant... you would have gotten an end to stagnation without a dark age if the Ostrogoths won over the Franks... too bad they didn't).

[Fade the Butcher]

Who Are You?,

I submit to you the following letter to Queen Victoria from the Negro leaders of Cameroon. Please comment.

Dearest Madam,

We your servants have join together and thoughts its better to write you a nice loving letter which will tell you all about our wishes. We wish to have your laws in our towns. We want to have every fashion altered, also we will do according to your Consul's word. Plenty wars here in our country. Plenty murder and plenty idol worshipers. Perhaps these lines of our writing will look to you as an idle tale.

We have spoken to the English consul plenty times about having an English government here. We never have answer from you, so we wish to write you ourselves.

When we heard about the Calabar River, how they have all English laws in their towns and how they have put away all their superstitions; oh, we shall be very glad to be like Calabar now.

We are, etc.
King Acqua
Prince Dido Acqua
Prince Black
Prince Jo Garner
etc.

[daisy]

Our whole system of Algerbra is named after the Arabic mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (786-833).
Al-Khwarizmi wasn't an Arab. He was a Persian mathematician who was born in what is now Uzbekistan. Notice his striking African features.
http://www.astromia.com/biografias/fotos/alkhwarizmi.jpg (http://www.astromia.com/biografias/fotos/alkhwarizmi.jpg)
he is a muded albino white power !

[Fade the Butcher]

The west didn't inherit that because the culture of the west after the fall was that of the Germanic barbariansThis is only partially true. The Byzantine concept of sacred monarchy flourished in the West during the Early Middle Ages. Germanic law is based on the notion that law resides in the folk.( brutish but not stagnant... you would have gotten an end to stagnation without a dark age if the Ostrogoths won over the Franks... too bad they didn't).The Ostrogoths were taken out by the Byzantines in the sixth century. The war devastated Italy and sapped the resources of Byzantium. The Byzantines were constantly at war. This is one reason why the Eastern Empire ossified and declined.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

It must have sucked majorly to have lived during those days of chaos and total uncertainty. Chances were that any given year some plundering mob would assault your city and leave you starving or in chains.

[Fade the Butcher]

Jared Diamond does NOT explain why Europeans conquered the world instead of Middle Easterners, Indians or Chinese.

Let me start off by reminding you that my post specifically dealt with Jared Diamond's claims about Africa. I will address those claims in the course of this thread and ignore his comments about the rest of the world. These claims are as follows . . .

1.) Sub-Saharan African development was retarded by its north-south axis.
2.) Sub-Saharan African development was retarded by its lack of domesticable plants and animal species.
3.) Sub-Saharan African backwardness is not attributable to any biological deficiency.

"In short, Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography -- in particular, to the continents' different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate."

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.400-401

That's something which probably is down to the cultural changes in Western Europe and Iberia since the Middle Ages.

Jared Diamond denies this. Unlike historians of science, Diamond does not trace the origins of European scientific and technological supremacy to internal developments within Western Europe during the High Middle Ages and Early Modern Era. He would have his readers believe that Sub-Saharan Africans were thousands of years behind more advanced societies in Eurasia at the time; that it is unreasonable to expect them to have caught up with the West due to their poor environment. This is true in some cases. It isn't true in others.

No good study has come of that yet to explain exactly what happened.

There have been plenty of such studies. There are historians of science and technology who work specifically in this field (unlike Jared Diamond). It seems reasonable to me that we should consult their work before taking into consideration the speculations of amateurs. Jared Diamond is not a historian.

That's a lot less than what the Eurasians had and what the Africans did have often witnessed human evolution and hence learned to fear humans and were far more difficult to tame or exterminate.

Africans had no shortage of cattle. Entire African societies were organized around herding cattle during the fifteenth century. Diamond also fails to take into consideration the fact that beef and dairy products played almost no role in the diets of advanced Mediterranean societies like Rome and Greece. Roman dominance of the Mediterranean basin was also based upon the legions for centuries.

(compare Zebras to horses and Elephants to giant North American mammals)

We can set aside the question of whether Africans could have domesticated zebras and elephants. It is irrelevant. Africans possessed horses, cattle, sheep, and goats just like Europeans. Africans were herding cattle as far south as Namibia when the Portuguese began to explore the Africa coast during the fifteenth century.

The thing which Eurasia offered, was 3-4 distinct areas that could be politically independent of each, while still influencing each other technologically immensely. (through the spread of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent)

Let's dispense with this geographic construct known as 'Eurasia'. Eurasian societies had little direct contact with each other until well into the Middle Ages. Ancient and Medieval Europeans knew very little about the Orient and vice versa. This only changed after the voyages of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. North Africa (home of St. Augustine, Diophantes, and Ptolemy) was far and away more familiar to Europeans. Plato and Aristotle both traveled to Egypt. They never went to China. Racial descriptions of black Africans survive from Greek Antiquity. Perhaps it would make more sense to discuss the history of Eurafrica.

Essentially Jared's contention is that if anyone was going to conquer the world, it was going to come out of Eurasia.

Iraq is occupied by the U.S. today. The U.S. is not occupied by Iraq (in spite of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon arising there thousands of years ago). They had one helluva head start over Germans and Anglo-Saxons.

He, again, gives no explanation as to why it was Europe and not anywhere else.

I would guess this is because his theory can't account for this. Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China were certainly privileged over Northwestern Europe in terms of the domesticable plants and animals he attaches so much importance to.

Which was never brought up. Jared Diamond focuses mostly on agro-animal resources, their presence and the difficulty of their spread.

He does bring this up. For example, he points out that the Incas made extensive use of stone tools in spite of Peru being endowed with such fantastic mineral wealth.

Actually, no those states are obviously not poor for the same reasons that the rest of Africa is.

Diamond's theory cannot explain this. Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia should not be so backward given their access to domesticated Eurasian plant and animal species as well as Eurasian knowledge and technology.

In fact, I would classify all three of those states as culturally "Eurasian" in the same way I would consider North African Arabs "Eurasian".

Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia are amongst the poorest countries on earth. I would still like to see someone explain this.

I think that's a huge exageration.

No. It's a fact. Sub-Saharan Africa did engage in more international trade than Western Europe until the rise of the Italian city states. Ask Mansa Musa about the Afro-Islamic states he is always crowing about.

First of all, sub-saharan Africans barely had contact with each other

This isn't true.

so even if people on the East coast had contact with Chinese and on the West coast had contact with Europeans there was no guarantee that technology would travel across the continent.

This is refuted even by Diamond's own book: he points out that Southeast Asian crops like the asian yam and the banana diffused across the continent. Islam was also able to spread all across West and East Africa during this period. It simply isn't true that Sub-Saharan Africans were cut off from Eurasia. The Arabs made fine slaves out of them during these centuries.

Second, any agricultural or animals Eurasians might bring simply would not be able to travel across the Sahara and equator across the continent until much much later in history.

The introduction of the camel during the first millennium made trans-Sahara trade quite common. Trade along the east coast of Africa had also been going on for centuries before that. Herodotus mentions an expedition by the Phoenicians that circumnavigated Africa during Antiquity.

(IE, until Eurasian technology made it possible)

Africans were unable to seaworthy vessels? Did they lack trees now?

This is the problem of the axis that Africa and the Americas had.

I am still not understanding how this was such an obstacle. Why didn't Africans construct ships and sail to Persia, India, and China? Geography also prevented the Romans from conquering Germania.

Agricultural benefits could not travel north-south because of the dramatic climactic differences.

Diamond makes a lot of noise about this but ignores the fact that both Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas had populations roughly equivilant to Europe's during the fifteenth century in spite of their inferior technology. In fact, Tenochtitlan was far larger than any contemporary European city.

If Europe had been placed directly North or South of the fertile crescent, it's extremely unlikely there would have been any European expansion or real civilization.

I am not following you here. Elaborate.

I think you misunderstand Jared's argument. There's nothing in Africa's geography (well, except the really nasty parts) which stop development today any more than the geography of Australia or North America.

Isn't that what Steve Sailer pointed out: that such 'barriers' to the diffusion of science, technology, and knowledge have all but collapsed, but Sub-Saharan Africa remains hopelessly backward, unlike Hong Kong or Singapore?

However, the geography of these continents did make it very difficult to generate the agriculture, and consequently society and technology, that would make geography no longer important as a factor of development.

Sub-Saharan Africans were both farmers and herders and they also possessed a limited amount of technology. I am still trying to figure out how the geography of Africa prevented Africans from absorbing Eurasian science and technology, but failed to stop them from absorbing Islam and Oriental luxury goods.

Being cut-off from every other centre of technology AND having very few centers of agriculture does not aid development.

They were not cut off from other centers of technology. I pointed out earlier that they engaged in more trade with the rest of the world than Western Europe. The Chinese never sailed there. Their agriculture was also sufficient to support a population equivilant to that of contemporary Europe (hence their slave surplus).

Second, racial arguments make absolutely no sense, except insofar as resistance to disease is concerned.

The genetic homogeneity of Amerindians caused them to be especially vulnerable to Eurasian diseases (unlike black Africans).

Remember, Europeans only became more advanced than their Chinese and Islamic neighbors around the 15th century. Are we to believe that suddenly their "whiteness" became more felt?

I have already addressed this matter elsewhere.

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2911

Only political isolation (that is, peace) is good. Cultural and technological isolation means you'll miss out on all the advances other places are making.

Western Europe was generally culturally isolated throughout the Middle Ages. That is why so many unique institutions arose there that didn't occur elsewhere. The university is the best example of this.

I think you completely, absolutely completely, miss the point of Jared's argument. The diseases that Eurasians felt were caused by their high population densities and proximity to numerous animals (which, in turn, was caused by the ease in establishing agro-animal economies).

The Central Plateau of Mexico was more densely populated in the early sixteenth century than any comparable area in Western Europe.

It didn't matter if Eurasians lost huge amounts of people to war and disease, simply because high food production meant there was a lot more Eurasians than anyone else in any case (still felt today, Eurasians, despite massive immigration to the Americas are what, 80% of the world?).

You are grossly exaggerating the relative population disparity between Western Europe, Africa, and the Americas at the outset of the Early Modern Era.

What's more, these plagues were actually a aided colonization in the sense that it turned Europeans into disease-resistant plague-bearers. (that's a valid race argument, if you want to call it that)

European diseases devastated black Africa?

Africans had some comparable diseases because of the very different climate, and hence, weren't exterminated like none-equatorial native Americans.

European diseases didn't play much of a role in the colonization of Africa. African diseases like malaria though kept Europeans out of Africa.

[humanist]

I'll reply soon.

[Sulla the Dictator]

To Fade:

Let me guess, you just read Guns, Germs, and Steel.

[Ixtab]

To Fade:

Let me guess, you just read Guns, Germs, and Steel.Are you using the word 'just' in the sense of 'recently', or in the sense of 'only'?

[Fade the Butcher]

To Fade:

Let me guess, you just read Guns, Germs, and Steel.No, I have had a copy of the book for years now. This discussion originated in a quarrel on Stormfront where a poster suggested we consult this book.

[Fade the Butcher]

I'll reply soon.

Tell me. Why is Africa so backwards?

[humanist]

Culturally backward? I do not think it is.

Economically backward? You should look into Dependency Theory. Here is an introduction:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/depend.htm

[Fade the Butcher]

Query: Let us assume for the sake of argument that everything Jared Diamond said about environmental diversity structuring human development is true. Can that explain the backwardness of black Africa today? No.

1.) Black Africans have full access to the biodiversity of the world.
2.) Black Africans have full access to the accumulated technology and scientific knowledge of the world.
3.) Black Africans are not isolated by geography from the rest of the world.

There is no reason why black Africans should not be able to catch up with the West if there is no intrinsic factor particular to their nature holding them back. Virtually all the hard work has already been done by Asians and Europeans. Blacks don't have to reinvent the automobile, the airplane, the machine gun, the refrigerator, the university and so on.

We don't see much progress in sub-Saharan Africa though do we? In fact, the standard of living there has grown positively worse since the end of colonialism. Sixty years ago Ghana and South Korea were on about the same level. Look at South Korea today though. Look at Taiwan and Hong Kong. Look at Malaysia and Singapore. Look at Japan. Sub-Saharan Africa doesn't look anything like East Asia though. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. We see blacks lagging behind whites in America in spite of all the opportunities they are afforded.

[Fade the Butcher]

Culturally backward? I do not think it is.

You don't think slavery and cannibalism are backwards?

Economically backward? You should look into Dependency Theory. Here is an introduction.

Dependency theory is garbage.

[Fade the Butcher]

I started rereading Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel the other day. I have had the book for several years and have read it cover to cover before, but my understanding of European history has grown enormously since then. Just wrapped up chapter three. It's about the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire. This chapter alone illustrates everything that is wrong with his argument.

Diamond essentially wants to trace the origins of European dominance thousands of years back into the past when nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, Spain had been unified for less than fifty years before it completed the conquest of the Inca empire. The rise of the centralized nation-state in Europe was a recent phenomena. Gunpowder was unknown in Europe until the middle of the thirteenth century. The earliest guns would have to wait until the fourteenth century. The improvements in European maritime technology were also of recent origin. Think of the introduction of the compass and the astrolobe as well as the late development of the caravel. Many of these innovations came from China and the Islamic world, but neither embarked upon a conquest of the Americas.

The inferiority of Inca military and maritime technology is something I find inexplicable. Diamond had already made a lot of noise in the previous chapter about the Polynesian maritime empires. I find it hard to believe that Polynesians with their limited resources were able to travel in thousands of miles in such vessels but the Inca (with the resources of a continent at their disposal) were unable to establish contact with Mesoamerica by simply sailing up the coast. And they didn't have swords? This strikes me as a conceptual deficiency. The Inca were clearly capable of producing all kinds of other fine goods. They should have been able to overwhelm the Spanish with their sheer numbers.

[Sulla the Dictator]

Tell me. Why is Africa so backwards?

Why is Russia so backwards?

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Why is Russia so backwards?

Aww...C´mon. They have an economic crisis as direct inheritor of demented bolshevik economics but they are hardly "backwards" and keep churning out a great deal of reknown scientists and inventions. Who is currently feeding the International Space Station?

[Ixtab]

They have an economic crisis as direct inheritor of demented bolshevik economics So it is not because capitalism is an ineffective system itself, or because the abolition of Socialism has resulted in a horrendous decline in every aspect of social life, but because of the prior system. Notice how Ebasitanus doesn't turn this around. He will never say, "well, the Socialists had to pull themselves out of the Tsarist filth before they could build a new society."

[Fade the Butcher]

This must be the third thread this week in the history forum that Sulla has entered and attempted to change the subject. As for Russia being backwards, Russian students trounce their American counterparts in all sorts of areas.

[Sulla the Dictator]

Aww...C´mon. They have an economic crisis as direct inheritor of demented bolshevik economics but they are hardly "backwards"


This sounds like the same 'blame the past' type of thing Africans are accused of. Russia reaped all sorts of rewards from Communism, and in fact probably owes what developments it HAS made towards it. Russia was historically considered a backwards nation by its European neighbors, before the Revolution.

My point is that we actually can see environmental factors at work in Russia's development. Russian history of outside invasion, climate, size, as well as the location of its raw materials all come together to contribute to Russian difficulties.

So too with the Balkans. Rugged terrain contributes to the balkanization of populations, seperating them into small groups. The large number of African ethnic and language groups is due to these natural dividers.

Jungle is a breeding ground for disease, and we don't need to take Jared Diamond's word for it. European explorers, traders, and colonists LEARNED IT the hard way in Africa and in the Americas. Stagnant water and a host of insects are not a tropical paradise.



and keep churning out a great deal of reknown scientists and inventions. Who is currently feeding the International Space Station?

Much of Russian science is the child of Soviet science....synonomous with stolen science. :p

[Sulla the Dictator]

This must be the third thread this week in the history forum that Sulla has entered and attempted to change the subject. As for Russia being backwards, Russian students trounce their American counterparts in all sorts of areas.

I don't think you can cherry pick European nations to compare to Africa and then balk when one wishes to discuss other parts of Europe.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

So it is not because capitalism is an ineffective system itself, or because the abolition of Socialism has resulted in a horrendous decline in every aspect of social life, but because of the prior system. Notice how Ebasitanus doesn't turn this around. He will never say, "well, the Socialists had to pull themselves out of the Tsarist filth before they could build a new society."

The system itself seems to be working in the west nonwithstanding that its also flawed and will end up imploding in the future.
What Bergwald seems to be missing is that Bolshevism can not and has not survived direct competition with western Capitalism much like the medieval Tzarist system would have neither stood up. And better "social life" is not some switch you just turn on or off. It has a very real cost which is passing on the bill right now across Europe.

Sulla, we had already this discussion about these "jungle diseases" about four years ago and that did not stop India or Campuchea from raising to great levels of civilization of which nothing can be found in Sub-saharian Africa in milenia. I also find it quite amusing when people talk of Africa like it was the size of Delaware. There is much more in sub-saharian Africa besides Jungle.

[Fade the Butcher]

I don't think you can cherry pick European nations to compare to Africa and then balk when one wishes to discuss other parts of Europe.

I would be more than happy to discuss Central and Eastern Europe with you. How are Central and Eastern Europeans comparable to black Africans and black Americans? I will assume you are insinuating here that Eastern Europeans are on the same intellectual level as Africans. Let's start with Russia, as you introduced Russia into this conversation. Take the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study for example. In 2003, the average mathematics score of the typical Russian eighth grade student was 508. The average mathematics score of the typical American eighth grade student was 504. Estonia: 531. Latvia: 508. Lithuania: 502. Slovakia: 508 Hungary: 529

This isn't telling us the whole truth though. Virtually all Russian eighth grade students are white. American students are of all races. The typical racist might assume here than America's nonwhite students are depressing the U.S. average in this respect. Is that an unfounded assumption? No. It's true. We can break the American average down racially: the average mathematics score of white eighth graders was 524 and the average score of black eighth graders was 448.

So tell us: how is that black American eighth grade students in America scored 60 points below the average Russian eighth grade student in mathematics? Is poverty and lack of funding to blame? Russians are far poorer than black Americans but outscore them. American public schools are far better funded than Russian schools too.

What about African countries? You wanted to compare Russia to Africa, right? I pointed out above that the average mathematics score of the typical Russian eighth grade student was 508. Let's put that into context here. Botswana: 366. Ghana: 276. South Africa: 264.

What about other age groups? Let's compare average mathematics scores of fourth graders on an international basis. Latvia: 536. Lithuania: 524. Russia: 532. Hungary 529. America: 518 . What does the American average look like broken down on a racial basis? White American: 542. Black American: 472.

Let's move on to science. Here are the average fourth grade science scores on an international basis. United States: 536. Latvia: 532. Hungary: 530. Russia: 526. Lithuania: 512. White American: 565. Black American: 487. Here are the average eighth grade science scores. Estonia: 552. Hungary: 543. United States: 527. Slovenia: 520. Lithuania: 519. Slovakia: 517. Russia: 514. Latvia: 512. Botswana: 365. Ghana: 255. South Africa: 244. White American: 552. Black American: 462.

[Fade the Butcher]

Russians and Eastern Europeans are usually in the upper echelon of primary school international achievement in science and mathematics. In fact, the Baltic countries usually outscore most Western European nations.

[Atlas]

Russians and Eastern Europeans are usually in the upper echelon of primary school international achievement in science and mathematics. In fact, the Baltic countries usually outscore most Western European nations.

Too bad they have to leave these place to find out a better student life and situation in either Western Europe or America.

[Dan Dare]

Query: Let us assume for the sake of argument that everything Jared Diamond said about environmental diversity structuring human development is true. Can that explain the backwardness of black Africa today? No.

1.) Black Africans have full access to the biodiversity of the world.
2.) Black Africans have full access to the accumulated technology and scientific knowledge of the world.
3.) Black Africans are not isolated by geography from the rest of the world.

There is no reason why black Africans should not be able to catch up with the West if there is no intrinsic factor particular to their nature holding them back. Virtually all the hard work has already been done by Asians and Europeans. Blacks don't have to reinvent the automobile, the airplane, the machine gun, the refrigerator, the university and so on.

We don't see much progress in sub-Saharan Africa though do we? In fact, the standard of living there has grown positively worse since the end of colonialism. Sixty years ago Ghana and South Korea were on about the same level. Look at South Korea today though. Look at Taiwan and Hong Kong. Look at Malaysia and Singapore. Look at Japan. Sub-Saharan Africa doesn't look anything like East Asia though. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. We see blacks lagging behind whites in America in spite of all the opportunities they are afforded.

It's not just African negroes that Diamond claims fell behind Europeans due to environmental disadvantages. He makes the same claims for (amongst others) Melanesians and Amerindians. In fact the book opens with Diamond's musings on a question posed to him by a Papuan:

"How come the white man has so much cargo, and we have none"?

That was evidently the question that Diamond attempted to resolve.

Incidentally, PBS has been re-running the National Geographic three-part series. It looks spectactular in HD even if much of the content is common-or-garden PC nonsense and intellectually dishonest.