http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

Sorry, I skipped some posts. - Nazi expansion was inspired by American expansion. A lot of the same reasons were said. For example, Manifest Destiny proponents said that we should expand to educate the lesser races. Oddly enough, people who opposed Manifest Destiny said that we shouldn't expand because we don't want or need the lesser races. This is still going on today- there's still talk about illegal Mexicans in California, and probably other states.

The same things were said about Lebensraum in Germany, and the original proponent of it was in fact inspired by Manifest Destiny. Hitler took that idea and ran with it.

Discuss.

And this is why my mother never let me watch 'Elbow Room'.

(courtesy link.)

edited 3rd Nov '09 5:51:56 PM by FurikoMaru

Deja vu...

So, if I may memetically mutate what you're saying,

"And then John was Those Wacky Nazis."

Oh ye gods. From the cited Wiki links:

Yeah, those are completely the same thing. *rolleyes*

edited 3rd Nov '09 7:35:00 PM by MasterThief

^ From what I gather, O'Sullivan's original concept didn't involve doing bad stuff to the other races, though he did exclude them from the nation. The idea transformed over time into the "expand America at the cost of the Indians" idea we think of today.

Err, O'Sullivan might not have explicitly thought that force would be neccessary, but you know *he is using force*. Settling on someone else's lands (or in the more proper way of looking at things, extracting someone else's resources) is an act of force.

And yes, the concepts are clearly related.

Because systematic killing and destruction of native american culture never happened??

The end result was pretty much the same. Systematic genocide and land-grabbing, followed by angry reactions from the international community, the dismantling of the belligerent nation, and the establishment of an independent, sovereign state for the victimized peoples... Oh Wait.

So the criminal acts are not the same because the thief got away?

So the criminal acts are not the same because the thief got away?

Yes.

In Finnish we have a saying, "minkä nuorena varastaa sen vanhana omistaa"  ^*

^{actually, it's just a corrupition of "Minkä nuorena oppii sen vanhana taitaa", what you learn when you're young, you are a master of at an old age}

. "What you steal when young, is your when you're old".

Please define your terms.

By far the biggest causes of death among Native Americans were European diseases like smallpox, measles, typhoid fever, yellow fever, bubonic plague, etc. that the natives had no immunity to and not even the European settlers fully understood. It wasn't anything centrally planned. It wasn't anything "systematic" - certainly not in the sense of what the Nazis did. And native american culture still exists today, and there's a general understanding that what happened was wrong and will not be repeated. Unlike, say, antisemitism in Europe...

I think the "They didn't know what the heck they were doing" can be used as an excuse for the spanish, but hardly for the americans in the 19th century. They knew *exactly* what they were doing.

@ Master Thief: What the bloody hell are you talking about? Does the term "Reservation" mean nothing to you? Or going back, what about the phrase "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead?" What about the various massacres?

Anyway, anti-Semitism is strongly frowned upon by mainstream Europeans nowadays, too.

edited 4th Nov '09 7:29:12 AM by BobbyG

As an American, he's obligated that Europe is worse in every way and that they have got it right. Therefore, Europe has racism problems, not them.

Yes, yes, yes. All true, and all objectively bad things. But the original question was an insta-Godwin comparison between American expanisionism between 1800-1900 and Nazi German expansion between 1938-1945. People died and bad things happened in both of these cases, but the similarities pretty much end there. For one thing, there's much more history to consider. The U.S. and Indian tribes variously fought wars and signed treaties and reparation agreements. There were bad people (Andrew Jackson, Tecumseh and good people (Jonathan Baxter Harrison, Chief Joseph) on both sides, as well as some with a mixed record (John Marshall.)

The basic difference is that the U.S. considered the Natives to be inferior as a matter of culture, which in part reservations were created to "cure" by allowing the natives to be, depending on how you look at it, either "educated" or "stripped of their ethnic identity." The Nazis, on the other hand, considered the slavic races (Poles, non-german Czechs, Russians) to be inferior as a matter of genetics and worthy only of a quick death. It's the difference between circling the Moral Event Horizon before pulling away and diving right in. Twice .

Oh, and compare the respective death tolls if you're still not convinced.

Hey, there's a reason my ancestors left Europe...

edited 4th Nov '09 8:49:59 AM by MasterThief

Forced relocation is also a crime against humanity, and is generally regarded as a tool of genoside. So is destruction of culture. This takes place in destruction of holy sites, cultural artefacts, and taking away childremn and teaching them out of their original culture (In the US, Canada and Australia, native children were placed in chistian orphanages while their parents were still alive, and taught into the white culture).

Note, that the comparison between lebensraum and manifest destiny wan't made up by people in this thread; wikipedia makes that connection as well, as there is academic work indicating a connection.

But it's manifest destiny = lebensraum, not manifest destiny = holocaust, as you're making the argument to be.

The empty promise of instant wealth?

Also, Godwins Law does not apply to a thread that already has a nazi comparsion in its opening post.

I'd just point out that the idea of lebensraum is different (although connected) to the anti-semitic ideas behind the Holocuast. Lebensraum was an accepted idea before the nazis, and yes, was expliciitly influenced by the idea of Manifest Destiny. The two are pretty much indistinguishable, really.

And there's a reason why I have no desire to live in the USA. I don't really see what that's got to do with Lebensraum or Manifest Destiny.

The Holocaust didn't happen last week. Modern anti-Semitism (if you don't mean anti-Israeli sentiments, which aren't always the same thing) is bad, yes, but I don't think it's considered any more acceptable than hatred of Native Americans.

Granted, but whenever you retroactively apply modern moral standards to historical ideologies, it is very rare to find anything that looks good afterward. Every country has some skeletons in its closet (as Americans in Internet threads are reminded every single day, to the point where there isn't a single past bad act we don't know about), but the trend of history is to recognize them and put things in place so that they don't happen again. Indeed, that's the reason why Nazism was so foul as an ideology; it seemed to be giving the middle finger to the idea that all human beings are equal in dignity at a time when most other Western countries were slowly coming to realize the power and truth of that idea (e.g. the slavery abolition movement in Great Britain and the U.S., the guarantees of rights given to colonized peoples under the League of Nations mandate system after WWI, etc.) Yes, Humans Are Bastards, but the point is we get better. (And I'll stop before I hit Patrick Stewart Speech territory.)

As someone who does academic work pretty much full-time and for pay, don't believe everything an academic tells you. As I noted above, the similarities between lebensraum and manifest destiny basically end at taking land and killing people. The ideologies that motivated the two and how they dealt with people already living on the land to be taken are very different.

Both lebensraum and the holocaust were expressions of Nazi racial ideology that divided the world into übermenschen and untermenschen - or as the South Park folks put it, "gods and clods." (You want an example of a place where the U.S. did influence Nazi ideology? Look into the history of the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century, and how the Nazis patterned their eugenics programs after ones carried out in the U.S. )

edited 4th Nov '09 9:40:06 AM by MasterThief

Both lebensraum and the holocaust were expressions of Nazi racial ideology that divided the world into übermenschen and untermenschen

Just like US (and for that matter, Britain, France, and the rest of the world, pretty much) divided the world into "Savage" and "civilized" people, the former of which it was allright to invade, deprive of their lands, and massacre if they dared to resist.

Honestly, the only thing different was that the nazis were doing it against other europeans, and on a larger scale, and 50 years later.

EDIT: It should be noted that one of the plans the nazis had for the jewish population was to ship them to a reservation somewhere in Poland, very much explicitly looking at the american example.

edited 4th Nov '09 9:43:26 AM by Arilou

And we have gotten better. I don't think Europe is worse than the US in that regard.