Azahul said:
Therumancer said:
Not going to argue with anything you said there (I'm not American and haven't studied the turn of the century in American history), but I am a tad confused about the point you're trying to make. It doesn't sound like you're disagreeing with anything Rath said, merely adding that the turn of the century was an all-around crappy time in terms of the behaviour of governments. Frequent clashes between natives and settlers doesn't excuse the massacre of unarmed men, women, and children, racist policies in other countries doesn't excuse racist policies in any other country, and I don't think Rath was arguing that America was in some way worse than any other state in the world. Rather, it seemed like an article highlighting the interesting juxtaposition of rising optimism, technology, and modern values in some areas compared to the appalling standards still in use in regards to race and immigrants and the like.
What you've said is all interesting information, but I can understand Rath not including it due to space concerns. His article provides context to a setting that many don't have too much information about, and if he wanted to do as you just did and provide context for his context he'd have to write a substantially larger document.
On topic though, a very interesting article. I'm really looking forward to this game, and I'll be interested to see how these themes play out in it.
Well, my point being that the way he conveyed his information seemed to have a very anti-American bent based on what information he decided to include and what information he didn't choose to include. If your going to give a balanced run down on the time, you need to explain things in context.
When it comes to racist policies and such, the point is that on a lot of levels the behavior of the rest of the world DOES justify them. You can't use modern morality to judge practices from a time when modern morality did not exist. Going on about racism, the treatment of immigrants, etc... devoid of context basically makes the US look like a bunch of bad guys, a real evil empire, until you consider that our practices were downright progressive compared to what the rest of the world did, and our relative even handedness and mercy grew into the modern morality we know today.
To put things into a certain context you talk about the massacre of unarmed women, children, etc... as if it's a bad thing, and I supposed to a modern eye it is, but understand that even a few centuries ago that was just how things were during war. The exceptional thing about the US is not that we massacred the natives at various places, but that in the long run we wound up showing an unheard of amount of mercy. In most such cases like this the dominant invader would have totally enslaved or outright eradicated those on the receiving end. The Native Americans are perhaps the best treated conquered people in all of history, and continue to survive because at the end of the day the white settlers didn't do to them what most people did. This also paved the way for a lot of those "nosey" policies so many people hate the US for where we prevent ethnic cleaning, genocide, and tend to coordinate sanctions and such against nations that don't treat former indiginous peoples well, indeed that's a big part of why tribes in the US host international meetings of conquered indiginous peoples, because the US provides a platform for them to do this, and provides a degree of support.
It's sort of like bringing up the "Trail Of Tears", it's a wonderful piece of "screw the US" propaganda liberals love to bring up, until you consider that for all of the hardships to the tribals, we went through a lot of time, effort, and expense, to relocate them, kicking and screaming, when anyone else would have just figured F@ck it, and exterminated them all to the smallest baby. Not a nice point, but an important one.
The point I'm getting at is that the purpose of this article is to pretty much reinforce Bioshock Infinite's view of the US at the time, and claim it's to an extent grounded in reality, to the point where you could see splinter groups from such a "deranged" time literally worshipping the founding fathers as gods or whatever. It's an amusing idea, but really even more liberties are taken with American mentality than were taken with objectivism for "Bioshock" and they pretty much went insane with that one (yet convinced some people that this was a fair representation and criticism of it's philsophies before you got to that inconveienent twist...).
See, it's easy to sit here and make "Manifest Destiny" sound like some kind of battlecry for Nationalistic Imperialism, when reality it was more of a defensive rallying cry, geared more towards not allowing ourselves to be penned in and trivialized by foreign colonies from then larger empires, more than some kind of ambition towards conquest and global domination. Indeed the biggest problem with the US for a long time was that we were actually highly isolationist, we believed in our "exceptionalism" in such a way that we felt other countries couldn't judge us by their standards or force us into their political squabbles, but we for the most part wanted nothing to do with anyone as long as we were left alone, taken to it's logical extreme where we pretty much waited until the 11th hour to stop Germany (twice) from pretty much taking over the world since we really had no desire to be involved in foreign wars or politics. While amusing, trying to say that any kind of American mentality could justify the idea of a "flying city intended to show the glory of America to the world" from that time period is absurd. We weren't even a world power until pretty bloody recently, and right now a big part of internal US politics on a lot of levels amounts to whether we should continue doing what we're doing for an ungrateful world, or just basically go back to borderline isolationism (pre- World War II type policies) and let the rest of the world do whatever the hell it wants, and "prove" it can get along without us. Our big problem is that whenever someone screams "help" or an issue happens we at least feel an obligation to try nowadays, instead of saying "we're done, go call France, maybe they'll do something". I suppose in the modern world there are some people who feel a flying US Propaganda City would make a symbolic point, but back during this time period? The US could basically give a crap. That's why it was such a big deal when we got involved during "World War I" we were so bloody isolationist the Germans and their allies never anticipated dealing with us and the manpower we could crank out since by all accounts there was no reason to expect America would get involved in anyone else's wars for any reason.
