Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Whatifalthist" channel.

Europeans COULDN'T colonise Africa until the late 19th century. The disease barrier of Africa, particularly malaria and yellow fever (another mosquito borne disease) kept the Europeans to the coastal regions of Africa, particularly tropical Africa. The Atlantic triangle African slave trade operated from the coast of Africa for centuries (the African slaves were brought to the ships by other Africans who had enslaved them in the first place). The late nineteenth century brought better medicine and improved railways technology and telegraph to Europe (as well as better guns admittedly) which gave the European sufficient tools to enter the hinterland of the African continent (and return alive in the majority of cases), also which the presence of a minority of Europeans there was generally viewed by the African tribes and chieftains, not as an act of conquest in most cases, but as a trading opportunity for technologies (particularly the guns), so they could go at their own long standing tribal enemies.
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China already has a native belief system called Falun Gong or Falun Dafa. Note, despite the ideological formation of the CCP by Mao Zedong, the original imprint of Communism is Marx and Engels, and hence a foreign Western philosophy to the Chinese. It is likely, with their higher moral character than the Communists, and the quasi-Buddhist nature of Falun Gong, that it will better resonate with the Chinese and is likely to supplant Communism and the CCP. Especially now. This is mainly why the CCP is so implacably against Falun Gong. It can be a successful competitor to win hearts and minds of the masses in China.
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The boomers grew up in a era of optimism, opulence and economic opportunity (and largely peace even if there was a Cold War) which is rapidly vanishing. Like all good lazy and ignorant humans; opportunities to intelligently change the world during Boomer rule was partially squandered by the boomers (rock and roll was interesting, but the previous generation of jazz equally or even more so). This is called history. The future looks worse with increased inequality, poverty (unemployment), war, disease (yes Covid) and unfixable pollution. I live in a caravan thanks to the boomers making housing unaffordable: Get to work to fix the pollution you lazy humans (this will be Gen Y and Zoomers speaking). Work like slaves in an environmentally damaged world with a failing demographic until you drop dead of it or shot for believing the wrong thing. Existentially beastly future.
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With Australia, you're right about agriculture. It's a poor country to grow rice. Ancient nitrogen and phosphorus poor soils and unreliable rains (in the North), kind of rules out rice farming, with a billion parrots eating rice seeds (they have tried growing rice in Australia's North, they really have). Whereas, the Mediterranean climate in the South of Australia is fine for growing wheat (provided you supply the phosphorus or super phosphate). That is why a Western European power colonized Australia (it could have been colonized by a Middle Eastern civilization, but you need ocean going ships to get there).
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I agree that Christianity is bound up with Western Civilization and Constantine's acceptance of Christianity as the state religion is a watershed moment between classical culture and Christianity. However, I argue that is not for the overall good. Christianity plunged Europe into a 1000 year scientific dark age after the death of Hypatia of Alexanderia at the hands of a Christian mob (she was a Neoplatonist philosopher, mathematician and librarian at the Great Library there. A fine example of the liberties and intellectualism allowed even to a handful of women which was absolutely disallowed elsewhere outside classical Greece and Rome). The moral compass of philosophy was replaced by church rule with a rigid unquestionable theology, which largely banished science. This theological dead hand of Christianity did not affect China, which had scientific amd technological advances during the Middle Ages while Europe languished this way. The renaissance began in Northern Italty with the rediscovery of classical philosophy, coupled with a new decentralism exemplified by the Medici family and their non-state taxes money spent on innovative art and science and gifted polymath experimental scientists like Leonardo da Vinci who was commissioned by these art and science loving elites for their time.
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While historical dialogue does relate to communication and culture, and we of the present have the advantage of having some idea of the past, while those in the past have no idea of the future and would find our modern ideas repellant and strange. Past societies were hierarchical, but not as ridgedly alluded to as this narrator has hinted it. Revolts did occur and many were serious challenges to the established order, like Watt Tyler's peasant rebellion in 1381 England, demonstrating that the social elite by no means had status and the economy of the country settled for decades and centuries.
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As for the British (English) they were initially a fairly poor country on the edge of Europe. With the Portuguese and Spanish mercantile discoveries, and the mutually competitive nature of European kingdoms, edged the British into piratical then naval competition with their Atlantic coast neighbouring countries. England was just wealthy enough to begin this start-up venture. The formation of the East India Company in London was squarely aimed at dominating mercantile trade with India. This would be as surprising these days if Iran had launched a Take Over America company. With state and naval weakness, India was not strong enough to beat off these seaborne invaders collectively (the Chinese with better Junk ships could hold back the European invaders until the mid-nineteenth century when the advent of ironclad ships made this also not possible).
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No religious wars in China?!? The TIaping Rebellion or the Taiping revolution, depending on what political side you are on. This was an aggressive form of mutant Christianity (which appealled with the lumpen proliteriat), lead initiallly by a failed civil service canididate, which spread mainly in Southern and Central China and clashed repeatedly with the imperial Qing government. Finally, at great human and financial cost, the Qing government was finally able to put down the Rebellion, but not after more deaths than World War 1 had occurred. The Yellow Turban Rebellion is another much earlier civil war in China.
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It's actually catastrophic. The only thing uniting China is the size of the country. It's demographics are collapsing, and Western and other East Asian businesses are leaving China in droves, sucking away production, investment and employment. Tens of millions of Chinese are now dying from unchecked Covid infection. The soils of China are overpolluted with similar problems with the streams, lakes and ground water. China may now have the most polluted agricultural lands on Earth. This is a double punch if I ever saw one historically. Furthermore, the CCP have largely brought this state of affairs upon the Chinese and themselves. I doubt that the CCP can survive much longer under these horrendous circumstances,
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Whichever emperor, king or whatever feudal lord is in power is irrelevant. Many leaders make bad decisions anyway, particularly under pressure, and these policies get handed down to the masses, whether they want them or not. What matters is the form of government, that it doesn't encroach too much on people's liberties and the local economy. Rule of law enforced by an independent professional judiciary which is semi-independent from the government of the day. This last is a difficult balancing act, but provided that judges only enforce the law and not make it, and moreover the executive is elected, then this form of rupublican representative government may work.
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@liliya_aseeva It's genocide almost as destructive as the Nazis against the Jews. There is a nasty equation going on here which unites the actions of the CCP with Himmler and the SS; racial purity and historical revenge. The Jaws were always a minority in Europe, and uniited by their distinct, tribal and excusive religion, while keeping themselves apart from Christendom, coupled with their hard work ethic and family saving responsibilities, drove them into the despised merchant classes and bankers throughout Europe. Wealth breeds envy and the Jews have copped it during the last millennia, but by the Nazis the worst. The CCP exists in a similar hard ruthless mindset as the Nazis against outsiders. This time the scapegoats are central Asian peoples, for not quite the same reason as Jews (the Uyghurs are mainly ranchers and farmers). However, Turkic people and other central and northern nomadic Asian people have periodically invaded China by horseback under weak rulers, not necessarily to stay, but mainly to historically despoil and loot. This, and the Uygers adhere to a rival religion; Islam, drives the paranoid and envious CCP to acts of genocides against them, similar now to the Nazis. The CCP are the modern Nazi Party of the East.
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@liliya_aseeva No you wouldn't
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The Jovian system, although scientifically fascinating, is out of bounds for human colonization for the simple reason that Jupiter's colossal magnetic field has extremely powerful Van Allen belts that kills anyone with radiation sickness who dares to personally visit the Galilean moons. My take on the solar system proper (for human exploration and colonisation) is Earth's moon, Mars and Saturn in that order.
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F**k ideology. Belief is delusional and dangerous. Religion is no advertisement for "moral action" (just read the history of many popes). Actually religion is profoundly immoral because it always provides a personal God relating to you; where the real universe is neutral and uncaring (which is a bit scary realizing the tiny insignificance of us and the overwhelming power of nature). Religion gives you "moral authority" through your God or gods to do unspeakable things to other people through fear of death; like exterminating them in a "holy war", sacrificing people daily to a sun God (the Maya and Aztecs), burning them on a pyre, and to kill and eat other human beings as a religious act (nearly all human ancestors as predicated by a cannibal gene change in nearly everyone), including the pseudo-cannibalistic Christian ritual of sacrement; consuming Christ. Ritual means nothing to the universe. Philosophy, ethics and metaphysics is a higher order than mere religion. This is higher than belief because science demystifies a changing universe.
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I've heard this from Germans who have stated like an article of faith that they almost won World War 1 (no), and that they could have won World War 2 in 1942 (again, no). What is not well understood is Germany's geostrategic position in Europe and why they had to fight a three front war each time. Three Fronts? Yes, a naval blockade is the third front. Why risk everything and fight then? Geostrategic logic from the point of veiw from a powerful central European state that had about half a dozen bordering states, two of them powerful and dangerous (France and Russia) and ancient enemies to the early 20th century Germans. The war strategy was (both times); go for broke in the West to face a humiliating condition on France that she has to sign a peace treaty that would give up some of her land as a buffer (worked in WW2, failed in WW1) then wheel round and do a similar thing to Russia (sort of succeeded in WW1, failed in WW2). This is a bad strategy, a Faustian pact with war and sheer throw of the dice, and it failed to neutralize the British who traditionally went against the strongest power in Europe with naval blockade and periphery invasions (happened during Napoleonic war).
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Very good point. Nieuw Amsterdam, which was renamed New York by later English colonialists was not discussed at all and also the later settlement of Dutch farmers to the state of Iowa.
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Really interesting thing is the without the evils of slavery and later racism and economic oppression, black African people have been arriving in Australia particularly in the last 20 years (very few here before this). Many of them have good jobs and are plutonium-driven to succeed, like my black Zimbabwean friend. The point I like to make is that 1. Africa is an enormous continent and that a person from Nairobi, Kenya would veiw a person from West Africa as would I (a non-Slav) view a Russian. 2. African people or people decended from African ancestry (actually all of Homo sapiens was originally African by DNA tests), and all of them have an enormous difference in experiences, either historically or modern, in stories to tell. I'm not excusing the awful Atlantic Triangle Slave trade, which ended in the 1830s thanks actually to the British Royal Navy which outlawed the trade and policed it, and the brutality of the Southern Slave States (i'm no friend of the Confederate), but experiences are much more than the colour of your skin.
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This shows that belief is failing and, in general, the average man on the street has not grasped science because of ignorance, half-truths and science being the antitheses of mysticism, which is all about the wounded self in relation to others, a personal God or gods and the search for order and meaning in the universe (hint, there is none, but why should childish nihilism be sought after when this is discovered?) Mysticism hence is still attractive as a comfort blanket, but solves nothing. Science, in other cultures, is perceived as Western, although over time, if science prevails and mysticism is finally thrown into the dustbin then we can build a more rational future with science being universal and not just Western (note that religion is highly expansionist, except for a few exclusive tribal cults such as Zionism) and that means survival.
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Sorry, I thought some of the Native North Americans had some copper working skills. From the Great Lakes region they smelted enough copper to make tools like arrowheads and copper jewellery such as torques. They were doing this 7000 years ago, before the Bronze Age in Europe. Like the Celts under the Roman military machine, the Native Americans didn't stand much chance from more numerous invasive peoples from the East who were just starting to industrialise when they were invading the Great Plains. Unlike Australia, which conquest took just over a century, the conquest of the more materially advanced Native Americans by Europeans (helped by inadvertent germ warfare) was a much longer affair; approximately 400 years since when the Spanish first arrived. Adopting the horse for war mobility and hunting (an animal ironically that originally evolved in the America's) provided some war band resistance by the Soiux and Apache's to European invasion.
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Please discuss this more. People of Latin American decent are the fastest growing immigrant group in the United States. Really interested that ancient civilizations, such as the Mayans, are migrating in the America's. In other words, Native American people migrating within the America's. The migration story of Latin Americans are tinged with oppression and tragedy though.
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Communism was a totalitarian movement, from the start, no it never had the seeds for success. Productivity; fail. Freedom of expression and thought; fail. Blah, blah, blah
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@kaushiksinha4673 You are right. This historical analysis is far from flawless.
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Early Latin America, apart from the genocide of the native South American Amerindian people, which was not uniform everywhere and affected by differing degree of culling mainly by disease and cultural destruction, was dominated by wealthy estate elites transplanted mainly from Spain or Portugal, plus a state sanctioned Roman Catholic church which accentuated centralism (Protestants tended to accentuate decentralism). The landed estates encouraged large scale plantation slavery in the Lation American countries, which was later in relinquishing slavery in comparison to the Anglophone world. Masses of middle class and skilled artisans, looking for new world opportunities, did not migrate from Europe to Latin American states to the same degree as in North America. Also property rights for migrants were not given as an egalitarian treatment in law or action in Latin America as were in the new Republic of the United States or in British colonies.
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Either YouTube is censored by a Wokeness Nazi or the computer algorithm is deeply flawed
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It's interesting to note that it's very true that the Roman elite renewed itself by incorporating social elites on the periphery of the Empire (this is something the Greeks did not largely do). For example, as late as the 3rd century AD, a North African noble from the Roman city of Leptis Magna in Tunesia (the ruins are still a famous archelogical site), Septimius Severus became emperor. Severus did try to conquor Caledonia (Scotland) with his legions, and died in Britain probably of old age while campaigning. This incorporation of emperors from the periphery did strengthen the Roman Empire with new blood, but at the cost of near continual pretenders to the throne and vicious civil wars between competing parties. Hence, the tetrachy (four ceasars) in the late Empire period.
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The ancient Slavs apparently occupied a location near the Vistula River. In the modern sense, they are one of the most numerous speakers of their group of Indo-European languages. The great migration period coeval to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, saw Slavs move into lands in Eastern and Central Europe, previously occupied by Germanic tribes, and Southwards into the Balkans. Slavs, such as the Russians, were late into forming kingdoms and settlements (such had occurred earlier in Western Europe under mainly Germanic kings), but proto-Slavic nations eager for centralized nobility structures and monarchy either took the Western (Latin forms, such as the Poles, Slovenes etc), or the Eastern Orthodox part set by the Greeks. This also set their alphabets between the Latin alphabet and Greek derived Cyrillic. This is not a nuanced version of the Slav peoples but an abridged version. Further Eastward land expansionism by Russians from the 17th century onwards, spread Slavic Christian Orthodox influence and European agriculture to central and East Asia (where desertification was not too severe). Slavs themselves are mainly Christians but sharply divided between Western (I.e, Roman Catholic) and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
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Sorry, I wanted to say something about India before the narrator said something wrong about Rome. India is complex, but it's baffling complexity of it"s own creation seems to isolate it from political currents in the rest of the world. This is both it's strength and weakness. In terms of science, Indians make excellent mathematicians but poor experimental scientists (education is valued in India but in a narrow spectrum). In other words, India is creative without being very practical. Also (and the Indians know it themselves) how much the caste system holds India back from success, On the Roman thing, the narrator was somewhat wrong about Roman creativity (during the Empire period). The Romans did invent the arch and concrete and the (horizontal axis) water wheel (debatable), but agriculturally, the Romans invented nothing (probably because they had too many slaves) so the Pax Romana was not innovative.
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Marlene Dietrich, a very intelligent and attractive woman, came out of Germany during the Weimar Republic and became a superstar in Hollywood. One interesting thing about Marlene is that she was a rabid anti-Nazi. Not really suprising for a person who made her career in the liberal arts, but another (unrelated) prominent diaspora German was Sir Prof. Frederick Lindemann. He was a Physicist and a cabinet member in Churchill's government (so Churchill wasn't anti-German, he was anti-Nazi). Lindemann was another rabid anti-Nazi, to the point that he recommended to Churchill that the British mass bomb German cities to the point of destruction, that even Churchill had to pause and ask why.
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