Why Poor Countries Are Poor

Turchin's model of asabiya is much more developed than the article's, but goes in exactly the same direction. He emphasizes the importance of frontiers and warfare -- the civilizational counterpart to Darwinian selection pressure, and a reminder that there are worse enemies than one's neighbor and higher causes than one's checkbook -- for asabiya development and, thus, the cohesion of societies. All this is borne out with some very impressive styles of measurement; he's the founder of a new discipline called "cliodynamics," taking its approaches from ecological population modeling.

On the other hand, before we embrace war as the road to prosperity, we need to remember what commentors here observed -- that most civilizations wage war lawlessly, to the point of torture and genocide; so some sort of authority to control the intensity and severity of warfare would be a good idea. I don't think the United Nations will cut it; but Chesterton thought that the Pope would have, had the medieval project been taken to its conclusion...

The parts of the Jesuit Relations dealing with the Jesuits' first missionary work among the Hurons relates how the Hurons weren't particularly interested in accepting or rejecting the Jesuits' religious message; what they were interested in was how to build French-style houses. The Cherokee tribe took this even further than the Hurons, developing a syllabic script, and assimilating completely to the norms of the American South (even to the point of owning African slaves, unfortunately).

Personally, my complaint about the wars with the American Indians is not that the United States all but annihilated deadly enemies like the Iroquois and the Sioux (although coexistence with them would have been better, and we're doing a little better that way at present); my objection is that the United States all but annihilated peoples like the Cherokee, who were better Europeans than most of the American frontiersmen who wanted them displaced. Like the American Indian casinos, I try to avoid twenty-dollar bills.

That's not the problem. Britain ruled Egypt for many decades using only 5,000 soldiers and actually turned a profit. Egypt at the time had 9 million people. Back in 1900, logistics were even more difficult, and Britain's technological edge was actually much less.

The core problem is the the U.S. cultural DNA is anti-imperialist. No one in state department or DOD has actually read the memoirs from the British empire about how they did it. Nor is the U.S. willing to use imperialist tactics. For instance, if you're doing imperialism you need to have a native army reporting directly to the ruling officer class. Instead, the U.S. is trying to police every street with American soldiers. Second, instead of encouraging political parties and democracy, an imperialist needs to prevent them. Political parties incite people to action by blaming other ethnic groups for problems, and they spend all their time worrying about grabbing their peace of the pie. It's very easy for political parties to turn into actual gangs. Third, you cannot be afraid to issue the entire population ID cards, have curfews, checkpoints, population control, etc, until the region is pacified.

Do the above three things, and imperialism is easy. You can do it with 5,000 troops and turn a profit. But do it American style, where you are doing imperialism without admitting it, and you get disaster.

Don't get me wrong; I love my mac book pro, my smart phone, playing silly RPG games, watching movies and so on.

I'm simply not prepared to claim that having these things makes me superior to other ways of life. It's different, but it's hard to say superior when a pie chart of how my life is spent would be made up mostly of work and sleep.

>It's based largely on personal memory of a lot of the things said during the lead-up to the invasion. "Beacon of democracy" was used several times in his press releases to drum up support for the war. The "domino theory" of liberalization was discussed in my International Relations course. In both the Bush and Kerry campaigns, there were widespread discussions about how to "win the peace".

I would recommend to you the BBC film "The power of nightmares". I do believe actual terrorists are responsible for 9/11, but I think nearly everything else we've seen or heard (Al Quieda and so on) is very much exaggerated or lied about (I don't buy this "we need a beacon of freedom" at all). As far as I can tell, the biggest thing that has actually happened from the Iraq war is a lot of tax payer money being transfered into the pockets of companies owned by people in Bush's staff.