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But the East Asians were clearly pretty good at war even before 1904? Attila the Hun and the Mongols both managed to beat Europeans in their day. Notably China also developed the compass and gunpowder weapons. China was a big source of porcelain, silk and other manufactured goods.
OK and what's the root cause of that compounding then? Sub-saharan Africa had plenty of gold, ivory, arable land, they certainly had things that people wanted. But they consistently failed to produce powerful states and institutions (you need to be highly organized and orderly for that), they failed to take control of trade routes (you need advanced financial abilities, strong laws, shipbuilding and seamanship), they failed to develop advanced metallurgy/textiles for industry and weapons (you need to be smart for this). Even today, the sub-Saharan African countries still can't make any advanced technology domestically, only apartheid South Africa could make their own jet fighters, nuclear weapons or pioneer heart transplants.
They had a shield of disease that prevented more capable foreigners from conquering them, that's how they retained independence (and how they expanded to the Caribbean tbh). But the moment that quinine pierced the shield, the Scramble for Africa.
Meanwhile Poland got carved up, plundered, colonized, genocided, communismed for a few centuries and they're now highly developed, producing infrared photonics, AAA video games, high-precision plasma generators. The Ottomans were slave-raiding, plundering, raping Eastern Europe for centuries. Eastern Europe is now highly developed. They make tanks, steel, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles... China got wrecked for a century, then hit with a particularly bad strain of communism but they're a superpower today.
Historical compounding and catch-up growth is a consequence of innate ability. Yes, there are historical and geographical factors that matter. But they matter less than innate ability. Even under Maoism, China was a major world power that could fight the US to a draw in Korea, develop ICBMs and H-bombs. Innate ability is the key. That's the best way to explain this trend.
This scenario didn't happen in Europe. The Russians (a full army and air force) went in on Georgia and walloped them, imposing a limited defeat. It was not a small band of adventurers like Wagner that took over a whole country and exploited their natural resources.
The strongest African powers occasionally hold off the weakest European powers but almost always lose. That's the key trend. Numbers and technology are of course very important. Mobilizing that is the whole aim of the game. Any win is still a win. But it's a very different kind of win to Russia fighting a very strong European power's full offensive power (making their own weapons) and marching their troops into Paris! The Russians did not merely fend off the French, they all but conquered France. The Ethiopians never conquered Italy.
What I mean by political vs military victory is kind of the difference between Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh city and New York becoming Vo Nguyen Giap City. That's a wholly different kind of victory, a total success at arms when all political resources were fully committed to the struggle. Some black countries achieved the former, never the latter.
Well if we introduced Africans to a very high human-capital civilization like America we'd assume the institutions would rub off on them right, they'd suddenly realize (like the East Asians did) how to do things effectively? Right? There'd be no chronic dysfunction, massively high crime rate, no poverty issues, no massive crime rate? They'd start getting STEM Nobels?
Or a US-supported black colony in Africa, with a constitution directly copied from America, shielded from any external threat by US power, that'd do well right?
Or all these black refugees/economic migrants heading to Europe, they'd be doctors and lawyers, not rapey welfare-abusers right?
But no, Liberia is a shithole, it's just the same as other West African countries. US blacks are violent, unproductive money-sinks. Europe is getting very sick of these refugees. I don't understand why centuries of poverty and brutal oppression immediately washes off Poles, Irish, Russians, Chinese, Koreans and they can immediately go out and do great things once free but blacks are somehow uniquely vulnerable to slavery and mistreatment that they'd be permanently degraded by this (in Ethiopia's case it was only a few years of Italian rule). The simplest scenario is that they're innately less capable.
I think it's much more dangerous to think that one's strength is in institutions or ideology rather than race. Racists like Stoddard (he wrote 'the rising tide of color') were extremely farsighted in predicting the power of China by observing the ability of the Chinese people. Whereas institution/culture people still deny Chinese potential, recall all the cope about how 'communists can't innovate.' We don't hear that much any more.
It's only dangerous if I'm wrong. But the predictions of racists have been proven more accurate than the anti-racists. The integrationists of the 50s and 60s thought that US blacks would be performing as if they were white, the investment would've paid off by now. But it hasn't. This is the arrogance that has cost trillions in fruitless, unjust DEI, tens of thousands of raped or murdered whites who 'didn't want to be racist', whole books like 'White girl bleed a lot' or 'Don't make the black kids angry' which are nothing but compilations of the tragicomedic failure of the antiracist worldview and the endless media/education work that's needed to prop it up.
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