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Notes -
Happy 4th of July to our American friends! I've come to share a little bit of history that struck me, then and now, as one of the more compelling paeans of American greatness: the opinion of Germans of American soldiers in 1917-18.
When the USA fell into WWI mostly-unprepared, it had to rapidly acquaint itself with the realities of modern warfare and gamely struggled with it. Once the fighting ended the Army was very interested in sourcing the enemy's opinions of its performance so as to be better prepared for next time. What actually happened was the USA retreated again into isolationism and it had to relearn all the same lessons in 1941-42 again at great cost. But it did produce this great document: Candid Comment on the American Soldier of 1917-18 (and Kindred Topics) by The Germans.
While much of it is devoted to German opinions of American combat performance (the general conclusion was brave, but foolhardy), the more interesting elements to me are the German impressions of Americans as individuals. Many of the American soldiers were ethnically German themself, and the whole situation lended itself to German introspection on how their American cousins had diverged in between the great German national failures of 1848 and 1918. This was after all a great clash of the ideals of the former versus the structure of the latter (which was drawn into sharper contrast by the further civil conflict within Germany; there are repeated instances of praise for American rule versus that of the "Spartacists").
You can see some selected quotes on various topics here, but what I find particularly interesting are the various comments about American class distinctions, given the shock Germans had in comparing their Prussian norms with American freedoms. Some choice quotes:
It is possible that the America of, say, 1870 to 1970 was an extraordinarily unique place in world history in which, for a great many reasons, three things were simultaneously true for ordinary people:
The rewards for ambition, competence, and conscientousness were extraordinarily great
The price for personal failure was still very high
It was possible for many to rise well above their station in life due to very rapid economic growth
I struggle to think of many other societies in which all three were simultaneously true. The few examples I can think of (the four 'Asian Tiger' economies from the 1960s to 1990s, maybe) were also temporary, and true for a much shorter period than the US.
But in such a society, propriety, boldness, ambition and self-respect would likely be more common among those who had great hopes of participating in that ongoing boom.
Don' be so epoch-parochial!
E.g. during the Yamnaya expansions into Europe, rewards for ambition & competence were extremely high, price for failure was absolute and it was certainly possible to rise well above your station by conquering and putting to service enough peasants.
I haven't heard of those people before and looked them up, given that they existed around 3500 BC, what firm evidence is there that they lived the way you claim?
It's a niche subject, and I don't expect to be able to track down much on the topic itself. I did at least bother to ask GPT-4, but it had little to share on the matter.
The wikipedia article ?
This isn't any secret or obscure history, save maybe in India where the local idiots-in-charge like to pretend Brahmins and other higher castes aren't a small remnant of northern conquerors but were actually indigenous to the region. (The genetic data is always a good way of riling up Hindu nationalists on twitter)
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