Is this supposed to be a surprising secret? I was taught this in American public schools as the core reason.
The real wake-up call isn't learning about the historical importance of expansion itself, but assigning a different moral value to it. It's realizing Manifest Destiny is just Lebensraum that won, that there's nothing morally justified about it.
The real secret cause was that galaxy brain Americans thought that tea was like a hardcore drug and that the Empire was doing a sort of opium wars on them with english breakfast teas
He’s right that the Americans wanted to genocide the indigenous people west of the Appalachians and take their land, and that was a big reason why they declared independence because the British wouldn’t let them.
He’s wrong that the British were restricting expansion out of morals and preserving the land for the indigenous peoples. It was just for the British, that maintaining a military presence in the Ohio Valley was much more expensive than the economic benefits they would get. If the numbers worked out a little differently they would have been just as eager to genocide as the Americans.
Wait. I had never heard anything about your first paragraph in school. Is there something specific I could look up to read more about this?
I’m not sure, it’s fairly common knowledge nowadays (my teacher in HS covered it). Real estate speculation in lands not yet fully ethnically cleansed was a massive source of wealth for many of the founding fathers.
Take it from an Ohioan, this place is cursed.
Oh, and America has practically built an ancap Hukou system so there’s a good chance I may be stuck here for the rest of my life.
I swear, as I moved leftward realizing just how much of a fascist Teddy Roosevelt was legit hurt me. It was like finding out the truth about Elon all over again.
But it just goes to show that Malthusianism is simply a core part of Anglo culture. Like every Anglosphere country is in a bare-knuckled fight to be the modern day Sparta.
good blog series about how Sparta was trash https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/
Sixth grade me in social studies: “So they just attacked Athens because they were violent warmongers jealous of their prosperity!? Why do we idolize them?!”
clueless over the nature Europeans had for the rest of the world
But yeah, thank you for the article. Sparta was awful and the 300 makes my skin crawl because of how it glorified some of the earliest fascists in history.
Teddy is one of the better presidents, too. He was especially good for the labor movement and trust busting. It's sad the best America can come up with are NazBols.
every angloid a fascist
