Why is nobody paying attention to this?

[fpb]

I had never even heard it, had any of you? And yet it is since 2007 that Germany had announced the establishment of a purely German space program, separate from the European space agency, and intended to go to the Moon. Now Peter Hintze, the German federal director of aerospace, has announced that Germany plans a mission to the Moon within ten years. One of the many ways in which the world media are corrupt is that they never pay any attention to news like this. There is a meme that Europe is lazy and declining, and that the future is in the Far East. Any news that contradict the meme simply are not publicized. And when German spacemen will in fact be walking on the Moon, everyone will be surprised, not knowing that the program had been widely announced.

(the news was reported by today's Italian Catholic newspaper L'Avvenire)

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Generally agreed.

But it's not clear that Western military technology *was* able to overwhelm healthy Indian communities, at least not in the 1600s. Disease led the way: Plymouth was settled on mass graves, Pizarro conquered an empire disrupted by smallpox killing the emperor, heir, and half the generals. Brazil may not have been empty, the first descriptions are of lots of villages, even cities, just as in North America. It's the second wave of explorers who found 'emptiness'...

Charles Mann's 1491 might be of interest, or the original essay.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It is perfectly clear that the Aztec Empire was repeatedly capable of fielding armies numbering, at a conservative estimate, in the tens of thousands. It is equally clear that, especially at the Valley of Otumba, less than 600 Spaniards covered in steel and mounted on horseback were capable of overcoming one such army. Smallpox came later. As for military technology, are you seriously telling me that a culture whose toughest weapons were made of obsidian had a prayer against one that had steel, gunpowder, and the wheel (which the Aztecs and Incas had never invented)? Revisionism is all very well, but there is a limit.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

600 Spaniards -- and thousands of native allies; Cortes and his chaplain estimated their allied losses at 2-4000 from that battle. With the Spaniards using shock cavalry against a population that had never seen such tactics before, and capturing the leader. Won the battle. The war might have been in doubt -- but then smallpox came via an abandoned slave, killing 40% of the population.

Guns of the time weren't that good; bows would have higher rate of fire and comparable killing power. Harder to train, but where most of the male population already knew how to use them (or spears, or massed sling formations)... Wheel's not much use if no one's built good roads for you to use them on. Steel armor's nice, but the logistics of conquest would be unfavorable. A few ships of troops with stretched supply lines vs. teeming societies. (That'd hurt the guns too -- got to keep up the ammunition supplies.) *All* European beachheads in the Americas were established with the help of mass plague. Contrast with Africa, with similar tech level differences (though more iron there.)

Read the article, at least.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are missing the point badly, and if that is what the article builds on, I am not impressed. The Spanish had already, in a few years, built a viable sea empire based on Cuba, with cities with thousands of inhabitants, before they ever made it to the mainland. When Cortez was in distress or in need of reinforcements, he did not need to appeal to Cadiz or Cordoba - Havana had all the troops and weapons he required. The point with Columbus' mission, as he knew very well himself, is that as soon as he had discovered a new route to the East (as he thought) there were hundreds of ships and tens of thousands men ready to follow it for trade and - if it happened that way - for conquest. He was not using anything special, just the ordinary kind of ocean-going vessel with which the Portuguese were taming the coast of Africa, and with which northern Europe had traded across the most unfriendly seas in the world for centuries. Western naval technology had led the world for 700 years by the time Columbus reached America and Vasco da Gama accomplished the much longer and more dangerous journey to India; nobody had noticed because, until the Portuguese started sticking their noses outward, European trade had been confined to the northern seas - a vast ice path which led nowhere except to the very limited opportunities of Lapland, Russia and Iceland - and to the Mediterranean, three quarters of whose shores were held by hostile land empires. Even so, the superiority of European ships was such that, from the eleventh century on, the Mediterranean remained an European lake in spite of the fact that most of its shores were held by hostile Arabs, Greeks and later Turks. Cyprus only fell to the Turks in 1570, Crete in 1669, Corfu and Malta never. Even the fact that the Arabs and the Greeks became dreaded pirates only proves that the West had the naval supremacy, for piracy is a parasitical phenomenon that depends for its existence on its enemies' prosperity. So does the fact that the language of Mediterranean harbours was an Italian dialect, the lingua franca. The originally autonomous Viking culture had cracked the secret of ocean sailing before the ninth century, and when it was absorbed into the Christian West, the miracle of its ocean-going trade became a part of the West, constantly improved and advanced. The masters of the rest of the world's seas simply did not realize what this meant until the Portuguese fell on the Arab trade of the east, destroying it and replacing it within a generation. The arrival of the Portuguese galleons in the Indian Ocean has been described as like an alien invasion movie; the locals simply did not have the answer to its immense technological superiority. Astonished Japanese visitors described Japanese and Dutch vessels as floating cities, towering over the ocean. The Portuguese, and then the Dutch, actually took control of the internal trade of Asia itself. And the Spanish in America did that even more thoroughly. The fact is that Europeans were used to going down to the ocean in ships and crossing the most dangerous seas; each European state had hundreds of groups that did so regularly, in the face of wind and weather. Indeed, there is evidence that British and Breton fishermen had located the Newfoundland Banks before Columbus, but had kept quiet about it. It was this immense depth of naval capability that simply overwhelmed the Americas.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

At any rate, that is beside the point. My point was that, whether Europeans conquered them (Mexico and Peru) or not (Japan, China, India, Persia), they went for the organized and civilized communities like flies to honey, and largely disregarded the tribal areas. Even the slave trade with West Africa was carried out with civilized African kingdoms which had been at the centre of their own trading networks for centuries - that is why it existed at all, and why it was economically efficient. The settlement of uncivilized areas, except for Brazil, came much later, and indeed, in the case of South Africa, it was the result of a wholly unplanned and undesired population boom in a harbour that had never been intended as anything but a refuelling station on the way to the (civilized empires of the) Indies.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was agreeing with that, just nitpicking some of the history.