Fuck off with your bullshit

	I read Guns, Germs and Steel some years ago, and provided many “aha” moments. Diamond’s explanations are extremely compelling, even to someone with more than a passing education in history, geography and historiography. Of course, they are all a “just so” story, rather than an accurate representation of how things turned out. Geography, of course, is important in the historical development of different nations and civilizations. Is geography (along with associated factors of agricultural technology, domesticated animals and his pained explanation about why Europeans were better with guns than the Chinese who invented them) the only factor in why Western Civilization grew to dominate others? Of course it isn’t.
	Europe had no unique access to these things: Asian civilizations had arguably superior such advantages. Victor Davis Hanson makes a similar “one factor” argument in his book Carnage and Culture. Hanson’s argument is that Westerners are simply better at war than other civilizations, because most Westerners were influenced by the Ancient Greeks, who developed methods of combat and developing innovations superior to that of other nations. Is Hanson’s theory 100% the One True Answer? No, the rise of Japan and the invincibility of Mongol raiders rather puts his theory to fault, but it’s at least as important as geography. There are all kinds of “one factor” arguments possible, all of which could make for as convincing a book as this one.
	Victorian historians thought it was the vigor of “Nordic” civilizations which made Western world domination inevitable: also convincing if that was the only book you had read on that particular day, and were also ultimately deeply silly (basically, this means the West dominates because it is dominant). Other Victorian historians made out human history to be the product of great battles, all of which had a huge element of random chance. Spengler also famously thought of civilizations as “cultural organisms” which eventually get old, become frail and die, just like any other organism whose telomeres have gotten shorter. I would imagine, like in, say, finance, the actual explanation for history is kind of complicated. I bet the Greek way of war has something to do with it, along with geography, culture, the Catholic Church, language and a whole lot of random chance. It’s nice to think we know exactly why something happened, but a lot of what happens in the world, especially the world of human beings, is just plain random noise. Putting one factor explanations on history as Diamond does is not particularly helpful.
	There is also the matter of historical perspective. Diamond writes as if everything leading up to the present time of European world cultural domination was some kind of historical inevitability, and that, of course, thus it will always be. This is the sheerest nonsense. At various times in human history, “Western Civilization” consisted of illiterate barbarians living in mud huts. In very recent times in human history (like, say, the 1940s), it kind of looked like that’s where the West was heading again. Other civilizations culturally and physically eclipsed or dominated the West through history: the Japanese, the Chinese, the Islamic civilizations, Egyptian, Assyrian, Mongolian, Persian or Russian (if you count them as different, which they are for the purpose of categorization, even though they’re mainly caucasoid–with some mongoloid) civilizations made Western civilization irrelevant through vast swathes of human history. Such civilizations may again eclipse Western civilization. Just to take one example, the Zoroastrian Persian civilization lasted longer than Rome, covered more territory, and was in many ways more advanced. They even generally beat the Romans in warfare in the Middle East. Why should I privilege the Romans over the Persians, just because some nations who were rather vaguely influenced by Rome now dominate the nations who were influenced by the Persians? I privilege them because they are my cultural ancestors, though in 1000 years, the poetry of Rumi may be more important than that of Martial.
	Finally, there are the matters of Diamond’s historical veracity and bigotry. To address the second thing first, he seems to take a sort of perverse glee in making racial pronouncements to the detriment of “Western” people. According to Diamond, Western people are dirty and have developed special immune systems–something I find hard to believe and doubt is backed up by anything resembling statistical fact. Why wouldn’t east Asians have developed superior immune systems? They lived in cities longer than the ancestors of most Westerners. Also, according to Diamond, he can tell that the average New Guinean is “on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people than the average European or American.” (page 20, along with a tortured explanation of why Diamond’s vacation perceptions are supposed to be superior to a century of psychometric research) This is the sort of casual bigotry that used to inform Nordicist history about the dominance of the West, except somehow it becomes politically correct when pointed at Western people in modern times.
	The following is a list of the arguments Guns, Germs and Steel makes and accompanying refutations.
	1. The unrivaled extent of the Eurasian landmass allowed the proliferation of many different civilizations, between which information could be exchanged allowing far greater cross-fertilization of cultures.
	WRONG! However unified the Eurasian landmass may look to a cartographer, it is intractably divided by formidable topographical features. Europe is isolated from Central Asia by the Alps, the Urals, the Caucasus, the Russian Steppes, the Taiga, and the Anatolian plateau. East Asia is divided from Central Asia by the Thar desert, the Himalayas, the Gobi desert, and the Tian Shan mountains. No significant cultural exchanges took place between these regions until the 15th century, by which time sub-Saharan Africa and America lagged far behind Europe and China technologically and culturally. Sub-Saharan Africa lies as close to the Fertile Crescent, regarded as the cradle of civilization, as Western Europe, and far closer than China.
	2. A diverse abundance of potential food crops is necessary in order for settled agricultural communities to flourish.
	WRONG! The Inca created a complex civilization based on the cultivation of two food crops: the potato and maize. Large agricultural communities, like Cahokia in North America, flourished on the exploitation of maize. Western European agriculture was overwhelmingly based on wheat production, China’s on rice.
	3. The European biome contained a greater variety of domesticable crops than Africa and America and these crops were more nutritious.
	WRONG! America had indigenous food crops which were more nutritious than European staples. Beans, corn, squashes and peanuts are superior to wheat and, if grown in rotation, create a self-replenishing agricultural cycle. Far from having no viable indigenous staples, Africa had okra, rice, sorghum, millet, the bambara ground nut, black-eyed peas, watermelons, and numerous gourds and tubers, as well as immensely useful plants such as the oil palm and the tamarisk. African slaves actually introduced rice cultivation to the United States. The standard reference on this subject is Lost Crops of Africa.
	4. Eurasia had more domesticable large mammals than Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas.
	WRONG! Africa has indigenous breeds of sheep, goats and cattle which were spread from the Sudan to the Cape by 200 AD. The South Americans domesticated the llama. The North Americans, like the Aboriginals of Australia, almost hunted their domesticable mammals to extinction. Why didn’t Europeans hunt horses, cows and sheep to extinction?
	5. Only urban civilizations can develop the levels of technological skill and social organization required for military conquest.
	WRONG! The two greatest conquerors in history, Attila the Hun and Ghengis Khan came from nomadic tribal civilizations. Rome was overthrown by nomads. The Indus Valley civilization–perhaps the oldest in human history by far–was destroyed by Indo-European barbarians.
	6. The transmission of European diseases helped European nations conquer non-European nations.
	WRONG! The European nations had achieved such technological superiority to non-European nations that, by the colonial epoch, there could be no serious question of a non-European army successfully resisting an attack by a European army. Europeans conquered huge swathes of territory with tiny armies (Pizzaro). Epidemic disease only became a factor post-conquest. In Africa, India and South America native diseases hie malaria were just as deadly to Europeans as European diseases were to the indigenous peoples. Also, it is now proven that seals and sea lions brought disease to the Americas, not Europeans.
	7. China lacked the type of convoluted coastline necessary for dissidents to hide out in.
	WRONG! AND BIZARRE! Is Jared Diamond trying to claim that dissidents can only hide on convoluted coastlines? This is about as strange as his assumption that only large bodies of water constitute an effective barrier to trade and travel. China abounds in intractable wastes and remote mountain ranges where bandits and outlaws fled the authority of central government, the most obvious region being the famous water margin.
	8. Urban populations are less intelligent than non-urban populations.
	WRONG! Western European civilizations sets a premium on education. Abstract reasoning skills are rewarded by better employment prospects, which in turn create enhanced relationship opportunities, meaning that intelligent people are encouraged to procreate with other intelligent people, unlike in Papua New Guinea, where the physical prowess is far more important than deductive logic. The cultural bias of subsaharan Africans against the codification and expression of abstract concepts through language and design is also a current point of scientific interest.
	Europe and China developed the worlds greatest civilizations in regions which were no bigger than the regions inhabited by any other cultures, which enjoyed no great advantages in terms of agricultural potential, which had no special abundance of handy food crops and which had particular disadvantages in terms of climate. Diamond’s theory sounds so incontestable because he has edited out substantial volumes of contradictory information with the skill and shamelessness of a Stalin era Commissar.
	It was debunked many, many times by any historian with a brain. It doesn’t even take a historian. “Harsh climate!” African climate is one of the most mild and undaunting. Meanwhile, Europeans not only managed to survive the Ice Age but also built a civilization in the mountainous infertile snowbowl known as Europe. “Untamable animals!” Which have proven to be easily domesticated. Blacks just never bothered with them. “Diseases!” Explains why European colonists went to such great lengths to cure sleeping sickness, the main scourge of African tribes.
	There are no magical land mammals that cannot be domesticated. Do you honestly think the horse, donkey, and their ancestors were domesticated with a snap of the finger in a few hundred years? That is most certainly not how it happens. You should enroll at your local community college instead of working in the food industry, maybe you could learn a little bit.
	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
	These were extremely feared and revered by ancient man, even during domestication. They were gigantic beasts with horns that were known to be incredibly destructive. The Sumer had mythical tales about them. Here’s what Julius Caesar said:
	“These are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied.”
	And despite this–despite the fact that these animals were dangerous, incredibly strong, and often attacked humans–they were domesticated. And now they’re cows. This happened with every species. Do you think pigs have always been easy to deal with? No, they were huge fuck-off wild boars, no more easily tamable than a goddamn bear. The fact that you can just ride a Zebra as a novelty doesn’t just prove they are domesticable, it proves they are more domesticable than most animals.