Washington's Farewell Address, 1796
 

So, I'm not a political or economical expert by any means, but I was always interested in Washington's Farewell address of 1796. One of his major points was for America to avoid unnecessary foreign influence:

Read the whole thing here: http://www.csamerican.com/doc.asp?doc=washfarewell#pt4

One might say that his point of view is outdated, but we still follow a constitution that was written in the 18th century...

I mean, look at all of the countries that are more successful than us, with technology that far exceeds ours, and education, and universal healthcare. I mean, we have the highest debt of any country.

What are your thoughts on this? It may seem cruel to allow things like genocide and terrorism to plague the world, but that should be a worldly concern, not an American concern. Why should America be concerned with the rest of the world, when they have so many problems at home?

Discuss.

First thought: Fuck George Washington

Second thought: American would not exist if it were not for genocide and slave labor.

Third thought: America killed a million Iraqis and has engaged in terror throughout the world.

Find a timeline of American history. It'll be hard to find a portion of it in which America hasn't messed with other peoples' business. The US felt entitled to everything even before it became the US.

Just to nitpick, North American natives were primarily killed of by disease, not by genocidal intentions.

Manifest Destiny baby!

Just to nitpick, that disease was spread by smallpox-infected blankets and clothes given to natives by Europeans.

Articles of confederation? I don't think anything happened during those. Unless you counted state to state arguments as international affairs (which they sort of were under the articles).


The wikipedia article on the population of the native US is rather interesting. I didn't realize the estimates varied that much (from 10 to 100+ million)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populat...f_the_Americas

The smallpox blanket thing happened, trail of tears, etc. but those were way after the smallpox epidemics in the 15th,16th,17th centuries (and primarily done by US manifest destiny citizens). The US offered smallpox vaccines to the Sioux in the 1830s.

The native population was decimated in places far from where european settlers had immediate contact. Most of the deaths occurred during the early Spanish occupation and most people who make claims about the Spanish spreading viruses blame it on poisoning water supplies rather than blankets. Anyways, the Spanish personally instituted fucked up forms of slavery and other things so poisoning water supplies in god's name seems possible but unlikely to have killed everyone in a 800 mile radius.

If you want another reason to say fuck white people, their explanations behind the epidemic are good motivation
and this made me laugh
Yeah, that apology really does a lot of good 150 years after the fact. Also, only apologizing to the Western tribes?

What a rosy picture you paint!

US foreign policy was pretty isolationist for the beginning of the country. :/ They followed Washington's advice for a while certainly. Changed a bit with the World Wars though.

Not exactly. There was the war with Barbari (america's first war), franco-american war (these two were mostly naval), war of 1812, mexican-american war in the 1830s, the Civil War almost turned international (if the north had lost Antietam then I think either the french or the british would have sent military aid to the south), the spanish-american war in 1898 (also known as "a splendid little war") and the subsequent occupations of cuba, the phillipines, puerto rico, and guam (the phillipines especially didn't like being occupied).

If you include wars against Amerindian nations/tribes it gets a lot longer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...nited_S tates

The Monroe doctrine also really made (and continues to make) the US act like total lunatics about South America.

That's still far from the definition of genocide, unless you're claiming that they intentionally spread disease, which is ridiculous.

What the Europeans did was awful. This doesn't mean we can ignore historical realities to suit our own agendas.

I mean, they did try though. Their intention was to take out as many Native Americans as possible. The only thing historians argue is that it wasn't the Europeans who started the spread. Smallpox was already spreading before that, so they just added on to an already growing epidemic.

I can't think of anything either. But given that it lasted just under a decade since its full ratification and until the Constitutional Convention, it's not much. I never did say it was nonexistent, just rare.

I'm not trying to be a dick, but I would doubt the precision of those Wikipedia articles.

I'm not saying this because I think what you're saying is wrong, but because, well, it's Wikipedia, and the interpretation of historical facts, in some of their articles, are not very rigorous

Read a book entitled Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer if you want to know about America's involvement in foreign affairs.