8th May 2004, 1:33 PM
Quote:Spain (and Austria) are the only two countries with worse military records than Mexico. They were both superpowers once; but neither has won a war in 400+ years, and isolated they couldn't win a war against an army of kittens.
Darunia, the problem with using "history" to prove a biased point is that history has a tendency to not just follow one belief's path... as in, you can try to twist it to fit your means but it won't mean that that has any relation to reality.
So, I prove that Mexico can win wars, and did indeed win two. So what do you do? Ignore it, of course! Come up with excuses. Well you know what? You can do that for ANYTHING! Anything. Now, Mexico did lose badly to the US in 1848. But the US was a far stronger nation that is contiguous to Mexico... Mexico honestly never had much of a chance. Especially not with as incompetent leadership as Santa Anna provided...
Quote:SPEAKING OF AUSTRIA, that plays very well into our discussion here, about immigration. Austria is just what it is today: one small Germanic country. It expanded to encompass more land, and soon it had dozens of minorities: Poles, Slavs, Germans, Greeks, Macedonians, Muslims---all these diverse peoples. They all wanted autonomy, and it tore Austria apart. What will happen in 50 years when California and New Mexico is SO overwhelmingly Spanish that THEY want to secede, like Quebec wants to do now?
You get your history a bit off again. Austria... you know, the Austrian Empire survived for centuries. It didn't disolve just because the minorities decided they didn't like Austria anymore. It dissolved because of the chaos of World War I. Kind of like Russia... the Austrian armies preformed pretty badly in the field. Now, Austria had been a second-rate power for many years at that point (its decline starting when Prussia began to get dominant in Europe -- that is, between the mid 1700s and mid 1800s...)
Anyway, it was a weak power. But before the war, they had managed to hold it together, despite all the pressures of nationalism pressing agaisnt it. Now, there were agitators, but the government did as good a job as they possibly could to keep the empire together. The army was important... not as much in supression as in pride in the Empire's military. That, and giving some nationalities (especially Hungarians, after the Germans) more rights than others... Austria only fell apart when it was clear they were losing the war and their army had failed pretty miserably in the field. Then, all of the parts declared independance... what proves that it wasn't just a 'we want freedom' thing (though that was part of it) was that Hungary went too. Hungary hadn't exactly been opressed under Austrian rule...
My point is, your point is flawed. Now, Austria well might have collapsed on its own later on. Actually, I'd bet on it... it just was not a strong enough nation to survive. But when you look at the whole case it has zero relation to anything to do with the US. There is very little one could say about the Austrian Empire that has much to do with the US... Quebec? That's a bit closer, because it's a nationality that has lived in that place for a long time and wants its freedom, but it's also not quite the same because unlike the minorities in Austria the French in Quebec are given as many rights as the English elsewhere... and as for Mexicans in the US, oh come on. You're just insane. People come to America because they don't want to live in Mexico anymore! Why in the world would they want to take over California again? And that also ignores how strong our military is, and how strong our economy is (just as important a factor here... given how many Slavs fled Austria for the US and elsewhere...), and how anyone who comes here IS Americanized in some way... you're just paranoid. And scared of Mexicans.
And if you want to talk about Spain, the story of their rise and fall is short, relatively. They had ships and were near the coast. They came to the Americas. They exploited it for all the money they could. They shipped that gold home. They at the same time went on a massive crusade to exterminate all the Jews and Muslims in their country, and did a good job of it. This greatly reduced their population in some important categories that Jews were common in, and was of great detriment to the nation's future success. So once the gold dried up, they had nothing left and their colonies withered for a very long time.
The English came up with a better model... :)
Um, did I mention that this semester one of my classes was European History, 1815-1914? (though plenty of what I said is stuff I knew before that, like the part on Spain...):)
Quote:If people keep leaving Mexico at this rate wouldn't Mexico eventually be empty?
No, because a lot of them are actually coming from Central America and compared to the number coming here even more are staying there. I'm sure that Mexico is growing in population naturally, and not just because of immigration like the US...