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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Not every country or tribe has been engaged in near continuous violence for over two centuries. That isn't simply "fighting many wars" it's being "existentially bound to warfare." The US is peculiar. It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder. It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war. It's the only nation to wage nuclear war, and did so primarily against civilians. It's (for the time being) the world's only superpower, with a military orders of magnitude larger than any other. It put the right to shoot people into its Constitution because its founders wanted a government that normalized regular revolutionary violence as a civic principle.

The US is weirdly attached to violence and war in ways you only tend to find in modern dictatorships or the empires of old.

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I appreciate this comment, and agree with it in some respects, but some of these specifics are demonstrably false.

> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder

Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.

> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)

That's fair criticism. The US isn't that unique in terms of colonialist expansion in the New World and I honestly forgot about Haiti. I just knew that Britain managed to end slavery without a war but I forgot about Haiti and its uprising.

That's stupid.

I mean we can start by gesturing at the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, heck England and France had a 100 years war, that was just one of their wars.

And I don't remember the US starting either WW1 or WW2 in fact if I remember that was the Germans and the French and the Russians and the English again.

I mean then you've got the Muslim conquests which do the match the description you're giving the US.

In fact theres only been a brief period of time from near the end of the Cold War till recently where every state wasn't preparing to engage in or having recently prosecuted a war, and there's considerable evidence that Europe didn't have to do that because the US was carrying all of NATO on its back.

So what is unique about the US right now apart from the fact that Pax Americana facilitated the most peaceful period in human history even considering the few wars that were fought?

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