Guns Germs Steel Essay

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Guns, Germs, and Steel is the documentary film version of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name. Like the book, the documentary is divided into three separate sections. This allows for the logical development of Diamond's ideas, and for the application of the underlying thesis to different time periods, themes, and human populations. Although extensive ground is covered in the three episodes, the premise and themes are straightforward enough so that the documentary never becomes complicated or clunky. The title explains the primary three issues that have impacted human history, allowing some people to have a strategic advantage over others. When these advantages occur in groups, the results can be dramatic to the victors and devastating to the losers.

Developing guns and other armament depends not only the availability of resources to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, but more importantly, the political situations that warrant their use. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond talks about the fact that geographic conditions like availability of resources or the presence of natural barriers may create situations in which people are divided into smaller and more protective tribes, or alternatively, into larger groups and expansive territories like China. Moreover, the film shows that peaceful people who have lived without great conflict have not developed military strategies and thus when they are confronted by a militaristic cultures, they are unprepared to defend themselves. This has happened with a great number of groups of people throughout history, who have succumbed to a more bellicose group of people simply because the latter was more interested in killing people than they were.

Germs refers to the fact that some people have not developed the resistance to certain diseases due to their genetic pool and geographic factors that never put them into contact with triggers requiring a biological response like the production of antibodies.

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Without antibodies, the person cannot fight the disease, and the person or group may be highly susceptible to plague or mass death. A perfect example of this phenomenon is the smallpox epidemic and other diseases that devastated the Native American populations after contact with Europeans.

Steel refers to the strategic advantages some groups of people have over others due to the luck of their location or climate. Regions ripe with local resources may have led to a more lackadaisical response to resources, because abundance breeds complacency. On the other hand, people and cultures that have had to work harder to survive may have been better equipped or more interested in expanding their territories. How some cultures became dominant has a lot to do with agriculture, sedentary lifestyles, and the evolution of ranching and livestock rearing.

The point of the documentary is to show why the power balance of the world had been skewed toward Europe. The success of the United States and Australia are only related….....

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