Did the US culture bomb Texas away from Mexico?

[hobbsyoyo]

In Civilization 5, you can use a 'culture bomb' to extend your borders. You can even use this to take territory away from another country. Doing this, however, is considered an act of aggression and often leads to war.

My question is:

Was the act of Texas breaking from Mexico and joining with the United States (resulting in a war that led to the US seizing several other states) a real life culture bomb?

One aspect I believe backs up this theory is the insitution of slavery. It was a (horrible/reprehensible/completely evil) cultural aspect that the United States had, which Mexico lacked. The right to own and use slaves was a major part of the reason behind the Texan succession and later involvement of the United States.

Is this assesment correct? Are their other cultural dynamics to this situation that lend credence to the theory of a real world culture bomb?

 

[Cutlass]

No. We just took it away because they didn't have the strength to stop us.

 

[Traitorfish]

Given that the majority of Texan rebels were American citizens who identified as Americans, is it really necessary to talk about "culture bombs" to explain why they, finding themselves a majority, might have preferred membership of the United States of America to the United Mexican States?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I'm just trying to start a conversation about how a game mechanic may apply to real life. Of course you don't have a general plop down a citadel and take territory.

What Traitorfish said about Texas rebels being Americans proves my point. People bring culture, cultures clash, violence follows and somebody comes out the winner.

 

[Traitorfish]

I think that you're simplifying how national identity works, there. Cultures don't "clash", because cultures aren't actually things. What clashes is people, and they do so along far more lines than the national or ethnic. What we see in Texas is a number of political fault-lines converging in such a manner as to produce the results we saw. My point was to suggest that, of the relatively narrow range of long-term options presented to them, the Texans choosing the one they did doesn't take any pained metaphors or wonkily mechanical models of culture to explain.

 

[KevinLancaster]

So it was more along the lines of city-flipping in Civilization 3 when a city was too influenced by a neighbouring civilization or had too many foreign citizens, then?

 

[Traitorfish]

It wasn't any game mechanic. The real world is far too complex to expressed in the necessarily reductive terms of a game, especially one which like Civ doesn't make any pretence to be a simulation. We might be able to describe an historical episode in Civ-like terms, but that's just a convenient analogy, not an accurate description of events.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Traitorfish, I don't know what part of the title of this thread gave you the impression this was thesis-defense level stuff. Just a light hearted thread for CiV and history fans to banter on.

 

[Dachs]

I don't really play Civ 5. Is a culture bomb sort of like using a Great Artist to pump out +4k culture points in Civ 4?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

So it was more along the lines of city-flipping in Civilization 3 when a city was too influenced by a neighbouring civilization or had too many foreign citizens, then?

That's kind of what gave me the original thought. Then I took into consideration that slavery had a lot to do with Texan discontent and I just thought...man we culture bombed that state. It was a Mexican state that got overrun by Americans who brought their own beliefs, ideas, way of life etc. and they just flipped it over.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I don't really play Civ 5. Is a culture bomb sort of like using a Great Artist to pump out +4k culture points in Civ 4?

Yeah, you basically take a great general and you have it move to a tile adjacent to your borders and build a citadel tile improvement. All of the tiles around the citadel flip to your control.

You can take territory from your neighbors this way. Although you can't take cities, you can take every tile around them. This pretty much guarantees a nasty war.

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Actually, it started as Mexican civil war in 1834, with the states divided between federalists* adhering to the constitution of 1824 and centrallists supporting a stronger national government and Santa Anna's internal coup of abrogating the constitution and dismissing the congress. By 1836 Santa Anna Had smashed the other state on Coahuila y Tejas's side(the federalists), the last two being Zacetecas and the Coahuila part of Coahuila yTejas (the two areas had been combined as a state a few years earlier, after starting as separate territories). The remaining federalists in Texas had the choice of giving up or declaring independence, with more recent arrivals of course favoring independence. So it is more like a civil war split, with the USA picking up the surviving splitter a decade later.

*opposing Santa Anna were: Coahuila y Tejas, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro, Durango, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Yucatán, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Yucatan and Zacatecas.

 

[Lord Baal]

Actually, it started as Mexican civil war in 1834, with the states divided between federalists* adhering to the constitution of 1824 and centrallists supporting a stronger national government and Santa Anna's internal coup of abrogating the constitution and dismissing the congress. By 1836 Santa Anna Had smashed the other state on Coahuila y Tejas's side(the federalists), the last two being Zacetecas and the Coahuila part of Coahuila yTejas (the two areas had been combined as a state a few years earlier, after starting as separate territories). The remaining federalists in Texas had the choice of giving up or declaring independence, with more recent arrivals of course favoring independence. So it is more like a civil war split, with the USA picking up the surviving splitter a decade later.

*opposing Santa Anna were: Coahuila y Tejas, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro, Durango, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Yucatán, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Yucatan and Zacatecas.

Man, I miss the civil wars from Civ II. You could play the WWII scenario as the Neutrals and end up splitting the Russians, Axis and Allies.

 

[sydhe]

More of an infiltration. Culture bombs do occur occasionally, as when Nicomedus IV willed Bithynia to Rome

 

[Tee Kay]

Cultural expansion is an invented game mechanic included in the game to represent the gradual absorption of surrounding cultures by a dominant culture or population or ethnic group or what have you. The Texas example can probably be called a real life culture bomb in this sense, but as others have pointed out this is a gross simplification that's not adequate when you actually look into it.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Keywords:

The remaining federalists in Texas had the choice of giving up or declaring independence, with more recent arrivals of course favoring independence. So it is more like a civil war split, with the USA picking up the surviving splitter a decade later.

Edit:
It was a civil war that we took advantage of. But I'm just saying that for (American-born) Texans, a big part of the reason to split and fight a civil war were the differences they had with Mexico as a result of coming from the US originally. That's a culture bomb in my opinion.

OT - were areas like California, New mexico, etc. orginally Mexican states like say, Chihuahua, or were they more like unicorporated territories?

 

[potatokiosk]

Who was the Great Artist in this case? Davy Crockett?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Who was the Great Artist in this case? Davy Crockett?

It's actually a Great General in CiV. Davy Crockett fits the bill nicely
Edit: Sam Houston even better

 

[Bugfatty300]

Keywords:OT - were areas like California, New mexico, etc. orginally Mexican states like say, Chihuahua, or were they more like unicorporated territories?

California and NM were one autonomous territory (Alta California). Texas was part of Coahuila which was a state.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thanks