alt Hacker NewsI mean, lots of things have been developed in European countries, and said countries either never commercialized the technology well enough, or lost leadership. I'm sure that prior to WW2, Brits would've treated the idea that they could be out-engineered by the Germans with ridicule.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here.
Upthread, the point about it not mattering what China stole but what they can do? That "Made in China" has gone from a sign of low quality to being the default as it became the factory of the world? Yes, China's winning and the sooner the rest of us wake up and smell the tea the better. They learned lessons from how my ancestors were able to push them around despite coming from a small, damp, sheep-filled rock in the Atlantic, and don't want that to happen again; for most of "the west", being on the receiving end of such humiliation is a historical footnote if it's in our own history books (or living history) at all*, and most of the exceptions are former-Soviet-bloc/Warsaw Pact.
But specifically to the point about the USSR claiming all (good) things for itself, as parodied in this manner by Star Trek? AFAICT, that was just plain soviet propaganda.
* What happened in Africa and India/Pakistan, however, is recent enough to still be in living memory. Israel likewise, though now this is on the edge of living memory for the things which led to its reincarnation.
And while the Irish definitely still retell history lessons about the British and the Famine, I'm not at all sure if the stuff in NI in my lifetime counts as "humiliation" given I'm British and our newspapers just said "terrorist" about everything that came from there.
This is only relevant to the point that most of us are deeply oblivious to how bad things can get when someone else is the boss and we don't get to vote in their elections.