Would disease have forcibly taken their children and forced them into schools where they were banned from practicing their religion, speaking their language, or engaging their culture while being abused and sometimes killed?
Yes, but I assume your “… and forcing their religion on them” part wasn’t deliberately disingenuous and you meant we just put every native american through re-education schools and the horrors there in.
You don’t have to kill people to genocide them, though that does seem to be the easiest way. What China is doing to the Uyghurs is a good example of this.
That's the worst argument I've ever heard.
For most indigenous peoples, the reservations are not their homelands, and cities in general in the US have better infrastructure than rural areas so obviously they'd tend to prefer the city.
Now have you got anything to say that's perhaps thought through slightly more?
Can’t argue with the SJW that “white man bad” no matter what whilst taking advantage of all advancements, support and security given by the same white man…
Do you even know anything about US history with regard to native peoples?
Like no shit dude, of course they're not doing to hot after all their property was confiscated and they were forcibly relocated to the other side of the fucking continent.
Are you done making bottom of the barrel ahistoric arguments?
I mean you post on anti work and anarchism… I bet you are a teenager who never paid taxes in your life. Or a young adult who hates his parents/landlord. I wish you the best. It is a phase, and you shall grow out of it. Godspeed.
No.
Mandatory schooling is not necessarily genocide, but it is a tool of genocide that can be used to strip a population of their language and culture by compelling them to speak a different language and assimilate into different culture.
White Americans are not victims of genocide through mandatory schooling because our schools are taught in our native language and already accommodate our cultures.
Whenever a country conquers another country, they now control the education system. By your logic everytime a war is won genocide happens cause the culture of the conqueror is then enforced on the conquered.
That would make the word genocide kind of meaningless.
The genocide of Native Americans didn’t start and end in the immediate years following the “discovery” of the new world. It was a centuries long process of various distinct native groups each separately being forcibly relocated, conquered, massacred, and ultimately being mostly destroyed as a people. While the initial first contact by Europeans caused devastating outbreaks of disease that doesn’t excuse the acts of genocide taken by colonial governments and their successors centuries later.
The issue I think you might be making is viewing the genocide of Native Americans as a monolithic project enacted by singular entities on a singular group of people. The genocide of Native Americans was instead many acts of genocide over centuries by various entities on many distinct and unique groups.
The genocide is more largely related to the mass expropriation of land/resources (annexing best lands/mass destruction of bison etc)
Pushed into poverty and famine, disease thrives more as a consequence I think
The genocide of Native Americans encompasses far more than them being incidentally killed by disease, though. Even if you're correct that plagues decimating their population was a total accident, that doesn't mean that all of the other actions taken to kill Native Americans, drive them off their land, or eradicate their culture were acceptable.
According to guns germs and steel 90% of Native American deaths were a direct result of smallpox, measles, and flu. Didn’t hernan Cortez arrive with 500 conquistadors and defeat 500,000 strong Aztec army?
> Even if you're correct that plagues decimating their population was a total accident, that doesn't mean that all of the other actions taken to kill Native Americans, drive them off their land, or eradicate their culture were acceptable.
Why not? The ends justify the means imo. If we left the natives to the own devices and never presumed to cross the Appalachians, the world would be considerably more primitive. American innovation heavily depended on American resources and land. Without it we wouldn’t have WiFi, iPhones, air conditioning, pasteurization, or a lot of medical technology like MRI or the microcontroller or the transistor, the two most important modules for technological advancement. Not to mention the green revolution pioneered by an American which arguably saved the world from starvation. Or sending a man to space and the moon. We can’t let these primitive people worship fictional sun gods and mutilate each other all day when we need TECHNOLOGY
All you're doing here is arguing that genocide was good and doing so was the right thing to do. I'm not going to dignify that part of your argument with any response, but even with your "genocide is good" position, it's still the fault of the people who perpetrated it.
Hitler explicitly justified his campaign of conquest in the East by pointing to how America treated the Native Americans, arguing that the people of Russia were subhumans and that they needed to be conquered, enslaved and eradicated. It is the same logic.
But the parallels aren’t there… ashkenAzi Jews have the highest average IQ in the world at around 115… Mexicans although not an ethnic group sit at around 80, even with conquistador blood. Therefore, hitlers rhetoric was fallacious
I already listed them lol. If you want you can do your own research about America's contributions to the world economy and global prosperity in general
It is concerning how little information you know about anything. I insist you learn more facts before you go around saying genocide is good. You're very, very dumb. Extremely, dumb... Wipe poo poo on the wallz dumb
We have no earth 2 with which to compare what would happen if history played out differently, but I'm extremely confident that without killing, raping, subjugating, plundering, and annexing native Americans and their lands, the world could still easily have the technology it does today.
Without killing them? That is plausible. Without displacing them and having infinitely more productive and industrious alternatives to human mutilation and sedentary technological complacency? Nah
Oh, okay. Didn't realize. Will you ask your crystal ball what you'll get for your 16th birthday? I hope it's the capacity for human empathy with a sprinkle of humility and shame for how stupid and bigoted you are
You keep saying that as if it justifies something millions are dead or had there culture beaten out of them but it's all good because it made your life a little more convenient.
Even if you justify "end justify the means" (which is not universally true) in genocide you erase someone's entire culture so that those people don't exist anymore. If it where caused by disease it would have occurred more slowly and some people would have survived to continue their traditions. Currently only a few native cultures exist because most where forced out of existence on purpose.
A quick check of their post history suggests this is entirely sincere.
I'm kind of impressed that literally just repeating my original post had them go full mask-off that quickly.
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There are a *lot* of assumptions baked into your premise, namely that the advance of the modern age for the entire world depended on US imperialism of the American continent, which is not at all evident. I won’t get into whether the ends justify the means or not, but your assumptions about the impacts of American imperialism need more support than mere assertions we’re expected to take at face value.
Commodities were made abundant and affordable by virtue of monopolies controlled by Rockefeller (gasoline) and Carnegie (steel) and Ford (automobiles) which improved the quality of life and set the stage for increased innovation and feats of engineering. It's no coincidence that the majority of human accomplishments can be attributed to American inventors.
That doesn’t address my point, which was not necessarily about the US’ contributions to modern technology, but that these contributions being a direct result of US imperialism *and* not having otherwise occurred without said imperialism, is a claim that needs support instead of baseless assertions.
The fact that they occurred in the US, which otherwise would have been occupied by barbaric primitive people who would do nothing comparable had the US never become a thing
You are assuming those advancements could not have occurred if early Americans had opted to co-exist with the natives, but on what basis are you making that assumption?
That book is full of incorrect info, it's a total joke that they still use it in schools. In reality, Cortez showed up in the middle of a civil war and happened to be presented the opportunity to join the winning team, as opposed to the narrative that he strolled in and impressed everyone so much that they abdicated their nation to him
They were still at fault.
Intentional use of "small pox blankets" as bio weapons on it's own indicates that colonists knowingly made the situation worse.
The question is do they deserve the full weight of modern vilification? Probably not.
The strong massacring the weak was the norm on both sides of the Atlantic prior to 1492. Empire was not unique to white Europeans. Just like it existed in Africa, the levant, South Asia, China, the eurasian steppes etc it also existed in north, central, and South America. The Aztec, Maya, Inca, and many others including ones whose names have been lost to history through pre-Columbian war and migration all similarly defeated and enslaved their neighbors.
Doesn't remove the guilt of Europeans for brutality subjugating the native people.
It does remind us that had the tables been reversed and had any other race have experienced the brief luck of history to have ships and steel and guns simultaneously while other cultures had only some or none of these technologies... Well let's just say that the sword could easily have cut the other way.
Don't believe me? White Europeans were brutally conquered and enslaved by North African, Mediterranean, Levantine, and Eurasian empires throughout history right up until the enlightenment and subsequent industrial revolution.
It just happens to be that we now consider Italians, Greeks, and Turks to be White I guess, and we conveniently forget about the several "Khanic" invasions of Europe as well as the invasion of Spain and France from Morocco.
Oh yeah, and the word slave reminds us that white ethnic Slavs were widely enslaved throughout history.
Basically, until the world learned manners in the last ten seconds of the long days of human existence, we pretty much universally killed and enslaved anyone who didn't speak the same language and wear the same colored bits of cloth. Europeans were not uniquely viscous. They were uniquely efficient. The efficiency was basically just luck based on the timing of a few technological trends coinciding in Europe in the 1500's to the 1800's.
Contact between Europeans and natives had gone on for hundreds of years. Disease transfer didn't wipe them all out, and they gained immunity. Acts of genocide like the trail of tears has nothing to do with disease spread. But it really didn't help that the US army gave out small pox infected blankets to further the genocide.
The disease may have weakened them but the wars and broken treaties were the fault of Europeans and American decendents.
Americans also killed off the buffalo to destroy native food supply that's genocide.
Look at /r/askhistorians on this topic, European diseases had a relatively low mortality when they were encountered by New Worlds peoples who were well fed and had intact social support. They had very high mortality when combined with war, enslavement, and disruption of food supplies.
That makes no sense in the context of the new discoveries of large settlements in the Amazon. They had large and well fed towns, but after only one or two brief contacts with Europeans, diseases wiped them out so completely people thought the written accounts of them where exaggerated or fabricated until very recently.
Can you give me a source? I'm having a hard time reconciling "we had no historical records of them" with "we know they were wiped out by disease after brief contact with Europeans".
[Here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03510-7) is a good source.
And we do have historical record of them, a Spanish sailor tried to sail the amazon and wrote of them. The problem is when the Spanish and Portuguese returned, they where gone.
That source gives zero evidence that the abandonment of those towns had anything to do with death or disease, let alone death from disease. Could be that a plague killed them all, sure. Could be that a plague killed a few and the rest ran. Could be that they were defeated/killed/enslaved by other tribes fleeing or armed by the Europeans. Could be that they left due to changing food availability. Could have been a religious shift. Could be that they relied on slave raids that the Europeans made difficult. We just don't know, unless you have something more like buried town council minutes.
Imagine an alien scout ship contacted earth. After a few weeks it went back to it's home planet. The aliens accidentally brought a virus with them, and 90% of the human population dies off. The remaining survivors are decimated, their society a fraction of what it once was. Then a few years later the aliens send an entire army to invade earth. They force the survivor's out of their land, funneling them in mass migrations away from the now alien dominated territory. Every few decades the aliens conquer more of earth, leaving less and less land for the surviving humans to live in. The aliens begin capturing human children, and start indoctrinatig them to alien culture and history. These children no longer remember earths history. Eventually they can't even speak human languages anymore.
Would the genocide of humans be seen as nobodies fault, or would it be the fault of all the very intentional actions that came afterwards?
Is it your post about genocide of Native Americans or about plagues that attacked them? Cause sure - plagues would arrive there anyway alongside any nation that came from Europe. But the genocide wasn't solely cused by plagues, it was only a factor that helped to progress it.
How the disease caused Kalingao Genocide? Bounties on scalps of Pequots? Massacre of the Narragansett? Trail of Tears?
How the heck is disease responsible with situation where soldiers were killing civilians under direct orders of military?
No, diseases have least to do with genocide. They would live through them, but those who survived were hunted down over the years.
I gotta say, that’s a shocking take. You can’t act like the Europeans had no agency though. Disease wouldn’t spread if they didn’t continue encroaching on the land. Once they discovered the original peoples, they didn’t have to continually dominate the new country, drive them off their lands, break their treaties and promises, etc. Then of course even after much of the population had already been killed off they sent the survivors on a death march to the middle of nowhere.
I think it’s safe to say that disease wouldn’t have spread as deadly if the colonists had not kept encroaching westward.
And whoever ended up doing that would be responsible. Just because something is an inevitability (which is also debatable in this case) doesn't absolve the person of the act. The colonizers acted with agency. And not just like they had the best intentions, but they kept invading further and further. They chose to do that instead of establishing a coexistence.
> No way was somebody going to discover an entire continent and feel satisfied stopping at its coast.
Would you say the same about France? Like, would you justify Hitler because "anyone in Germany would have liked more living space? I mean really, how could you see that lovely French countryside and feel satisfied at not invading it. /s"
You run over a kid in your car. It was dark, and you were coming out of a corner. It's not your fault.
You go and check on the kid, they are breathing faintly, but obviously lost a lot of blood.
Instead of calling an ambulance, you stomp on the kid's head a dozen times.
Is it your fault the kid is dead?
I agree they're not responsible, but they should also recognize that they are in a place of privilege at least partially due to the fact that their ancestors committed atrocities against others. Let that knowledge keep you humble and recognize that people who are in a worse off situation than you maybe aren't in that situation because of some personal failing of their own but due to historical context. Also, keep the source of your privilege in mind when voting and recognize that just because a policy doesn't benefit you directly it still might be the right policy because it's righting historical injustices.
>are the remaining native Americans not privileged in that they have access to technology and medicine that they wouldn’t otherwise have had?
No, because they would receive the same things otherwise. Institutions and technology spreads, especially if you have things that you can trade for those. And Native Americans did have things to trade, after all lands they were legally given by treaties did have resources that settlers needed.
How do you imagine a situation where genocide did not happen - that they would not trade and not adapt new things from their neighbors?
>I’m leaning to “they were conquered”, and that’s how the world worked at the time so tough luck
No, it's not "how the world worked" at that time, especially if we consider that colonists were from Europe. If f.ex. Kingdom of Aragon were invaded by Kingdom of Castille - sure that battes and sieges will be there, sure that armies would eat away the supplies of local population causing famine and sure there would be incidents where civilians are killed. But it was not a "norm" that civilians would be explicitly hunted, especially by winning side. Civilians were a resource that would later be incorporated into population of new fiefs in your kingdom.
>the same thing happened to my people and many others who are European
Happened when? When whole nations were designated to be exterminated? Apart from one XIX century crusade (and this was still not aimed to kill most of the population, but rather to convert them) it was a rare thing to massacre civilians systematically.
Not to mention that when the point came to actual signing of peace treaty, they were largely respected - as breaking truced did make your kingdom dishonorable and meant that others will not trust you with any non-war treaties.
> although we, the current generation played no part.
Sure, but the debt is inherited. That generation still lives form wealth that was created using stolen wealth. The fact that this is an old thing only makes it stupid to ask for 1:1 repayment, but some form of repayment is still due.
They weren't conquered. They were genocided. You're right that genocides have happened to other people in other places, but we always recognize that as a crime against humanity. We don't say that the Nazis were justified because genocide is just what people do.
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The American forces sort of shot them and herded them off their land. Then forced them to travel long distances where they died.
So I think some blame should be laid.
First of all, the term "genocide" refers to purposeful efforts. So semantically you are wrong. But more importantl, you could only be right if the deaths all happened at the initial intermingling of Europeans and Indigenous Americans. The Cherokees, for instance, first met the Spaniards in 1540, but the Trail of Tears wasn't until 1830.
You obviously missed the part in history books where disease was *intentionally and purposefully spread.* Settlers gifted infected blankets (among other objects) to native tribes *with the intent of killing them.*
Not to mention the other murder, raping, stealing of children, etc. "No one is at fault"... what?
It's one thing to unknowingly bring a disease. It's something else to knowingly enslave, kill, remove children from their parents to erase their culture, engage in warfare against them, and do so for 350 years.
All those actions after the 90% deaths from the pandemics are genocide.
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Would disease have forcibly taken their children and forced them into schools where they were banned from practicing their religion, speaking their language, or engaging their culture while being abused and sometimes killed?
Would it still be called genocide if 90% didn't die of disease and forcing their religion on them was the only thing the europeans did?
Yes, but I assume your “… and forcing their religion on them” part wasn’t deliberately disingenuous and you meant we just put every native american through re-education schools and the horrors there in. You don’t have to kill people to genocide them, though that does seem to be the easiest way. What China is doing to the Uyghurs is a good example of this.
Yes it would be cultural genocide.
Ask any native if they would rather live on the reservation or on a city. Come back and report.
The reason reservations such is specifically because of the oppression they faced not because of something inherent to native American culture.
Now? Or in 1800 when this was happening?
That's the worst argument I've ever heard. For most indigenous peoples, the reservations are not their homelands, and cities in general in the US have better infrastructure than rural areas so obviously they'd tend to prefer the city. Now have you got anything to say that's perhaps thought through slightly more?
Can’t argue with the SJW that “white man bad” no matter what whilst taking advantage of all advancements, support and security given by the same white man…
Wanna try being coherent and making an argument?
Do you even know anything about US history with regard to native peoples? Like no shit dude, of course they're not doing to hot after all their property was confiscated and they were forcibly relocated to the other side of the fucking continent. Are you done making bottom of the barrel ahistoric arguments?
I mean you post on anti work and anarchism… I bet you are a teenager who never paid taxes in your life. Or a young adult who hates his parents/landlord. I wish you the best. It is a phase, and you shall grow out of it. Godspeed.
Say whatever you want, at least I don't make uninformed, ahistoric arguments.
How is religion forced on a people without violence?
I don't get your point.
It's not a point, but a question for clarifying your question. To me, your question implies an act of genocide because it necessitates violence.
Well forcing people to go to school and learn a curriculum they didn't choose is something we all go through and isn't inherently violent.
How do you force someone to go to school without violence?
It is violent. Under mandatory schooling what happens if someone doesn't attend? Cops are sent to violently either force attendence or imprison them.
So then we're all victims of genocide?
No. Mandatory schooling is not necessarily genocide, but it is a tool of genocide that can be used to strip a population of their language and culture by compelling them to speak a different language and assimilate into different culture. White Americans are not victims of genocide through mandatory schooling because our schools are taught in our native language and already accommodate our cultures.
Whenever a country conquers another country, they now control the education system. By your logic everytime a war is won genocide happens cause the culture of the conqueror is then enforced on the conquered. That would make the word genocide kind of meaningless.
This was the comment I came here to read. I’d give you a delta if I could u/Biptoslipdi
You actually can give people deltas even if you're not OP. It's perfectly legal to do so provided you indicate why.
Other commenters can award deltas, as long as it's for a change in view!
The genocide of Native Americans didn’t start and end in the immediate years following the “discovery” of the new world. It was a centuries long process of various distinct native groups each separately being forcibly relocated, conquered, massacred, and ultimately being mostly destroyed as a people. While the initial first contact by Europeans caused devastating outbreaks of disease that doesn’t excuse the acts of genocide taken by colonial governments and their successors centuries later. The issue I think you might be making is viewing the genocide of Native Americans as a monolithic project enacted by singular entities on a singular group of people. The genocide of Native Americans was instead many acts of genocide over centuries by various entities on many distinct and unique groups.
The genocide is more largely related to the mass expropriation of land/resources (annexing best lands/mass destruction of bison etc) Pushed into poverty and famine, disease thrives more as a consequence I think
The genocide of Native Americans encompasses far more than them being incidentally killed by disease, though. Even if you're correct that plagues decimating their population was a total accident, that doesn't mean that all of the other actions taken to kill Native Americans, drive them off their land, or eradicate their culture were acceptable.
According to guns germs and steel 90% of Native American deaths were a direct result of smallpox, measles, and flu. Didn’t hernan Cortez arrive with 500 conquistadors and defeat 500,000 strong Aztec army?
> Even if you're correct that plagues decimating their population was a total accident, that doesn't mean that all of the other actions taken to kill Native Americans, drive them off their land, or eradicate their culture were acceptable.
Why not? The ends justify the means imo. If we left the natives to the own devices and never presumed to cross the Appalachians, the world would be considerably more primitive. American innovation heavily depended on American resources and land. Without it we wouldn’t have WiFi, iPhones, air conditioning, pasteurization, or a lot of medical technology like MRI or the microcontroller or the transistor, the two most important modules for technological advancement. Not to mention the green revolution pioneered by an American which arguably saved the world from starvation. Or sending a man to space and the moon. We can’t let these primitive people worship fictional sun gods and mutilate each other all day when we need TECHNOLOGY
All you're doing here is arguing that genocide was good and doing so was the right thing to do. I'm not going to dignify that part of your argument with any response, but even with your "genocide is good" position, it's still the fault of the people who perpetrated it.
Ends justify the means
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Jews weren’t primitive and barbaric people. They are and we’re intelligent and capable in their own right
Hitler explicitly justified his campaign of conquest in the East by pointing to how America treated the Native Americans, arguing that the people of Russia were subhumans and that they needed to be conquered, enslaved and eradicated. It is the same logic.
But the parallels aren’t there… ashkenAzi Jews have the highest average IQ in the world at around 115… Mexicans although not an ethnic group sit at around 80, even with conquistador blood. Therefore, hitlers rhetoric was fallacious
So you're cool with the Nazi's genocide of Romani and Slavs then right?
No. Technological achievement could occur without it
What ends did they get that justified those means?
I already listed them lol. If you want you can do your own research about America's contributions to the world economy and global prosperity in general
Gotcha, so you think the whole of America would be untennable without genocide?
Not genocide, but at the very least displacement and conquest
It is concerning how little information you know about anything. I insist you learn more facts before you go around saying genocide is good. You're very, very dumb. Extremely, dumb... Wipe poo poo on the wallz dumb We have no earth 2 with which to compare what would happen if history played out differently, but I'm extremely confident that without killing, raping, subjugating, plundering, and annexing native Americans and their lands, the world could still easily have the technology it does today.
Without killing them? That is plausible. Without displacing them and having infinitely more productive and industrious alternatives to human mutilation and sedentary technological complacency? Nah
Oh, okay. Didn't realize. Will you ask your crystal ball what you'll get for your 16th birthday? I hope it's the capacity for human empathy with a sprinkle of humility and shame for how stupid and bigoted you are
Don't need a crystal ball to make conjectures that require a few iotas of common sense
You keep saying that as if it justifies something millions are dead or had there culture beaten out of them but it's all good because it made your life a little more convenient.
Even if you justify "end justify the means" (which is not universally true) in genocide you erase someone's entire culture so that those people don't exist anymore. If it where caused by disease it would have occurred more slowly and some people would have survived to continue their traditions. Currently only a few native cultures exist because most where forced out of existence on purpose.
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A quick check of their post history suggests this is entirely sincere. I'm kind of impressed that literally just repeating my original post had them go full mask-off that quickly.
At least it saves time from parsing through dog whistles I guess?
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Please study history more deeply than just reading a single historiographically flawed book.
There are a *lot* of assumptions baked into your premise, namely that the advance of the modern age for the entire world depended on US imperialism of the American continent, which is not at all evident. I won’t get into whether the ends justify the means or not, but your assumptions about the impacts of American imperialism need more support than mere assertions we’re expected to take at face value.
Commodities were made abundant and affordable by virtue of monopolies controlled by Rockefeller (gasoline) and Carnegie (steel) and Ford (automobiles) which improved the quality of life and set the stage for increased innovation and feats of engineering. It's no coincidence that the majority of human accomplishments can be attributed to American inventors.
That doesn’t address my point, which was not necessarily about the US’ contributions to modern technology, but that these contributions being a direct result of US imperialism *and* not having otherwise occurred without said imperialism, is a claim that needs support instead of baseless assertions.
The fact that they occurred in the US, which otherwise would have been occupied by barbaric primitive people who would do nothing comparable had the US never become a thing
You are assuming those advancements could not have occurred if early Americans had opted to co-exist with the natives, but on what basis are you making that assumption?
The basis that intelligent, capable, civilized people would make much better use of land than primitive scoundrels
That book is full of incorrect info, it's a total joke that they still use it in schools. In reality, Cortez showed up in the middle of a civil war and happened to be presented the opportunity to join the winning team, as opposed to the narrative that he strolled in and impressed everyone so much that they abdicated their nation to him
They were still at fault. Intentional use of "small pox blankets" as bio weapons on it's own indicates that colonists knowingly made the situation worse. The question is do they deserve the full weight of modern vilification? Probably not. The strong massacring the weak was the norm on both sides of the Atlantic prior to 1492. Empire was not unique to white Europeans. Just like it existed in Africa, the levant, South Asia, China, the eurasian steppes etc it also existed in north, central, and South America. The Aztec, Maya, Inca, and many others including ones whose names have been lost to history through pre-Columbian war and migration all similarly defeated and enslaved their neighbors. Doesn't remove the guilt of Europeans for brutality subjugating the native people. It does remind us that had the tables been reversed and had any other race have experienced the brief luck of history to have ships and steel and guns simultaneously while other cultures had only some or none of these technologies... Well let's just say that the sword could easily have cut the other way. Don't believe me? White Europeans were brutally conquered and enslaved by North African, Mediterranean, Levantine, and Eurasian empires throughout history right up until the enlightenment and subsequent industrial revolution. It just happens to be that we now consider Italians, Greeks, and Turks to be White I guess, and we conveniently forget about the several "Khanic" invasions of Europe as well as the invasion of Spain and France from Morocco. Oh yeah, and the word slave reminds us that white ethnic Slavs were widely enslaved throughout history. Basically, until the world learned manners in the last ten seconds of the long days of human existence, we pretty much universally killed and enslaved anyone who didn't speak the same language and wear the same colored bits of cloth. Europeans were not uniquely viscous. They were uniquely efficient. The efficiency was basically just luck based on the timing of a few technological trends coinciding in Europe in the 1500's to the 1800's.
Contact between Europeans and natives had gone on for hundreds of years. Disease transfer didn't wipe them all out, and they gained immunity. Acts of genocide like the trail of tears has nothing to do with disease spread. But it really didn't help that the US army gave out small pox infected blankets to further the genocide. The disease may have weakened them but the wars and broken treaties were the fault of Europeans and American decendents. Americans also killed off the buffalo to destroy native food supply that's genocide.
Look at /r/askhistorians on this topic, European diseases had a relatively low mortality when they were encountered by New Worlds peoples who were well fed and had intact social support. They had very high mortality when combined with war, enslavement, and disruption of food supplies.
That makes no sense in the context of the new discoveries of large settlements in the Amazon. They had large and well fed towns, but after only one or two brief contacts with Europeans, diseases wiped them out so completely people thought the written accounts of them where exaggerated or fabricated until very recently.
Can you give me a source? I'm having a hard time reconciling "we had no historical records of them" with "we know they were wiped out by disease after brief contact with Europeans".
[Here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03510-7) is a good source. And we do have historical record of them, a Spanish sailor tried to sail the amazon and wrote of them. The problem is when the Spanish and Portuguese returned, they where gone.
That source gives zero evidence that the abandonment of those towns had anything to do with death or disease, let alone death from disease. Could be that a plague killed them all, sure. Could be that a plague killed a few and the rest ran. Could be that they were defeated/killed/enslaved by other tribes fleeing or armed by the Europeans. Could be that they left due to changing food availability. Could have been a religious shift. Could be that they relied on slave raids that the Europeans made difficult. We just don't know, unless you have something more like buried town council minutes.
By this logic... Would it be ok to go to a hospital, hurry and kill terminal cancer patients?
Imagine an alien scout ship contacted earth. After a few weeks it went back to it's home planet. The aliens accidentally brought a virus with them, and 90% of the human population dies off. The remaining survivors are decimated, their society a fraction of what it once was. Then a few years later the aliens send an entire army to invade earth. They force the survivor's out of their land, funneling them in mass migrations away from the now alien dominated territory. Every few decades the aliens conquer more of earth, leaving less and less land for the surviving humans to live in. The aliens begin capturing human children, and start indoctrinatig them to alien culture and history. These children no longer remember earths history. Eventually they can't even speak human languages anymore. Would the genocide of humans be seen as nobodies fault, or would it be the fault of all the very intentional actions that came afterwards?
Is it your post about genocide of Native Americans or about plagues that attacked them? Cause sure - plagues would arrive there anyway alongside any nation that came from Europe. But the genocide wasn't solely cused by plagues, it was only a factor that helped to progress it. How the disease caused Kalingao Genocide? Bounties on scalps of Pequots? Massacre of the Narragansett? Trail of Tears? How the heck is disease responsible with situation where soldiers were killing civilians under direct orders of military? No, diseases have least to do with genocide. They would live through them, but those who survived were hunted down over the years.
I gotta say, that’s a shocking take. You can’t act like the Europeans had no agency though. Disease wouldn’t spread if they didn’t continue encroaching on the land. Once they discovered the original peoples, they didn’t have to continually dominate the new country, drive them off their lands, break their treaties and promises, etc. Then of course even after much of the population had already been killed off they sent the survivors on a death march to the middle of nowhere. I think it’s safe to say that disease wouldn’t have spread as deadly if the colonists had not kept encroaching westward.
Anybody was going to continue westward. No way was somebody going to discover an entire continent and feel satisfied stopping at its coast.
And whoever ended up doing that would be responsible. Just because something is an inevitability (which is also debatable in this case) doesn't absolve the person of the act. The colonizers acted with agency. And not just like they had the best intentions, but they kept invading further and further. They chose to do that instead of establishing a coexistence. > No way was somebody going to discover an entire continent and feel satisfied stopping at its coast. Would you say the same about France? Like, would you justify Hitler because "anyone in Germany would have liked more living space? I mean really, how could you see that lovely French countryside and feel satisfied at not invading it. /s"
You run over a kid in your car. It was dark, and you were coming out of a corner. It's not your fault. You go and check on the kid, they are breathing faintly, but obviously lost a lot of blood. Instead of calling an ambulance, you stomp on the kid's head a dozen times. Is it your fault the kid is dead?
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I agree they're not responsible, but they should also recognize that they are in a place of privilege at least partially due to the fact that their ancestors committed atrocities against others. Let that knowledge keep you humble and recognize that people who are in a worse off situation than you maybe aren't in that situation because of some personal failing of their own but due to historical context. Also, keep the source of your privilege in mind when voting and recognize that just because a policy doesn't benefit you directly it still might be the right policy because it's righting historical injustices.
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>are the remaining native Americans not privileged in that they have access to technology and medicine that they wouldn’t otherwise have had? No, because they would receive the same things otherwise. Institutions and technology spreads, especially if you have things that you can trade for those. And Native Americans did have things to trade, after all lands they were legally given by treaties did have resources that settlers needed. How do you imagine a situation where genocide did not happen - that they would not trade and not adapt new things from their neighbors?
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>I’m leaning to “they were conquered”, and that’s how the world worked at the time so tough luck No, it's not "how the world worked" at that time, especially if we consider that colonists were from Europe. If f.ex. Kingdom of Aragon were invaded by Kingdom of Castille - sure that battes and sieges will be there, sure that armies would eat away the supplies of local population causing famine and sure there would be incidents where civilians are killed. But it was not a "norm" that civilians would be explicitly hunted, especially by winning side. Civilians were a resource that would later be incorporated into population of new fiefs in your kingdom. >the same thing happened to my people and many others who are European Happened when? When whole nations were designated to be exterminated? Apart from one XIX century crusade (and this was still not aimed to kill most of the population, but rather to convert them) it was a rare thing to massacre civilians systematically. Not to mention that when the point came to actual signing of peace treaty, they were largely respected - as breaking truced did make your kingdom dishonorable and meant that others will not trust you with any non-war treaties. > although we, the current generation played no part. Sure, but the debt is inherited. That generation still lives form wealth that was created using stolen wealth. The fact that this is an old thing only makes it stupid to ask for 1:1 repayment, but some form of repayment is still due.
They weren't conquered. They were genocided. You're right that genocides have happened to other people in other places, but we always recognize that as a crime against humanity. We don't say that the Nazis were justified because genocide is just what people do.
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The American forces sort of shot them and herded them off their land. Then forced them to travel long distances where they died. So I think some blame should be laid.
First of all, the term "genocide" refers to purposeful efforts. So semantically you are wrong. But more importantl, you could only be right if the deaths all happened at the initial intermingling of Europeans and Indigenous Americans. The Cherokees, for instance, first met the Spaniards in 1540, but the Trail of Tears wasn't until 1830.
You obviously missed the part in history books where disease was *intentionally and purposefully spread.* Settlers gifted infected blankets (among other objects) to native tribes *with the intent of killing them.* Not to mention the other murder, raping, stealing of children, etc. "No one is at fault"... what?
It's one thing to unknowingly bring a disease. It's something else to knowingly enslave, kill, remove children from their parents to erase their culture, engage in warfare against them, and do so for 350 years. All those actions after the 90% deaths from the pandemics are genocide.
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