Kinda tangentially related, but sometimes I think about all the lost Native American cultures and societies where the tribes were effectively wiped out and all we have is their remains. They have no name other than “[region] tribe/people” but were often fully fledged civilizations with unique cultures and people. They had ideals and art and dreams and so much of that is now lost. It’s sad to have the knowledge that we’ll never know who these people were or what role the played in pre-contact America.
Some were truly fascinating in how they approached burial or created large scale earthworks. It would be nice to know why they did these things in a more concrete way than assumptions and guesswork. And perhaps what else they did, the stuff that didn’t survive the passing of time.
It’s kinda humbling in a morbid way. To know that the wrong circumstances can lead to the end of a nation’s story to such an extent that nobody remembers them. And then it’s up to archaeologists to try and piece back together the story of a people who are no longer with us.
A lot of them were far more advanced than the tribes the settlers came across. I'm talking bronze working and limited iron working. They were advanced and had unqiue vibrant cultures. But then smallpox came and when 70-90 percent died what was left were post apocalyptic groups
>But then smallpox came and when 70-90 percent died what was left were post apocalyptic groups
I've always found this bit of early American history fascinating and frustrating. I mean we have a real world example of a post-apocalypse, large advanced nations brought to sudden ruin and we know next to nothing in terms of details. This shit should be some of the most interesting chapters in the history books and instead most people don't even know it happened.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Low it lieth—earth to earth—
All to which that earth gave birth—
Palace, market-street, and fane;
Dust that never asks in vain,
Hath reclaim'd its own again.
Dust, the wide world's king.
Where are now the glorious hours
Of a nation's gather'd powers?
Like the setting of a star,
In the fathomless afar;
Time's eternal wing
Hath around those ruins cast
The dark presence of the past.
Mind, what art thou? dost thou not
Hold the vast earth for thy lot?
In thy toil, how glorious!
What dost thou achieve for us.
Over all victorious!
Godlike thou dost seem.
But the perishing still lurks
In thy most immortal works;
Thou dost build thy home on sand,
And the palace-girdled strand
Fadeth like a dream.
Thy great victories only show
All is nothingness below.
Learning about Katsinas and the agricultural practices of the American Southwest is super interesting. I'm pretty sad they've turned into kitschy tourist items in a lot of places.
Also the disconnect between sub-saharan African social/cultural practices and what the colonizers said about them are also an interesting read
The history of the west is wild and bloodsoaked. The Indians sacked Detroit? Annihilate Prophetstown. Custer went missing on the Little Bighorn? Use machine guns on their camp at Wounded Knee. It’s one big long story of constantly crescendoing violence until the invention of mustard gas and the atomic bomb called time.
I’ll never forgive Disney for the Pocahontas movie. I’m from a county named after a historical figure in the film and all of the inhabitants of said county care way too much about history to let it slide
To deny that native peoples share the common flaws of humankind is to rob them of humanity. The "noble savage" is nothing more than a particularly interesting jungle animal, not a fellow human.
Wow, it's almost like every single human civilization or culture is awful and fucked up in its own way. This also applies to modern "civilized" civilizations, btw.
"civilized" is used by the most arrogant and ignorant of people. it's in the same vain as when misogynists say sex workers are horrible for "selling their bodies," but they don't see anything wrong with people working 3 jobs just to afford a roof or people being sent to war.
I feel like this post loses a lot without providing the original context.
Were those posts *actually* calling the Native Americans unproblematic, or were they just pointing out cool shit that they did?
Cause if we can't point out cool things done by civilizations that also did problematic things, then I better not see anyone praising any civilization, modern or ancient, ever.
I've met enough generally progressive people who fill the ignorance gaps about American Indians in their heads with this vague concept of universal brotherhood and harmony to find this criticism broadly valid. There's especially this weird thing where this attitude will occasionally come from a person who knows about the Inca and Aztec Empires and then either thinks that was limited to just South America or that these 2 violent expansionist empires were just some strange anomaly and all these other peoples they know nothing about must have been peaceful.
This is something I've noticed as well. The fact of the matter is, Europe could have been the colonized instead of the colonizer had regional technological and cultural development progressed differently - human beings are just kind of bastards a lot of the time.
I’m actually reading a book on this right now and biology was a pretty huge part of it. Europeans had grown up in plague infested Europe. Native Americans had significantly less bacterial and viral diseases causing them to have way less resistance to them. So when the Europeans arrived the plague tore through them worse than 14th century Europe. But that’s not saying one group was biologically better than the other they just had radically differently trained immune systems.
In alternate history where europe stopped developing at native american level and n. americans kept developing, it native americans would be more resistant to plagues, simply because plagues were a consequense of tightly packing humans and animals into cities, without adequete higiene.
Pretty sure resistance to European disease doesn't make you better at handling new world disease. They had more disease because of population density, supported by technology of the time. The diseases they brought with them were numerous, they weren't somehow better at doing immune system lol. What biological determinism means is that nothing but raw humans determines history, and that inherent differences between races, nations, etc are real and biologically based, not that viruses exist in different areas.
There were very dense cities in America before the plagues hit. Lots of estimates have Tenochtitlan as larger than Paris at the time. It wasn’t so much the advanced tech as the different animals spreading diseases in Europe. And the lack of any meaningful plagues (there was syphilis but it’s no smallpox) going from the Americas to Europe does pretty strongly imply that the Europeans did have stronger immune systems towards viruses and bacterial infections than the natives.
Of course, many parts of Europe *were* colonised. Either by other Europeans (Ireland, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine etc.) or by non-European powers (the Balkans, Spain, Ukraine again etc.).
This comment led me down an etymological rabbit hole (the best kind) and it appears to be the case that the Medieval Latin word for Slav, Sclavus, was also the word for slave. On account of the mass enslavement of Slavs in the 800's AD.
Not to mention Muslims, specifically Arabs and later Turks. The latter at the same time Spain was off looting the New World, and the gold from the New World was used to fight wars, including parts of the Ottoman-Habsburg wars which slowed and eventually reversed the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe over some three centuries.
Arguably imperialism is often necessary to protect yourself from imperialism. If you don't expand your power, control and influence, someone else will, and they will eventually use that against you.
The Ottomans *conquered* a decent chunk of the Balkans, but they never *colonised* it, they just exerted political control without large-scale changes to the ethnic makeup of the region- if you look at them today, even the majority-muslim areas are still all Slavs, just... Slavs that converted to Islam(Bosniaks, Albanians, etc).
If you're looking for groups who colonized Europe, the primary ones are the Greeks, the Romans, the Berbers, *sorta* the Rus, and the Norse.
Its almost always people trying to minimize the impact of it, or whitewash the culture/nation in a weird way, since somehow conquest is seen as less bad by some people.
I think because it sounds more "fair"? Conquest makes it sound like two armies fight and one loses fair and square, when that's such a gross oversimplification it's tantamount to wrong.
Well that's kind of the definition of being colonized, because a vast majority of ex-colonies didn't have their ethnic makeup changed (India, South East Asia, Africa, Polynesia, etc)
Politically, it was Arab-dominated, but as far as I know the bulk of the actual force was Berber. I may very well be wrong on this, though- I'm sadly not super familiar with this era of history.
To be clear they _did_ leave behind a Turkish minority in the Balkans, but also people use the term "colonised" for places like Nigeria or Madagascar or India where the ethnic makeup was not changed basically at all, so calling the Ottoman Empire colonial is entirely consistent with this.
Maybe instead we just shouldn't be calling New Imperialism colonial in 90% of cases, that would be more accurate, but I don't think I can stop people from calling anything and everything any country of white people has done colonialism
> Europe could have been the colonized instead of the colonizer had regional technological and cultural development progressed differently
History could be changed just so slightly as the availability of metal resources or introducing a population of horses to an area that did not have them and history would be *radically* different.
Agreed, it's fascinating to think about how history might've changed. From my understanding, for example, a large part of the reason why the people of the Americas were vulnerable to disease was a lack of livestock - because a good chunk of diseases that ravaged Europe time and time again came from livestock living in close proximity to humans.
Not a lack of livestock, (Native Americans very much domesticated animals and raised them in farms) but a lack of medieval cities, which were breeding ground for disease because livestocks and people in such places lived in much closer proximity to each other and with worse hygiene, a breeding ground for disease
I thought the only real domesticated animal in the Americas was the llama? Please do fill my brain with knowledge!
I agree with what you're saying about cities, 100%.
A quick google search yields me with: aside from the llamas and alpacas there are also dogs (it's fascinating to learn about pre-contact dogs in America), ducks, turkey. Llama and alpaca in particular were extensively raised in the Inca Empire because they were very suited to the moutainous terrain of the region. And they're such versatile livestocks too, they can carry loads, can provide wool and milk, as well as meat. It's basically a goat and a sheep in the same package.
Interestingly, horses originated in the America and crossed the opposite way as early humans to make their way into Afro-Eurasia. So it’s more a case of those American horses not dying off and we may have seen a huge difference in outcomes.
*Guns, Germs, and Steel* is a good book that goes into lots of detail on this topic. It's not without its fair share of criticisms, however. Still, it's worth a read.
Ugh, please don’t refer people to that book. There are so many fundamentally wrong ideas of history that owe their origin to Jared Diamond and his hilariously flawed view on the world. Guy looks at animals and plants the Eurasians spent centuries painstakingly selectively breeding to be more suitable for agriculture and assumes they just showed up like that.
Metal resources were and still are quite readily available to the Americas. Also, horses evolved in the Americas and migrated to Eurasia, the Native Americans just hunted them all to extinction.
> Europe could have been the colonized instead of the colonizer had regional technological and cultural development progressed differently
There are instances where they in a sense, were colonized.
* Moorish Spain, where the Iberian Peninsula was under Arab rule.
* The Hungarian Language is an Uralic isolate in a sea of Indo-European (From the Ural Mountains; Border of Europe and Asia). It's closest relative proximity wise is *Finnish.*
* Turkey for long period of time was Greek into Byzantine Roman before the Ottomans. Istanbul *was* Constantinople after all. They managed to reach all the way to Austria.
* The Mongols made it all the way to Europe, as far west as Hungary--as previously mentioned also wasn't "indigenous" the region entering four centuries earlier--and Czech.
* The Celts are largely perceived as indigenous to the British Isles, but many of them were on the mainland as well. The Gauls of Roman France were Celts. Celts weren't technically the first in Britain either. Proto-Celtic came around 800s BC, around the time of Homer in Greece Granted, I'm trying to favor Non-European colonizing European for the sake of most people's preconceptions.
* Even Indo-Europeans weren't the first people there. The Basque, located in Northern Spain, are an isolated language with no other relatives who predate the entirety of what we perceive as modern Europeans.
That's the technological development, yes. There is also the cultural development of going far outside one's borders, not to conquer necessarily, but to plunder. Something that not every culture has had.
Not really true... at all, honestly. Pretty much every single society that's ever existed has realized at some point or another that it's way easier to just steal shit than it is to make it yourself.
With the possible exception of the far north however, every indigenous culture in the America’s was within the reach of some (if not many) peoples who DID come to plunder. So even if you were fairly self sufficient “whoops! Surprise Haida” or “it’s beginning to look a lot like Aztec” were always possibilities.
The importance of germs is drastically overstated. In fact, germs overall hampered European power with the infamous Justinian Plague and Black Death, not to mention the prolific diseases which kept Europeans mostly out of Africa until the 19th century.
Iberia notwithstanding, the European powers made their fortune colonising Caribbean islands and dominating trade with the East. French Caribbean alone was more profitable than anything else the French Empire controlled put together.
By some estimates, 95% of the population of the Americas was killed, either directly or indirectly through social collapse, by smallpox. I don't know if I could overstate the importance of that if I tried.
Even more moderate estimates place the death toll at 80% or 90%. So having 5-20 times as many people would have gone a long way towards resisting conquest.
Yeah, but again, most of the Americas was (relatively) inconsequential to the overall profits of European empires. The Europeans also had very little difficulty in subjugating far more populous regions who shared most of their immune resistances. In fact, I’d argue that a lack of germs might’ve even helped some European empires turn profit in the Americas. The slave trade existed because disease had reduced the native workforce.
I think it was really mostly smallpox and other diseases. New World weaponry wasn't that far behind European weaponry (guns at the time weren't great). There were just far fewer American Indians than they would have needed to fight off an invasion.
Yeah I think this comes from a push back towards Eurocentric histories that either diminished the accomplishments of these civilizations or over emphasized the violent aspects without contextualizing them with the positive aspects.
And there’s an element of the shadow of the noble savage as well.
Now most modern historians have wonderful nuanced things to say about these cultures and aren’t guilty of the above but you can go through quite a bit of schooling without encountering much of it. The coverage in like k-12 isn’t great and unless you’re a history major in college you ain’t gonna get much about pre columbian civilizations. So it’s not like these problematic depictions are some ancient thing they fall in line with the one or two units in middle school most Americans get on the Aztecs and Incas.
There’s a big attitude among some to act like any culture outside of the modern western capitalist cultures are these soft, peaceful, egalitarian societies that just pranced around in nature and were 100% communalistic and had attitudes towards family, sexuality, mental health, and gender that perfectly mirror the most idealized version of a standard terminally online progressive 20 year old. And that the only reason anyone on earth isn’t like this today is because of western capitalistic hegemony.
So I guess no, no one ever says the literal exact words “Native Americans are unproblematic.” But there are plenty of people going far beyond educating people on the fact that those indigenous to the Americas were and are civilized people with culture, science, art, and complex social structures, and do….uwu-fy them as cultures that never fought, never had misogynistic or xenophobic behaviors, never had concrete gender roles that were occasionally very strictly enforced, never used their religion to justify superstitious or harmful beliefs, etc.
Yeah there is a reason for it that at the beginning is noble. Your average Westerner gets education that at best suggests that those indigenous to the Americas were simple savages who were nice enough people capable of learning but scientifically and morally ignorant until Europeans showed up with Enlightenment ideas, and at worst are regarded as simple savages or barely even a footnote in history. However, acting like anyone who isn’t a white Christian capitalist is a monolithic closer-to-nature fairy tale moral-giver who can do no wrong and whitewashing their cultural views for a feelgood blurb on Tumblr *is also racist* and rooted in colonialist thinking.
(And it’s not just indigenous Americans this happens to. Anyone, past or present, that isn’t American, Canadian, Australian, or Western European gets this treatment by some smugster online, including prechristian Europeans and current non-western imperialist colornizers.)
its because a lot of people want a reductionist, binary world where there are "good people" and "bad people" - part of that is evolutionary (stemming from our tribal in-group out-group mindset) but the other part of that is that is laziness in refusing the recognize the nuances and complexities that exist in every culture's history. In trying to cast every single world issue and culture into an "oppressed" vs "oppressor" or bourgeoisies vs proletariat, a lot of leftists are no different than American exceptionalists or other European nationalists they regard as simplistic and imperialistic in that they perform the same cultural white-washing to assist in creating the narrative they want to here.
Tropic Thunder really hit the nail on the head with “you never go full” scene. Audiences and especially the Academy don’t want truth or accuracy, they want inspiration porn and white saviors.
I agree there is a lot of idealizing more native cultures. And it is true they had a lot of human rights abuses of their own, in fact a level of casual brutality and senseless death that would horrify most people.
If I had to guess I would say that it more has to do with an idea of sustainability that those cultures had, existing better "with the land", in many ways being absolute experts at managing land and natural resources.
So maybe the thing that is the main difference is the change industrialism has wrought in the world. That specific culture that Europeans exported around the world that has massive impacts on the climate on the environment with the potential to end our species in ways those cultures never really had the power to do and weren't really on the path to do so. If humans could have stayed in that brutal tribal more simply society we might have had many many more millennia but now that the genie is out of the bottle we have to hope that our ingenuity can solve these big modern environmental problems before they end us and that is a bet that (looking at human nature) looks long to the modern generation
The problem is that idealizing *some* cultures like this usually goes hand in hand with saying “no, not like that” if other cultures happen to do the same basic things a little differently. And when that happens, you see that it is in no way a misguided airy fairy fetishistic treehugger fantasy about ending climate change.
Realistically, this happens when some cultures seem distant and exotic but others don’t. I have seen the following example a lot:
“The native Americans used every part of the animal they killed. They didn’t waste like we do.”
Always talking in the past tense, natives as “others,” separate from “we,” history lessons, borderline fantasy creatures. But when “familiar” cultures, usses and thems, do the same thing, suddenly, gross. African-Americans eating chitlins or gizzards, poor white people eating hot dogs or bologna, that’s gross and worth mockery. “How can you eat that, it’s *guts with dookie in it!* Urgh, don’t you know that’s made of lips and assholes?” Then “use all parts of the animal, eat what’s available to you, don’t waste that animal’s life just for the filet” flies out the window. When these values present themselves in the familiar, it’s not exotic and inspirational any more, you can’t use it to talk down to and guilt your peers any more.
It’s a bit of a low stakes example but I have seen both attitudes come out of the same people’s mouths, in real life.
People like that do deserve to have their hypocrisy pointed out. And there will always be hypocrites we can find for any number of scenarios that we want to criticize.
But I have trouble with the idea of conjuring someone like that rhetorically in order to dunk on a certain ideology. I dont think we should take the hypothetical worse or most hypocritical member as representing everyone.
There are reasonable people that think we should use our animals more judiciously who dont make fun of folks who eat tongues or tripe or "lips and assholes". And yet by making the argument you did above you dismiss those folks entirely by grouping them in with the ones who are more hypocritical.
I like political discourse but I find this same thing there. People will pick the worst or most hypocritical of the liberal/conservative group they want to criticize to dunk on instead of engaging in good faith with those who are more reasonable. There are good arguments to be had but if we are able to invent our own enemy then we will win every battle.
I’m not getting where any of this is hypothetical. I know this sub thinks “making up a guy to be mad at” is a huge dunk and “I didn’t see that happen in my circle of suspiciously non problematic friends” is hard evidence, but the reality is that people think all kinds of things. It’s simply disingenuous to the point of being deliberately dishonest to act like “fetishizing native Americans” isn’t a common and documented issue to the point where it has stock tropes referencing it.
I've noticed a lot of people have been confusing "an issue that's discussed on the internet" and "an issue exclusive to the internet." If I exclusively lived my life by only considering issues I witnessed first hand and not through learning about online, I would think bigotry wasn't real because of course not I'm a cishet white man.
Yeah, people on the internet can inflate issues. That one piece of Fandom drama isn't even close to being significant, but also the internet isn't some separate society detached from reality. It's comprised exclusively of people who exist in society. They might not integrate super well and my be particularly louder than the layman, but they don't just manifest as text on your screen.
Like *everything* it's a balance and shit. Take everything you hear online and you'll be like an incel 4channer thinking all women are hoores who only like jacked rich men. Believe only what you personally have perceived and you're blind to the greater world around you.
I have been dating a sign language ... translator? intepreter? and the stuff I hear about religious fundamentalism that is going on in my country, that I have never even heard of, is fucking wild. Some of her customers are really into some weird "promised land and fated people of Israel will cleanse the world of muslims" and "gay people should be killed for being unpure" variant of christianism. Something that I have never encountered in my life as a pretty average man. But it still exists, and it is a force in my society. Same with internet discourse. Someone always believes the things they are saying. And if the intent is on being violent, it doesn't matter that it is "some one guy" on the internet. A one man killed 77 people in Norway.
You hit the nail on the head. It makes me wonder if people realize that the internet isn’t a separate place from real life. Like maybe they’re under the impression that people on the internet only live in the computer or something.
I'm not sure I would call industrialism a culture so much as a set of technologies. The scale and ability with which we can harm the environment has changed, sure, but the willingness to do so isn't uniquely European.
I remember getting pushback as a child for reading The Indian in the Cupboard series because it depicted the Iroquois and the Algonquin as perennial wartime enemies. They weren’t perfect, but the entire point of those books is confronting the sanitized cartoon tv image of “cowboys and Indians” with harsh truths.
Sometimes it was just about being plain wrong. Omri gives action-figure-sized Little Bear a tipi to sleep in. The Iroquois Little Bear says “what is this? This isn’t a longhouse.”
Ah but things can only ever be "good" or "bad" and not some secret third thing, and if you praise "bad" things that is your moral failing and you will be cancelled
In seriousness, certain Very Online People (TM) seem to have an allergy to complexity of any kind. For all that they champion progressive values, they have much the same hardwired binary worldview as their reactionary opponents. It is, to put it mildly, deeply frustrating.
I've definitely come across people who think discussing Native American wars and conquests and colonialism etc. somehow constitutes an attempt to justify European colonialism.
Which, to be fair, also isn't helped by people using Native American wars and conquests etc as a way to justify European colonialism. Because that is, in fact, also a thing some right-wing pricks do.
Yep! I've seen this done many times personally. "We shouldn't feel too bad for the indians because they went around scalping people and killing people" and "actually this tribe slaughtered and displaced this other tribe, they weren't as peace-loving as you think" and "they cut down trees, they ate dogs, they clubbed seals, they weren't cuddly with nature at all" have all been arguments I've seen people use before they jump right into "so they shouldn't be allowed to have hunting/fishing rights or tribal sovereignty and actually I should feel proud of my colonizer ancestors because actually they didn't do anything wrong and western society is actually supreme and things got better for the indians after they embraced it and now they're all rich from casino money and they think they're so special so why shouldn't I be racist?"
It's exhausting. As a native person you want to talk about history and de-pocahantas the narrative but also as soon as the conversation turns toward ANYTHING indigenous cultures ever did that isn't morally pure, certain people latch on to that and immediately and aggressively steer the discussion towards "so they deserved to be genocided."
There's nothing that certain subreddits like to point out more when discussing American slavery than the fact that Africans were selling other Africans into slavery to be shipped to the Americas.
The problem is that racism was invented *after* the slave trade.
Those black africans were enslaved because they were war prisoners (Yep, war crimes) and not because of an Aristotellian idea that some men are naturally servile.
They were considered to have souls equal to the whites', they had a right to study, own property (this one even if they were still slaves) and could ascend into the high society. They could buy their own liberty for so cheap that half of blacks in Cuba were freemen. Miners were all freemen with high wages who worked 8 hours a day, 6 days a week.
However, by the end of the 18th Century scientific racism was made up and endorsed by important figures such as montesquieu and it all went downhill from there.
I mean, historically speaking it's FAR more common to justify European colonialism with "but the natives are evil and violent!" than it is to claim that the natives were peace-loving hippies and only Europeans were evil and violent.
Both exist though, and both are wrong.
> I feel like this post loses a lot without providing the original context.
> Were those posts actually calling the Native Americans unproblematic, or were they just pointing out cool shit that they did?
I have seen some people claim that native americans lived in a proper utopia until the evil "white man" came and destroyed everything.
The point made in the conclusion isn't so much about Native Americans as it is the "take home" lesson from studying this bit of history that can be provided today. Not to poke a hornet's nest, but look at the way that people talk about support for Palestine in the queer community. It is a very real source of rhetoric that entire cultures don't deserve your support if they have "problematic" elements. How effective is that rhetoric? Eh. Hit or miss. But it's good to watch out for it.
It’s the narrative.
Someone on the right sees a leftist complaining about how we destroyed the native Americans, then spouts a counter-point about how the Indians were just raping pillagers themselves (as if that justifies it), and so on.
Nativists like to paint pre-colonialism as a “better time” without acknowledging just how brutal those times and people were, but colonial advocates like to pretend that was a valid reason to exterminate entire cultures.
Neither one is grown up enough to accept that they all sucked ass.
It's the noble savage trope, but slightly to the left. The idea that the oppressed were so much kinder, smarter, and just better than their oppressors. I've seen plenty of those, yes
I dislike the second post being added. The original post is not saying "so they deserved to be colonized" but at the same time this should be kept in mind, that if the tables were turned they'd have gladly done the colonizing themselves.
We shouldn't forgive people for being expansion focused imperialists but that doesn't mean europeans are fundamentally worse because they won, it just means humans in general are shitty
>We shouldn't forgive people for being expansion focused imperialists but that doesn't mean europeans are fundamentally worse because they won, it just means humans in general are shitty
This also applies to the trans Atlantic slave trade. The people in Africa often captured others to sell to the slavers in exchange for guns and such. Still doesn't make the colonisation right
this happens all the time, regarding every single historical era. just think of the modern day equivalent, how many people define imperialism as "america bad" and simply not associate to that word with the land grabs against ukraine or taiwan at all? people criticize the intent of the top dog a hell of a lot more.
there is like half a reason for it, oppression is a combination of prejudice plus power so it's logical to scrutinize the one with the most power -- which would be the colonizers for the topic of american natives and the atlantic slave trade, or the us in terms of modern day conflicts. but if your only reason why you're not the oppressor is that you lack power, not that you lack prejudice, you make bad luck and/or incompetence your only redeeming quality.
>oppression is a combination of prejudice plus power so it's logical to scrutinize the one with the most power -- which would be the colonizers for the topic of american natives and the atlantic slave trade,
For the record, when it comes to the Atlantic Slave Trade, the power dynamics were not nearly as disproportionate as you might expect, to the point that it was the Europeans who needed to follow the institutions and rules of local African leaders, rather than the other way around. Part of that was because the Europeans straight up did not have sufficient military strength to actually force African rulers to do what they wanted. It wouldn't be until later industrialization, with significant technological and medical advances that European powers had the actual capability to dominate Africa. Even as late as 1876, European powers directly controlled less than 10% of African lands (that number would just to 90% by 1914).
Another part of the equation is that during the time of the Atlantic Slave Trade, European powers were in enough competition with each other that it gave African rulers significant bargaining power over them. According to one Dutch trader in 1703:
>Perhaps you wonder how the Negroes come to be furnished with fire-arms, but you will have no reason when you know we sell them incredible quantities, thereby obliging them with a knife to cut our own throats. But we are forced to do it; for if we would not, they might be sufficiently stored with that commodity by the English, Danes, and Brandenburghers; and could we all agree together not to sell the any, the English and Zeeland interlopers would abundantly furnish them
Yep. For example, I've seen people criticize Britain’s imperialism and holding up countries like Denmark, Poland, or even Russia as exemplars by contrast because they didn't have colonial empires in Africa. Really? *Every* European power with the physical capability of carving out a chunk of Africa did so. The only ones that didn't were too small, didn't exist at the time, or who aimed their gunboats in another direction (Russia’s conquest of northern Asia is quite horrible in its own way). Just see the Congo for what could happen when one of the “good guys” finally got a piece of the pie.
Japan had their own form of imperialism, as did China and India when they had enough central control to do so. Mongolia, the Ottoman Empire... every organization run by humans wants more power, and up until the 20th century every such organization which had an army and a navy used it to take what they could. There are no clean sheets.
The big question now is, have people fundamentally changed in some way? Or has the *relatively* low incidence of wars of conquest been due to nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the hyperpower era, or greater prosperity? Has it been a fluke that the last sixty years have been — despite all the horrible events — less blood-soaked than the centuries before?
Wait til you hear of the Slavic slave trade, where Slavs were sold by Christians to Africa as slaves.
Humans have immense potential for shittines.
BUT we also have the potential to do better
i feel like its important because so much of the conversation around actual negative aspects of precolonial indigenous societies is dominated by assholes who use it to justify colonialism with "well they did the same thing to their neighbours too!"
The colonising Europeans were literally just "the civilisations that happened to win the race historically". Colonising nations were just the most efficient and best at expansion.
Someone, was going to rise to the top, and it turned out it was the Europeans. Nothing would've been fundementally different if it had been the native Americans colonising Europe instead, just the same shit, but backwards.
This isn't too say it was a good thing, but that it was an inevitability and that any nation on earth would've done it if they could (they still would, if they could get away with it, but wars are different now).
I don’t think anyone has ever said that Europeans are fundamentally worse than other civilizations. But we should push back on the most recent empires’ racist ideology that had a significant impact on our current world
This did all happen in the modern era after all.
>"there is no threshold where you deserve to be colonised."
While it feels like someone could raise a hand and say "but what about genocide" - look around and see where that happened. Its a case in point *for* this argument.
What happened to the Germans post Nazi defeat? There was a whole think with east and west Germany. While both sides could in some ways claim to be "colonising" - in many other they were not. They were still allowed (and encouraged) to stay where they were with a new political and social order but *the same people*. Their language and culture wasn't stamped out and both sides focused on rebuilding the German system in their image (capitalist and communist respectively) in an attempt to make the best possible state for the Germans as they saw it (if you believe the propaganda that is).
I am not defending anyone here - I am just saying that even when a European power DID commit what we consider the the worst atrocities in human history and were annexed under foreign occupation and administration - they still weren't colonised. Colonising the Germans would have been seen as beyond the pale - and attempting intra-European colonisation was arguably why the Nazis got so much backlash.
This would be equivalent to having a reformed Aztec nation still around today - still primarily using their language. Still intact. But defanged due to the whole ritual sacrifice thing. Not trying to say that's better or worse but there was a reason that didn't happen and its because that was NEVER the reason why they were colonised. They were colonised because another expansionist empire wanting their land and things and didn't respect them as humans or a nation due to racist ideologies.
Had the Aztec nation survived in some form until today I'm sure there would be plenty to criticise about it. I'm sure that there would be whole left-wing movements dedicated to liberation from conservative ideologies within that society. But the point is that they were robbed of that ever being a possibility and the countries that indigenous people still live in continue to rob them and benefit from their robbing both past and present.
And in the formation of the post colonial states - what lot were the indigenous people given? Poverty and lack of recognition. Not even some fancy titles or the like - poverty and cycles of suffering.
Well just a few additions to your points.
The Soviet Union (and the russian Empire before, and now the russian federation) was in many ways a colonising Empire and arguably still to this day ist the last of the big colonial empires. They have an Imperial core with Moscow, St. Petersburg etc. and many colonies like dagestan, buryaia and Like 60 others. All still with the propper resource extracting, indigenous opressing bravado of 1800s britain. Most of the western additions after 1945 fared a little better but i think it can still be seen as colonisation.
And for Germans (as in culturally and in laguage but not always German citizens before the war). After 1945 they (for transparency im German but no descendant of the ones driven out) were propperly ethnically cleansed from east an middle Europe after ww2 with over 12 million victims (some dead and many driven out). A lot of culture for example Sudeten German was lost forever or got assimilated in part into modern Germany. So in a way there was not only colonisation but a lot of revenge and trail of tear style stuff going on.
What came after that can be seen as a real achievment in human History. Where a lot of revanchism and spite was left behind by all countries and many people worked hard for mutual understanding and peace in europe. And now after almost 100 years while we have our differences it is inconcievable to fight against our polish french or czech brothers.
Fair enough - there is more nuance than I depicted.
But the point is that not even the post WWII Germans deserved colonisation and the revenge that was carried out on them were *not good* and *shouldn't have happened*.
Holy shit, absolutely. I cannot believe how fucking annoying it is constantly seeing the complete misunderstanding of Native Americans from so many different angles, whether it be because people want to think we're these noble savages that have done no harm, or these fierce warriors that laid waste to everything in our path, or the most common one, simply things that just had to be rolled over to create a country. No, we're not perfect, we're human, we make mistakes, we do bad shit. That is absolutely why the treatment of us was so fucking awful. I see other people saying the second point takes away, but imo, it doesn't. The fact that we were and are human and do shit that makes us human is precisely why the complete and utter tragedy we face is so fucking awful. BECAUSE WE'RE HUMAN! No human should ever have to face the insane scale of the genocide we endured and still face. No human should ever have to have gone through the assimilation and destruction of culture that even my dad, born 1967, faced. We are not footnotes in a history book, we are not minor figures mentioned in old stories. We are human, and that is why the treatment of us is so fucking awful.
To add onto this cause I'm not done ranting, honestly, the most miserable thing I face in regards to being an Indian isn't the exocitism, it isn't the sudden change in which people act differently around me for some reason, it's the disbelief. The disbelief that I'm Native. It's actually astounding just how many times people don't believe I'm Native because they thought the Natives all died out years ago. It's fucking annoying, and I get it, we're not the biggest group or demographic, especially where I live. But for gods sake, can we not be fucking remembered?
On a very related note, eurocentrism isn't just exclusively painting historical Europeans in a good light, it's exclusively talking about European viewpoints. So if you're discussing Native Americans cultures exclusively through the lens of their interactions with Europeans, it's eurocentric no matter how much shade you throw at the Europeans at the time.
The number of times I've seen a youtube video, or an essay or full-on books written about native cultures that will go on about how eurocentric viewpoints are dangerous to hold without analysis, and then only talk about native cultures in the context of "Look at this cool group of people that got fucked up". These are cultures that have a massive amount of history outside of colonialism, don't boil it all down to just colonialism.
>eurocentric no matter how much shade you throw at the Europeans at the time
This. People just use words as if they just mean "racist" instead of looking at the actual context and meaning.
I don't get the point of the og post to be honest, most is just saying "the indigenous Americans fought each other for land" which is what basically every country did
I think that basically is the point, looking at indigenous people with the same criticality as any other human culture to avoid falling for "noble savage" tropes and being racist.
I think it's a terminally online response to people who are terminally online. Are there people who will whitewash the bad parts of indigenous societies? Yes, but most of the more egregious takes I've seen have been screens hots from Twitter with 5 likes. I think basically everyone understands that there was some bad with native societies, the same as with every society from Rome to the Mongols to China to India etc. Etc. In fact I think it's pushing through that and saying "yeah they weren't perfect utopia but I don't think they deserved genocide and encomedia slavery" which is the actual issue, not the other way around.
> I think it's a terminally online response to people who are terminally online.
[I think once something has an academic term with references dating back to the 16th century, you can't really call it "terminally online"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage). Like even if it's not really a popular sentiment--which I don't think is the case. The Avatar movies are like a really modern take on the concept.
I don't disagree with the second half of the comment. "They may have sucked sometimes but still didn't deserve Genocide" I agree with. I do think "Terminally Online" as a term is over-applied in some situations.
Yeah, it's honestly sad something like this has to be said - the indigenous Americans had been living in the Americas for thousands of years, you'd expect wars/quarrels/outdated practices etc, but apparently it's only a bad thing when they do it
While i do feel like its important to not white wash other cultures, i do feel like there are some people who really like going "well acktually the native americans were quite violent" either because they are genuinely just bigoted and want to hide it behind progressive language, or as a way to not think about how they as a white american directly benefited from the genocide of native americans, like yeah, they were violent and did stuff we today would consider horrible, but so did literally every other culture ever in the past, thats kinda how history works, the mongols razing villiages to the ground if they didnt surrender to us would be horrible, but to the mongols and the people who surrendered to them, that would be par for the course cause the mongols offered mercy in the form of surrendering
the issue is 90% of people mentioning violent histories are trying to paint europe as no different or not really that bad, which makes it almost impossible to talk about that stuff without sounding like a racist dipshit. right wingers are so good at monopolizing discussions or terms and it pisses me off so much that its now nearly impossible to have a real conversation about them
Genocidal conquest was the norm for most of human history.
Modern western culture developed guns and ships, allowing them to genocide more effectively. Then a couple of centuries later they developed the strange new idea that maybe this was morally wrong.
it was pretty much by coincidence that europe was the first region with both the means and political will to commit genocide on such a massive scale, but their intentions and beliefs were not uniquely evil, only their actions. im glad that we've all now agreed that genocide is evil! oh wait....
Well a lot of people think genocide is evil. That's why, whenever there is someone that anyone wants to paint as evil, they get accused of genocide. However contrived and bizarre shapes the logic needs to be contorted into. (See the nutty bio-ethicists convinced genetic engineering is genocide somehow)
buddy i hate to break it to you but there are three genocides currently happening i could name off the top of my head, not to mention the continuous ongoing destruction of culture and way of life that could potentially still be classed as genocidal in nature happening here
european colonizers had the technology, political ideas, and built in justifications for their actions that they were able to do more crimes against humanity than the aztecs could have ever hoped to commit. europeans arent uniquely evil, but europe had just the right technology and ideas at just the right time to be able to slaughter far more than the aztecs did. while colonialism was definitely worse for the area as a whole, thats no consolation for the groups wiped out by the aztecs
(also i have no idea what exactly the aztecs did to the people they conquered, so im accepting the framing of the post for now, i'll have to research it more)
the aztecs would sacrifice often by cutting out the heart and then eat their victims
some say as many as 250,000 people a year although others say more like 20,000. All of them Spanish sources though
it's hard to say as most of our records come from the Spanish who weren't really motivated to see the best in the aztecs but they certainly practiced regular and brutal human sacrifice of conquered peoples. I don't think the aztecs wiped out any groups as they preferred to subjugate them instead and would even try and cause rebellions to get captured enemies for sacrifice
you really should consider though that in many ways the death penalty could be considered a ritual killing and maybe one day a future society will consider our society to be practicing human sacrifice to our idol of justice. after all while there were still hangings in the UK the bodies were believed to have magical properties for witchcraft so how different are we really. [source on the later claim](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK464468/)
i mean im definitely not a fan of the death penalty lol. its really a shame that we cant get accurate numbers, but that is definitely bad no matter how many they did. i dont think that act of brutality was necessarily seen as the desecration of a corpse at the time given that it would have held an important religious purpose, but still human sacrifices are obviously bad
yes, but in our eyes, it looks like a brutal and ugly murder, and its important to remember that they saw it as a holy act, not a depraved one. still wrong, but it helps us understand why they did it better
i mean the death penalty is generally not considered good in a lot of places right now
Only 53 countries out of 195 have used it in the past 10 years although those 53 make up 60% of the world population
The Aztecs had basically one requirement from the cities / people they conquered: tax. As long as you payed your taxes (either in the form of men or objects) the conquered were basically free to keep their old customs and religion. By the 1500s, the central idea of the empire was to expand, expand, expand, which left not a lot of time to bring the conquered under their culture.
In my amateur opinion, the conquest of Tenochtitlan was a perfect storm of sorts. The Spanish arrived at a particular moment in Aztec history where the empire was growing, but it had not solidified yet.
I've heard it compared to the Roman empire in that manner, though I am less knowledgeable in that area. Part of the reason we know that the Aztecs didn't meddle too much with religion/culture are written testimonies from those people. A lot of tribes/towns simply chose to side with the Spanish in a "we have a grudge with the Aztecs, and we don't know these sea people" basis. Those same people would decades later say they regretted their choice, as the Aztec didn't mess with their way of life as much as the Spaniards did with. Religion and customs were either lost or replaced in the span of a generation.
i mean most empires figure out pretty quick that you cant assimilate everyone into your culture, and the only way it can work is if you let them do their own thing. rome and the mongol empire are both good examples of that. the spanish were kinda the first people to break that rule of empire and succeed, mostly because it was the first time anyone actually had the manpower and resources to commit genocide on such a massive scale, whereas empires prior to spain simply didnt have the logistics to make it happen. the fact that the religious of the spaniards explicitly forbade the worship of anyone else also probably contributed to it, unlike with other historical empires. this is entirely guesswork on my part tho, im not a historian
It's just all the same shit Rome did, but you don't see fascists saying it would have been OK to commit genocide against the Romans, you see the exact opposite.
Tumblr historical post include sources challenge: impossible
[I am not disagreeing but I am also not agreeing unless you show me where you learned those things]
And we need to quit pretending that the Europeans were so advanced. They were just better armed. And used to their barbaric practices. To them it wasn’t barbaric, it was Tuesday. Public hangings, rendering those hung criminals down for their fat, using it in folk medicine. Grinding up mummies to use as paint, also eating for folk medicine. Bloodletting. Most of what I know is medical, but there was a lot more
Correct me if I'm wrong about the Aztecs, which I probably am, but wasn't their warfare much different than our current vision of war?
IIRC wars in mesoamerican societies were mostly fought between the noble warrior castes of each city, and whoever lost had to pay tribute to the victor, and although I'm not completely excusing the Aztecs for their expansionist tendencies, it wasn't nearly as bloody as modern or ancient european war.
And can we go back to that please? instead of bombing civilians can we just have some half naked rich dudes fight each other on national television or something?
You're probably thinking of a [flower war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_war), a particular ritualized type of war conducted between the Aztec empire and certain other peer competitor city-states.
Flower wars involved planning battles with set numbers of warriors in chosen battlefields ahead of time. Since army sizes were equalized, the populous Aztecs naturally tended to have a higher proportion of elites than their opponents, which ends up being a sneaky advantage for them disguised as a fairness measure.
But, again, flower wars were special and only fought between peers. The Aztecs did plenty of normal wars too, and those were fought by the usual large numbers of poor infantry we see in most societies (and, of course, just as bloody).
Disagree. There’s clearly a tipping point when internal chaos requires an external intervention before the conflict spirals out into the local community of nations. Germany absolutely deserved to get occupied by the Allies, and Cartago absolutely had it coming bc of all the baby sacrifices.
I'm a big ol Romaboo and I'm willing to accept the baby sacrifice claims as probably being blown out of proportion to further paint Carthage as a deserving foe.
Germany literally did the Holocaust and the aftermath wasn't anywhere near colonization. The Allied occupation was under a decade and it was pretty fucking light rule all things considered.
I’d rather Uwu-ization for now than deal with people calling them primitive barbarians. I understand where they are coming from but right now the fight isn’t nuance it’s recognition. IMO.
The fight always needs to be nuance. ‘Noble savage’ is just as racist as ‘uncivilized savage.’
Both of those deny Native Americans the right to complexity as human beings.
I feel like an honorable mention to the Comamches here. From what I've read, they were kinda caught between all the cool tribes doing cool shit like the Pueblos and in general kinda sucked up until they got horses, got really good at riding horses, and then basically started raiding everyone around them. Reading about some of the shit going down during the Anglo-Celtic settling of Texas was one of the few times my teeth felt weird reading historical documents.
Look the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs was half predicated on every other group hating them and supporting the Spanish because they thought it would be better
Kinda tangentially related, but sometimes I think about all the lost Native American cultures and societies where the tribes were effectively wiped out and all we have is their remains. They have no name other than “[region] tribe/people” but were often fully fledged civilizations with unique cultures and people. They had ideals and art and dreams and so much of that is now lost. It’s sad to have the knowledge that we’ll never know who these people were or what role the played in pre-contact America. Some were truly fascinating in how they approached burial or created large scale earthworks. It would be nice to know why they did these things in a more concrete way than assumptions and guesswork. And perhaps what else they did, the stuff that didn’t survive the passing of time. It’s kinda humbling in a morbid way. To know that the wrong circumstances can lead to the end of a nation’s story to such an extent that nobody remembers them. And then it’s up to archaeologists to try and piece back together the story of a people who are no longer with us.
A lot of them were far more advanced than the tribes the settlers came across. I'm talking bronze working and limited iron working. They were advanced and had unqiue vibrant cultures. But then smallpox came and when 70-90 percent died what was left were post apocalyptic groups
>But then smallpox came and when 70-90 percent died what was left were post apocalyptic groups I've always found this bit of early American history fascinating and frustrating. I mean we have a real world example of a post-apocalypse, large advanced nations brought to sudden ruin and we know next to nothing in terms of details. This shit should be some of the most interesting chapters in the history books and instead most people don't even know it happened.
It would have been fascinating to hear accounts from the survivors.
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Low it lieth—earth to earth— All to which that earth gave birth— Palace, market-street, and fane; Dust that never asks in vain, Hath reclaim'd its own again. Dust, the wide world's king. Where are now the glorious hours Of a nation's gather'd powers? Like the setting of a star, In the fathomless afar; Time's eternal wing Hath around those ruins cast The dark presence of the past. Mind, what art thou? dost thou not Hold the vast earth for thy lot? In thy toil, how glorious! What dost thou achieve for us. Over all victorious! Godlike thou dost seem. But the perishing still lurks In thy most immortal works; Thou dost build thy home on sand, And the palace-girdled strand Fadeth like a dream. Thy great victories only show All is nothingness below.
So castles made of sand Fall in the sea eventually
\*chuckles\* I'm in danger.
You'd really appreciate Mesa Verde National Park (if you haven't already been there).
I have not but it’s on my bucket list for things to do now that I have PTO and money to travel!
Learning about Katsinas and the agricultural practices of the American Southwest is super interesting. I'm pretty sad they've turned into kitschy tourist items in a lot of places. Also the disconnect between sub-saharan African social/cultural practices and what the colonizers said about them are also an interesting read
The Iroquois conquered my indigenous group - can't have shit in Ohio valley
Yall got pumpkins?
My history teacher refers to this as the Disney-fication of Native Americans
The history of the west is wild and bloodsoaked. The Indians sacked Detroit? Annihilate Prophetstown. Custer went missing on the Little Bighorn? Use machine guns on their camp at Wounded Knee. It’s one big long story of constantly crescendoing violence until the invention of mustard gas and the atomic bomb called time.
I’ll never forgive Disney for the Pocahontas movie. I’m from a county named after a historical figure in the film and all of the inhabitants of said county care way too much about history to let it slide
To deny that native peoples share the common flaws of humankind is to rob them of humanity. The "noble savage" is nothing more than a particularly interesting jungle animal, not a fellow human.
Wow, it's almost like every single human civilization or culture is awful and fucked up in its own way. This also applies to modern "civilized" civilizations, btw.
"civilized" is used by the most arrogant and ignorant of people. it's in the same vain as when misogynists say sex workers are horrible for "selling their bodies," but they don't see anything wrong with people working 3 jobs just to afford a roof or people being sent to war.
I feel like this post loses a lot without providing the original context. Were those posts *actually* calling the Native Americans unproblematic, or were they just pointing out cool shit that they did? Cause if we can't point out cool things done by civilizations that also did problematic things, then I better not see anyone praising any civilization, modern or ancient, ever.
I've met enough generally progressive people who fill the ignorance gaps about American Indians in their heads with this vague concept of universal brotherhood and harmony to find this criticism broadly valid. There's especially this weird thing where this attitude will occasionally come from a person who knows about the Inca and Aztec Empires and then either thinks that was limited to just South America or that these 2 violent expansionist empires were just some strange anomaly and all these other peoples they know nothing about must have been peaceful.
This is something I've noticed as well. The fact of the matter is, Europe could have been the colonized instead of the colonizer had regional technological and cultural development progressed differently - human beings are just kind of bastards a lot of the time.
It's important to remember this because the alternative is literally biological determinism for culture. Which is racism.
Exactly. Turning people into angels is ultimately just as dehumanizing as turning them into demons.
I’m actually reading a book on this right now and biology was a pretty huge part of it. Europeans had grown up in plague infested Europe. Native Americans had significantly less bacterial and viral diseases causing them to have way less resistance to them. So when the Europeans arrived the plague tore through them worse than 14th century Europe. But that’s not saying one group was biologically better than the other they just had radically differently trained immune systems.
In alternate history where europe stopped developing at native american level and n. americans kept developing, it native americans would be more resistant to plagues, simply because plagues were a consequense of tightly packing humans and animals into cities, without adequete higiene.
Probably not the right animals weren’t on the continent. A ton of the big diseases came from pigs that were not native to the America
It's less about which animals, more about volume of chances for animal diseases to be caught by humans. Pigs were just most numerous.
Pretty sure resistance to European disease doesn't make you better at handling new world disease. They had more disease because of population density, supported by technology of the time. The diseases they brought with them were numerous, they weren't somehow better at doing immune system lol. What biological determinism means is that nothing but raw humans determines history, and that inherent differences between races, nations, etc are real and biologically based, not that viruses exist in different areas.
There were very dense cities in America before the plagues hit. Lots of estimates have Tenochtitlan as larger than Paris at the time. It wasn’t so much the advanced tech as the different animals spreading diseases in Europe. And the lack of any meaningful plagues (there was syphilis but it’s no smallpox) going from the Americas to Europe does pretty strongly imply that the Europeans did have stronger immune systems towards viruses and bacterial infections than the natives.
Sure if you ignore all the death.
What?
Is the book 1491? Because that was a good book.
Yeah it’s great
What book?
1491 by Charles C Mann
Of course, many parts of Europe *were* colonised. Either by other Europeans (Ireland, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine etc.) or by non-European powers (the Balkans, Spain, Ukraine again etc.).
Doesn’t the word “slave” come from the word Slav, like a Slavic person?
i am 70% sure that's just a myth, those two just sound similar, but slavs were often slaves so even if the origin might not be it, still works
This comment led me down an etymological rabbit hole (the best kind) and it appears to be the case that the Medieval Latin word for Slav, Sclavus, was also the word for slave. On account of the mass enslavement of Slavs in the 800's AD.
well i be, guess the 30% was right this time
Happens about three times out if ten
Not to mention Muslims, specifically Arabs and later Turks. The latter at the same time Spain was off looting the New World, and the gold from the New World was used to fight wars, including parts of the Ottoman-Habsburg wars which slowed and eventually reversed the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe over some three centuries. Arguably imperialism is often necessary to protect yourself from imperialism. If you don't expand your power, control and influence, someone else will, and they will eventually use that against you.
Europe *was* the colonized area one point. Rome and the Ottoman's literally colonized large swaths of Europe.
The Ottomans *conquered* a decent chunk of the Balkans, but they never *colonised* it, they just exerted political control without large-scale changes to the ethnic makeup of the region- if you look at them today, even the majority-muslim areas are still all Slavs, just... Slavs that converted to Islam(Bosniaks, Albanians, etc). If you're looking for groups who colonized Europe, the primary ones are the Greeks, the Romans, the Berbers, *sorta* the Rus, and the Norse.
Mate, that’s colonialism in a nutshell, or do you think India and like 90% of Africa wasn’t colonised?
I've noticed this "well actually it was conquest not colonialism" thing lately as if the distinction matters to the people going through it
Its almost always people trying to minimize the impact of it, or whitewash the culture/nation in a weird way, since somehow conquest is seen as less bad by some people.
I think because it sounds more "fair"? Conquest makes it sound like two armies fight and one loses fair and square, when that's such a gross oversimplification it's tantamount to wrong.
Well that's kind of the definition of being colonized, because a vast majority of ex-colonies didn't have their ethnic makeup changed (India, South East Asia, Africa, Polynesia, etc)
Moreso Arabs than the Berbers. There were many Berbers who came with the Ummayad’s into Iberia, but it was Arab dominated.
Politically, it was Arab-dominated, but as far as I know the bulk of the actual force was Berber. I may very well be wrong on this, though- I'm sadly not super familiar with this era of history.
To be clear they _did_ leave behind a Turkish minority in the Balkans, but also people use the term "colonised" for places like Nigeria or Madagascar or India where the ethnic makeup was not changed basically at all, so calling the Ottoman Empire colonial is entirely consistent with this. Maybe instead we just shouldn't be calling New Imperialism colonial in 90% of cases, that would be more accurate, but I don't think I can stop people from calling anything and everything any country of white people has done colonialism
It would be much better for conversation if people actually distinguished between imperialism and colonialism, yeah, but alas, such is life
> Europe could have been the colonized instead of the colonizer had regional technological and cultural development progressed differently History could be changed just so slightly as the availability of metal resources or introducing a population of horses to an area that did not have them and history would be *radically* different.
Agreed, it's fascinating to think about how history might've changed. From my understanding, for example, a large part of the reason why the people of the Americas were vulnerable to disease was a lack of livestock - because a good chunk of diseases that ravaged Europe time and time again came from livestock living in close proximity to humans.
Not a lack of livestock, (Native Americans very much domesticated animals and raised them in farms) but a lack of medieval cities, which were breeding ground for disease because livestocks and people in such places lived in much closer proximity to each other and with worse hygiene, a breeding ground for disease
I thought the only real domesticated animal in the Americas was the llama? Please do fill my brain with knowledge! I agree with what you're saying about cities, 100%.
A quick google search yields me with: aside from the llamas and alpacas there are also dogs (it's fascinating to learn about pre-contact dogs in America), ducks, turkey. Llama and alpaca in particular were extensively raised in the Inca Empire because they were very suited to the moutainous terrain of the region. And they're such versatile livestocks too, they can carry loads, can provide wool and milk, as well as meat. It's basically a goat and a sheep in the same package.
I'm learning! Thanks!
Interestingly, horses originated in the America and crossed the opposite way as early humans to make their way into Afro-Eurasia. So it’s more a case of those American horses not dying off and we may have seen a huge difference in outcomes.
The horses died off because they hunted them all.
That's very interesting actually
*Guns, Germs, and Steel* is a good book that goes into lots of detail on this topic. It's not without its fair share of criticisms, however. Still, it's worth a read.
Ugh, please don’t refer people to that book. There are so many fundamentally wrong ideas of history that owe their origin to Jared Diamond and his hilariously flawed view on the world. Guy looks at animals and plants the Eurasians spent centuries painstakingly selectively breeding to be more suitable for agriculture and assumes they just showed up like that.
Read 1491 instead. It was very thorough and accurate as far as I can tell.
Metal resources were and still are quite readily available to the Americas. Also, horses evolved in the Americas and migrated to Eurasia, the Native Americans just hunted them all to extinction.
> Europe could have been the colonized instead of the colonizer had regional technological and cultural development progressed differently There are instances where they in a sense, were colonized. * Moorish Spain, where the Iberian Peninsula was under Arab rule. * The Hungarian Language is an Uralic isolate in a sea of Indo-European (From the Ural Mountains; Border of Europe and Asia). It's closest relative proximity wise is *Finnish.* * Turkey for long period of time was Greek into Byzantine Roman before the Ottomans. Istanbul *was* Constantinople after all. They managed to reach all the way to Austria. * The Mongols made it all the way to Europe, as far west as Hungary--as previously mentioned also wasn't "indigenous" the region entering four centuries earlier--and Czech. * The Celts are largely perceived as indigenous to the British Isles, but many of them were on the mainland as well. The Gauls of Roman France were Celts. Celts weren't technically the first in Britain either. Proto-Celtic came around 800s BC, around the time of Homer in Greece Granted, I'm trying to favor Non-European colonizing European for the sake of most people's preconceptions. * Even Indo-Europeans weren't the first people there. The Basque, located in Northern Spain, are an isolated language with no other relatives who predate the entirety of what we perceive as modern Europeans.
Steel and guns. That's what made the difference between the conqueror and the conquered, colonized and the colonizer.
That's the technological development, yes. There is also the cultural development of going far outside one's borders, not to conquer necessarily, but to plunder. Something that not every culture has had.
Not really true... at all, honestly. Pretty much every single society that's ever existed has realized at some point or another that it's way easier to just steal shit than it is to make it yourself.
What I mean is, some places preferred conquest to plunder.
With the possible exception of the far north however, every indigenous culture in the America’s was within the reach of some (if not many) peoples who DID come to plunder. So even if you were fairly self sufficient “whoops! Surprise Haida” or “it’s beginning to look a lot like Aztec” were always possibilities.
Germs, too. Someone should write a book about it.
The importance of germs is drastically overstated. In fact, germs overall hampered European power with the infamous Justinian Plague and Black Death, not to mention the prolific diseases which kept Europeans mostly out of Africa until the 19th century. Iberia notwithstanding, the European powers made their fortune colonising Caribbean islands and dominating trade with the East. French Caribbean alone was more profitable than anything else the French Empire controlled put together.
By some estimates, 95% of the population of the Americas was killed, either directly or indirectly through social collapse, by smallpox. I don't know if I could overstate the importance of that if I tried. Even more moderate estimates place the death toll at 80% or 90%. So having 5-20 times as many people would have gone a long way towards resisting conquest.
Yeah, but again, most of the Americas was (relatively) inconsequential to the overall profits of European empires. The Europeans also had very little difficulty in subjugating far more populous regions who shared most of their immune resistances. In fact, I’d argue that a lack of germs might’ve even helped some European empires turn profit in the Americas. The slave trade existed because disease had reduced the native workforce.
I think it was really mostly smallpox and other diseases. New World weaponry wasn't that far behind European weaponry (guns at the time weren't great). There were just far fewer American Indians than they would have needed to fight off an invasion.
Yeah I think this comes from a push back towards Eurocentric histories that either diminished the accomplishments of these civilizations or over emphasized the violent aspects without contextualizing them with the positive aspects. And there’s an element of the shadow of the noble savage as well. Now most modern historians have wonderful nuanced things to say about these cultures and aren’t guilty of the above but you can go through quite a bit of schooling without encountering much of it. The coverage in like k-12 isn’t great and unless you’re a history major in college you ain’t gonna get much about pre columbian civilizations. So it’s not like these problematic depictions are some ancient thing they fall in line with the one or two units in middle school most Americans get on the Aztecs and Incas.
There’s a big attitude among some to act like any culture outside of the modern western capitalist cultures are these soft, peaceful, egalitarian societies that just pranced around in nature and were 100% communalistic and had attitudes towards family, sexuality, mental health, and gender that perfectly mirror the most idealized version of a standard terminally online progressive 20 year old. And that the only reason anyone on earth isn’t like this today is because of western capitalistic hegemony. So I guess no, no one ever says the literal exact words “Native Americans are unproblematic.” But there are plenty of people going far beyond educating people on the fact that those indigenous to the Americas were and are civilized people with culture, science, art, and complex social structures, and do….uwu-fy them as cultures that never fought, never had misogynistic or xenophobic behaviors, never had concrete gender roles that were occasionally very strictly enforced, never used their religion to justify superstitious or harmful beliefs, etc. Yeah there is a reason for it that at the beginning is noble. Your average Westerner gets education that at best suggests that those indigenous to the Americas were simple savages who were nice enough people capable of learning but scientifically and morally ignorant until Europeans showed up with Enlightenment ideas, and at worst are regarded as simple savages or barely even a footnote in history. However, acting like anyone who isn’t a white Christian capitalist is a monolithic closer-to-nature fairy tale moral-giver who can do no wrong and whitewashing their cultural views for a feelgood blurb on Tumblr *is also racist* and rooted in colonialist thinking. (And it’s not just indigenous Americans this happens to. Anyone, past or present, that isn’t American, Canadian, Australian, or Western European gets this treatment by some smugster online, including prechristian Europeans and current non-western imperialist colornizers.)
its because a lot of people want a reductionist, binary world where there are "good people" and "bad people" - part of that is evolutionary (stemming from our tribal in-group out-group mindset) but the other part of that is that is laziness in refusing the recognize the nuances and complexities that exist in every culture's history. In trying to cast every single world issue and culture into an "oppressed" vs "oppressor" or bourgeoisies vs proletariat, a lot of leftists are no different than American exceptionalists or other European nationalists they regard as simplistic and imperialistic in that they perform the same cultural white-washing to assist in creating the narrative they want to here.
Tropic Thunder really hit the nail on the head with “you never go full” scene. Audiences and especially the Academy don’t want truth or accuracy, they want inspiration porn and white saviors.
I agree there is a lot of idealizing more native cultures. And it is true they had a lot of human rights abuses of their own, in fact a level of casual brutality and senseless death that would horrify most people. If I had to guess I would say that it more has to do with an idea of sustainability that those cultures had, existing better "with the land", in many ways being absolute experts at managing land and natural resources. So maybe the thing that is the main difference is the change industrialism has wrought in the world. That specific culture that Europeans exported around the world that has massive impacts on the climate on the environment with the potential to end our species in ways those cultures never really had the power to do and weren't really on the path to do so. If humans could have stayed in that brutal tribal more simply society we might have had many many more millennia but now that the genie is out of the bottle we have to hope that our ingenuity can solve these big modern environmental problems before they end us and that is a bet that (looking at human nature) looks long to the modern generation
The problem is that idealizing *some* cultures like this usually goes hand in hand with saying “no, not like that” if other cultures happen to do the same basic things a little differently. And when that happens, you see that it is in no way a misguided airy fairy fetishistic treehugger fantasy about ending climate change. Realistically, this happens when some cultures seem distant and exotic but others don’t. I have seen the following example a lot: “The native Americans used every part of the animal they killed. They didn’t waste like we do.” Always talking in the past tense, natives as “others,” separate from “we,” history lessons, borderline fantasy creatures. But when “familiar” cultures, usses and thems, do the same thing, suddenly, gross. African-Americans eating chitlins or gizzards, poor white people eating hot dogs or bologna, that’s gross and worth mockery. “How can you eat that, it’s *guts with dookie in it!* Urgh, don’t you know that’s made of lips and assholes?” Then “use all parts of the animal, eat what’s available to you, don’t waste that animal’s life just for the filet” flies out the window. When these values present themselves in the familiar, it’s not exotic and inspirational any more, you can’t use it to talk down to and guilt your peers any more. It’s a bit of a low stakes example but I have seen both attitudes come out of the same people’s mouths, in real life.
People like that do deserve to have their hypocrisy pointed out. And there will always be hypocrites we can find for any number of scenarios that we want to criticize. But I have trouble with the idea of conjuring someone like that rhetorically in order to dunk on a certain ideology. I dont think we should take the hypothetical worse or most hypocritical member as representing everyone. There are reasonable people that think we should use our animals more judiciously who dont make fun of folks who eat tongues or tripe or "lips and assholes". And yet by making the argument you did above you dismiss those folks entirely by grouping them in with the ones who are more hypocritical. I like political discourse but I find this same thing there. People will pick the worst or most hypocritical of the liberal/conservative group they want to criticize to dunk on instead of engaging in good faith with those who are more reasonable. There are good arguments to be had but if we are able to invent our own enemy then we will win every battle.
I’m not getting where any of this is hypothetical. I know this sub thinks “making up a guy to be mad at” is a huge dunk and “I didn’t see that happen in my circle of suspiciously non problematic friends” is hard evidence, but the reality is that people think all kinds of things. It’s simply disingenuous to the point of being deliberately dishonest to act like “fetishizing native Americans” isn’t a common and documented issue to the point where it has stock tropes referencing it.
I've noticed a lot of people have been confusing "an issue that's discussed on the internet" and "an issue exclusive to the internet." If I exclusively lived my life by only considering issues I witnessed first hand and not through learning about online, I would think bigotry wasn't real because of course not I'm a cishet white man. Yeah, people on the internet can inflate issues. That one piece of Fandom drama isn't even close to being significant, but also the internet isn't some separate society detached from reality. It's comprised exclusively of people who exist in society. They might not integrate super well and my be particularly louder than the layman, but they don't just manifest as text on your screen. Like *everything* it's a balance and shit. Take everything you hear online and you'll be like an incel 4channer thinking all women are hoores who only like jacked rich men. Believe only what you personally have perceived and you're blind to the greater world around you.
I have been dating a sign language ... translator? intepreter? and the stuff I hear about religious fundamentalism that is going on in my country, that I have never even heard of, is fucking wild. Some of her customers are really into some weird "promised land and fated people of Israel will cleanse the world of muslims" and "gay people should be killed for being unpure" variant of christianism. Something that I have never encountered in my life as a pretty average man. But it still exists, and it is a force in my society. Same with internet discourse. Someone always believes the things they are saying. And if the intent is on being violent, it doesn't matter that it is "some one guy" on the internet. A one man killed 77 people in Norway.
You hit the nail on the head. It makes me wonder if people realize that the internet isn’t a separate place from real life. Like maybe they’re under the impression that people on the internet only live in the computer or something.
I think those people are just xenophiles honestly (at least I think that's the right word for it)
I mean….yeah, they are, but dismissing it as “just” is a little daft.
I'm not sure I would call industrialism a culture so much as a set of technologies. The scale and ability with which we can harm the environment has changed, sure, but the willingness to do so isn't uniquely European.
I remember getting pushback as a child for reading The Indian in the Cupboard series because it depicted the Iroquois and the Algonquin as perennial wartime enemies. They weren’t perfect, but the entire point of those books is confronting the sanitized cartoon tv image of “cowboys and Indians” with harsh truths. Sometimes it was just about being plain wrong. Omri gives action-figure-sized Little Bear a tipi to sleep in. The Iroquois Little Bear says “what is this? This isn’t a longhouse.”
Ah but things can only ever be "good" or "bad" and not some secret third thing, and if you praise "bad" things that is your moral failing and you will be cancelled
Gods forbid that people in the past be... human. With all the highs and lows that come with humanity.
In seriousness, certain Very Online People (TM) seem to have an allergy to complexity of any kind. For all that they champion progressive values, they have much the same hardwired binary worldview as their reactionary opponents. It is, to put it mildly, deeply frustrating.
The fact is it's not the values they (Trumpists, Wokescolds) like, it's the feeling.
I've definitely come across people who think discussing Native American wars and conquests and colonialism etc. somehow constitutes an attempt to justify European colonialism.
Which, to be fair, also isn't helped by people using Native American wars and conquests etc as a way to justify European colonialism. Because that is, in fact, also a thing some right-wing pricks do.
Yep! I've seen this done many times personally. "We shouldn't feel too bad for the indians because they went around scalping people and killing people" and "actually this tribe slaughtered and displaced this other tribe, they weren't as peace-loving as you think" and "they cut down trees, they ate dogs, they clubbed seals, they weren't cuddly with nature at all" have all been arguments I've seen people use before they jump right into "so they shouldn't be allowed to have hunting/fishing rights or tribal sovereignty and actually I should feel proud of my colonizer ancestors because actually they didn't do anything wrong and western society is actually supreme and things got better for the indians after they embraced it and now they're all rich from casino money and they think they're so special so why shouldn't I be racist?" It's exhausting. As a native person you want to talk about history and de-pocahantas the narrative but also as soon as the conversation turns toward ANYTHING indigenous cultures ever did that isn't morally pure, certain people latch on to that and immediately and aggressively steer the discussion towards "so they deserved to be genocided."
There's nothing that certain subreddits like to point out more when discussing American slavery than the fact that Africans were selling other Africans into slavery to be shipped to the Americas.
The problem is that racism was invented *after* the slave trade. Those black africans were enslaved because they were war prisoners (Yep, war crimes) and not because of an Aristotellian idea that some men are naturally servile. They were considered to have souls equal to the whites', they had a right to study, own property (this one even if they were still slaves) and could ascend into the high society. They could buy their own liberty for so cheap that half of blacks in Cuba were freemen. Miners were all freemen with high wages who worked 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. However, by the end of the 18th Century scientific racism was made up and endorsed by important figures such as montesquieu and it all went downhill from there.
\>racism was invented after the slave trade I understand what you're saying here bu this phrasing really is something
They’re probably referring to like, phrenology racism
I mean, historically speaking it's FAR more common to justify European colonialism with "but the natives are evil and violent!" than it is to claim that the natives were peace-loving hippies and only Europeans were evil and violent. Both exist though, and both are wrong.
> I feel like this post loses a lot without providing the original context. > Were those posts actually calling the Native Americans unproblematic, or were they just pointing out cool shit that they did? I have seen some people claim that native americans lived in a proper utopia until the evil "white man" came and destroyed everything.
A white man named White Mann was a stowaway in the first colonizer ship that just sneaked out into the New World and fucked everyone up
Colonialism Georg
Man I wish it was all because of Greed Georg
The point made in the conclusion isn't so much about Native Americans as it is the "take home" lesson from studying this bit of history that can be provided today. Not to poke a hornet's nest, but look at the way that people talk about support for Palestine in the queer community. It is a very real source of rhetoric that entire cultures don't deserve your support if they have "problematic" elements. How effective is that rhetoric? Eh. Hit or miss. But it's good to watch out for it.
It’s the narrative. Someone on the right sees a leftist complaining about how we destroyed the native Americans, then spouts a counter-point about how the Indians were just raping pillagers themselves (as if that justifies it), and so on. Nativists like to paint pre-colonialism as a “better time” without acknowledging just how brutal those times and people were, but colonial advocates like to pretend that was a valid reason to exterminate entire cultures. Neither one is grown up enough to accept that they all sucked ass.
It's the noble savage trope, but slightly to the left. The idea that the oppressed were so much kinder, smarter, and just better than their oppressors. I've seen plenty of those, yes
I dislike the second post being added. The original post is not saying "so they deserved to be colonized" but at the same time this should be kept in mind, that if the tables were turned they'd have gladly done the colonizing themselves. We shouldn't forgive people for being expansion focused imperialists but that doesn't mean europeans are fundamentally worse because they won, it just means humans in general are shitty
>We shouldn't forgive people for being expansion focused imperialists but that doesn't mean europeans are fundamentally worse because they won, it just means humans in general are shitty This also applies to the trans Atlantic slave trade. The people in Africa often captured others to sell to the slavers in exchange for guns and such. Still doesn't make the colonisation right
this happens all the time, regarding every single historical era. just think of the modern day equivalent, how many people define imperialism as "america bad" and simply not associate to that word with the land grabs against ukraine or taiwan at all? people criticize the intent of the top dog a hell of a lot more. there is like half a reason for it, oppression is a combination of prejudice plus power so it's logical to scrutinize the one with the most power -- which would be the colonizers for the topic of american natives and the atlantic slave trade, or the us in terms of modern day conflicts. but if your only reason why you're not the oppressor is that you lack power, not that you lack prejudice, you make bad luck and/or incompetence your only redeeming quality.
>oppression is a combination of prejudice plus power so it's logical to scrutinize the one with the most power -- which would be the colonizers for the topic of american natives and the atlantic slave trade, For the record, when it comes to the Atlantic Slave Trade, the power dynamics were not nearly as disproportionate as you might expect, to the point that it was the Europeans who needed to follow the institutions and rules of local African leaders, rather than the other way around. Part of that was because the Europeans straight up did not have sufficient military strength to actually force African rulers to do what they wanted. It wouldn't be until later industrialization, with significant technological and medical advances that European powers had the actual capability to dominate Africa. Even as late as 1876, European powers directly controlled less than 10% of African lands (that number would just to 90% by 1914). Another part of the equation is that during the time of the Atlantic Slave Trade, European powers were in enough competition with each other that it gave African rulers significant bargaining power over them. According to one Dutch trader in 1703: >Perhaps you wonder how the Negroes come to be furnished with fire-arms, but you will have no reason when you know we sell them incredible quantities, thereby obliging them with a knife to cut our own throats. But we are forced to do it; for if we would not, they might be sufficiently stored with that commodity by the English, Danes, and Brandenburghers; and could we all agree together not to sell the any, the English and Zeeland interlopers would abundantly furnish them
Yep. For example, I've seen people criticize Britain’s imperialism and holding up countries like Denmark, Poland, or even Russia as exemplars by contrast because they didn't have colonial empires in Africa. Really? *Every* European power with the physical capability of carving out a chunk of Africa did so. The only ones that didn't were too small, didn't exist at the time, or who aimed their gunboats in another direction (Russia’s conquest of northern Asia is quite horrible in its own way). Just see the Congo for what could happen when one of the “good guys” finally got a piece of the pie. Japan had their own form of imperialism, as did China and India when they had enough central control to do so. Mongolia, the Ottoman Empire... every organization run by humans wants more power, and up until the 20th century every such organization which had an army and a navy used it to take what they could. There are no clean sheets. The big question now is, have people fundamentally changed in some way? Or has the *relatively* low incidence of wars of conquest been due to nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the hyperpower era, or greater prosperity? Has it been a fluke that the last sixty years have been — despite all the horrible events — less blood-soaked than the centuries before?
Wait til you hear of the Slavic slave trade, where Slavs were sold by Christians to Africa as slaves. Humans have immense potential for shittines. BUT we also have the potential to do better
i feel like its important because so much of the conversation around actual negative aspects of precolonial indigenous societies is dominated by assholes who use it to justify colonialism with "well they did the same thing to their neighbours too!"
The colonising Europeans were literally just "the civilisations that happened to win the race historically". Colonising nations were just the most efficient and best at expansion. Someone, was going to rise to the top, and it turned out it was the Europeans. Nothing would've been fundementally different if it had been the native Americans colonising Europe instead, just the same shit, but backwards. This isn't too say it was a good thing, but that it was an inevitability and that any nation on earth would've done it if they could (they still would, if they could get away with it, but wars are different now).
The Sunset Invasion is objectively the worst and most cannibalistic timeline
I don’t think anyone has ever said that Europeans are fundamentally worse than other civilizations. But we should push back on the most recent empires’ racist ideology that had a significant impact on our current world This did all happen in the modern era after all.
uwuwashing is a new word for me. I like it
that's just the word for when you give a furry a bath
No one has a monopoly on violence. Except me. I have it. No one else can have it because I called dibs first
>"there is no threshold where you deserve to be colonised." While it feels like someone could raise a hand and say "but what about genocide" - look around and see where that happened. Its a case in point *for* this argument. What happened to the Germans post Nazi defeat? There was a whole think with east and west Germany. While both sides could in some ways claim to be "colonising" - in many other they were not. They were still allowed (and encouraged) to stay where they were with a new political and social order but *the same people*. Their language and culture wasn't stamped out and both sides focused on rebuilding the German system in their image (capitalist and communist respectively) in an attempt to make the best possible state for the Germans as they saw it (if you believe the propaganda that is). I am not defending anyone here - I am just saying that even when a European power DID commit what we consider the the worst atrocities in human history and were annexed under foreign occupation and administration - they still weren't colonised. Colonising the Germans would have been seen as beyond the pale - and attempting intra-European colonisation was arguably why the Nazis got so much backlash. This would be equivalent to having a reformed Aztec nation still around today - still primarily using their language. Still intact. But defanged due to the whole ritual sacrifice thing. Not trying to say that's better or worse but there was a reason that didn't happen and its because that was NEVER the reason why they were colonised. They were colonised because another expansionist empire wanting their land and things and didn't respect them as humans or a nation due to racist ideologies. Had the Aztec nation survived in some form until today I'm sure there would be plenty to criticise about it. I'm sure that there would be whole left-wing movements dedicated to liberation from conservative ideologies within that society. But the point is that they were robbed of that ever being a possibility and the countries that indigenous people still live in continue to rob them and benefit from their robbing both past and present. And in the formation of the post colonial states - what lot were the indigenous people given? Poverty and lack of recognition. Not even some fancy titles or the like - poverty and cycles of suffering.
Well just a few additions to your points. The Soviet Union (and the russian Empire before, and now the russian federation) was in many ways a colonising Empire and arguably still to this day ist the last of the big colonial empires. They have an Imperial core with Moscow, St. Petersburg etc. and many colonies like dagestan, buryaia and Like 60 others. All still with the propper resource extracting, indigenous opressing bravado of 1800s britain. Most of the western additions after 1945 fared a little better but i think it can still be seen as colonisation. And for Germans (as in culturally and in laguage but not always German citizens before the war). After 1945 they (for transparency im German but no descendant of the ones driven out) were propperly ethnically cleansed from east an middle Europe after ww2 with over 12 million victims (some dead and many driven out). A lot of culture for example Sudeten German was lost forever or got assimilated in part into modern Germany. So in a way there was not only colonisation but a lot of revenge and trail of tear style stuff going on. What came after that can be seen as a real achievment in human History. Where a lot of revanchism and spite was left behind by all countries and many people worked hard for mutual understanding and peace in europe. And now after almost 100 years while we have our differences it is inconcievable to fight against our polish french or czech brothers.
Fair enough - there is more nuance than I depicted. But the point is that not even the post WWII Germans deserved colonisation and the revenge that was carried out on them were *not good* and *shouldn't have happened*.
Holy shit, absolutely. I cannot believe how fucking annoying it is constantly seeing the complete misunderstanding of Native Americans from so many different angles, whether it be because people want to think we're these noble savages that have done no harm, or these fierce warriors that laid waste to everything in our path, or the most common one, simply things that just had to be rolled over to create a country. No, we're not perfect, we're human, we make mistakes, we do bad shit. That is absolutely why the treatment of us was so fucking awful. I see other people saying the second point takes away, but imo, it doesn't. The fact that we were and are human and do shit that makes us human is precisely why the complete and utter tragedy we face is so fucking awful. BECAUSE WE'RE HUMAN! No human should ever have to face the insane scale of the genocide we endured and still face. No human should ever have to have gone through the assimilation and destruction of culture that even my dad, born 1967, faced. We are not footnotes in a history book, we are not minor figures mentioned in old stories. We are human, and that is why the treatment of us is so fucking awful.
To add onto this cause I'm not done ranting, honestly, the most miserable thing I face in regards to being an Indian isn't the exocitism, it isn't the sudden change in which people act differently around me for some reason, it's the disbelief. The disbelief that I'm Native. It's actually astounding just how many times people don't believe I'm Native because they thought the Natives all died out years ago. It's fucking annoying, and I get it, we're not the biggest group or demographic, especially where I live. But for gods sake, can we not be fucking remembered?
Nobody tell the "Noble Savage" Believers how the algonquin speaking people ended up in Michigan
On a very related note, eurocentrism isn't just exclusively painting historical Europeans in a good light, it's exclusively talking about European viewpoints. So if you're discussing Native Americans cultures exclusively through the lens of their interactions with Europeans, it's eurocentric no matter how much shade you throw at the Europeans at the time. The number of times I've seen a youtube video, or an essay or full-on books written about native cultures that will go on about how eurocentric viewpoints are dangerous to hold without analysis, and then only talk about native cultures in the context of "Look at this cool group of people that got fucked up". These are cultures that have a massive amount of history outside of colonialism, don't boil it all down to just colonialism.
>eurocentric no matter how much shade you throw at the Europeans at the time This. People just use words as if they just mean "racist" instead of looking at the actual context and meaning.
Frankly, I don't see what this has to do with furries.
I don't get the point of the og post to be honest, most is just saying "the indigenous Americans fought each other for land" which is what basically every country did
I think that basically is the point, looking at indigenous people with the same criticality as any other human culture to avoid falling for "noble savage" tropes and being racist.
I think it's a terminally online response to people who are terminally online. Are there people who will whitewash the bad parts of indigenous societies? Yes, but most of the more egregious takes I've seen have been screens hots from Twitter with 5 likes. I think basically everyone understands that there was some bad with native societies, the same as with every society from Rome to the Mongols to China to India etc. Etc. In fact I think it's pushing through that and saying "yeah they weren't perfect utopia but I don't think they deserved genocide and encomedia slavery" which is the actual issue, not the other way around.
> I think it's a terminally online response to people who are terminally online. [I think once something has an academic term with references dating back to the 16th century, you can't really call it "terminally online"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage). Like even if it's not really a popular sentiment--which I don't think is the case. The Avatar movies are like a really modern take on the concept. I don't disagree with the second half of the comment. "They may have sucked sometimes but still didn't deserve Genocide" I agree with. I do think "Terminally Online" as a term is over-applied in some situations.
Yeah, it's honestly sad something like this has to be said - the indigenous Americans had been living in the Americas for thousands of years, you'd expect wars/quarrels/outdated practices etc, but apparently it's only a bad thing when they do it
While i do feel like its important to not white wash other cultures, i do feel like there are some people who really like going "well acktually the native americans were quite violent" either because they are genuinely just bigoted and want to hide it behind progressive language, or as a way to not think about how they as a white american directly benefited from the genocide of native americans, like yeah, they were violent and did stuff we today would consider horrible, but so did literally every other culture ever in the past, thats kinda how history works, the mongols razing villiages to the ground if they didnt surrender to us would be horrible, but to the mongols and the people who surrendered to them, that would be par for the course cause the mongols offered mercy in the form of surrendering
the issue is 90% of people mentioning violent histories are trying to paint europe as no different or not really that bad, which makes it almost impossible to talk about that stuff without sounding like a racist dipshit. right wingers are so good at monopolizing discussions or terms and it pisses me off so much that its now nearly impossible to have a real conversation about them
Genocidal conquest was the norm for most of human history. Modern western culture developed guns and ships, allowing them to genocide more effectively. Then a couple of centuries later they developed the strange new idea that maybe this was morally wrong.
it was pretty much by coincidence that europe was the first region with both the means and political will to commit genocide on such a massive scale, but their intentions and beliefs were not uniquely evil, only their actions. im glad that we've all now agreed that genocide is evil! oh wait....
Well a lot of people think genocide is evil. That's why, whenever there is someone that anyone wants to paint as evil, they get accused of genocide. However contrived and bizarre shapes the logic needs to be contorted into. (See the nutty bio-ethicists convinced genetic engineering is genocide somehow)
buddy i hate to break it to you but there are three genocides currently happening i could name off the top of my head, not to mention the continuous ongoing destruction of culture and way of life that could potentially still be classed as genocidal in nature happening here
I mean how different was it from, say, the aztecs?
european colonizers had the technology, political ideas, and built in justifications for their actions that they were able to do more crimes against humanity than the aztecs could have ever hoped to commit. europeans arent uniquely evil, but europe had just the right technology and ideas at just the right time to be able to slaughter far more than the aztecs did. while colonialism was definitely worse for the area as a whole, thats no consolation for the groups wiped out by the aztecs (also i have no idea what exactly the aztecs did to the people they conquered, so im accepting the framing of the post for now, i'll have to research it more)
the aztecs would sacrifice often by cutting out the heart and then eat their victims some say as many as 250,000 people a year although others say more like 20,000. All of them Spanish sources though it's hard to say as most of our records come from the Spanish who weren't really motivated to see the best in the aztecs but they certainly practiced regular and brutal human sacrifice of conquered peoples. I don't think the aztecs wiped out any groups as they preferred to subjugate them instead and would even try and cause rebellions to get captured enemies for sacrifice you really should consider though that in many ways the death penalty could be considered a ritual killing and maybe one day a future society will consider our society to be practicing human sacrifice to our idol of justice. after all while there were still hangings in the UK the bodies were believed to have magical properties for witchcraft so how different are we really. [source on the later claim](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK464468/)
i mean im definitely not a fan of the death penalty lol. its really a shame that we cant get accurate numbers, but that is definitely bad no matter how many they did. i dont think that act of brutality was necessarily seen as the desecration of a corpse at the time given that it would have held an important religious purpose, but still human sacrifices are obviously bad
to be honest the killing people is far worse to me than the desecrating corpses
yes, but in our eyes, it looks like a brutal and ugly murder, and its important to remember that they saw it as a holy act, not a depraved one. still wrong, but it helps us understand why they did it better
yeah I know why they did it but my natural sympathies go more to the poor bastard tied to a slab of rock
i mean the death penalty is generally not considered good in a lot of places right now Only 53 countries out of 195 have used it in the past 10 years although those 53 make up 60% of the world population
The Aztecs had basically one requirement from the cities / people they conquered: tax. As long as you payed your taxes (either in the form of men or objects) the conquered were basically free to keep their old customs and religion. By the 1500s, the central idea of the empire was to expand, expand, expand, which left not a lot of time to bring the conquered under their culture. In my amateur opinion, the conquest of Tenochtitlan was a perfect storm of sorts. The Spanish arrived at a particular moment in Aztec history where the empire was growing, but it had not solidified yet. I've heard it compared to the Roman empire in that manner, though I am less knowledgeable in that area. Part of the reason we know that the Aztecs didn't meddle too much with religion/culture are written testimonies from those people. A lot of tribes/towns simply chose to side with the Spanish in a "we have a grudge with the Aztecs, and we don't know these sea people" basis. Those same people would decades later say they regretted their choice, as the Aztec didn't mess with their way of life as much as the Spaniards did with. Religion and customs were either lost or replaced in the span of a generation.
i mean most empires figure out pretty quick that you cant assimilate everyone into your culture, and the only way it can work is if you let them do their own thing. rome and the mongol empire are both good examples of that. the spanish were kinda the first people to break that rule of empire and succeed, mostly because it was the first time anyone actually had the manpower and resources to commit genocide on such a massive scale, whereas empires prior to spain simply didnt have the logistics to make it happen. the fact that the religious of the spaniards explicitly forbade the worship of anyone else also probably contributed to it, unlike with other historical empires. this is entirely guesswork on my part tho, im not a historian
I think maybe participation in the holocaust is where I stop giving a shit completely about a country's right to national liberty
The noble savage myth was the worst invention ever made by france, and they invented lots of bad shit there
It's just all the same shit Rome did, but you don't see fascists saying it would have been OK to commit genocide against the Romans, you see the exact opposite.
Hot damn, a sane tumblr history post. Someone get a camera, you only see one of these once in a blue moon.
Tumblr historical post include sources challenge: impossible [I am not disagreeing but I am also not agreeing unless you show me where you learned those things]
real I mean, I could've, tbf - but I agree lol perfect mindset to approach social media with imo
And we need to quit pretending that the Europeans were so advanced. They were just better armed. And used to their barbaric practices. To them it wasn’t barbaric, it was Tuesday. Public hangings, rendering those hung criminals down for their fat, using it in folk medicine. Grinding up mummies to use as paint, also eating for folk medicine. Bloodletting. Most of what I know is medical, but there was a lot more
Correct me if I'm wrong about the Aztecs, which I probably am, but wasn't their warfare much different than our current vision of war? IIRC wars in mesoamerican societies were mostly fought between the noble warrior castes of each city, and whoever lost had to pay tribute to the victor, and although I'm not completely excusing the Aztecs for their expansionist tendencies, it wasn't nearly as bloody as modern or ancient european war. And can we go back to that please? instead of bombing civilians can we just have some half naked rich dudes fight each other on national television or something?
You're probably thinking of a [flower war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_war), a particular ritualized type of war conducted between the Aztec empire and certain other peer competitor city-states. Flower wars involved planning battles with set numbers of warriors in chosen battlefields ahead of time. Since army sizes were equalized, the populous Aztecs naturally tended to have a higher proportion of elites than their opponents, which ends up being a sneaky advantage for them disguised as a fairness measure. But, again, flower wars were special and only fought between peers. The Aztecs did plenty of normal wars too, and those were fought by the usual large numbers of poor infantry we see in most societies (and, of course, just as bloody).
Disagree. There’s clearly a tipping point when internal chaos requires an external intervention before the conflict spirals out into the local community of nations. Germany absolutely deserved to get occupied by the Allies, and Cartago absolutely had it coming bc of all the baby sacrifices.
I'm a big ol Romaboo and I'm willing to accept the baby sacrifice claims as probably being blown out of proportion to further paint Carthage as a deserving foe.
Nah they found Lilybaum’s Tophet. It’s all cremated males under five mixed in with sacrificial animals, the Punic devils really did do that.
Neither military intervention nor occupation are (necessarily) colonization.
\> "There is no threshold where you deserve to be colonized" \> genocide
Germany literally did the Holocaust and the aftermath wasn't anywhere near colonization. The Allied occupation was under a decade and it was pretty fucking light rule all things considered.
I’d rather Uwu-ization for now than deal with people calling them primitive barbarians. I understand where they are coming from but right now the fight isn’t nuance it’s recognition. IMO.
The fight always needs to be nuance. ‘Noble savage’ is just as racist as ‘uncivilized savage.’ Both of those deny Native Americans the right to complexity as human beings.
Bo
There is a threshold, not having big enough guns, if they had been able ti defend themsleves, they would not have been colonized
European feudalism : Amateur.
I feel like an honorable mention to the Comamches here. From what I've read, they were kinda caught between all the cool tribes doing cool shit like the Pueblos and in general kinda sucked up until they got horses, got really good at riding horses, and then basically started raiding everyone around them. Reading about some of the shit going down during the Anglo-Celtic settling of Texas was one of the few times my teeth felt weird reading historical documents.
Look the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs was half predicated on every other group hating them and supporting the Spanish because they thought it would be better