> If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
All the rest are good points, but this is an emotional non-sequitur. The reason we don't have context to judge is because we live lives of comfort today, we have no idea what it was like to move into the Wild West and the danger and hardship that entailed.
Of course I agree genocide is bad, that doesn't make me equipped to judge people who lived 200 years ago based on hazy historical generalities.
> It was never moralistically portrayed like you seem to want.
How else do you portray an intentional and centuries long systematic genocide of an entire continent of nations? How do you portray the greatest genocide in human history?
> But definitely it was mentioned that 90% of Indians were killed by European diseases, sometimes intentionally delivered like the trail of tears, and additionally whenever gold was rumored to be on a site the indians would be pushed out.
Nothing you listed indicate an actual genocide. You didn't read about actual hunting and raping and exterminating of natives that happened all across the country? You didn't read about actual statehood laws ( majority white ) which encouraged settlers to kill off the natives. You didn't read about the US government working with railroad tycoons to kill off the natives to build railroads?
As I said, if the natives were in charge, how do you think the history will be written? We'd be portrayed as monsters far worse than nazis. That was my point. History is written by the victors. Which you proved with your comment but yet deny.
> You better believe the interior was dangerous before railroads and highways and air conditioning, especially the mountains and deserts of the American southwest. It's only comparatively recently that many of these places have been able to support large populations
Very. In fact many books about the rise of new migrants into the Mid-west are documented with immense amounts of violence at the hands of native plain tribes, specifically the Comanche [1] who were no joke the most well refined killing force on horseback on Earth not seen since the Mongolians in their peak.
It a really fascinating, and bloody history. I live in Colorado, which is where the Arapahoe tribe was centered and much is named after them to this day. After I arrived I looked into who they were and what they did which was marked with a before-and-after with an alliance with the Lakota, Dakota, and Cheyenne tribes who only together were able to push the Comanche back to the Southern Plains as the Comanche did not care who they raided and everything was fair game.
Its pretty insane to think that not that long ago this mainly raiding nomadic tribe had the influence they did on this continent, and many Western settlers were lured into the Midwest/South only to suffer a hapless fate as so many and were captured, killed, raped, enslaved. And acted as a sort of buffer kill zone while settlement further south in Texas was taking place.
While I'm not trying to marginalize the plight of Native Americans, I even actively directly helped them with my fintech startup as my co-founder made it a priority to do so, I cannot help but think that this current political atmosphere has been very ignorant view on just what exactly was taking place as Western migration was taking place, and the amount of countless stories of barbaric violence that will never be told because no one lived to tell about it.
It doesn't justify the violence that has come since from Westerners, but it also should be noted that the thing we should be against is institutionalized violence and not just hyper-focus on those acts of a certain racial/ethnic group in Society but ask how we got here and what to do about it moving forward.
> And my country (Germany) was not even involved in the slave trade, or much of colonization. Yes, if you look down far enough in history, you will find violence and all sorts of ugly things.
Your nation quite literally carried out a genocidal project against non-white people so at this point I'm not even sure what you're arguing.
> Our history with Native Americans is not a morally uplifting one. It is also not a genocide.
What a weird thing to say. Of course it was a genocide, that some tribes may have been slavers or that a meager remainder of their people and culture somehow survives in reservations doesn't make what Europeans and the early US did to their people and culture any less terrible, or not a genocide.
> It's important not to leave out the fact the warfare was two-way.
I’m pretty sure the Navajos did not send settlers and army on death marches. Nor did the tribes start massive programs of sterilisation, or child removal and cultural destruction. The US did that. The settlers did that. The first governor of California literally stated:
> a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the indian race becomes extinct
Because settlers wanted the place, and natives were in the way. Or could be used for forced labour (see: Act for the Government and Protection of Indians 1850)
> It's just too easy to fall into the "settlers exterminating natives because they're in the way" narrative, when that's not what happened.
Isn’t it? Settlers took over land, and when tribes got inconvenient settlers moved to extermination and called in the army.
The US made a bunch of empty treaties and broke them just as fast, doing nothing or even encouraging the destruction of the lifestyle of numerous tribes.
> But let's not romanticize Native American culture either.
Absolutely. But lets also not pretend that the natives were racially motivated genocidal maniacs either.
> The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times.
Sure. But they need to do so in order to survive. And lets not forget that we hunted the comanche like animals and wiped them out. Settlers were encouraged to hunt indians and bring their scalps in exchange of money.
> There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture.
Even if they were the most peaceful buddhists, they would have been wiped out. We wanted their land and they simply had no choice. It's pretty idiotic to blame the comanches for fighting back.
> It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves.
It was wrong no matter what century you are in.
> We simply don't have the context to judge them.
If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
What happened to the natives was the greatest extermination campaign in history. The holocaust was a joke compared to what happened to the natives.
To emphasize this point, there are more jews in the US than there are natives...
> especially with a coda that seems to serve no real purpose but to denigrate the victims of it.
I'm not denigrating Native Americans by rejecting the racist trope that they were too simplistic and culturally at peace with nature to ever destabilize the environment they were in.
I think there is a big gulf between how we are interpreting this thread that I can't bridge. European colonization of the Americas was marked by many, many acts of horrific violence, regardless of whether they were the sole cause of bison extinction.
> What I'm trying to say is you have a very one-sided view of history.
What do you mean by "one-sided"? What are the "sides" involved here?
> You've already decided that the purpose of militias was to "kill Indians". You didn't back that up at all.
Why would I have to back it up? It's a very basic fact which nobody is disputing, not even you. You feel that the killing of natives by militias was justified at least in part in self-defense, you have inferred from my choice of words that I disagree with you, and you're unhappy about that.
But you haven't proposed an alternative explanation to whom the militias were meant to kill (if not native americans, who? Other settlers? Bears?) or why (if not because the settlers were squatting on indigenous land, then why? Family feud? Religion? The color of their hats?) If you do have an alternative explanation for the existence of militias, now would be a good time to make your case.
he failed! suggesting the psychological appeal of knowing that I grew up in a town that was violently ripped from native americans makes me feel AWFUL, what kind of psychotic asshole do you need to be to actually know about the genocide you live on top of and then to feel pride in that? People are generally not bothered by their own colonialist history because they're shockingly ignorant of what it actually means to go somewhere and eradicate an entire culture. But to suggest that these people are actually intimitely aware of such conquest and that it there is "undeniable appeal" to feeling "proud" of that is revolting.
> Mass extermination never occurred in the United States, what are you even talking about?
You've made me curious about how the American media describes US history. It's interesting that the mass extermination of Native Americans is referred to as the "Indian Wars". It sounds almost patriotic.
> Forced labor, in the 1930s through 1960s? No. Just no.
Right. Because with the Indian Citizenship Act, the US magically transformed into a different country and therefore shouldn't be held accountable for anything that happened before 1930. But Russia...
> Every side was indeed awful, but Nazi Germany's and Imperial Japan's actions in particular were so unprecedentedly awful that far-future generations in those countries probably would've eventually had a reckoning and realized they were the worst actors in the war, like what eventually happened in the US when it comes to treatment of Native Americans, propping up brutal dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, and other things.
You honestly think Americans are aware of even the most common atrocities committed in the name of colonization? My read is a) they mostly don't and b) there is an ongoing effort to victim-blame Native Americans going back centuries.
The alternate reality where Nazi Deutschland won would likely similarly deal with the occupied USA/UK/etc like the US treated the natives.
>They could have created a different union, or struck out on their own. The idea they had no other options is, well, ahistorical.
Bullshit. The land is owned and controlled by the United States government. Do you really think a bunch of settlers were ever going to take up arms against government? No. Furthermore there is no evidence that anything else was even considered.
>A lot of the early European settlers in the US were fleeing religious persecution.
What's your point?
Some of them turned around and treated people who didn't fit in with them even worse than they themselves had been treated when in Europe. I can think of a couple groups who, in retrospect, the natives should have killed on day 1.
>They were killed by what the settlers brought with them. No, it was not deliberate (#), but nevertheless, their arrival is what killed most of the natives.
That's all I meant to clarify. You'd be surprised how many people today actually think that the native population was wiped out through deliberate and intentional action. Your wording made it seem you believed that as well, but that seemed to not be the case.
>Obviously the settlers would have preferred to keep the natives alive since then they would not have needed to ship vast quantities
> I feel the need to show being realistic about the past instead of having an emotional response.
What's wrong with an emotional response to an atrocity? Is it irrational to cry over the Holocaust because, hey, the Tsars didn't some pretty bad pogroms, too? No, emotional responses are perfectly fine and are a normal mode of thinking. Your fetishization of reason is dangerous and echoes the same rhetoric that enabled these atrocities: oh, they're not people, they're savages because X, so cut off their hands if they don't bring enough silver. The correct response here is to denounce colonialism, not to say, "oh, hey, it's not that bad because other people have done bad things."
>I’m not really sure how this argument justifies anything.
My argument is not that europeans are in the right because they inflicted upon others what those others inflicted upon still others. My argument is that nobody has a clean record. If your position is that what happened to natives is wrong, then what the natives did to each other is also wrong.
>I’m not sure where you are getting this. At what point is an occupation over?
What I'm saying is you will be hard pressed to find a territory that has been continually occupied by one group since the arrival of humans. At some point each territory was probably wrested from some prior group via the usual means. Exceptions apply. Isolated islands come to mind.
> "Why do you even feel the need to justify the murdering of the natives?"
Wait, what? Thanks for going all "think of the children" on me man, where if I'm not with you I'm for murdering the natives. You are (apparently) representative of the moral absolutism problem I am talking about.
I'm not defending the extermination of native American natives.
The problem with this article is that it cast native American society as a utopian paradise, and the white European invaders as evil, ruthless, and completely without moral compunction. This sort of historical revisionist "blackwashing" doesn't help anyone - because it has not fairly represented either side. The natives were not utopian societies, nor were they savages deserving of murder. The Europeans were not ruthless monsters, nor were they benevolent conquerors. To represent this situation as black and white is both ignorant and unproductive.
By "blackwashing" I mean skewing the facts and injecting calls to emotion where it doesn't belong, to try and make something seem worse - where whitewashing is the opposite (skewing the facts and injecting emotion to make it seems better)
[edit] Also, to address specifically why the moral absolutism is a problem: by casting the Europeans as ruthlessly evil, you have removed any deep introspection into why the murder of the natives occurred. You've transformed a complex human situation into a fairy tale - where the bad guys need no explanation. You've also effectively discounted the possibility that bad things can happen for relatively benign (or at least, not overtly evil) goals.
Not to mention dehumanization is inherently dangerous - even if the person you're dehumanizing is the "bad guy".
We have some idea, but what's your point? Because life is difficult, let's kill a bunch of indian men,women and children and scalp them for money?
Using your argument, we don't know the hardships the germans and the nazis went through either, so we can't judge their actions.
Do you see how retarded you sound?
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