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Yes, we were born in blood...

So, let's go back an re write history a bit. The Europeans come to the new world, see it populated, and so don't try to colonize it. They trade with the natives, but otherwise leave them alone.

So, today what is the US and Canada is instead a continent divided among hundreds of tribes of people still living a stone age existence. There is some trade among them, but little unity as they represent hundreds of different languages and cultures. North America is the poorest area of the world, poverty worse than Africa. Disease is rampant. Periodic famines wipe out populations. Moreover, warfare has progressed from bows and arrows to AK 47s. Bands of warriors roam, raping and pillaging, much as is happening in Africa. There are few roads in North America, fewer cars and trucks, no electricity except in a few larger towns, and no modern medical care. The area produces nothing much of value, so trade is limited.

:lamo Dark people are doomed without the Holy Europeans!

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Nazis were able to overwhelm the democracies and take over the region. The "master race" has wiped out most of the Jews, most of the gays, all of the Gypsies. Europe is living in an Orwellian dystopia much like the one that exists in North Korea, except that George Orwell was executed as an enemy of the state long before he did much writing.

Except the Soviet Union would have won, and then been promptly nuked by Britain. The US ensured WW2 ended sooner, but the Allies would have won without you.

Cultures, like organisms, are subject to selection of the fittest. That's how modern societies evolve. Don't cry for the societies that have fallen by the wayside, but celebrate the ones that have survived to pass their culture on to future generations. Life is much better than it would have been had the colonizers just stayed home.

Social Darwinism FTW!
 
:lamo Dark people are doomed without the Holy Europeans!

No one said anything about skin color but you.

Except the Soviet Union would have won, and then been promptly nuked by Britain. The US ensured WW2 ended sooner, but the Allies would have won without you.

Except that the atom bomb was invented by the United States. The Soviet Union might have won, to be sure, but then what would have been the result of that? Peaceful democracy?



Social Darwinism FTW!

You can ignore it if you want.
 
:lamo Dark people are doomed without the Holy Europeans!



Except the Soviet Union would have won, and then been promptly nuked by Britain. The US ensured WW2 ended sooner, but the Allies would have won without you.



Social Darwinism FTW!

How, exactly, would the Soviets have won without the massive amount of aid they got from the Western democracies?

Especially considering the U-Boats were only narrowly overcome even with American naval support.,
 
No one said anything about skin color but you.

You believe the natives of the Americas would be unable to progress without being enslaved or massacred by Europeans. You may not have mentioned skin colour, but what you said was still pretty racist.

Except that the atom bomb was invented by the United States. The Soviet Union might have won, to be sure, but then what would have been the result of that? Peaceful democracy?

It was invented in the US, not by the US, and the US could not have done without the, at least, the British and Canadians.

You can ignore it if you want.

Nah, couple that with your opinion on the indigenous Americans, and you'd get along just peachy if the Nazi's had actually won WW2.
 
I never even remotely implied that native Americans were angels - where did you pull that out of? Actually, never mind. But I'm curious what exactly your argument has now become by trying to use that strawman: That native Americans were as bad as all other humans throughout all of history have been, and therefore they somehow deserved to be exterminated en masse?
No, the implication came from all the blame you were assessing only the Europeans/Colonists, for EVERYTHING. No mention anywhere of atrocities by Native Americans... Europeans apparent all little Hitlers whose main and purposeful intent was trying to exterminate the seemingly always innocent Indians... not how it was at all, was trying to bring a little needed balance into the lopsided picture you were painting.

You know when you use words, they have definitions. Exterminate = to destroy or kill (a group of animals, people, etc.) completely … never happened. So first, you need to learn the definitions of words like genocide, exterminate... hard to have a proper historical conversation if you are going to be so loose in usage.

I don't disagree with anything in the OP. What I replied to was the comment in post #2: "Don't cry for the societies that have [been conquered, dispossessed and largely exterminated], but celebrate the ones that [did all that]." I'm fairly sure that if Dittohead were to go back in time he actually would not condone or participate in or celebrate the conquest and genocide, so I would assume that he simply didn't think that one all the way through.
If I remember correctly, what caught my attention was you blaming Europeans for a genocide [the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation ] a plague they could not have anticipated that wiped out about 90% of the Native population. Felt that outright and biased misrepresentation of the facts needed some correction.

Denying the brutality of our history (as many have and still do) or sugar-coating it (like the attempts to portray indigenous people as hopeless savages and the genocide as a good thing compared with some imaginary alternative) are not very laudable approaches. Recognising the reality and trying to justify or dismiss it as being just 'what everyone was like' is an improvement on that, though it still sets a very low bar. The good and great things that have come from the US (or Australia in my case) should certainly be celebrated with national holidays and suchlike; but there should be just as much recognition and reflection on all the suffering and greed in our histories also - such as a national Invasion Day, for starters.
Yes, and denying the brutality of the losers in history just because they lost, somehow leaving their part completely out of the equation is equally a bad accounting of the history. Where there are warts, scars and scabs all parties must fess up if we are to learn from our histories. Your genocide fantasy is outrageous, I would say bordering on disgusting with implying it purposeful. You cannot possibly support it rationally.

The idea of trying to look at the distant past with 21st century sensibilities is as unfair as it is unrealistic. If everybody of the time did it, that was the common mindset. It was the West that reflected on such events, determined finally that Imperialism, domination of other nations by force, probably was not right, enslaving others also not right... and the West, slowly but as trendsetters, began to set things up more properly, mostly steady improvement, with some mighty jolts [like the world wars], for all mankind. Sure we can look back at it now and say what was wrong, but it was more the rule of the jungle then, true dog eat dog, with the better being the one not being eaten.
 
With very little European contact, I think the indigenous people of north America's cultures would've evolved and progressed. It wouldn't have paralleled European society or culture, though they would've progressed in some fashion.

I read a book some time ago whose main thesis was that the Americas suffered from geography, namely the Central American isthmus, which fettered the spread of technology in the pre-Colombian Americas.
 
Correct.


The single biggest reason the conquest by the colonists was inevitable isn't guns, it is agriculture.


I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but the amount of wilderness required to support one hunter-gatherer family could, using colonial era agriculture, feed hundreds of colonial families.


We were able to immigrate and breed numbers they couldn't match as long as they stuck with hunter-gatherer, slash-and-burn subsistence strategies. That's the main reason we took over.


Some Natives, some of my ancestors among them, recognized this early and adopted Colonial style farming and living, intermarried with the colonists and largely avoided being shipped off to the Reservations.


The guns and cannon didn't hurt, either, but the Natives obtained and used those as fast as they could also, and it didn't make the difference. We had long-term numbers, and large-scale organization, made possible by relatively advanced agriculture.

are you kidding, no, european disease is what did it. How exactly does "couldn't match" matter if there's no killing going on? They just peacefully coexist if that's the case. So even if your theory were correct, it doesn't account for the drastic population *loss* among the population already here

I've taken a class on epidemics and from all sources i've seen the native population dropped by 90% where they came into contact with europeans. That includes mexico, south america, and the gradual western expansion. Such a loss within a half century is *impossible* from anything other than disease they had no immunity to. It was so obvious that the british even used smallpox as a biological weapon when they captured forts
 
No, the implication came from all the blame you were assessing only the Europeans/Colonists, for EVERYTHING. No mention anywhere of atrocities by Native Americans... Europeans apparent all little Hitlers whose main and purposeful intent was trying to exterminate the seemingly always innocent Indians... not how it was at all, was trying to bring a little needed balance into the lopsided picture you were painting.

You know when you use words, they have definitions. Exterminate = to destroy or kill (a group of animals, people, etc.) completely … never happened. So first, you need to learn the definitions of words like genocide, exterminate... hard to have a proper historical conversation if you are going to be so loose in usage.

If I remember correctly, what caught my attention was you blaming Europeans for a genocide [the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation ] a plague they could not have anticipated that wiped out about 90% of the Native population. Felt that outright and biased misrepresentation of the facts needed some correction.

Yes, and denying the brutality of the losers in history just because they lost, somehow leaving their part completely out of the equation is equally a bad accounting of the history. Where there are warts, scars and scabs all parties must fess up if we are to learn from our histories. Your genocide fantasy is outrageous, I would say bordering on disgusting with implying it purposeful. You cannot possibly support it rationally.

The idea of trying to look at the distant past with 21st century sensibilities is as unfair as it is unrealistic. If everybody of the time did it, that was the common mindset. It was the West that reflected on such events, determined finally that Imperialism, domination of other nations by force, probably was not right, enslaving others also not right... and the West, slowly but as trendsetters, began to set things up more properly, mostly steady improvement, with some mighty jolts [like the world wars], for all mankind. Sure we can look back at it now and say what was wrong, but it was more the rule of the jungle then, true dog eat dog, with the better being the one not being eaten.

they didn't stop because it "wasn't right," but because it was no longer profitable, necessary, or worth the effort. The british and other empires collapsed not out of pity for the conquered, come on
 
are you kidding, no, european disease is what did it. How exactly does "couldn't match" matter if there's no killing going on? They just peacefully coexist if that's the case. So even if your theory were correct, it doesn't account for the drastic population *loss* among the population already here

I've taken a class on epidemics and from all sources i've seen the native population dropped by 90% where they came into contact with europeans. That includes mexico, south america, and the gradual western expansion. Such a loss within a half century is *impossible* from anything other than disease they had no immunity to. It was so obvious that the british even used smallpox as a biological weapon when they captured forts

Yeah... and most of those who died did so without ever seeing a European. The Americas did give Europe syphilis, however.

 
Yeah... and most of those who died did so without ever seeing a European. The Americas did give Europe syphilis, however.


if native americans had traveled to europe for the purposes of conquest and pillage and genocide, *in addition to* bringing their diseases, you may have a point. As it stands, they are wholly innocent re: syphilis in the old world, because the natives could neither force the europeans to come where they didn't belong, nor to return to europe, and once they did return, to further spread the diseases thru war (it was called the "french disease" because french invasions and what truly spread it throughout the continent)
 
if native americans had traveled to europe for the purposes of conquest and pillage and genocide, *in addition to* bringing their diseases, you may have a point. As it stands, they are wholly innocent re: syphilis in the old world, because the natives could neither force the europeans to come where they didn't belong, nor to return to europe, and once they did return, to further spread the diseases thru war (it was called the "french disease" because french invasions and what truly spread it throughout the continent)

It is apparent you didn't read the article.
 
they didn't stop because it "wasn't right," but because it was no longer profitable, necessary, or worth the effort. The british and other empires collapsed not out of pity for the conquered, come on
Oh I think you are pretty much wrong on why Britain stopped with the slave trade. Read that history first, then get back to me. We in the US were already trying to limit it as much as possible and still have union with the Constitution, but dont kid yourself, it was already on the wane. Yes, with a cheap influx of labor from Europe and mechanization, that helped pushed the idea as well, but it was driven by people of conscience, mostly Christians and against the "science" of those days, Social Darwinism.

The collapse of the British Empire had many a different reasonings little to do with their views on slavery.
 
No, the implication came from all the blame you were assessing only the Europeans/Colonists, for EVERYTHING. No mention anywhere of atrocities by Native Americans... Europeans apparent all little Hitlers whose main and purposeful intent was trying to exterminate the seemingly always innocent Indians... not how it was at all, was trying to bring a little needed balance into the lopsided picture you were painting.

You know when you use words, they have definitions. Exterminate = to destroy or kill (a group of animals, people, etc.) completely … never happened. So first, you need to learn the definitions of words like genocide, exterminate... hard to have a proper historical conversation if you are going to be so loose in usage.

If I remember correctly, what caught my attention was you blaming Europeans for a genocide [the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation ] a plague they could not have anticipated that wiped out about 90% of the Native population. Felt that outright and biased misrepresentation of the facts needed some correction.

Yes, and denying the brutality of the losers in history just because they lost, somehow leaving their part completely out of the equation is equally a bad accounting of the history. Where there are warts, scars and scabs all parties must fess up if we are to learn from our histories. Your genocide fantasy is outrageous, I would say bordering on disgusting with implying it purposeful. You cannot possibly support it rationally.

Look, many of the Europeans who went over were good and decent people; religious minorities fleeing oppression, settlers seeking challenge and a better life... even missionaries wanting to teach the 'savages' and save their souls without harming their bodies. Likewise many of the native Americans were were as small-minded or greedy or power-hungry or just plain cruel as anyone else in the world. As far as I'm aware no-one in the thread has said or even implied anything different. But that doesn't change the facts here:

> Europeans directly killed documented tens and most likely hundreds of thousands of native Americans. For example over ten thousand died in the Trail of Tears alone. That's a mere twenty years (1830-50) in a specific region of the civilized United States.

> Deaths caused indirectly due to dispossession and deprivation of land, and the associated incalculable social disruption, were likely an order of magnitude greater still. Cold and malnutrition, along with otherwise preventable diseases, are far more effective killers than swords and muskets. Increased infant mortality and the elderly would obviously be the biggest factors here.

> Since limited exposure obviously means limited infection rates, and hence slower and more controllable rates of spreading, it is inescapably true that had the Europeans restricted themselves to a handful of coastal trading settlements, their introduced diseases would have killed far fewer native Americans. A quarter as many? A tenth? Even less? You yourself pointed out that 1492 wasn't the first time Europeans had reached the continent, but it did mark the beginning of deep incursions and conquests which soon spanned the entire continent, forcing widespread and rapid exposure to their diseases.

> From the combination of these factors, native populations declined from a (modern broad consensus) estimated 50+ million to well below 10 million​

So besides objecting that the Europeans shouldn't be held responsible for the 'accidental' consequences of their invasion, conquest and dispossession, I'm really not understanding the point that you're trying to make here.

That it's wrong to use the word exterminate, because 'only' 80-90% of the native population died?

That it's wrong to use the word genocide, because many Europeans really would have preferred that a quarter or a third of the natives had remained alive, to spare them the hassle of shipping slaves over from Africa?

Fair enough I guess, but they're rather feeble points of semantic quibbling if you ask me.
 
You believe the natives of the Americas would be unable to progress without being enslaved or massacred by Europeans. You may not have mentioned skin colour, but what you said was still pretty racist.



It was invented in the US, not by the US, and the US could not have done without the, at least, the British and Canadians.



Nah, couple that with your opinion on the indigenous Americans, and you'd get along just peachy if the Nazi's had actually won WW2.

The native Americans were hunter gatherers with a stone age culture. They were fractured into hundreds of different tribes, each with its own language and culture. Those observations are true. Race and color of skin had nothing to do with it.
 
The native Americans were hunter gatherers with a stone age culture. They were fractured into hundreds of different tribes, each with its own language and culture. Those observations are true. Race and color of skin had nothing to do with it.
The natives had an intricate and vast trade network throughout the Americans. They also built some pretty impressive cities and were proficient in agriculture. They were a bit more than hunter gathers with a stone age culture.
 
For anyone who otherwise finds themselves unwilling to learn about non-Eurasian civilizations, this might be a good place to start...


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica is a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northernCosta Rica, within which pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.[1][2] It is one of six areas in the world where ancient civilization arose independently, and the second in the Americas along with Norte Chico (Caral-Supe) in present-day northern coastal Peru.

As a cultural area, Mesoamerica is defined by a mosaic of cultural traits developed and shared by its indigenous cultures. Beginning as early as 7000 BC, the domestication of cacao, maize, beans, tomato, squash and chili, as well as the turkey and dog, caused a transition from paleo-Indian hunter-gatherer tribal grouping to the organization of sedentary agricultural villages.
 
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This problem persists because they are ran by leftists.

Correction: we have the same problem in every major city, period, no matter who runs them.

I suggest reality. It might scare you at first, but you may find you'll come to like it!
 
The native Americans were hunter gatherers with a stone age culture. They were fractured into hundreds of different tribes, each with its own language and culture. Those observations are true. Race and color of skin had nothing to do with it.

You believe they would be unable to progress without being conquered. That simple exposure to outside influences through trade would be insufficient for them to advance.
 
The natives had an intricate and vast trade network throughout the Americans. They also built some pretty impressive cities and were proficient in agriculture. They were a bit more than hunter gathers with a stone age culture.

There was some trade between tribes. Some of them planted squash, corn and beans. Most of them did not practice agriculture. The Aztecs did build cities at the southern tip of South America.

None of them had a written language. They had only a rudimentary understanding of mathematics. There was no literature, of course, or philosophy. They had not invented the wheel. They were basically a collection of stone age hunter gatherers.

Had the Europeans left them to their own devices, they'd still be divided into hundreds of different tribes speaking hundreds of different languages. It would have been hundreds of years before they would have coalesced into anything like modern nations. There is no such thing as a monolithic native American culture.
 
You believe they would be unable to progress without being conquered. That simple exposure to outside influences through trade would be insufficient for them to advance.

They may have progressed if left to their own devices, but it would have taken hundreds or even thousands of years. They had already been in the Americas for thousands of years without much progress. That's not to say there's something wrong with the native Americans. It just takes a very long time for mankind to progress from the stone age to modern life, that's all.
 
I agree with the OP. America has done some ****ed up things, but we are by in large, "the good guys." Which is something to be very proud of.

However, he's arguing against a strawman that really doesn't exist. There's no big, "hate America first" coalition, and I don't really see the point in this whole thread.
 
What establishes ownership of land? If a small band of three dozen primitive people wandered around an area of, say, one thousand square miles, spending a few months in one place before moving on to another, and never even visiting parts of that area, let alone settling permanently and improving any of it by building permanent structures on it, or by cultivating it, isn't their claim to own that one thousand square miles of land--roughly 17,000 acres for each one of them--awfully tenuous?

What if the entire native population of the area that is now the U.S. had been only one thousand people? Would it still be reasonable to claim they owned the entire three million-plus square miles, more than two million acres for every man, woman, and child? When tens of thousands of times that many people could use that land productively, why should they not be allowed to? There is a point at which an area is so very thinly populated that the mere fact a small band of people has sporadically migrated around a huge area cannot reasonably be said to establish their ownership of that whole area.

In some areas, the native population may have been dense and permanent enough to make a reasonable claim that they had established ownership of that land, and that it was therefore wrong for whites to take it from them by force. But there were many more cases where the fact a few people had been drifting around a vast expanse of land, doing nothing to improve it, was not even close to being enough to make them the owners of that land. In those areas, the land was anyone's for the taking, much as it had been when the Indians themselves first set foot on it.
 
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What establishes ownership of land? If a small band of three dozen primitive people wandered around an area of, say, one thousand square miles, spending a few months in one place before moving on to another, and never even visiting parts of that area, let alone settling permanently and improving any of it by building permanent structures on it, or by cultivating it, isn't their claim to own that one thousand square miles of land--roughly 17,000 acres for each one of them--awfully tenuous?

What if the entire native population of the area that is now the U.S. had been only one thousand people? Would it still be reasonable to claim they owned the entire three million-plus square miles, more than two million acres for every man, woman, and child? When tens of thousands of times that many people could use that land productively, why should they not be allowed to? There is a point at which an area is so very thinly populated that the mere fact a small band of people has sporadically migrated around a huge area cannot reasonably be said to establish their ownership of that whole area.

In some areas, the native population may have been dense and permanent enough to make a reasonable claim that they had established ownership of that land, and that it was therefore wrong for whites to take it from them by force. But there were many more cases where the fact a few people had been drifting around a vast expanse of land, doing nothing to improve it, was not even close to being enough to make them the owners of that land. In those areas, the land was anyone's for the taking, much as it had been when the Indians themselves first set foot on it.

As someone already pointed out, human historically have generally been no different from animals in our tendency to live at or close to the limit of population our environments can support. The global population has exploded over the past two centuries; from about 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1920, to 7 billion now. That didn't occur because previous generations intentionally maintained low numbers, but because developments in agriculture, transport and food preservation increased our environmental population limit.

To suggest that any group able or willing to live at higher population densities - through sacrifices in standard of living and/or improved agriculture techniques - automatically has a valid claim to the lands of other groups already living at or near their optimum density is absurd. How much currently-unoccupied US soil (a country whose domestic population is actually in decline) would you cede to China or India by this rationale?
 
There was some trade between tribes. Some of them planted squash, corn and beans. Most of them did not practice agriculture. The Aztecs did build cities at the southern tip of South America.

None of them had a written language. They had only a rudimentary understanding of mathematics. There was no literature, of course, or philosophy. They had not invented the wheel. They were basically a collection of stone age hunter gatherers.

Had the Europeans left them to their own devices, they'd still be divided into hundreds of different tribes speaking hundreds of different languages. It would have been hundreds of years before they would have coalesced into anything like modern nations. There is no such thing as a monolithic native American culture.
There were trade routes throughout the Americas, for example Southwestern Indians traded turquoise and gems with Indians on the East Coast, and it was more than just some of them that grew just corn and squash. A majority of the native Americans took part in agriculture, it was survival for them. They cultivated potatoes blueberries, tomatillos, chili peppers, quinoa, onions, sweet potatoes, pineapples, raspberries and avocados.
And the Aztecs weren't the only group that built cities. I suggest you visit Cahokia in Illinois. Or many of the ruins of the ancient cities scattered throughout New Mexico.
 
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