Yes, we were born in blood...

[Mithrae]

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.

When someone says the Aztecs built at the southern tip of South America, you know they're struggling :lol: If you'd bothered to click on the link in post #66 and read the opening Wikipedia paragraphs about Mesoamerica (far too much in-depth research to bother with before inventing alternative histories, I know), you would have read that:

Also in this period [Formative, c. 2000BCE-200CE], villages began to become socially stratified and develop into chiefdoms with the development of large ceremonial centers, interconnected by a network of trade routes for the exchange of luxury goods, such as obsidian, jade, cacao, cinnabar, Spondylus shells, hematite, and ceramics. While Mesoamerican civilization did know of the wheel and basic metallurgy, neither of these technologies became culturally important.[3]

Among the earliest complex civilizations was the Olmec culture [c. 1500-400BCE]. . . .


This Formative period saw the spread of distinct religious and symbolic traditions, as well as artistic and architectural complexes. In the subsequent Preclassic period, complex urban polities began to develop among the Maya, with the rise of centers such as El Mirador, Calakmul and Tikal, and the Zapotec at Monte Albán. During this period, the first true Mesoamerican writing systems were developed in the Epi-Olmec and the Zapotec cultures, and the Mesoamerican writing tradition reached its height in the Classic Maya hieroglyphic script.

Mesoamerica is one of only five regions of the world where writing was independently developed.​

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.

Funny thing is that if you look at the areas in which civilizations independently arose, five of the six all lie between about 15 and 35 degrees' latitude, in the hemisphere with most of the world's land mass. That is, Mesoamerica (Mexico), Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the basins of the Nile (Egypt), Indus (India) and Yellow rivers (China). Mesopotamia had direct or indirect contact with Egypt on one side and India on the other long before 2000BCE, and India's contact with China is documented at least as early as 200BCE.

But as others have already pointed out (unless I'm remembering stuff I've read elsewhere), in the case of the Americas the north-south orientation of the continent meant that any extensive travel would mean more substantial climatic changes. The other region of civilization which independently arose on the continent, in the area of coastal Peru, was not only equatorial rather than sub-tropical, but was down past the Panama isthmus. Therefore both regions lacked substantial contact with other civilizations, if there was ever any at all (it's hard to imagine the southerners would have failed to adopt or adapt the Mesoamerican writing system if they'd ever encountered it!). So unlike the geographic lottery bestowed upon the Eurasians, the American civilizations had no benefits of outside exchange of worldviews and ideas, and perhaps more importantly the competition encouraging them to expand and face the challenges presented by different regions and climates.

There is every reason to suppose that if their contact with Europeans had been limited to a handful of trading settlements - instead of invasion and conquest - the realization not only that there was competition, but that it was technologically more advanced than they would have spurred on the native American civilizations in Mexico, Peru and (as Henry notes) Mississippi even more than it had for the Eurasian civilizations in earlier millennia.

It's a fascinating topic for speculation really, if we can get past ill-informed denigration of the native civilizations in defense of the genocide.

 

[matchlight]

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?

I do not subscribe to the "mean old white people stole the U.S. from the poor Indians" party line, which some people love to underscore by calling them "Native Americans." It is one part of a romantic exaltation of the primitive and a denigration of Western civilization--of the United States in particular--that is characteristic of people who claim to be "liberals." This adoration of he primitive and non-white, mostly engaged in by whites who live in this and other advanced countries, can be traced to the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and possibly to those of even earlier philosophers.

This is a staple of the world view of most leftists, who seem to derive a warm sense of their supposed moral superiority from constant recitation of a litany of America's alleged sins. They want all Americans to wear the hair shirt and go around apologizing for their country like so many B. Hussein Obamas, but I refuse. Many of the Indians were warlike by nature, and some routinely practiced the cruelest savagery, both against each other and against whites. Finally they encountered an enemy that was too powerful for them.

I thought I had made my hypotheticals extreme enough to make the point to anyone, but apparently not. So I'll go further yet. Say three people, during their lifetimes, had wandered to various points whose farthest reach from each other enclosed an area the size of Texas, and yet had never even set foot on any but a minuscule fraction of that area. By your lights, the three would have established their ownership of all those quarter-million-plus square miles of land; they were simply living at their "optimum density" of fifty-seven million acres per capita; and the mere fact these three people had begun their meandering earlier gave them a claim to more than a quarter-million square miles of land that was unquestionably superior to that of the many thousands of newcomers.

That is not a reasonable view of what is needed to establish ownership of land. There is some point at which the population of an area is so diffuse, and their presence on it so desultory, that is no longer reasonable even to say that they inhabit that land, let alone that they own it.

 

[HenryChinaski]

I do not subscribe to the "mean old white people stole the U.S. from the poor Indians" party line, which some people love to underscore by calling them "Native Americans." It is one part of a romantic exaltation of the primitive and a denigration of Western civilization--of the United States in particular--that is characteristic of people who claim to be "liberals." This adoration of he primitive and non-white, mostly engaged in by whites who live in this and other advanced countries, can be traced at least to the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is a staple of the world view of most leftists, for whom constantly reciting a litany of America's alleged sins seems to give a warm glow of moral superiority. We are all supposed to wear the hair shirt, but I refuse. Many of the Indians were warlike by nature, and some routinely practiced the cruelest savagery, both against each other and against whites. Finally they encountered an enemy that was too powerful for them.

I thought I had made my hypotheticals extreme enough to make the point to anyone, but apparently not. So I'll go further yet. Say three people wandered around an area the size of Texas, never even setting foot on any but a small portion of that area during their lifetimes. By your lights, the three had thereby established their ownership of all those quarter-million-plus square miles of land; they were simply living at their "optimum density" of fifty-seven million acres per capita; and the fact these three people had begun their squatting and meandering before other people arrived gave them a claim to more than a quarter-million square miles of land that was unquestionably superior to that of the newcomers. That is not a reasonable view of what is needed to establish ownership of land. There is some point at which the population of an area is so diffuse, and their presence on it so desultory, that is no longer reasonable even to say that they inhabit that land, let alone that they own it.

So were Europeans, and Africans and people from the Indian Continent.
Boundaries of tribal lands were well known, defined by drainage basins, streams, hills, or other physical limits. The quality and quantity of lands and resources varied from tribe to tribe, according to each tribe's strength and location. But there were some fishing places and certain oyster beds at the shore that appear to be have been open and neutral to all tribes. So Native Americans, like aboriginal Australians, did have concepts of private property and land ownership but European systems did not recognize the social and legal frameworks that undergirded it. If a claim did not have the force of European legal recognition, then for them, it didn't exist. If it did have that recognition, then the "rules" usually allowed for certain conditions of forfeiture, so it was a win/win for the settlers. At the heart of it all was the ability to use force to back these assertions.

 

[matchlight]

So were Europeans, and Africans and people from the Indian Continent.
Boundaries of tribal lands were well known, defined by drainage basins, streams, hills, or other physical limits. The quality and quantity of lands and resources varied from tribe to tribe, according to each tribe's strength and location. But there were some fishing places and certain oyster beds at the shore that appear to be have been open and neutral to all tribes. So Native Americans, like aboriginal Australians, did have concepts of private property and land ownership but European systems did not recognize the social and legal frameworks that undergirded it. If a claim did not have the force of European legal recognition, then for them, it didn't exist. If it did have that recognition, then the "rules" usually allowed for certain conditions of forfeiture, so it was a win/win for the settlers. At the heart of it all was the ability to use force to back these assertions.

I see no reason why whites should have recognized some native group's vague rules about land ownership as superior to their own. If a few people are going to claim ownership of vast tracts of land, to the exclusion of others, they had better have the power to enforce their claim.

 

[HenryChinaski]

I see no reason why whites should have recognized some native group's vague rules about land ownership as superior to their own. If a few people are going to claim ownership of vast tracts of land, to the exclusion of others, they had better have the power to enforce their claim.

Of course you don't and they were hardly "vague" to the various native groups.

 

[Dittohead not!]

When someone says the Aztecs built at the southern tip of South America, you know they're struggling :lol: If you'd bothered to click on the link in post #66 and read the opening Wikipedia paragraphs about Mesoamerica (far too much in-depth research to bother with before inventing alternative histories, I know), you would have read that:

Also in this period [Formative, c. 2000BCE-200CE], villages began to become socially stratified and develop into chiefdoms with the development of large ceremonial centers, interconnected by a network of trade routes for the exchange of luxury goods, such as obsidian, jade, cacao, cinnabar, Spondylus shells, hematite, and ceramics. While Mesoamerican civilization did know of the wheel and basic metallurgy, neither of these technologies became culturally important.[3]

Among the earliest complex civilizations was the Olmec culture [c. 1500-400BCE]. . . .


This Formative period saw the spread of distinct religious and symbolic traditions, as well as artistic and architectural complexes. In the subsequent Preclassic period, complex urban polities began to develop among the Maya, with the rise of centers such as El Mirador, Calakmul and Tikal, and the Zapotec at Monte Albán. During this period, the first true Mesoamerican writing systems were developed in the Epi-Olmec and the Zapotec cultures, and the Mesoamerican writing tradition reached its height in the Classic Maya hieroglyphic script.

Mesoamerica is one of only five regions of the world where writing was independently developed.​

Funny thing is that if you look at the areas in which civilizations independently arose, five of the six all lie between about 15 and 35 degrees' latitude, in the hemisphere with most of the world's land mass. That is, Mesoamerica (Mexico), Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the basins of the Nile (Egypt), Indus (India) and Yellow rivers (China). Mesopotamia had direct or indirect contact with Egypt on one side and India on the other long before 2000BCE, and India's contact with China is documented at least as early as 200BCE.

But as others have already pointed out (unless I'm remembering stuff I've read elsewhere), in the case of the Americas the north-south orientation of the continent meant that any extensive travel would mean more substantial climatic changes. The other region of civilization which independently arose on the continent, in the area of coastal Peru, was not only equatorial rather than sub-tropical, but was down past the Panama isthmus. Therefore both regions lacked substantial contact with other civilizations, if there was ever any at all (it's hard to imagine the southerners would have failed to adopt or adapt the Mesoamerican writing system if they'd ever encountered it!). So unlike the geographic lottery bestowed upon the Eurasians, the American civilizations had no benefits of outside exchange of worldviews and ideas, and perhaps more importantly the competition encouraging them to expand and face the challenges presented by different regions and climates.

There is every reason to suppose that if their contact with Europeans had been limited to a handful of trading settlements - instead of invasion and conquest - the realization not only that there was competition, but that it was technologically more advanced than they would have spurred on the native American civilizations in Mexico, Peru and (as Henry notes) Mississippi even more than it had for the Eurasian civilizations in earlier millennia.

It's a fascinating topic for speculation really, if we can get past ill-informed denigration of the native civilizations in defense of the genocide.

My bad. I meant North America, of course, as that was the subject of the conversation.

 

[Dittohead not!]

Back to the original premise of the conversation: What would North America look like had the natives simply been left alone?

It would still be fractured among hundreds of different cultural/linguistic groups.
Those groups would still be warring among themselves.
There still would be no unified nations such as the big three of North America. There would be no United States, no Canada, and no Mexico.

The Aztecs might still have their cities and be making blood sacrifices still.

The Pueblos may still be planting subsistence crops.

The rest of the land would be occupied by nomadic hunter gatherers.

 

[matchlight]

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.

Agreed as to the first three sentences, but not as to the last two. It's part and parcel of being a good pseudo-liberal cosmopolitan to recite, at ever opportunity, the supposedly sinful history of the United States. These people seem to imagine that this disdain of American culture marks them as refined members of a cultural elite--thinkers too sophisticated and worldly to be patriotic. In their hearts, they dislike Western civilization while romanticizing and exalting the non-white and the primitive--in short, Rousseau's "noble savage." For them, the white, advanced, Western, or Christian (and often, male or heterosexual as well) is tainted and suspect, to be admired mainly by nativist members of the hoi polloi. There are now enough of these specimens in this once-great nation to have given us eight years' worth of a man after their own hearts--a president who resents, and apologizes for the supposed sins of, the very nation whose interests he is supposed to be defending.

 

[Mithrae]

I do not subscribe to the "mean old white people stole the U.S. from the poor Indians" party line, which some people love to underscore by calling them "Native Americans." It is one part of a romantic exaltation of the primitive and a denigration of Western civilization--of the United States in particular--that is characteristic of people who claim to be "liberals." This adoration of he primitive and non-white, mostly engaged in by whites who live in this and other advanced countries, can be traced to the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and possibly to those of even earlier philosophers.

This is a staple of the world view of most leftists, who seem to derive a warm sense of their supposed moral superiority from constant recitation of a litany of America's alleged sins. They want all Americans to wear the hair shirt and go around apologizing for their country like so many B. Hussein Obamas, but I refuse. Many of the Indians were warlike by nature, and some routinely practiced the cruelest savagery, both against each other and against whites. Finally they encountered an enemy that was too powerful for them.

I thought I had made my hypotheticals extreme enough to make the point to anyone, but apparently not. So I'll go further yet. Say three people, during their lifetimes, had wandered to various points whose farthest reach from each other enclosed an area the size of Texas, and yet had never even set foot on any but a minuscule fraction of that area. By your lights, the three would have established their ownership of all those quarter-million-plus square miles of land; they were simply living at their "optimum density" of fifty-seven million acres per capita; and the mere fact these three people had begun their meandering earlier gave them a claim to more than a quarter-million square miles of land that was unquestionably superior to that of the many thousands of newcomers.

That is not a reasonable view of what is needed to establish ownership of land. There is some point at which the population of an area is so diffuse, and their presence on it so desultory, that is no longer reasonable even to say that they inhabit that land, let alone that they own it.

Wow. Where did that little rant come from? For about the dozenth time in this thread, I said nothing whatsoever about native Americans being peaceful and nothing whatsoever about the nobleness or otherwise of savagery.

You came up with an absurd hypothetical of a few dozen people living in all of Florida, or wherever, and I pointed out that it is indeed an absurd hypothetical. Humans, like all other animals, have historically grown to reach population levels at or close to the sustainable limit of their environment. What is so difficult to grasp about that?

In fact often - in societies too big and complex for most people to understand those limits of food production, etc. - they have exceeded their comfortable limits. But if that granted some divine right for over-populated Europe to take over parts of well-populated America in the past, then it must give the same right to China or India today. Again, really not that difficult to comprehend, is it? And no nobbly savages - I really wish you folks would stop trying to argue against your own fantasies :lol:

 

[matchlight]

Wow. Where did that little rant come from? For about the dozenth time in this thread, I said nothing whatsoever about native Americans being peaceful and nothing whatsoever about the nobleness or otherwise of savagery.

You came up with an absurd hypothetical of a few dozen people living in all of Florida, or wherever, and I pointed out that it is indeed an absurd hypothetical. Humans, like all other animals, have historically grown to reach population levels at or close to the sustainable limit of their environment. What is so difficult to grasp about that?

I don't know what "you folks" means. I speak for myself. The purpose of my hypotheticals was to show that as the population of an area becomes more diffuse and impermanent, at some point it is so sparse and so feebly established that it is no longer reasonable to claim that this group of people owns all the land they occasionally wander on. And yet that is the basis for the commonly parroted notion that "whites stole the land from the Native Americans." It's not possible to steal land no one ever had a valid claim to.

And who had the Indians that whites encountered here butchered and driven out, when they first arrived? Some peaceful Indian tribes were probably wronged, at least where they had established fairly permanent settlements which white settlers encroached on. But I can't feel any sympathy for cruel, warlike savages who finally were themselves subdued by violence, when they had been even more cruelly subduing other Indians by violence for centuries.

 

[Mithrae]

I don't know what "you folks" means. I speak for myself. The purpose of my hypotheticals was to show that as the population of an area becomes more diffuse and impermanent, at some point it is so sparse and so feebly established that it is no longer reasonable to claim that this group of people owns all the land they occasionally wander on. And yet that is the basis for the commonly parroted notion that "whites stole the land from the Native Americans." It's not possible to steal land no one ever had a valid claim to.

I understand the point which the absurd hypothetical was meant to convey (which is debatable, but not unreasonable), but that doesn't change the fact that it bears no resemblance to reality: It has absolutely nothing to do with foreigners coming in and taking over land whose inhabitants were living at or near the population limit which could be sustained by their environment, which is what the native Americans - like all other human and animal groups - were doing. Occasional population dips from famines, plagues, wars or natural disasters aside, of course.

And who had the Indians that whites encountered here butchered and driven out, when they first arrived? Some peaceful Indian tribes were probably wronged, at least where they had established fairly permanent settlements which white settlers encroached on. But I can't feel any sympathy for cruel, warlike savages who finally were themselves subdued by violence, when they had been even more cruelly subduing other Indians by violence for centuries.

Perhaps this is a moral grey area, but I would say that nothing justifies genocide. We're talking about taking over a continent and wiping out some 80-90% of its inhabitants through conquest, displacement and the further consequences of that aggression (ie, forced exposure to foreign diseases).

It'd be a bit like deciding to kill half the people in Germany because of WW2; men, women and children alike. Really not justified no matter how barbarous their military and social institutions had been! But maybe that's just me.

That's not to say that all or even most of the European colonists were little Hitlers. Most Germans, even most German soldiers weren't little Hitlers! But the intent both expressed and carried out over the centuries and right up to the 19th century's "manifest destiny" was to take over more and more of the Indians' land with a callous disregard for them because of their race, a policy which would inescapably and knowingly (at least by the 17th century) mean a high percentage of deaths including women and children from forced exposure to foreign diseases, along with the essential destruction of their nations and cultures. That's genocide by pretty much any definition you care to name; and that's even assuming the natives would passively lie down and let the invaders (well-meaning settlers though many were in their own minds) walk all over them.

 

[matchlight]

I understand the point which the absurd hypothetical was meant to convey (which is debatable, but not unreasonable), but that doesn't change the fact that it bears no resemblance to reality: It has absolutely nothing to do with foreigners coming in and taking over land whose inhabitants were living at or near the population limit which could be sustained by their environment, which is what the native Americans - like all other human and animal groups - were doing. Occasional population dips from famines, plagues, wars or natural disasters aside, of course.



Perhaps this is a moral grey area, but I would say that nothing justifies genocide. We're talking about taking over a continent and wiping out some 80-90% of its inhabitants through conquest, displacement and the further consequences of that aggression (ie, forced exposure to foreign diseases).

It'd be a bit like deciding to kill half the people in Germany because of WW2; men, women and children alike. Really not justified no matter how barbarous their military and social institutions had been! But maybe that's just me.

That's not to say that all or even most of the European colonists were little Hitlers. Most Germans, even most German soldiers weren't little Hitlers! But the intent both expressed and carried out over the centuries and right up to the 19th century's "manifest destiny" was to take over more and more of the Indians' land with a callous disregard for them because of their race, a policy which would inescapably and knowingly (at least by the 17th century) mean a high percentage of deaths including women and children from forced exposure to foreign diseases, along with the essential destruction of their nations and cultures. That's genocide by pretty much any definition you care to name; and that's even assuming the natives would passively lie down and let the invaders (well-meaning settlers though many were in their own minds) walk all over them.

I do not accept that most of the Indians living in the area that is now the United States owned the land they temporarily occupied. And I don't care that they were displaced by people more powerful than they were. The notion that the Indians were living "at or near the population limit which could be sustained by their environment" is ludicrous. Obviously the land they were wandering around on is capable of supporting a population many thousands of times larger than theirs, as has been proven. The romantic idea of the "noble savage" does nothing for me, nor do I suffer what has been called "white liberal guilt"--not even for a moment. Some aboriginals were displaced by people who were far more advanced, just as had happened many times before all over the earth. Or maybe you imagine the Han Chinese, for example, nicely asked the people who were there before them to please move over just a little.

 

[Mr Person]

Errmmm...

The problem I see with the OP is that it castigates unidentified persons as "hate-America-firsters", then proceeds to say exactly the same things about American history that are said by anyone who takes issue with the notion that Americans are better than everyone else on earth (aka, a "hate-America-firster"), but nonetheless concludes by identifying its author as someone who is decidedly not a "hate-America-firster". You said the exact same things as this "they" do. You just made sure to include a few mentions of non-American countries you deem worse.

Can't stand terms like "hate-America-firster". FFS. Recognizing all the evils one's country has done doesn't mean one hates it. It means one is knowledgeable and honest.




The atrocities worse than exterminating native Americans by land mentioned in the OP? The Holocaust, Stalin's reign of terror, Chinese/Japanese war atrocities?

Guess what: those wouldn't have been possible but for ultra-nationalism - the same kind of ultra-nationalism that reacts to any criticism of one's country by calling the critic a traitor. Calling critics "hate-America-firsters" is simply a lighter version.....nationalism as opposed to ultra-nationalism. The people who are wrongly and maliciously targeted with such labels are simply honest about our history




And of course, comparisons to empires from two thousand years ago don't go very far. It would be tricky to be more brutal than ancient Rome.




Finally, we didn't feel the need to build an expansive empire like Britain (and there are a TON more examples of British atrocities - virtually everywhere they went, they subjugated the native population in horrific ways). Unlike Britain and other European imperial powers, we had a vast space ripe for the taken given our technological advantage over those native Americans who weren't wiped out by our diseases. Why go about starting wars in foreign lands when you've got so much space right next door, obtainable with far less bloodshed? (This was also pointed out differently on p2). In contrast, if a European country wanted to extend its holdings or sphere of influence, it had to actually go invade some other country with less advanced natives.

It's these kind of sticky points that one must train oneself to ignore or at best play down, if one wants to be an American Exceptional who is better than all those nasty "hate-America-firsters".......

 

[Mr Person]

The argument has been made that, had the US stayed out of WWI, Hitler may never have been able to rise to power in the first place. That may be true, I don't know.

Strange argument by those who make it. It wasn't our involvement that created the conditions that made Hitler possible, it was the punitive terms of the Versailles treaty. Germany may have deserved such treatment for its actions, but that is generally a rather terrible basis for decision-making.

If they had received an undeserved reprieve, Hitler might not have been able to rely on popular prejudices to rise to power.

 

[Mithrae]

I do not accept that most of the Indians living in the area that is now the United States owned the land they temporarily occupied. And I don't care that they were displaced by people more powerful than they were. The notion that the Indians were living "at or near the population limit which could be sustained by their environment" is ludicrous. Obviously the land they were wandering around on is capable of supporting a population many thousands of times larger than theirs, as has been proven.

Then we're back to modern China and India having a valid claim to United States territory, though you've seemed eager to avoid that one so far.

These are two entirely different issues you're confusing here. The first (your hypotheticals) suggests that folk can't have a valid ownership claim over stuff they are not regularly using. That's debateable - it'd completely undermine the property rental market, for example, though maybe that'd be a good thing - but at least it's reasonable and understandable. However the native Americans were using all their land, the best they could. Even the hunter-gatherers were living at or close to the limits of their environment.

By dramatically changing the environment, agricultural civilizations could squeeze more people in there, no doubt about that. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the natives not using the land. It's an assertion that you've only got a valid ownership claim if you're using something in certain ways, and that high population density is an end for its own sake (which again would undermine rental properties, ironically). That's even more debatable - some would say absurd on the face of it - but if you're going to go down that route, perhaps you could first acknowledge that you believe countries/cultures which use their land far more efficiently than the US must necessarily have a valid claim to much of its territory?

 

[matchlight]

Then we're back to modern China and India having a valid claim to United States territory, though you've seemed eager to avoid that one so far.

Let them try to enforce any claim like that they imagine they have.

These are two entirely different issues you're confusing here. The first (your hypotheticals) suggests that folk can't have a valid ownership claim over stuff they are not regularly using. That's debateable - it'd completely undermine the property rental market, for example, though maybe that'd be a good thing - but at least it's reasonable and understandable.

If you think so, why were you calling it absurd earlier? The principle that land should be used profitably, and that those who don't use it that way should lose it to those who will, can be seen in the writings of Locke and Smith, and it is directly reflected in principles of real property law like adverse possession. Be an absentee owner who neglects his land long enough, and you will forfeit ownership of it to people whom you, through your lack of concern, have allowed to come onto that land and improve it.

However the native Americans were using all their land, the best they could. Even the hunter-gatherers were living at or close to the limits of their environment.

By dramatically changing the environment, agricultural civilizations could squeeze more people in there, no doubt about that. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the natives not using the land. It's an assertion that you've only got a valid ownership claim if you're using something in certain ways, and that high population density is an end for its own sake (which again would undermine rental properties, ironically). That's even more debatable - some would say absurd on the face of it - but if you're going to go down that route, perhaps you could first acknowledge that you believe countries/cultures which use their land far more efficiently than the US must necessarily have a valid claim to much of its territory?

I don't care whether any such country thinks it has a valid claim against the U.S. All sorts of people have all sorts of claims, and they are worth nothing whatever unless they can be enforced. I also don't much care whether any foreigner likes my country, or not.

But for this country, much or even all of the civilized world would probably have fallen to the barbarous dictatorships in Germany and Japan seventy years ago, with the people living in it either exterminated or enslaved. Just after the war, the U.S. could easily have forced its will on every country it chose to, if Americans had really been the villains some of our critics seem to imagine. By 1949, before the USSR or any other country had acquired its first nuclear weapon, the U.S. had a stockpile of about two hundred. That would have been more than enough to force every nation the U.S. even imagined might be an adversary to do just as it was told, by making very clear that any steps toward acquiring nuclear weapons, or in the case of the USSR, failure to dismantle its weapons program immediately, would be answered by nuclear attacks that would end it as a nation.

It will be a cold day in hell before I apologize, to anyone, for anything the United States has ever done.

 

[d0gbreath]

Perhaps, but it is debatable. The natives tribes had not advanced a great deal in the previous 300 years...

They didn't need to change. They were living the glorious life that we threw away when we created agriculture, money, and assembly lines.

 

[blaxshep]

They didn't need to change. They were living the glorious life that we threw away when we created agriculture, money, and assembly lines.

Ironically their way of life was sustainable ours is not.

 

[Dittohead not!]

Ironically their way of life was sustainable ours is not.

They didn't manage their resources very well.

The latest volley in a long-running debate over why woolly mammoths, giant sloths, mastodons and cave lions died out worldwide suggests that humans are to blame.

A new global look at the extinctions of large mammals over the past 130,000 years finds that the loss of species correlates more closely with the arrival of humans than with changes in climate, which some studies have cited as a possible culprit.

 

[Mithrae]

If you think so, why were you calling it absurd earlier? The principle that land should be used profitably, and that those who don't use it that way should lose it to those who will, can be seen in the writings of Locke and Smith, and it is directly reflected in principles of real property law like adverse possession. Be an absentee owner who neglects his land long enough, and you will forfeit ownership of it to people whom you, through your lack of concern, have allowed to come onto that land and improve it.

I called your argument absurd because your hypothetical of an average one person in every 17,000 acres bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the historical reality of native Americans. Occasional population dips from famine, disease, war or natural disasters aside, they (like all human and animal populations) were living at or close to the sustainable limits of their environment.

In fact as Dittohead has just pointed out, they (like most human and animal populations) initially pushed as hard up against the limit as they could at the expense of other species, and may well have had population declines after the extinctions of some of their food sources. 'Sustainability' tends to be an eventual equilibrium state, not a planned objective.

Let them try to enforce any claim like that they imagine they have. . . .


I don't care whether any such country thinks it has a valid claim against the U.S. All sorts of people have all sorts of claims, and they are worth nothing whatever unless they can be enforced. I also don't much care whether any foreigner likes my country, or not.

The question was whether you genuinely believe your principle that higher population densities give one country or culture the right to take over the land of another. By the looks of it you do not, which means that it's just a poorly-considered ad hoc justification for the genocide of the native Americans.

Your comments above, which look a lot like 'might makes right' can never be a legitimate moral or legal principle by the way, because it can only ever be retrospective.

It will be a cold day in hell before I apologize, to anyone, for anything the United States has ever done.

I can't imagine anyone would want you to apologize for something your country has done, least of all anything which happened hundreds of years ago. I for one would certainly feel no obligation to personally apologize for my own country's treatment of its Aborigines - that's a job for the government - but I can still recognize that it was wrong.

 

[Dittohead not!]

I called your argument absurd because your hypothetical of an average one person in every 17,000 acres bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the historical reality of native Americans. Occasional population dips from famine, disease, war or natural disasters aside, they (like all human and animal populations) were living at or close to the sustainable limits of their environment.

In fact as Dittohead has just pointed out, they (like most human and animal populations) initially pushed as hard up against the limit as they could at the expense of other species, and may well have had population declines after the extinctions of some of their food sources. 'Sustainability' tends to be an eventual equilibrium state, not a planned objective.



The question was whether you genuinely believe your principle that higher population densities give one country or culture the right to take over the land of another. By the looks of it you do not, which means that it's just a poorly-considered ad hoc justification for the genocide of the native Americans.

Your comments above, which look a lot like 'might makes right' can never be a legitimate moral or legal principle by the way, because it can only ever be retrospective.



I can't imagine anyone would want you to apologize for something your country has done, least of all anything which happened hundreds of years ago. I for one would certainly feel no obligation to personally apologize for my own country's treatment of its Aborigines - that's a job for the government - but I can still recognize that it was wrong.

It's really not a matter of right or wrong. Humans have been competing and fighting with each other for territory since the Olduvai Gorge. The strong prevail and occupy the land, the weak are marginalized or die out. Like any other animal, this competition results in the survival of the fittest.

Should we apologize for the demise of the Neanderthals as well? Surely, that was a genocide as well.

 

[Moot]

It's really not a matter of right or wrong. Humans have been competing and fighting with each other for territory since the Olduvai Gorge. The strong prevail and occupy the land, the weak are marginalized or die out. Like any other animal, this competition results in the survival of the fittest.

Should we apologize for the demise of the Neanderthals as well? Surely, that was a genocide as well.

I think early Hominids and Neanderthals may have bred with each other. So not all was lost.

 

[Mithrae]

It's really not a matter of right or wrong. Humans have been competing and fighting with each other for territory since the Olduvai Gorge. The strong prevail and occupy the land, the weak are marginalized or die out. Like any other animal, this competition results in the survival of the fittest.

Should we apologize for the demise of the Neanderthals as well? Surely, that was a genocide as well.

To be fair, in the case of the Neanderthals we're not exactly talking about the actions of an existing political entity. From what I gather, North America's eastern regions had been thoroughly settled by the British and French, and much of the south and west by the Spanish, before the United States became a nation; but that country which still exists today did participate in the tail end of the native American genocide in the westward expansion of the 19th century. It was Matchlight who brought up apologizing, but like I said no individual could be expected to apologize for deeds they hadn't done, and nor should any countries or institutions be expected to apologize for anything they had not done. Personally I don't know and scarcely care if the US has acknowledged or apologized on that front - mere words are only a first step in addressing some of the issues endemic to indigenous communities in both of our countries, after all - but as far as our little forum goes I reckon it's worth discussing as a matter of historical fact and not trivialized as "well others did it too!" or (even worse) by suggestions that the land was unoccupied/unowned.



Competition often produces great results, and sometimes even war - the harshest competition of all - leads to advances and long term benefits. But does that mean war is a good thing? Does it mean that genocide is a good thing?

History isn't black and white, and a handful of fringe lunatics aside no-one claims that America (or other colonial or post-colonial powers) is some kind of utterly evil empire; nor that indigenous populations were peaceful angels living in complete harmony with nature. But as evidenced by this very thread, some people are unwilling even to come to terms with the fact that invasion, conquest, direct mass killing and indirect consequences of these policies resulting in near-extermination of two continents' populations is in fact genocide.

 

[RetiredUSN]

The apologists never cease with their guilt trips, and other nonsensical ideas about the "prior" North American inhabitants.

The scenario of happy little Indians frolicking through the woods and plains without a care in the world.......never existed.

 

[Dittohead not!]

I think early Hominids and Neanderthals may have bred with each other. So not all was lost.

Yes, it appears that they did.
The Europeans bred with the native Americans as well.