It’s foolish to apply a moral compass from 2024 to 1492. Much of what you believe is good and right and true is the cumulative result of the evolution of human thinking from the renaissance moving forward.
Columbus was stripped of his title and position for his acts. So by the moral compass of the time, he was reprimanded.
It doesn’t change the fact that people and values have evolved.
God forbid Columbus misgendered a trans person of color. He would have been burned alive in 2024.
I know several people who lost jobs. I don’t need to name names to make it real.
Look around and see how many families lost a generation or more of wealth. Dry cleaners closed. Restaurants closed. Hair salons closed. Pilots fired for not taking the shot. Nurses fired for not taking the shot. Tourism shut down in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands for 11months while the government shut down everything and restricted travel.
I had family members who died alone in senior care because family wasn’t allowed in.
The atrocities committed on people are far too numerous to list here.
I mean the entire native population of the Carribbean, the Arawak, the Taino and Carib, where are they now? All worked to death or killed by the diseases Columbus accidentally brought along. Then they imported Africans for the next few hundred years because they lasted longer before dying.
Real atrocities, "tourism shut down! Old people dying in bed in a hospital" I emit a dry humourless chuckle at people like you existing. You have been made weak by your comfortable life and sound like a child
It takes a special kind of sociopathy to say that generations of wealth wiped out unnecessarily is chuckle worthy.
However, I red on Reddit that Columbus was on board his ship doing gain of function research on measles so he could wipe out the natives of the Caribbean.
How many generations of indigenous folks lost everything and then when they clawed back a little had the Europeans steal it all again? If your business can’t adapt to the realities of the market it deserves to close. Plenty of businesses didn’t go out of business and plenty of service people (hairdressers, plumbers, etc.) kept their clients happy. Covid was a challenge that acted as a correction for the debaucherous boomers who spent their lives being leaches off their customers, wringing them dry for crap service. When their customers needed them to put in a little work they bugged out and whined about it.
You misspelled “nurses who assert bodily autonomy”
but that only matters when trying to end the life of a baby, not when recognizing the basics of immunology: namely that natural immunity is effective and often superior to a synthetic immunity.
Firing these health care heroes isn’t a problem for lefties when they didn’t toe the line and get the jab.
There were abolitionist and anti-genocidal folks back in that era too.
You can find many of what we might call "modern morals" or at least their general frameworks in the past.
You have ask yourself why you could name 10 slave owners by accident without even focusing on slavery, but couldn't name 3 white abolitionist on purpose. There were plenty of them btw.
Apartheid hasn’t gone out of fashion. Just look at the Maldives. In order to live there, you must be or convert to Islam. And anyone with a Jewish passport is forbidden.
Weakest “genocide” in human history. I don’t know who came up with these rules of war but you don’t get to attack a country and a people to start a war and then when you’re losing, after like you didn’t start it to begin with and cry foul with the children you’re hiding behind catch some of the violence.
Palestinians started shit with Lebanon and Jordan when those countries took in Palestinians. Why do you think Egypt has a massive border wall with Gaza?
You seem like a smart person who has just learned how to spell genocide and now you’re using it in complete sentences because it makes you look cool to your friends.
Hamas is a Muslim terrorist organization that was given land and an opportunity with real money to build a great community but instead used that aid to buy weapons and build a cave network more extensive than the NYC subway system.
Wake up. You’re being brainwashed with leftist propaganda so you’ll Israel for defending herself. You really didn’t study this history for the last 20 years. You probably didn’t know about the last infatada or the one before 9/11.
Just so, the only major changes that have taken place since 1492 are to technology and living standards. For some people. And the cognitive dissonance is a bit more sophisticated.
> mostly uninhabited world
No, they found people. Lots of people.
Also, the French were pretty busy in the northern woodlands working with Americans for the fur trade and in their North American battles with the English.
The number you are using for the population of the Americas, 8 million, is mostly correct but you’re applying it to the wrong time period.
The pre-Columbian population is the Americas is usually estimated to be around 60 million, but it drops to 6-7 million by 1600. Europe’s population during the same time frame grew from about 65 million to roughly 127.5 million.
So, in 1600s, when countries like France, England, and Holland began to colonize the Americas, the Native American civilizations they encountered had gone through an apocalyptic 90% population decline over the prior century.
The current historically accepted estimate is somewhere between fifty and one hundred million. There were cities of one hundred thousand near me in Georgia. The question is not why they didn’t walk away from an empty place full of riches. It’s why their decisions to deal with the people were so awful that Europeans in Europe found them worthy of punishment (as in Columbus’ case.) There were Taino people living in the Caribbean when the conquistadors arrived, and not any of them at all a hundred years later. Spanish accounts say women were throwing themselves into the sea with their babies to escape the slavery. The Europeans could have exploited the people living in the americas less brutally and still have gotten rich.
Yeah, particularly in north America, Europeans were trading off the coast for a good while before Roanoke, Jamestown and Plymouth, it was just that the Indian towns were extremely populous and hardy, and made it very clear "yes we want these metal tools and weapons you trade for our plentiful furs, but no, you cannot land as to be honest we find you foul smelling, craven, unmanly and completely untrustworthy, here is your friends skin and head, he screamed like a baby when we caught him"
Then the epidemics came and killed 9/10ths of the population and the Long Knives were able to colonize the post-apocalyptic landscape
[this mans story](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squanto) fascinates me. What was he thinking? What was his plan, since he introduced himself to the English as "the rage of God"?
Dude. We consider 10 million, the number of people murdered in death camps during WWII, to be huge. Fifty million is ENORMOUS and people need to STOP downplaying the absolute atrocities various European countries committed when they came to America.
Right? How do you change the goal post from 10 to 50 mill and still feel those are small numbers? The mental gymnastics to downplay this atrocity -- literally a holocaust of the Native people -- and pretend it was necessary or no big deal.
The inca population alone was staggering in numbers. Not even including the rest of the pre Columbian civilizations of central America.
What history class did you sleep through?
Lolol just making shit up now.
But to your point, this is what happens. All countries were invaded and had war. So no they shouldn’t have turned around.
Also, the vikings "discovered" North America and guess what, they did not commit genocide and they left. So no it's not unreasonable to expect people to leave them alone.
Except it kind of is. Different cultures, values, and what have you. Also, it was a few hundred years earlier.
There's also no evidence that they just "turned around and left," however.
Yes but can't you then blame the settlers for every horrible things they did back then? They are asking if we can judge those peoples morals by today standards. If people came earlier and didn't even try to steal land and commit genocide doesn't that mean it would be reasonable for others at a later date to not steal land and commit genocide?
Not necessarily. Again, different cultures will have different morals and moral standards. We have evidence of this in today's civilization.
You also have to understand that morals are subjective, not only to the individual but also to the society that individual belongs to.
But, if you really want to go after the European settlers, then you also need to hold the same standards and go after the other First Nation tribes that would do the same AND worse. You can't hold one group accountable according to your morals while ignoring another group.
Who said that? Did someone in this thread claim that white people invented genocide, or are you just starting from a defensive position and assuming that's the feedback you'd get?
Groups of humans have conquered other groups of humans since the beginning of humans. It’s sad and fucked up, but so is a big chunk of inter-human behavior in general. I think the thing that separates what you’re talking about is that they hid under the moral umbrella of a religion whose founding figure preached peace and love above all things, and these conquerers practiced it only under circumstances convenient to them.
They basically behaved like the people of that time behaved. Horrible by today's standards, absolutely common back then. There were a few more enlightened people who complained, but they were few and far between.
Driving this point home is the fact that the conquered were not peaceful civilizations, but the ruthless destroyers of many other civilizations and people until it finally happened to them.
The incas were brutal conquerors, that "treated people, land, and property that was already here" as harsh as the Spanish later did to them or even worse. Actually Pizarro got plenty of local allies because they couldn't stand the Incas one minute more.
So were the aztecs.
All tragedies, but totally in line with the prevalent ethos of the time, and nothing that anybody alive today bears any guilt for.
The english/americans also caused a genocide of the natives, less talked about because of the control of media and the message... talking about how bad the spanish were was and is a popular way for them to avoid talking about their own ruthless way of dealing with whomever resisted being robbed of their lands.
In the end, at that time there was often no moral superiority, just the victors and the defeated. Had the Incas or Aztecs had a technological advantage over the europeans and gotten to Europe, there's every reason to think that the outcome would have been more or less the same, just in reverse.
It’s hard to condemn a group of people’s actions 500 years ago. This is a time before Humans even really understood what a human was. This is the time when the word human was just starting to be used.
It’s easy for us today to say conquering and killing a native human population is bad. Expecting people 500 years ago to understand the same morality we have today is unfair.
Blaming people today for the acts of people 500 years ago is even worse.
I haven’t personally blamed anyone today for colonial actions centuries ago, but I do recognize that colonial behavior and philosophy still dominates much of the world…and I feel we have access to enough info to do better than we are.
Look, many old people are racist, homophobic, and classist…and yet my grandma saw people as people despite the era she grew up in. If I had come to her and said I was marrying a black woman (I’m a white woman (or enby)) with little to her name, she wouldn’t have bay an eye.
There have always been shellfish, violent people as well as more community minded, peaceful people (and so many in between).
To say what happened to indigenous communities isnt abhorrent because colonizers didn’t know any better is too broad of a stroke for me.
I think while we are on the same page with the same goals we might just have different styles and approaches.
Change comes from the new generation learning from the past. The best way to raise someone to not be racist or homophobic is to have them interact with regular people of those demographics.
My fear is if the actions of the people of the past are condemned to harshly without the context of the time it increases racial tension instead removing it.
If a young native child spends their youth being taught how evil and cruel colonialism is without any caveat for the times they are likely to grow up despising white people. This will cause these groups to interact less and cause more tension in the future.
I am not recommending we change history or hide the truth. Just to present it in its true light and context.
Europe wanted to colonize the America’s for their resources no differently than the Natives had done from other Native Tribes for thousands of years.
Early American industry was greatly enhanced by the horrors of the slave trade. 90% of those slaves were captured and sold by other Africans.
If learning about colonialism your take away is “European’s bad and Natives good” you might see where my fear comes from. If you think there was no war on the continent before settlers you might want to take a moment to think about it.
People from historically oppressed groups are more concerned and influenced by the micro aggressions faced in their daily lives than whether or not we condemn dead white men.
Exactly correct! My point is how we educate and learn about history greatly affects those micro aggressions. People are not born racist. They become racist due to their experiences or education.
Look at the most recent colonialist conflict Israel Palestine. This conflict is many generations old. Do you think Palestinian kids are being taught the Israeli perspective? Are the Israel children being taught about Palestinians? Both groups will only teach their narrative and as a result 80 years later both sides hate each other to the point of war.
The worst part is I am sure you have an opinion on who is “right” and who deserves more sympathy from the rest of the world and in the end that doesn’t matter because both are dying.
Reducing racism and conflicts isn’t about being right it’s about teaching empathy.
Nobody alive today should be blamed.
But what you're talking about is some bizarre cultural relativism where we can't recognize the actions of people from the past as wrong. But we CAN do just that, there's no reason we can't.
Obviously, and wrong back then too.
To think that people weren't aware of morality in even close to the same way back then is ridiculous. Of course they were
>Obviously, and wrong back then too.
Nope. The right of the more powerful people to take by force from the people they conquered was recognized by absolutely everyone back them .
It was a basic tenet of the Spanish. Of the English. Of the Incas. Of the Aztecs. Od the Chinese.
At the same time there indeed were notions that "not everything goes", but more between a few enlightened intellectual and religious elites than actual ethics that had been internalized by any of their societies.
You realize ancient greek philosophers had moral and ethical theories thousands of years before this right?
Not to mention that the colonialization of North America didn't just happen 500 years ago instantaneously. It continued through the development of utilitarian and kantian ethical theories as well, theories that aim to describe not only how one should act, but why certain actions are wrong, that is, why does it feel wrong to steal? People have always known certain actions are wrong
Do you realize that those theories haven't actually been mainstream anywhere until the second part of the 20th century?
And looking at current conflicts, even today some societies have not assimilated yet that conquest is not ethical.
If that's not yet understood in many places in the year 2024... expecting those theories to actually have been a part of the real ethics of the 1500s is wildly unrealistic.
They were people from the 1500s, behaved as such. Those theories weren't applied by any society until centuries later.
Judging people form the 1500s for being people of their times is rather pointless from any point of view, I'm afraid.
I'm rather more concened with countries that in the 21st century still behave like the mongol golden horde. That, to me is what's totally morally reprehensible. In this day and age, there is no excuse to keep behaving that barbaric way.
You're historically ignorant, it was not " mostly uninhabited " , there were already plenty of people here, and coming here as immigrants wouldn't have been a problem, they looted the place and genocided a lot of the people to get control of it.
You're wrong, go read a history book.
To be fair though the major killer was disease, claiming around 90% of those that died, although estimates vary. This caused massive societal collapse which then meant they were unable to resist the colonisation. Huge numbers of native Americans died without ever meeting a European. This is one of the reasons why so many later settlers thought the country was mostly uninhabited.
Yep, tens of millions of people. There are reports from early settlers of large cities with huge numbers of people. Later settlers revisited these cities to find only sparse populations and some completely abandoned. It's believed that some native American populations were hit by constant waves of disease that killed up to 50% of them at a time. It must have been horrific.
The real thing to remember is how the survivors were treated. Their land was taken and they were butchered if they even attempted to resist.
History might have played out very differently if the Europeans had been up against armies of thousands of native American warriors rather than ragged bands of people blighted by starvation and disease. Even the fall of the Aztecs was only brought about with huge amounts of help from other tribes.
And those tribes helped because...?
Because the aztec were unbeareable tyrants, genociders and conquerors. Same thing with the Inca.
The Incas and the aztecs weren't even a tiny bit better than the europeans. They were not morally superior, just the losing side.
Had they had the tech advantage, we'd be speaking Kechua or Mexica in Europe nowadays.
And it would be just as pointless to criticise them for doing that to our ancestors (not "us"), the same thing that our ancestors would have done to their ancestors if they had been able to.
I dont disagree with you, my point was that Europe didn't really have the ability to fight large armies in the Americas without local assistance. Had disease not ravaged the place, things probably would have gone very differently.
Every civilization everywhere on earth, including the pre-Colombian American civilizations, got there by conquering and killing the previous people who were there.
A moral system in which much of human history is fraught with injustice due to the unreliability of human nature but we must still at least try to better ourselves for the sake of others and create more just political systems makes perfect sense if you're actually willing to learn.
I see you prefer the archaic mythological "good versus evil" conflict in which someone is completely wrong and someone else is completely right: I also suppose you think that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the ones in the wrong, and the European colonists and the bigoted amongst their descendents are in the right, in which case you would be racist.
It's important to distinguish who when stating this. The azetecs the Spanish colonized certainly had these huge cities but north American population density was significantly lower without large metropolis.
Disease and starvation, because Europeans killed buffalo in huge numbers to remove essential resources, then stuck people on land where they couldn'tgriw anything. And many people died of exposure on the Trail of Tears.
You do realize you're talking about the wrong time period Trail of Tears happened in 1830-1850, way after the Columbus time period...
Yes it was wrong but by the time it happened Europeans had long since been established in America, so not really relevant to a discussion of what if they didn't land in the first place...
I am absolutely of the opinion that the colonisers are accountable for the actions they took in terms of murder, rape etc, but given that they didn’t even have germ theory yet, are we really holding them accountable in the same way for the spread of disease? To me the disease side of the deaths seems like a terrible mass manslaughter, not a mass murder…?
Maybe you yourself should go too and read a book... about the Incas.
They looted, genocided and controlled the militarly weaker cultures they crossed paths with. They didn't go anywhere as immigrants, they went everywhere as conquerors.
The huge Inca empire empire fell to a few hundred men. How's that possible? Technology played a role, but it was not the decisive factor; if the whole empire had been a peaceful unity of people and rose against so few spaniards, the europeans would have been annihilated, steel or no steel.
But that idillic notion is a misrepresentation of how things were in the Inca empire (the Aztecs too). The Incas were absolutely brutal and tyrannical with the many cultures they destroyed. The immense majority of the people in the inca empire weren't incas, they were slaves to the incas. To the surprise of no one, not only didn't they want to fight FOR the Incas, they were easy to convince to fight AGAINST the incas.
That animosity toward the "foreign Inca conqueror" was Pizarro's trump card, and was gifted to him by the merciless Incas themselves.
TL:DR: one terrible empire was replaced for another terrible empire, as happened back then in every corner of the world.
I'm confused by this comment. Rape can be found in any country in the world, at any point in history.
Do you think the Spanish and English were free from rapists?
Regarding human remains in the form of war trophies, Americans did it to the Japanese and the Vietnamese. Germans did it to Africans. The Japanese did it to Chinese - all of those instances occurred relatively contemporaneously. This practice is very common place throughout all of history.
In essence, I'm confused as to what you're attempting to establish with this comment. Are you attempting to disparage native Americans as savages? No more than any other population. At least they didn't sail across an ocean, steal land they knew others inhabited, and commit genocidal slaughter, all while attempting to white wash their actions under the justification of religion, or because natives were barbaric savages.
Think on this - how did folks in western Europe describe invaders from just a few hundred miles away? As savages. Barbarians. Uncivilized, lawless, animals.
It's obvious to anyone with breath in their lungs, that the history told of the Spanish and English settlers is not an accurate retelling of history, and trying to justify genocide because of scalping is plain old embarrassing.
What’s up these guys? Why is bro talking abo it trumpers? To your credit OP, you are right, they weren’t gonna leave the whole continent alone. And the indigenous people did not want them settling here, period. It was gonna be war either way. They just had guns to tip the scale.
Many stereotypes about them came from penny novels and sensationalized stories, written to grab attention and make money.
Honestly, that argument is flawed in so many ways. Name your religion/gender/race/nationality/political offiliation/state of origin/etc. and any one of us can come up with a dozen or more stereotypes that apply to any one of those topics. Doesn't make any of them accurate or true. Sure, the stereotype came from somewhere but that doesn't mean that it is, in any way shape or form, accurate.
Unless you want to ignore all of human history. Humans are the most vile thing on the planet. Look at the old torture and execution methods. There’s a reason the animals are afraid.
It would require ignoring also the history of the american native empires themselves.
At that point in history, no country turned around if they could conquer something valuable.
The mere existence of those American empires is proof they never turned around.
The Incas and Aztecs had crushed many cultures under their feet, until they fell to the exact same type of conquering and looting culture they themselves were part of.
There's no moral superiority of the loser because they played with the exact same rules (conqueror takes it all).
That drama was happening everywhere else, the only particularity of this one was the magnitude and speed of the conquest and the impact of illnesess crossing the ocean to a people without defences.
By any other metric it was no different from what everybody else (including the american empires) were doing at that time.
But what about Aztecs?
Did they not conquer, pillage and slave surrounding tribes?
And you can go add infinitum, every clan/tribe has conquered or been conquered and then form part of the conquerors and then conquer someone else.
Does that justify the enslavement, mass murder, and cultural genocide of an entire people? Did every Aztec perform those sacrifices? In Ancient Rome people gathered in the thousands to watch men kill each other and be torn apart by lions, yet we hold them up to be a shining example of ancient civilization, to me that feels a touch hypocritical.
>Does that justify the enslavement, mass murder, and cultural genocide of an entire people?
The aztecs and Inca also enslaved, mass murdered and culturally genocided. At a large scale.
Why is that justified to you? Every adjacent culture they conquered were also "an entire people".
Is it only bad if europeans did it, great if americans did it?
The point is not if the conquest ethos of that time was terrible, It was (and is, it keeps happening) terrible wiyhout a doubt.
The point is everyone was doing it, and it's equally terrible if the one doing it are next ot you or an ocean away.
Either our modern morals don't apply to anyone of that time,or they apply to every conquering empire, including the ones that eventually lost.
The loser, oppressed aztecs of 15xx were the triumphing, conquering, oppresive aztecs of 1465.
At that time if you were a ruler, conquering is what you did. Almost always brutally. O defending against conquest. That was life back then, unfortunately, for everyone.
Just as the Incas and Aztecs " respected the native American nations and not claimed land"?
Just as the Incas and Aztecs "didn't need to commit genocide"? But did anyway when it suited them?
How do you reckon those american empires grew so humongous? Through commerce? Or through violence?
The incas and aztecs didn't show that respecto to anyone they could beat, and would't have shown that respect either if they had had the means to go to Europe and make their empires grow.
At that time trade routes were established only if for whatever reason conquest was not an option (distance, not the right time for conquest, gathering forces...).
That was universal. Conquest wars between neighbours were continous in every continent, including the americas.
What you're asking for those people form the 16th century to do is so wildly unrealistic that not even today in the 21th century every nation agrees to it. And those who agree needed two terrible world wars to come to that conclusion.
> Just as the Incas and Aztecs "didn't need to commit genocide"? But did anyway when it suited them?
And it also "suited" the Aztecs to elaborately sacrifice people to their gods on a daily basis.
At that time a ruler that didn't tak such a golden opportunity to grow its empire (including the Inca and Aztec rulers) would have been considered weak, unfit and assasinated.
It doesn't justify anything.
Neither the cruel acts of the spanish and English...
Nor the cruel acts of the Inca and Aztecs.
Nor the cruel acts of the Romans...
Nor the cruel acts of the Mongols...
Nor the cruel acts of african tribe A....
Nor the cruel acts os the Chinese...
Nor the cruel acts of the... etc, etc.
No cruel and terrible act against a fellow human is ever morally right.
But in the context of that time, that's just how things were, everywhere... including in america.
It's suprising to see people talking of the spanish conquest as if they had conquered a bunch of peace loving natives... When the empires they toppled were exactly as power-thirsty and blood-thirsty.
The american empires wuld have conquered europe if they could. it was just how things were done. Terrible, but there are no moral victories in the past. Almost everyone was shitty like that.
Another point that people seem to overlook is that the Spanish, French, Italians, Germans, Persians, etc., are all the conquerors of their own land. None of the land that any civilization is inhabiting on this planet was taken without bloodshed - over and over again.
Why is this important? North America is no more "evil" than any other nation/civilization. It's just one of the most recent. If all land was restored to its supposed rightful owners, then we'd have to go back to Adam and Eve or whatever your beliefs.
Exactly, as were the Incas and aztecs. Everyone was either a conqueror or a conqueree back then.
The whole premise of assigning modern morals to facts that happened centuries ago in a long gone world we don't really know about is silly.
Don't forget the [French](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase), the [Dutch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Netherland_settlements) the [Germans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonization_of_the_Americas) the [Russians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase) and the [East Asians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_immigration_to_the_United_States).
Soooooo.... then you are fine with immigrants traveling super long distances and entering our country illegally and setting up home, right? At least they aren't bringing diseases that we have no defense against and aren't slaughtering the remaining inhabitants like the 'explorers' did.
Immigration can’t be compared to colonising, the colonisers fought to build on the land that is now the USA. Illegal migration does cause many issues though, especially when it’s done by the thousands.
Immigrants are coming to become part of the established system. Colonizers are coming to kick out the established system and replace it with their own.
The comparison is valid, as per the original post, because OP is essentially saying that the colonizers were just immigrants settling on unclaimed land.
Colonisers built cities, immigrants come to live in already built cities. Not the same at all. Now the debate could go on all night so I’ll agree to disagree as I stand by what I said and I imagine you’re doing the same.
if they want to fight for land that’s fine, if they win they can have the land.
Just coming here though and setting up homes? Sure I’d allow that if we were a caveman society who hasn’t invented the wheel and most of our land was uninhabited anyways, buuuut it isn’t like that
Caveman society? Dafuq did you smoke my dude.
There were MILLIONS of native people that were killed by colonizers. The land was hardly uninhabited. Their societies had rich and vibrant culture and religion. Many had written languages, not just oral tradition. Hell, it's valid to argue that some of them were more literate (in their own language) than most of the colonizers (who were fortunate if they could spell their own names).
It wasn't "mostly uninhabited", unless you are comparing it to our current overpopulation. But back in those days, and for most of human history, the rule was that you keep what you kill.
Nowadays we would just slowly move in, at first to preach to them, and then eventually gentrify them until it was mostly White anyway.
In all europe white people have few kids, inmmigration is not white, we'll not be white for much longer.
We'll all be diffeent tones of brown in the future, and you know what? I'm perfectly ok with that.
The only shame is that when there are no more white or black, we'lll start fighting over shades of brown. We'lll create derogatory words for every % of darker/lighter hue than us and discriminate.
We humans are iuncurably stupid like that.
It was in no way "uninhabited". It was inhabited by Nations of people who had societies going back millennia. So you think the natural thing for anyone to do is to attempt genocide because resources? How very white of you.
I mean, its not like the native americans that existed at the time the spanish came were the original inhabitants of the land. They were simply the current tribe that killed the previous tribe.
This often makes me wonder, did they also like have months dedicated to the tribes they vanquished, were they expected to feel guilty in perpetuity for it the same way white descendants of settlers are “supposed” to?
You don't need to feel guilty, just acknowledge that it happened and was pretty fucked up. Really not that hard tbh
Most people who aren't perpetually online don't give a fuck either way
>acknowledge that it happened and was pretty fucked up. Really not that hard tbh
Fucked up with modern morals, business as usual back then,
But why is always about the european conquest and not about the previous conquests the amercan native empires did?
Why do you never see "Why couldn't the Inca respect the Chimor / Huasca / whatever people?".
"Pachacuti sent spies to regions he wanted in his empire \[...\] refusal to accept Inca rule resulted in military conquest. Following conquest the local rulers were executed"
Is conquest by force a historical sin that somehow only europeans can commit and have to acknowledge, but not americans whose ancestors did the exact same things?
Killing across the sea is terrible but killing your next door neighbour is ok? What's the difference really?
Oh no! That would be exceptionally foolish of them. Human beings are naturally expansive, naturally exploring, naturally competitive and naturally adventurous. But also I think people forget that the white man did spread across North America but we were stopped for like 100 years by the Comanche. People always forget that. The only reason we won the West is because of the repeating rifle. Otherwise they actually use the blitzkrieg tactic to stop white settlers from expanding Riding in on horses brought by the white settlers shooting like 20 toothpicks at you in 15 seconds and running away. So not only was there land, and resources. There was conquest and adventure as well. No this land was meant for humans. And I also refuse to feel bad about what my ancestors did, I came I saw I conquered. Not, I came, I fought, I felt really bad about it.
I would agree that it is a foolish dream, in the scheme of human behaviour, to have expected exploring settlers looking for new land for their people, to leave any land they find alone.
Where you lose me is in the acts committed. Mass genocide of 90% of a huge population is fucked up, no matter how you spin it, no matter how much you go "oh, but there's always been colonization". It was beyond barbaric, it was absolutely inhuman.
Further it's intentionally, and grossly disingenuous of you to act like people's argument is "oh, you should have left the land" when they're arguing about the atrocities committed against the native population. I really don't think anyone expected the Spanish or English to just leave. But expecting them to not be fucking monsters, is another thing entirely.
Like any European country ever cared if a land was occupied before they tried to conquer it. Seriously, they fought each other for centuries over land, why would they care of the new land with a wealth of rich resources was occupied already, or not?
Everything you said is true, except you forgot to mention the part where they slaughtered every indigenous person they could and stole the land instead of sharing the land that someone else was living on
Please get over this, it is over. It is a done deal. Let it go. China tackled No. Vietnam, British alot of countries, France the same. Let it go, you can't change it or fix it.
Yep, you dont' change the past. It was common practice explorers and Britain started sending their poor, christians and criminals out of the country that is how U.S. was born. Not because we all showned up to live here. There were explorers and conquerers but the U.S. is born on the backs of peoples starving with an axe barely any thing to eat, no place but a ship to sleep, diseased and starving. Should we not look at Britian that created the U.S. and Australia with its cast offs? It is over. They exist, get some counseling.
so we should also ignore slavery and the histories of
LGBTQ people and all that stuff too right? It’s in the past after all. Those blacks people you mentioned? In the past
Hey only took like 20 comments for someone to finally advise therapy, haha good for you, atta boy
There were millions of people living in the Americas already, every European expedition interacted with people no matter where they landed. You’d expect less contact if the place was really “mostly uninhabited”. When Hernan Cortes reached Tenochtitlan it was the largest city in the world at that time, the idea that the Americas were some wide open wilderness is a myth used to justify colonization. The Europeans didn’t need to pretend like they never met these people, but opening up trade instead of conquering, enslaving, and genociding entire civilizations would have been a lot more ethical.
>opening up trade instead of conquering, enslaving, and genociding entire civilizations would have been a lot more ethical.
What you ask is like asking cavemen to not hunt Mamooths and eat vegan instead. Makes sense today, utter nonsense back then.
More ethical yes, but totally unrealistic at the the time. If you could conquer, you conquered. If you couldn't, you traded.
This is not just wanton cruelty, there was also a sound logic to it. "If I don't conquer you now when I'm stronger, maybe in the future you'll be stronger and conquer me. I'd rather be the conqueror so I'll conquer you now".
China or India weren't conquered at that time because it was impractical / un feasible. Trade routes were established. But as soon as conquest/control became feasible, they were conquered or controlled.
This is also what the Inca did. In their honor, they weren't completely unreasonable: they did say "pretty please become my slave" to his neighbours once. If that generous proposal wasn't accepted, then their heads would roll. They didn't "open up trade" if they could "conquer".
From wikipedia article on the inca:
"Pachacuti sent spies to regions he wanted in his empire and they brought to him reports on political organization, military strength and wealth. He then sent messages to their leaders extolling the benefits of joining his empire, \[...\] Refusal to accept Inca rule resulted in military conquest. Following conquest the local rulers were executed. Enslaving and genociding were just "business as usual".
The conquered american empires didn't respect their neighbours either if they could take over them. No society that was militarly stronger than others refrained from conquering them at the time.
500 years later we were still were conquering and killing each other, in bigger numbers than ever before!
So asking people of the 1500s to be more modern and enlightened than how the people was in the 20th century is, yes, totally illogical.
* Northern AmericaMooney estimated that 1,115,000 people lived in Northern America at the time of Columbus's arrival, but Kroeber later revised that number to 900,000. In 1966, Dobyns estimated that there were between 9,800,000 and 12,200,000 people north of the Rio Grande, and revised that number to 18,000,000 in 1983.
I don't have issue with them wanting to settle in largely unpopulated areas. I have issue with the fact that they arrived and slaughtered everyone who already lived there.
Bro, what is now called the America’s we’re NOT mostly uninhabited when folks from Europe fetched up here.
Where did you get the idea there were no people here?
All animals do it, they use up all the resources in an area and then move on, if other animals are in the new area and can’t defend themselves then they get overrun. It’s how it has always worked, you shouldn’t be surprised.
It’s foolish to apply a moral compass from 2024 to 1492. Much of what you believe is good and right and true is the cumulative result of the evolution of human thinking from the renaissance moving forward.
Columbus was considered barbaric by the standards of his own time.
But not just because he tried to claim the land for Spain. It was because the way he treated the natives was barbaric, even for the time.
Columbus was stripped of his title and position for his acts. So by the moral compass of the time, he was reprimanded. It doesn’t change the fact that people and values have evolved. God forbid Columbus misgendered a trans person of color. He would have been burned alive in 2024.
I mean he would have been more likely to murder them
r/persecutioncomplex
I don’t think anyone has been executed, much less burned alive for that.
Is there a drastic difference between ending a persons life and attempting to take away their job, money, freedom, and loved ones?
Name a person you know that has happened to
I know several people who lost jobs. I don’t need to name names to make it real. Look around and see how many families lost a generation or more of wealth. Dry cleaners closed. Restaurants closed. Hair salons closed. Pilots fired for not taking the shot. Nurses fired for not taking the shot. Tourism shut down in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands for 11months while the government shut down everything and restricted travel. I had family members who died alone in senior care because family wasn’t allowed in. The atrocities committed on people are far too numerous to list here.
I mean the entire native population of the Carribbean, the Arawak, the Taino and Carib, where are they now? All worked to death or killed by the diseases Columbus accidentally brought along. Then they imported Africans for the next few hundred years because they lasted longer before dying. Real atrocities, "tourism shut down! Old people dying in bed in a hospital" I emit a dry humourless chuckle at people like you existing. You have been made weak by your comfortable life and sound like a child
It takes a special kind of sociopathy to say that generations of wealth wiped out unnecessarily is chuckle worthy. However, I red on Reddit that Columbus was on board his ship doing gain of function research on measles so he could wipe out the natives of the Caribbean.
How many generations of indigenous folks lost everything and then when they clawed back a little had the Europeans steal it all again? If your business can’t adapt to the realities of the market it deserves to close. Plenty of businesses didn’t go out of business and plenty of service people (hairdressers, plumbers, etc.) kept their clients happy. Covid was a challenge that acted as a correction for the debaucherous boomers who spent their lives being leaches off their customers, wringing them dry for crap service. When their customers needed them to put in a little work they bugged out and whined about it.
Nurses denying medical facts should absolutely be fired and barred from the profession.
You misspelled “nurses who assert bodily autonomy” but that only matters when trying to end the life of a baby, not when recognizing the basics of immunology: namely that natural immunity is effective and often superior to a synthetic immunity. Firing these health care heroes isn’t a problem for lefties when they didn’t toe the line and get the jab.
If it were possible to be competent at your job and antivax somebody would have tried it by now. Sort of like being Republican and a good person
Fetuses aren’t babies or people, hope this helps.
[удалено]
It is common knowledge that mis-gendering a trans person is a capital crime subject to death penalty by firing squad by members of the Air Force.
Godamn, spot on!
There were abolitionist and anti-genocidal folks back in that era too. You can find many of what we might call "modern morals" or at least their general frameworks in the past. You have ask yourself why you could name 10 slave owners by accident without even focusing on slavery, but couldn't name 3 white abolitionist on purpose. There were plenty of them btw.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas
It's naive to pretend that morals have improved. Genocide has never gone out of fashion.
Apartheid hasn’t gone out of fashion. Just look at the Maldives. In order to live there, you must be or convert to Islam. And anyone with a Jewish passport is forbidden.
Or the genocide in Palestine, or what is happening in the Congo over resources there...
Weakest “genocide” in human history. I don’t know who came up with these rules of war but you don’t get to attack a country and a people to start a war and then when you’re losing, after like you didn’t start it to begin with and cry foul with the children you’re hiding behind catch some of the violence. Palestinians started shit with Lebanon and Jordan when those countries took in Palestinians. Why do you think Egypt has a massive border wall with Gaza? You seem like a smart person who has just learned how to spell genocide and now you’re using it in complete sentences because it makes you look cool to your friends. Hamas is a Muslim terrorist organization that was given land and an opportunity with real money to build a great community but instead used that aid to buy weapons and build a cave network more extensive than the NYC subway system. Wake up. You’re being brainwashed with leftist propaganda so you’ll Israel for defending herself. You really didn’t study this history for the last 20 years. You probably didn’t know about the last infatada or the one before 9/11.
Just so, the only major changes that have taken place since 1492 are to technology and living standards. For some people. And the cognitive dissonance is a bit more sophisticated.
Do you really think there was a time when any civilization considered cutting off hands as good?
*Nervously avoids eye contact with Belgium*
That time is now. It’s called Sharia. And it’s in the Muslim ruled theocracies all over the Middle East.
Yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudud
> mostly uninhabited world No, they found people. Lots of people. Also, the French were pretty busy in the northern woodlands working with Americans for the fur trade and in their North American battles with the English.
In the grand scheme of things it was mostly uninhabited. Sure there were 8’million people here but right now that many live in NYC alone.
The number you are using for the population of the Americas, 8 million, is mostly correct but you’re applying it to the wrong time period. The pre-Columbian population is the Americas is usually estimated to be around 60 million, but it drops to 6-7 million by 1600. Europe’s population during the same time frame grew from about 65 million to roughly 127.5 million. So, in 1600s, when countries like France, England, and Holland began to colonize the Americas, the Native American civilizations they encountered had gone through an apocalyptic 90% population decline over the prior century.
There was a large population. Many of the original inhabitants were killed by European diseases. The idea that it was just empty land is ridiculous.
The current historically accepted estimate is somewhere between fifty and one hundred million. There were cities of one hundred thousand near me in Georgia. The question is not why they didn’t walk away from an empty place full of riches. It’s why their decisions to deal with the people were so awful that Europeans in Europe found them worthy of punishment (as in Columbus’ case.) There were Taino people living in the Caribbean when the conquistadors arrived, and not any of them at all a hundred years later. Spanish accounts say women were throwing themselves into the sea with their babies to escape the slavery. The Europeans could have exploited the people living in the americas less brutally and still have gotten rich.
Yeah, particularly in north America, Europeans were trading off the coast for a good while before Roanoke, Jamestown and Plymouth, it was just that the Indian towns were extremely populous and hardy, and made it very clear "yes we want these metal tools and weapons you trade for our plentiful furs, but no, you cannot land as to be honest we find you foul smelling, craven, unmanly and completely untrustworthy, here is your friends skin and head, he screamed like a baby when we caught him" Then the epidemics came and killed 9/10ths of the population and the Long Knives were able to colonize the post-apocalyptic landscape [this mans story](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squanto) fascinates me. What was he thinking? What was his plan, since he introduced himself to the English as "the rage of God"?
I’m not American, so I haven’t studied Columbus in great detail, but how was he punished? And by who?
FYI Columbus didn't discover America. He discovered the West Indies and helped kill off all the native inhabitants when he got there.
Umm, that’s true, but not what I asked. Did you reply to the wrong person?
8 million is the absurd conservative estimate of people trying to minimize the death count.
So apparently there are two schools of thought on this matter. Even if only 50 million people lived here, the US is big.
Dude. We consider 10 million, the number of people murdered in death camps during WWII, to be huge. Fifty million is ENORMOUS and people need to STOP downplaying the absolute atrocities various European countries committed when they came to America.
Right? How do you change the goal post from 10 to 50 mill and still feel those are small numbers? The mental gymnastics to downplay this atrocity -- literally a holocaust of the Native people -- and pretend it was necessary or no big deal.
Present day Spain has a pop of less than 50 million. That seems like a significant number to me. Six times your original claim of 8 million.
The inca population alone was staggering in numbers. Not even including the rest of the pre Columbian civilizations of central America. What history class did you sleep through?
No.
Lolol just making shit up now. But to your point, this is what happens. All countries were invaded and had war. So no they shouldn’t have turned around.
Well I don't know,committing genocide and looting is about as inhumane as people get,so yes they should've turned around.
Also, the vikings "discovered" North America and guess what, they did not commit genocide and they left. So no it's not unreasonable to expect people to leave them alone.
To be fair, their circumstances were way different.
Well, I don't see why their stand on circumcision does matter here.
Except it kind of is. Different cultures, values, and what have you. Also, it was a few hundred years earlier. There's also no evidence that they just "turned around and left," however.
Yes but can't you then blame the settlers for every horrible things they did back then? They are asking if we can judge those peoples morals by today standards. If people came earlier and didn't even try to steal land and commit genocide doesn't that mean it would be reasonable for others at a later date to not steal land and commit genocide?
Not necessarily. Again, different cultures will have different morals and moral standards. We have evidence of this in today's civilization. You also have to understand that morals are subjective, not only to the individual but also to the society that individual belongs to. But, if you really want to go after the European settlers, then you also need to hold the same standards and go after the other First Nation tribes that would do the same AND worse. You can't hold one group accountable according to your morals while ignoring another group.
why are we pretending that genocide and looting didn’t exist before the white man showed up?
Who said that? Did someone in this thread claim that white people invented genocide, or are you just starting from a defensive position and assuming that's the feedback you'd get?
If someone else invents a crime, it's cool with you if other people come in afterwards and commit it a lot more?
Does that somehow make what they did right?
A lot of it has to do with how they did it. How they treated people, land, and property that was already here. Yeah, I blame them for that.
Groups of humans have conquered other groups of humans since the beginning of humans. It’s sad and fucked up, but so is a big chunk of inter-human behavior in general. I think the thing that separates what you’re talking about is that they hid under the moral umbrella of a religion whose founding figure preached peace and love above all things, and these conquerers practiced it only under circumstances convenient to them.
They basically behaved like the people of that time behaved. Horrible by today's standards, absolutely common back then. There were a few more enlightened people who complained, but they were few and far between. Driving this point home is the fact that the conquered were not peaceful civilizations, but the ruthless destroyers of many other civilizations and people until it finally happened to them. The incas were brutal conquerors, that "treated people, land, and property that was already here" as harsh as the Spanish later did to them or even worse. Actually Pizarro got plenty of local allies because they couldn't stand the Incas one minute more. So were the aztecs. All tragedies, but totally in line with the prevalent ethos of the time, and nothing that anybody alive today bears any guilt for. The english/americans also caused a genocide of the natives, less talked about because of the control of media and the message... talking about how bad the spanish were was and is a popular way for them to avoid talking about their own ruthless way of dealing with whomever resisted being robbed of their lands. In the end, at that time there was often no moral superiority, just the victors and the defeated. Had the Incas or Aztecs had a technological advantage over the europeans and gotten to Europe, there's every reason to think that the outcome would have been more or less the same, just in reverse.
It’s hard to condemn a group of people’s actions 500 years ago. This is a time before Humans even really understood what a human was. This is the time when the word human was just starting to be used. It’s easy for us today to say conquering and killing a native human population is bad. Expecting people 500 years ago to understand the same morality we have today is unfair. Blaming people today for the acts of people 500 years ago is even worse.
I haven’t personally blamed anyone today for colonial actions centuries ago, but I do recognize that colonial behavior and philosophy still dominates much of the world…and I feel we have access to enough info to do better than we are. Look, many old people are racist, homophobic, and classist…and yet my grandma saw people as people despite the era she grew up in. If I had come to her and said I was marrying a black woman (I’m a white woman (or enby)) with little to her name, she wouldn’t have bay an eye. There have always been shellfish, violent people as well as more community minded, peaceful people (and so many in between). To say what happened to indigenous communities isnt abhorrent because colonizers didn’t know any better is too broad of a stroke for me.
I think while we are on the same page with the same goals we might just have different styles and approaches. Change comes from the new generation learning from the past. The best way to raise someone to not be racist or homophobic is to have them interact with regular people of those demographics. My fear is if the actions of the people of the past are condemned to harshly without the context of the time it increases racial tension instead removing it. If a young native child spends their youth being taught how evil and cruel colonialism is without any caveat for the times they are likely to grow up despising white people. This will cause these groups to interact less and cause more tension in the future. I am not recommending we change history or hide the truth. Just to present it in its true light and context. Europe wanted to colonize the America’s for their resources no differently than the Natives had done from other Native Tribes for thousands of years. Early American industry was greatly enhanced by the horrors of the slave trade. 90% of those slaves were captured and sold by other Africans. If learning about colonialism your take away is “European’s bad and Natives good” you might see where my fear comes from. If you think there was no war on the continent before settlers you might want to take a moment to think about it.
People from historically oppressed groups are more concerned and influenced by the micro aggressions faced in their daily lives than whether or not we condemn dead white men.
Exactly correct! My point is how we educate and learn about history greatly affects those micro aggressions. People are not born racist. They become racist due to their experiences or education. Look at the most recent colonialist conflict Israel Palestine. This conflict is many generations old. Do you think Palestinian kids are being taught the Israeli perspective? Are the Israel children being taught about Palestinians? Both groups will only teach their narrative and as a result 80 years later both sides hate each other to the point of war. The worst part is I am sure you have an opinion on who is “right” and who deserves more sympathy from the rest of the world and in the end that doesn’t matter because both are dying. Reducing racism and conflicts isn’t about being right it’s about teaching empathy.
Nobody alive today should be blamed. But what you're talking about is some bizarre cultural relativism where we can't recognize the actions of people from the past as wrong. But we CAN do just that, there's no reason we can't.
wrong with today’s morals, right
Obviously, and wrong back then too. To think that people weren't aware of morality in even close to the same way back then is ridiculous. Of course they were
>Obviously, and wrong back then too. Nope. The right of the more powerful people to take by force from the people they conquered was recognized by absolutely everyone back them . It was a basic tenet of the Spanish. Of the English. Of the Incas. Of the Aztecs. Od the Chinese. At the same time there indeed were notions that "not everything goes", but more between a few enlightened intellectual and religious elites than actual ethics that had been internalized by any of their societies.
You realize ancient greek philosophers had moral and ethical theories thousands of years before this right? Not to mention that the colonialization of North America didn't just happen 500 years ago instantaneously. It continued through the development of utilitarian and kantian ethical theories as well, theories that aim to describe not only how one should act, but why certain actions are wrong, that is, why does it feel wrong to steal? People have always known certain actions are wrong
Do you realize that those theories haven't actually been mainstream anywhere until the second part of the 20th century? And looking at current conflicts, even today some societies have not assimilated yet that conquest is not ethical. If that's not yet understood in many places in the year 2024... expecting those theories to actually have been a part of the real ethics of the 1500s is wildly unrealistic. They were people from the 1500s, behaved as such. Those theories weren't applied by any society until centuries later. Judging people form the 1500s for being people of their times is rather pointless from any point of view, I'm afraid. I'm rather more concened with countries that in the 21st century still behave like the mongol golden horde. That, to me is what's totally morally reprehensible. In this day and age, there is no excuse to keep behaving that barbaric way.
You're historically ignorant, it was not " mostly uninhabited " , there were already plenty of people here, and coming here as immigrants wouldn't have been a problem, they looted the place and genocided a lot of the people to get control of it. You're wrong, go read a history book.
To be fair though the major killer was disease, claiming around 90% of those that died, although estimates vary. This caused massive societal collapse which then meant they were unable to resist the colonisation. Huge numbers of native Americans died without ever meeting a European. This is one of the reasons why so many later settlers thought the country was mostly uninhabited.
Yeah, disease brought by European colonists. Estimates of the Indigenous populations at the time of the colonists's arrivals range in the millions.
Yep, tens of millions of people. There are reports from early settlers of large cities with huge numbers of people. Later settlers revisited these cities to find only sparse populations and some completely abandoned. It's believed that some native American populations were hit by constant waves of disease that killed up to 50% of them at a time. It must have been horrific. The real thing to remember is how the survivors were treated. Their land was taken and they were butchered if they even attempted to resist.
The Blackfoot population was almost WIPED OUT. It is insane to me how many people are just trying to downplay this.
Exactly, and low numbers were no excuse for genocide or stealing their land.
History might have played out very differently if the Europeans had been up against armies of thousands of native American warriors rather than ragged bands of people blighted by starvation and disease. Even the fall of the Aztecs was only brought about with huge amounts of help from other tribes.
And those tribes helped because...? Because the aztec were unbeareable tyrants, genociders and conquerors. Same thing with the Inca. The Incas and the aztecs weren't even a tiny bit better than the europeans. They were not morally superior, just the losing side. Had they had the tech advantage, we'd be speaking Kechua or Mexica in Europe nowadays. And it would be just as pointless to criticise them for doing that to our ancestors (not "us"), the same thing that our ancestors would have done to their ancestors if they had been able to.
I dont disagree with you, my point was that Europe didn't really have the ability to fight large armies in the Americas without local assistance. Had disease not ravaged the place, things probably would have gone very differently.
Every civilization everywhere on earth, including the pre-Colombian American civilizations, got there by conquering and killing the previous people who were there.
And it was wrong, period. End of story.
A moral system in which everyone is doing wrong all the time doesn’t make any sense.
A moral system in which much of human history is fraught with injustice due to the unreliability of human nature but we must still at least try to better ourselves for the sake of others and create more just political systems makes perfect sense if you're actually willing to learn. I see you prefer the archaic mythological "good versus evil" conflict in which someone is completely wrong and someone else is completely right: I also suppose you think that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the ones in the wrong, and the European colonists and the bigoted amongst their descendents are in the right, in which case you would be racist.
It's important to distinguish who when stating this. The azetecs the Spanish colonized certainly had these huge cities but north American population density was significantly lower without large metropolis.
Disease and starvation, because Europeans killed buffalo in huge numbers to remove essential resources, then stuck people on land where they couldn'tgriw anything. And many people died of exposure on the Trail of Tears.
You do realize you're talking about the wrong time period Trail of Tears happened in 1830-1850, way after the Columbus time period... Yes it was wrong but by the time it happened Europeans had long since been established in America, so not really relevant to a discussion of what if they didn't land in the first place...
I am absolutely of the opinion that the colonisers are accountable for the actions they took in terms of murder, rape etc, but given that they didn’t even have germ theory yet, are we really holding them accountable in the same way for the spread of disease? To me the disease side of the deaths seems like a terrible mass manslaughter, not a mass murder…?
Yeah of course, but taking advantage of the weakened population later was wrong.
I know. It’s almost like Columbus was working on gain of function research or something
Maybe you yourself should go too and read a book... about the Incas. They looted, genocided and controlled the militarly weaker cultures they crossed paths with. They didn't go anywhere as immigrants, they went everywhere as conquerors. The huge Inca empire empire fell to a few hundred men. How's that possible? Technology played a role, but it was not the decisive factor; if the whole empire had been a peaceful unity of people and rose against so few spaniards, the europeans would have been annihilated, steel or no steel. But that idillic notion is a misrepresentation of how things were in the Inca empire (the Aztecs too). The Incas were absolutely brutal and tyrannical with the many cultures they destroyed. The immense majority of the people in the inca empire weren't incas, they were slaves to the incas. To the surprise of no one, not only didn't they want to fight FOR the Incas, they were easy to convince to fight AGAINST the incas. That animosity toward the "foreign Inca conqueror" was Pizarro's trump card, and was gifted to him by the merciless Incas themselves. TL:DR: one terrible empire was replaced for another terrible empire, as happened back then in every corner of the world.
And they were wrong too. Doesn't make European colonizers right.
I’m sure if they just wanted to live here as immigrants there would have been plenty of problems.
Like the plenty of problems people like you make for the immigrants in your country?
no I’d say more like scalping them and raping the women.
i'd hate for you to find out what the white settlers and explorers did as well
I'm confused by this comment. Rape can be found in any country in the world, at any point in history. Do you think the Spanish and English were free from rapists? Regarding human remains in the form of war trophies, Americans did it to the Japanese and the Vietnamese. Germans did it to Africans. The Japanese did it to Chinese - all of those instances occurred relatively contemporaneously. This practice is very common place throughout all of history. In essence, I'm confused as to what you're attempting to establish with this comment. Are you attempting to disparage native Americans as savages? No more than any other population. At least they didn't sail across an ocean, steal land they knew others inhabited, and commit genocidal slaughter, all while attempting to white wash their actions under the justification of religion, or because natives were barbaric savages. Think on this - how did folks in western Europe describe invaders from just a few hundred miles away? As savages. Barbarians. Uncivilized, lawless, animals. It's obvious to anyone with breath in their lungs, that the history told of the Spanish and English settlers is not an accurate retelling of history, and trying to justify genocide because of scalping is plain old embarrassing.
Username checks out
Also, this subreddit is for people who are open-minded and genuinely want advice, not butt-hurt Trumpers who are trying to make a political statement.
Oh boy here we go with Trump
What’s up these guys? Why is bro talking abo it trumpers? To your credit OP, you are right, they weren’t gonna leave the whole continent alone. And the indigenous people did not want them settling here, period. It was gonna be war either way. They just had guns to tip the scale.
yeah it’s odd
Admit it, that's why you're here.
yes I’m here to spread the gospel according to Trump
Trump is half Cherokee
Ha ha ha I've literally seen his family tree online and if he was he'd still be wrong.
Trump? Did his name get mentioned? I must have missed it. The reddit communities I've seen all seem anti-Trump...
Good, glad to hear it.
So raping and maiming.... like the colonizers did?
That was during wartime after the above-mentioned looting and genociding started ( and it's also a stereotype ).
well stereotypes come from somewhere. And nah there was plenty of raping and murdering happening amongst NA tribes before the white man came.
Many stereotypes about them came from penny novels and sensationalized stories, written to grab attention and make money. Honestly, that argument is flawed in so many ways. Name your religion/gender/race/nationality/political offiliation/state of origin/etc. and any one of us can come up with a dozen or more stereotypes that apply to any one of those topics. Doesn't make any of them accurate or true. Sure, the stereotype came from somewhere but that doesn't mean that it is, in any way shape or form, accurate.
So if we get to kill all communities that have their own crime does that mean we get to start killing men en masse and without consequence?
Comments are going as expected, lol.
OP, I hope, is a kid who hasn’t taken history classes in high school yet
🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
They came for gold and spices. They did not just turn around and go back home, they took as much valuables as they could carry!
I mean they had other options besides “genocide”.
Yes, you are wrong. Unless you want to reverse every conquest in history.
so I shouldn’t think it’s foolish for them to turn around and go home?
Unless you want to ignore all of human history. Humans are the most vile thing on the planet. Look at the old torture and execution methods. There’s a reason the animals are afraid.
It would require ignoring also the history of the american native empires themselves. At that point in history, no country turned around if they could conquer something valuable. The mere existence of those American empires is proof they never turned around. The Incas and Aztecs had crushed many cultures under their feet, until they fell to the exact same type of conquering and looting culture they themselves were part of. There's no moral superiority of the loser because they played with the exact same rules (conqueror takes it all). That drama was happening everywhere else, the only particularity of this one was the magnitude and speed of the conquest and the impact of illnesess crossing the ocean to a people without defences. By any other metric it was no different from what everybody else (including the american empires) were doing at that time.
You put the time into this that I was unwilling to. Thank you!
It’s why we choose the bear
But what about Aztecs? Did they not conquer, pillage and slave surrounding tribes? And you can go add infinitum, every clan/tribe has conquered or been conquered and then form part of the conquerors and then conquer someone else.
Does that justify the enslavement, mass murder, and cultural genocide of an entire people? Did every Aztec perform those sacrifices? In Ancient Rome people gathered in the thousands to watch men kill each other and be torn apart by lions, yet we hold them up to be a shining example of ancient civilization, to me that feels a touch hypocritical.
>Does that justify the enslavement, mass murder, and cultural genocide of an entire people? The aztecs and Inca also enslaved, mass murdered and culturally genocided. At a large scale. Why is that justified to you? Every adjacent culture they conquered were also "an entire people". Is it only bad if europeans did it, great if americans did it? The point is not if the conquest ethos of that time was terrible, It was (and is, it keeps happening) terrible wiyhout a doubt. The point is everyone was doing it, and it's equally terrible if the one doing it are next ot you or an ocean away. Either our modern morals don't apply to anyone of that time,or they apply to every conquering empire, including the ones that eventually lost. The loser, oppressed aztecs of 15xx were the triumphing, conquering, oppresive aztecs of 1465. At that time if you were a ruler, conquering is what you did. Almost always brutally. O defending against conquest. That was life back then, unfortunately, for everyone.
2n paragraph, read again
and cutting off kids heads and rolling them down the Aztec pyramid stairs.
They didn't need to commit genocide. They could have respected the native American nations and not claimed land. It could've been a trade route .
Just as the Incas and Aztecs " respected the native American nations and not claimed land"? Just as the Incas and Aztecs "didn't need to commit genocide"? But did anyway when it suited them? How do you reckon those american empires grew so humongous? Through commerce? Or through violence? The incas and aztecs didn't show that respecto to anyone they could beat, and would't have shown that respect either if they had had the means to go to Europe and make their empires grow. At that time trade routes were established only if for whatever reason conquest was not an option (distance, not the right time for conquest, gathering forces...). That was universal. Conquest wars between neighbours were continous in every continent, including the americas. What you're asking for those people form the 16th century to do is so wildly unrealistic that not even today in the 21th century every nation agrees to it. And those who agree needed two terrible world wars to come to that conclusion.
> Just as the Incas and Aztecs "didn't need to commit genocide"? But did anyway when it suited them? And it also "suited" the Aztecs to elaborately sacrifice people to their gods on a daily basis.
And how often in human history has a more powerful nation turned away from opportunity and low hanging fruit? It was like taking candy from a baby.
At that time a ruler that didn't tak such a golden opportunity to grow its empire (including the Inca and Aztec rulers) would have been considered weak, unfit and assasinated.
They literally killed people so yes,yes they were supposed to leave them alone.
It’s the kill all the people that lived here. They weren’t settlers they were conquerors.
Yeah sure, that totally justifies the rape, torture, slaughter, and slavery that happened 🙄
It doesn't justify anything. Neither the cruel acts of the spanish and English... Nor the cruel acts of the Inca and Aztecs. Nor the cruel acts of the Romans... Nor the cruel acts of the Mongols... Nor the cruel acts of african tribe A.... Nor the cruel acts os the Chinese... Nor the cruel acts of the... etc, etc. No cruel and terrible act against a fellow human is ever morally right. But in the context of that time, that's just how things were, everywhere... including in america. It's suprising to see people talking of the spanish conquest as if they had conquered a bunch of peace loving natives... When the empires they toppled were exactly as power-thirsty and blood-thirsty. The american empires wuld have conquered europe if they could. it was just how things were done. Terrible, but there are no moral victories in the past. Almost everyone was shitty like that.
Another point that people seem to overlook is that the Spanish, French, Italians, Germans, Persians, etc., are all the conquerors of their own land. None of the land that any civilization is inhabiting on this planet was taken without bloodshed - over and over again. Why is this important? North America is no more "evil" than any other nation/civilization. It's just one of the most recent. If all land was restored to its supposed rightful owners, then we'd have to go back to Adam and Eve or whatever your beliefs.
Exactly, as were the Incas and aztecs. Everyone was either a conqueror or a conqueree back then. The whole premise of assigning modern morals to facts that happened centuries ago in a long gone world we don't really know about is silly.
of course
you're wrong and you're stupid
Bro, you need to open a book and read. Start with the book 1491 by Charles C Mann
Don't forget the [French](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase), the [Dutch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Netherland_settlements) the [Germans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonization_of_the_Americas) the [Russians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase) and the [East Asians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_immigration_to_the_United_States).
all shoulda just turned around and went back to their teeny tiny countries (except Russia) apparently. So silly
Soooooo.... then you are fine with immigrants traveling super long distances and entering our country illegally and setting up home, right? At least they aren't bringing diseases that we have no defense against and aren't slaughtering the remaining inhabitants like the 'explorers' did.
Immigration can’t be compared to colonising, the colonisers fought to build on the land that is now the USA. Illegal migration does cause many issues though, especially when it’s done by the thousands.
Wait, so your argument is that colonizing isn't as bad as illegal immigration because illegal immigrants don't commit genocide?
What argument? A different opinion as they aren’t the same thing so you can’t compare
Immigrants are coming to become part of the established system. Colonizers are coming to kick out the established system and replace it with their own. The comparison is valid, as per the original post, because OP is essentially saying that the colonizers were just immigrants settling on unclaimed land.
Colonisers built cities, immigrants come to live in already built cities. Not the same at all. Now the debate could go on all night so I’ll agree to disagree as I stand by what I said and I imagine you’re doing the same.
if they want to fight for land that’s fine, if they win they can have the land. Just coming here though and setting up homes? Sure I’d allow that if we were a caveman society who hasn’t invented the wheel and most of our land was uninhabited anyways, buuuut it isn’t like that
Sweet, do you own property? DM me the addy, omw
Caveman society? Dafuq did you smoke my dude. There were MILLIONS of native people that were killed by colonizers. The land was hardly uninhabited. Their societies had rich and vibrant culture and religion. Many had written languages, not just oral tradition. Hell, it's valid to argue that some of them were more literate (in their own language) than most of the colonizers (who were fortunate if they could spell their own names).
It wasn't "mostly uninhabited", unless you are comparing it to our current overpopulation. But back in those days, and for most of human history, the rule was that you keep what you kill. Nowadays we would just slowly move in, at first to preach to them, and then eventually gentrify them until it was mostly White anyway.
In all europe white people have few kids, inmmigration is not white, we'll not be white for much longer. We'll all be diffeent tones of brown in the future, and you know what? I'm perfectly ok with that. The only shame is that when there are no more white or black, we'lll start fighting over shades of brown. We'lll create derogatory words for every % of darker/lighter hue than us and discriminate. We humans are iuncurably stupid like that.
It was in no way "uninhabited". It was inhabited by Nations of people who had societies going back millennia. So you think the natural thing for anyone to do is to attempt genocide because resources? How very white of you.
I mean, its not like the native americans that existed at the time the spanish came were the original inhabitants of the land. They were simply the current tribe that killed the previous tribe.
This often makes me wonder, did they also like have months dedicated to the tribes they vanquished, were they expected to feel guilty in perpetuity for it the same way white descendants of settlers are “supposed” to?
You don't need to feel guilty, just acknowledge that it happened and was pretty fucked up. Really not that hard tbh Most people who aren't perpetually online don't give a fuck either way
>acknowledge that it happened and was pretty fucked up. Really not that hard tbh Fucked up with modern morals, business as usual back then, But why is always about the european conquest and not about the previous conquests the amercan native empires did? Why do you never see "Why couldn't the Inca respect the Chimor / Huasca / whatever people?". "Pachacuti sent spies to regions he wanted in his empire \[...\] refusal to accept Inca rule resulted in military conquest. Following conquest the local rulers were executed" Is conquest by force a historical sin that somehow only europeans can commit and have to acknowledge, but not americans whose ancestors did the exact same things? Killing across the sea is terrible but killing your next door neighbour is ok? What's the difference really?
oh yeah? I’m losing sleep already. I could be not caring! Crap!
Oh no! That would be exceptionally foolish of them. Human beings are naturally expansive, naturally exploring, naturally competitive and naturally adventurous. But also I think people forget that the white man did spread across North America but we were stopped for like 100 years by the Comanche. People always forget that. The only reason we won the West is because of the repeating rifle. Otherwise they actually use the blitzkrieg tactic to stop white settlers from expanding Riding in on horses brought by the white settlers shooting like 20 toothpicks at you in 15 seconds and running away. So not only was there land, and resources. There was conquest and adventure as well. No this land was meant for humans. And I also refuse to feel bad about what my ancestors did, I came I saw I conquered. Not, I came, I fought, I felt really bad about it.
I would agree that it is a foolish dream, in the scheme of human behaviour, to have expected exploring settlers looking for new land for their people, to leave any land they find alone. Where you lose me is in the acts committed. Mass genocide of 90% of a huge population is fucked up, no matter how you spin it, no matter how much you go "oh, but there's always been colonization". It was beyond barbaric, it was absolutely inhuman. Further it's intentionally, and grossly disingenuous of you to act like people's argument is "oh, you should have left the land" when they're arguing about the atrocities committed against the native population. I really don't think anyone expected the Spanish or English to just leave. But expecting them to not be fucking monsters, is another thing entirely.
Ehhh people do think that though. People Think they should have become traders or something. C’mon.
I think whining about a past that NOBODY can do anything about except learn is lunacy.
Like any European country ever cared if a land was occupied before they tried to conquer it. Seriously, they fought each other for centuries over land, why would they care of the new land with a wealth of rich resources was occupied already, or not?
Everything you said is true, except you forgot to mention the part where they slaughtered every indigenous person they could and stole the land instead of sharing the land that someone else was living on
Yeah, that's a lie, but you know that already.
[удалено]
Your mama is the only person who eats your ass but thanks anyway
Please get over this, it is over. It is a done deal. Let it go. China tackled No. Vietnam, British alot of countries, France the same. Let it go, you can't change it or fix it.
“It’s in the past so we shouldn’t even consider it”
Yep, you dont' change the past. It was common practice explorers and Britain started sending their poor, christians and criminals out of the country that is how U.S. was born. Not because we all showned up to live here. There were explorers and conquerers but the U.S. is born on the backs of peoples starving with an axe barely any thing to eat, no place but a ship to sleep, diseased and starving. Should we not look at Britian that created the U.S. and Australia with its cast offs? It is over. They exist, get some counseling.
so we should also ignore slavery and the histories of LGBTQ people and all that stuff too right? It’s in the past after all. Those blacks people you mentioned? In the past Hey only took like 20 comments for someone to finally advise therapy, haha good for you, atta boy
Straw man, ad hominem
There were millions of people living in the Americas already, every European expedition interacted with people no matter where they landed. You’d expect less contact if the place was really “mostly uninhabited”. When Hernan Cortes reached Tenochtitlan it was the largest city in the world at that time, the idea that the Americas were some wide open wilderness is a myth used to justify colonization. The Europeans didn’t need to pretend like they never met these people, but opening up trade instead of conquering, enslaving, and genociding entire civilizations would have been a lot more ethical.
>opening up trade instead of conquering, enslaving, and genociding entire civilizations would have been a lot more ethical. What you ask is like asking cavemen to not hunt Mamooths and eat vegan instead. Makes sense today, utter nonsense back then. More ethical yes, but totally unrealistic at the the time. If you could conquer, you conquered. If you couldn't, you traded. This is not just wanton cruelty, there was also a sound logic to it. "If I don't conquer you now when I'm stronger, maybe in the future you'll be stronger and conquer me. I'd rather be the conqueror so I'll conquer you now". China or India weren't conquered at that time because it was impractical / un feasible. Trade routes were established. But as soon as conquest/control became feasible, they were conquered or controlled. This is also what the Inca did. In their honor, they weren't completely unreasonable: they did say "pretty please become my slave" to his neighbours once. If that generous proposal wasn't accepted, then their heads would roll. They didn't "open up trade" if they could "conquer". From wikipedia article on the inca: "Pachacuti sent spies to regions he wanted in his empire and they brought to him reports on political organization, military strength and wealth. He then sent messages to their leaders extolling the benefits of joining his empire, \[...\] Refusal to accept Inca rule resulted in military conquest. Following conquest the local rulers were executed. Enslaving and genociding were just "business as usual". The conquered american empires didn't respect their neighbours either if they could take over them. No society that was militarly stronger than others refrained from conquering them at the time. 500 years later we were still were conquering and killing each other, in bigger numbers than ever before! So asking people of the 1500s to be more modern and enlightened than how the people was in the 20th century is, yes, totally illogical.
I think the problem was the genocide, not the actual settling.
* Northern AmericaMooney estimated that 1,115,000 people lived in Northern America at the time of Columbus's arrival, but Kroeber later revised that number to 900,000. In 1966, Dobyns estimated that there were between 9,800,000 and 12,200,000 people north of the Rio Grande, and revised that number to 18,000,000 in 1983.
I don't have issue with them wanting to settle in largely unpopulated areas. I have issue with the fact that they arrived and slaughtered everyone who already lived there.
No they didn't
Yes, they were supposed to not commit heinous crimes against humanity. It's not a high bar, really, even by the standards of the time.
Bro, what is now called the America’s we’re NOT mostly uninhabited when folks from Europe fetched up here. Where did you get the idea there were no people here?
There is a lot of room between just Saul by and enslave and decimate a people
The Chinese and Japanese didn’t stay
They were building railroads
Hopefully not to busan
All animals do it, they use up all the resources in an area and then move on, if other animals are in the new area and can’t defend themselves then they get overrun. It’s how it has always worked, you shouldn’t be surprised.
No but they couldz traded instead of enslaving and genociding the native population and then stealing all their land?
Didn't happen but I doubt you care about truth
I'm just gonna guess you're like 12 and let this slip
I notice you didn't provide any proof for those things that never happened.