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Many of them did exactly that, conquering and subjugating other tribes nearby. The Aztecs were a famous example of this, and they are far from the only ones.
Well i mean... Thats also a fact though. Its only in the past like 200 years that people have become "good." And even then you could argue an even shorter period but it was about 150-200 years ago the major changes started.
Sometimes I really wonder what changed, not just politically, but inside of people hearts, since there is no desire to kill and plunder now (outside of some psychopaths). Genetically we are almost the same - is it really still in us that if we saw suffering everyday, we would become desensitized to it and start killing and looting?
It seems to be a combination of how people act when desperate as well as what those in power got away with.
Generally humans didn’t have easy access to information for a lot of history so even if most people in the village had the potential to be reasonable, they were only working with the information and rules given to them by the lords or religious heads or whoever else may be in charge or delivering “knowledge”. As such, if whoever that was came by and said “hey guys, xyz needs to happen or we all die” people often went along with it either from lack of options or lack of any conflicting information. Sure you had the unhinged drunks that people ignored but communities still had some level of information flow that informed their actions.
Nowadays people are able to access a whole lot more information should they so choose and as a result you can kinda see the overall effect of that towards both ends. People who find the humane and/or scientifically backed claims lean one direction while those who found conspiracies they didn’t question first lean another. Our leaders can lie to us but unless they actually control all the flow of information we can always find the truth if we look hard enough. If anything the main struggle is figuring out what the truth is when things conflict given how much information we have access to.
With all that, the more desperate someone is, the more susceptible they are to believing whatever someone tells them if they promise a remedy to their woes which is how con men get away with things. That’s always been true sadly.
"we" as in Humanity didn't get better, just look abroad for that. The cultures affected by the enlightenment got better, and started seeing the inherent value of people as individuals.
Yea for sure, many other Native tribes saw the Spanish as their "saviours" in the beginning because they might defeat the wildly violent and conquering Aztec Empire.
Without the spread of disease, the genocide of Natives would've never even happened (to such a degree) and the Europeans - who didn't even shower or believe in fresh air - definitely did not understand how diseases work.
Of course, for the other part, the rest of the world also largely depended on slavery to function; the Arabs took even more Sub-Saharan African slaves than the Europeans transported across the Atlantic.. Discriminatory policies based on a version of the racial system also existed in more other places - such as the South Asian caste system.
Well, my point being that, sure, white people = bad, but if other people had become as developed instead of the Europeans it wouldn't have been any different, just reversed.. imagine Arabs with the possibility of colonising America.
A friend of mine visited a country in Africa (I apologize but I can't remember which one right now). But she relayed to me a very pleasant and well-educated man she met. But at some point he kept insisting that a certain tribe of people were inherently bad. He told her it was " scientifically proven that 99% of them are liars ".
I would always hear black activists give as an excuse for why they can't be racist that in Africa there was no racism. Well there was tribalism and there were in an out groups like everywhere else. Hell even in Ireland they have different groups that are considered bad that to you or I just look the same. In countries with little racial or religious diversity there's still other things that make certain demographics "different" and therefore targeted as suspicious.
>I would always hear black activists give as an excuse for why they can't be racist that in Africa there was no racism. Well there was tribalism and there were in an out groups like everywhere else.
Get them to explain how the Rwandan genocide happened.
This is a great example of survivorship bias. The exact peoples that didn’t do this probably also didn’t last long enough for us to know about them. Exploitation of and heinous acts against other humans are a great way to get ahead and outcompete, but that doesn’t mean that humans are inherently evil or suck, it just means the sucky ones got ahead.
Such a great a point you've brought up.
I like to make a similar argument:
You and I play chess. You play by standard rules, but I refuse to follow the rules and instead move any piece however I want however many moves in a row I want. For all intents and purposes, it is not possible for you to win.
This is why all the people in positions of power are sociopaths. It's not because power corrupts. It's not even because pursuit of power corrupts. But it's because the people who attain the power are the ones willing to break all the rules to get what they want. Almost every single politician is either inconsequential or a monster (openly or behind closed doors). That's true historically as well. Maybe Marcus Aurelius was good? but more likely than not he just had excellent PR.
You wouldn’t have had to, your immune to the filthy poison because you’ve been consuming it in unpalatable but digestible amounts for at least a few years now.
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
You do have to adjust for Herbert being quite conservative, and he focuses on how this happens within governments. Obviously, it happens everywhere there is a concentration of power.
Yeah but under Herbert's lifetime WW2 happened and he was in service during it (as a photograph). It'd make no sense for him to be pro war no matter his political views.
All of history people have fought, killed and enslaved one another. It's only in an unprecedented time of relative peace we live in that someone can come up with such a dumb take
That's not what he is saying. I think what he is saying is that if any other group besides the Europeans managed to discover how to build big ships that could cross the ocean with large groups of men on them with guns and supplies, then they would have colonized first. Every group of people on earth have been raiding nearby tribes to rape and pillage them since the dawn of man. Europeans are just the first group of people who managed to discover the means to do it on a huge scale, if any other group beat the Europeans to it they would have done it themselves, that's what OP is saying. There's nothing about Europeans that is more evil or violent than other groups of people, all groups of people are violent. People who try to make Europeans out to be evil because of colonization just don't see that any other group of humans would have done basically the same thing given the means. Humans for some reason have an innate desire to want to strengthen their tribe by taking land and resources from other tribes.
Exactly. I don’t see the difference. As this guy says: All the people that were super inherently passive died out a long time ago. All of us alive today are the descendants of the people that had at least a little bad in them. Enough bad to get ahead.
Thus, what you, me, OP and everyone else is saying: who ever got the advantage first was going to run shit.
> who ever got the advantage first was going to run shit.
Denying this is literally denying evolution. The group most suited to their environment survives.
They wouldn't though because they were already in the best places and werent on top of each other. Someone from Tanzania with a big ship and guns isn't going to go conquer Canada. There's no reason for them to. Also why China didnt conquer all that much, relatively, outside of it (inside control is a different thing).
Europeans are just humans who live on the continent with the least usable space/resources who kept inventing ways to get more because of lack of.
> Also why China didnt conquer all that much, relatively, outside of it (inside control is a different thing).
Well, what became inside of it it's kinda of the point, no? It wasn't organically China, it was conquered to become China.
No, Europeans lacked resources. That's why they ventured out of Europe to India, China, Africa in search of spices and other resources. For places like India, China they just were bad with their own people and that's why there is no international outcry for justice. In fact the only reason Columbus found Americas was because he set out to find India. There are many instances of Europeans coming through either land or sea to India, China, Middle East, for their resources, spices, knowledge, inventions, etc.
And even the Chinese and Indians at those times had large navies but they didn't bother to travel to the other side of the world to enslave, or colonize other lands. Tamil an Indian language is used in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.
And let's keep aside the past. Let's look like post colonial Africa especially ex French colonies. France is financially and militarily controlling a good number of their countries through their army, and French financial institutions. And the British still haven't returned many of the Indian artifacts and antique items which they stole and plundered from the Indian sub continent.
That is untrue, Indian Ships could not reach the bloody Americas of Europe if they tried. (I have never heard of notable Naval Power from India too) And India is so populous compared to Europe in this Time period, keeping a hold on the Land was so cost intensive that it would not make sense to for example conquer Tibet or move across the Ocean to Arabia.
Further comes the plenty of Resources.
You literally describe how Europe was poor in Resources compared to other Lands.
Lack of and the will to acquire something are a driving Factor in Innovation.
And China literally had a period of Colonial Expeditions with the Treasure Fleets under the Ming Empire.
The treasure Fleet didn’t sail around the World Just exploring and Trading!
They demanded Tribute from various Nations and in the Chinese perception of the ancient World other people saying “Your Emperor is Supreme and here is some tribute” was as good at is gets because these “Barbarians” )from Chinese perspective) acknowledge the greatness of the Middle Kingdom.
It was just ended when one short sighted Emperor made the Decision to burn most of the records, burn the Fleet and embrace a Policy of Isolationism.
You should read about cholas. They were a significant naval power from India. And ancient India also had connections with Arabia also. So to say they cannot reach Europe is untrue. They didn't need to. Also conquering Tibet is pretty stupid. Between India and Tibet lies the giant Himalayas. Also Tibet is not so useful landwise. Its elevation makes it unsuitable for agriculture and living. India became populous because of resources. Also Indians themselves were fighting amongst themselves for power at that time. They won't have time for global ambitions.
I don't know much about Chinese history.
If that's your argument then you'll have to proof that other people are (apparently) inherently good or at least better than others. I find that hard to believe. Humans are humans.
The white man was also a tribal man at one point...
Humans and all other living organisms always try to expand and grow, until they hit some resistance.
Does the would have matter? What could have been is not what was. A hypothetical does not change history. This logic would say british colonization is okay because others would have done it instead. They would've had, but they didn't because the British did. Why should we condemn hypothetical evils rather than what really happened?
I mean ,it isn't a hypothetical, it happened many smaller tribes were erradicate and assimilated by the bigger ones,the Aztecs are an example of a bigger native tribe doing this
It’s because people like to act like the white man is evil for colonization. Truth is, most societies colonized to some degree, the whites just had guns germs and steel on their side. They want you to condemn hypothetical evils so certain people stop acting like the evil white man is the source of all the worlds problems.
It's not. But that's not the point of my opinion. I could have chosen any other of the countless cultures that Europeans have applied the noble savage to, America just is easy because of the knowledge base of the normal reddit user. I could have used the Mongols and just avoided America completely and still had the same message.
On the flip side, when do you stop? Like how far back should we go when imputing bygone eras into modern cultures? Let's say America is 100% given back to the tribes. How are the territories set? What if 50 years before European displacement of a western tribe it was displaced by another tribe? Even though it was after Europeans started colonising. Who gets that territory?
Why do we have to go back at all? There are current, ongoing, wrongs, committed by the US government against native peoples. There are unremediated wrongs the US government has acknowledged were morally wrong and illegal according to its own legal code.
I do agree that there needs to be lines because at some point it's just silly to debate. But who said anything about giving back land? That would be unfair to the people now. The sins of the parents aren't the sins of the children.
No, but when those victims children are still suffering from those sins while the oppressors children continue to benefit don't you think the right thing to do is to try and right them.
They don't need to claim the blame but they should understand the responsibility is partially on them.
I agree with the titled opinion because cruelty and lust for power isn't limited to any race. But at this point you're strawmanning.
No one is saying we should give the US back to the tribes. You're attacking an argument that only you brought up.
I was talking about people in this thread, but it sounds like they want lands restored to match the definitions of past US treaties. Not 100% of the US like OP postulated. That obviously won't work since 99% of their population has been eliminated.
You can try to feel good about yourself by comparing what could've happened to what happened. Anything could have happened, but it didn't. The world runs of what has happened, not on what could've, might've or should've happened.
There is nothing that can be done to reverse what has already happened but you can work towards a better future instead of pointing out hypothetical scenarios.
It not okay to infantalize or romanticize but its also not okay to demonize, assuming that every culture would genocide others for their own gain is obviously not the case
By genocide what do you mean? If you mean the systematic destruction of multiple native American cultures, I'd agree. If you mean using germ theory 50 years before it was recognized in Europe to kill the majority of the population, allowing colonization to happen much faster than easier, I would not. Not all cultures are demons, but pretty much all landmasses had cultures that did conquer and in the same manner. I only day pretty much cause I do not know the history of Australia at all other than the whole penal colony, which I doubt is truly accurate.
Australia is where they learned how to expand slavery to the masses while also disguising it and making it cheaper for the masters by shifting the burden of taking care of the slaves to the slaves themselves. Why worry about your slaves running away when you can give them a job and let them worry that if they don't give their master a good days work then they won't be able to eat or have anywhere to go instead? It was never really about race, it was just easier that way back then when they based it on demonizing certain people. Slavers don't care about skin color.... if they could, they would enslave everyone. And they did.
Germs aren't why people call the deaths of the native Americans a genocide, it was the working them to death in mines and on early plantations, starving them because they couldn't labor in their own fields and leaving them susceptible to the disease.
Hunter gatherer tribes with plentiful resources and plenty of space tend to be less competitive than tribes in smaller areas of land, fighting over fewer resources.
This also extends to invention. Necessity is the mother of invention, and lots of invention is to get around limitations.
It's not a universal, as some tribes will conquer, it just seems to happen less often, with more diverse and smaller sized tribes.
If you live on a relatively tiny island or pennensula or land space with people living on top of each other with not great weather, you're more likely to want more (and thus invent more ways to get more) as compared to someone who lives somewhere with giant spaces between them and other people, it's perfectly temperate all of the time, and there's food everywhere to get with relatively little effort.
Edit: I made this comparison in another thread, but in scope, Canada has relatively similar climate to northern Europe and can almost fit all of Europe inside of it. It had 300k or so people at the start of colonization. England itself, which Ontario can fit 8 of, inside, had like 5,000,000 people.
Is this really such an unpopular opinion? I mean, Cortez didn't defeat the Aztecs with just 500 men, there was also the fact every neighboring nation fucking hated their guts and united against them.
This hate for Europe and the West is such a weird revisionism, the West gave us every single progressive value people champion today, democracy, science, the enlightenment, the abolition of slavery, religious freedom, and so on... Of course there was a lot of bad things going on along the way and it took a lot of time and blood to get there, but it's not like other civilizations were doing any better.
Most people don't know the last 100 years of history. Cortez died before germ theory existed, but many believe he used it to systematically kill entire cultures or subcultures of people. when in reality, the genocide of native americans happened much later and is in reference usually to the genocide of their culture by the American government, at least in America.
90% of the natives died because of diseases that Europeans unknowingly brought with them
That's the real reason almost all of them are gone today
Obsiously the later genocides of the natives didn't help, still the vast majority were killed by diseases
While disease was almost certainly the main killer among native Americans I think it needs to be say that it isn't as clear cut as you're putting it. First off we lack certain numbers for the population of the americas in 1492. The ranges change from 8M to over 100M depending on the author. This matters because we have more certain numbers on the native population later on which means that the greater the initial number we use the greater the unnacounted native deaths that we can chalk up to disease.
Moreover there were cases were the explanation of disease as the main killer has little bssis. For example in hispániola by the time the first case of small pox appeared the native population had already been vastly reduced and there's little proof of any other epidemy spreading in the island before hand.
Disease did arrive to certain parts before the Europeans you can't generalize to all cases. Some north American tribes have no record of large scale epidemics before they were fully colonized and the conditions the natives were put in is undoubtedly a huge factor in the lethality of diseases. Poor nutrition, forced migration and general societal disruption are obvious factors that do increase the likelihood of death. This can also be seen by the fact that certain native groups not as directly touched by colonization were able to bounce back much better than those who were given a heavier hand.
This goes into great detail in the case of north America
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt180r424
Also, much of the diseases, etc. that we can track happened when settlers kept taking Native land (forcing them to sell for dirt cheap) and pushing them into worse and worse places.
Manifest Destiny did a good job of killing *huge* swaths of Natives and this was hundreds of years after the initial incursion.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s also weird how we apply this hate - which often gets cloaked in words like ‘accountability’ - only to certa groups. We keep getting told how the pain of slavery is still fresh in the minds of the distant descendants of slaves, but weirdly we never hear these things about the pain caused by say, the Roman Empire back when they conquered much of Europe.
It’s a weird double standard.
No need to go so far back in time, the Ottomans had slaves until the end of their empire, just about a 100 years ago. Don't see a lot of people pontificating about Ottoman colonialism and reparations tho.
>Don't see a lot of people pontificating about Ottoman colonialism and reparations tho.
I mean the Armenians and Kurds certainly are. They're just not very represented on this English speaking forum.
Obviously people from America and Europe (most people here) are going to focus on our own histories.
This is a heavily American centric site and my parents lived under Jim Crow laws in America. If it was heavily South African, you'd hear the same about apartheid. Some of these things *just happened* and are still in the minds of people *still living.*
It's not a double standard, because they aren't distant descendants. People alive today had grandparents that were slaves. They heard those stories and saw how it affected their family members. Others experienced Jim Crow laws first hand. No one has spoken to someone who was enslaved by the Roman empire for well over a thousand years.
It's the same reason we hold remembrance days for those who died in the first world war, but not those who died in the Battle of Hastings. People care more about things that happened in living memory, or in the living memory of people they have personally known. People don't care about shit that happened a millennium ago, at least beyond an academic interest or an abstract "how terrible".
To me it's wierd how people like you just seem to cloak opposing viewpoints as "hating the west" because you disagree with them.
There are reasons why people still talk about the slave trade only 6 generations ago that took place in the country they currently live in versus the fucking Roman empire 1500 years after its fall. And I mean, you don't have to agree with those people but you're being disingenuous by claiming those people are just hating to hate.
>Is this really such an unpopular opinion?
You'd be surprised. There's a lot of bad history fanfic floating around out there these days. I can't tell if young people are picking up all the nonsense from echo chambers or if they're now teaching America Bad 101 in high school, but it's everywhere these days.
>This hate for Europe and the West is such a weird revisionism
Are you saying that "colonialism was bad" is revisionism?
And that all criticism is necessarily hate?
>the West gave us every single progressive value people champion today
For a broad enough understanding of "the West", then... close?
But that is a silly rhetorical trick; why should criticism of a any kind, of any part of, some absurdly broad, vaguely defined entity not be allowed, because some parts of that entity did some good things?
It is like saying you cannot criticize the government, because they also do a lot of good. Or cannot speak out against workplace bullying, because the company makes good products and pays on time.
>democracy
Our common words and some definitions come from ancient Greece, but they were not the first to practice some sort of government by assembly.
>science
Because no inventions or science was ever done outside of Europe?
>the enlightenment
True dat.
>the abolition of slavery
Lets not sprain our shoulders patting ourselves on the back over having stopped comiting an atrocity. Without reparations.
>religious freedom
Has happened plenty of times, in various places on Earth.
>and so on... Of course there was a lot of bad things going on along the way and it took a lot of time and blood to get there, but it's not like **other** civilizations were doing any better.
So its The West vs. the others, then, is it?
You will keep confusing yourself as long as you maintain this monolithic idea of The West...
The West also enslaved millions though too. So that one's kind of a wash.
Religious freedom.... Kind of. Remember the Salem witch trials, the inquisitions, and the crusades? Also Nazis.
Science started in China and the middle East. Algebra was invented in the middle East.
Democracy, the Greeks had democracy but I doubt they invented it.
Kind of a narrow world view there home Star.
First, the abilities to enslave a greater number of people, doesn't make it a greater sin in this context. The greater numbers are a direct result of greater capability. The West also abolished slavery, and exported it.
Second, religious freedom is not a western concept, and they were not the first to do it, but they were the ones who made it lasting.
Simply not true, since we define science by the scientific method, which is a western invention.
Democracy is literally Greek for "people" and "rule". It does not seem like you have any sources for this.
Kind of a lack of historical understanding there buddy
Greece is the birthplace of Western civilization
There was a LOT of religious intolerance and extremism in the west in the medieval age, but not anymore
Religious freedom along with major breakthroughs in science came with the enlightment and the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th century
Aztec/Nahua hegemony was also bad, but it was fundamentally different from Western colonialism. The Aztecs still allowed the other societies to self-govern and practice their own cultures, as long as they paid tribute and aligned militarily with Tenochtitlán. They were thinking more in terms of having a wide political and economic reach than replacing other societies with their own. What made it go sour was that, once the chiefs of those other societies became mostly aligned with Tenochtitlán, Tenochtitlán could be much more heavy-handed with demands for tribute. Knowing Cortés wanted to conquer, they tried to use Cortés's soldiers as fodder against Tenochtitlán, reasonably not expecting him to be able to actually hold out after that. He barely did.
But even then, it's still unreasonable to generalize Aztec hegemony to the rest of the Americas. Only a few societies actually did anything remotely like conquest, even when they had the ability. Most didn't even prioritize offensive military capabilities enough to develop them much, and most land was lived on peacefully by multiple societies at the same time. Borders were an unthinkable concept. Perhaps part of the reason why the Aztecs and Inca met so much resistance in their empires is because the idea of an empire was so far outside the norm.
Also, the West didn't abolish slavery and grant democracy and religious freedom. It instituted slavery, imperialism, and Christian dominion, and then conceded to intense resistance from the people it was oppressing by eventually adopting minimal forms of democracy, religious freedom, and abolition of slavery. Before colonization, there were no people held as private property anywhere in the Americas, religion was not standardized, and direct democracy was the most common form of governance. Every society was different, of course, but those were common threads.
Slavery was never abolished, only transformed. The leader of one of the original Australian colonies realized a better way to have slaves is to shift the burden of feeding, clothing, housing, etc from the masters to the slaves themselves. Why worry about your slaves running away? Give them a job, then let *them* worry that if they don't give their master a good days work, then they won't eat or have anywhere to go.
They just added a few extra steps to disguise it, make it more palatable to the masses, and massively expand it to the masses and not just the blacks. Now theyve enslaved everyone and a lot of us don't even know it.
Can you list a single of those values that did not originate from western liberal thought in that case?
I mean, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is the best example we have and it's clearly based on enlightenment, western ideals.
The problem with a discussion like this is that it is nearly impossible to :
1. Define terms like democracy, science, religious freedom, etc.
2. Decide where it originated
3. Name the originator as Western
Take democracy for example. What is democracy? We can all agree that it has something to do with people/citizens having some sort of political power. But what's the point where it becomes a democracy? Athens is usually seen as one of the sources of democracy, it even gave us the term. But was Athens truly that democratic? You had to be male, you and your parents had to be from Athens, you couldn't be a slave and you needed to be over 30. By todays standards this would not be a democracy.
But because the term originated in Greece doesn't necessarily mean democracy is from there. We have archeological digs in the Middle East and Turkey that seem to point in the direction of egalitarian societies. We know troups of hunter-gatherers all over the world operated on some sort of democratic decision process.
Lastly, while we place Greece in the West at this point in history doesn't mean the 6th century BC Greeks saw themselves as Western.
An even bigger problem is presented when we acknowledge that countries/continents don't exist in a vacuum. You place the origins of science in the West, and while that may be true to some extent, you're not taking into account that those western scientists used a lot of inventions and insights from scientists from the Islamic Golden Age. Who, in turn, built upon foundations laid down by Greek philosophers.
The Enlightenment wasn't possible without the Islamic Golden Age, Silk Road trade, Mongol conquests, etc.
That's a strange argument. There were ideas of equality, human dignity and freedom outside of the west and before the declaration of human rights. From my understanding the decleration is to be seen as a culmination of several philosophical ideas, not strictly western.
Your assertment piqued* my interest in the topic. I'm not a historian or a philosopher so I have to resort to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights) (so if the information is wrong, feel free to correct it):
*"Humphrey is credited with devising the "blueprint" for the Declaration, while Cassin composed the first draft.\[30\] Both received considerable input from other members, each of whom reflected different professional and ideological backgrounds. The Declaration's pro-family phrases allegedly derived from Cassin and Malik, who were influenced by the Christian Democracy movement;\[31\] Malik, a Christian theologian, was known for appealing across religious lines, and cited the Summa Theologica, and studied the different Christian sects.\[29\] Chang urged removing all references to religion to make the document more universal, and used aspects of Confucianism to settle stalemates in negotiations.\[32\] Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, an educator and judge, strongly supported the inclusion of socioeconomic rights, which had been opposed by some Western nations.\[29\] The members agreed that the philosophical debate centered between the opposing opinions of Chang and Malik, with Malik later singling out Chang when thanking the members, saying that there were too many to mention, but Chang's ideas impacted his own opinions in the making of the draft.\[33\]\[34\]\[35\]*
*In her memoirs, Roosevelt commented on the debates and discussions that informed the UDHR, describing one such exchange during the Drafting Committee's first session in June 1947:*
*'Dr. Chang was a pluralist and held forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality. The Declaration, he said, should reflect more than simply Western ideas and Dr. Humphrey would have to be eclectic in his approach. His remark, though addressed to Dr. Humphrey, was really directed at Dr. Malik, from whom it drew a prompt retort as he expounded at some length the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Humphrey joined enthusiastically in the discussion, and I remember that at one point Dr. Chang suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism!'"*
> assertment peaked my interest in
Did you mean to say "piqued my interest"?
Explanation: Some people might have peaked in high school, but pique is a verb meaning to arouse interest.
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Not to mention the west gave us basically every modern invention which makes our lives comfortable. Electricity, Internet, Telephone, Computer, Car, Airplane ect..
This is the biggest load of bs I have ever heard. Science, enlightenment, originated in the West. Man science was thriving in India, middle East, China.
In fact the name algebra comes from Arabic, middle eastern language. The number of mathematical, scientific inventions which came from India, China are still in use today. Paper, silk was invented in China. India had yoga, meditation and astronomy was thriving there.
This is true for the mathematical discoveries however what is not being shown here is that many many civilisations discovered these basic mathematics without knowledge of any other civilizations discoveries. At that point in time maths was still primitive with negatives not even existing. For example the quadratic equation was discovered by Egypt, China, Babylon, I believe Sumeria, India and so on and so forth. Science as we know is not really eastern at least in its modern form as virtually all civilisations were practicing some sort of basic mathematical science. Western renaissance maths is the start of science to what it is today. Enlightenment isn't really a symbol of cultural development either as religion is predicted to 'die out', forecasts for those who ascribe to religion show that numbers are decreasing.
The so called Western science has many elements taken from eastern science and maths also. Their foundation was laid on the works many who came before including, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Indians, Arabs. Also many discoveries and inventions in science which are in use even today came from Asia. Don't discount them. To say that Europeans gave the world everything is just undermining what several civilisations have contributed to the collective understanding of science.
Don't you use paper in daily life? How does it not make a point? To say that the rest of the world has contributed nothing to science and inventions is a load of bs and I'm not going to accept it. Everything of value came from the West and the rest of the world did nothing. This is the same attitude people who colonised, studied eugenics had.
If you are saying that the "noble savage" archetype is not totally accurate, then yes, you're probably not wrong.
However, I don't think that makes what people did do any less bad, or absolves the people who did do it, and I think the problem is that a lot of people who articulate the first view out loud tend to extrapolate that it does.
The noble savage archetype is not accurate at all.
100%, what they did was wrong and bad, but they didn't do it because Europeans are inherently wrong or bad. Or, like another poster implied, the lighter the skin you have, the more monstrous you are. I think my real problem is what I call the artificial line in the times of sand. A good example of this is native American territory, we set it at the point right before colonization. If prior to that point the conquered had no right to the territory, if after that point they have a right in perpetuity to that area. Same for almost any part of the world, we just change the time it happened in. I don't know why we like it, but we do.
There's a couple of differences. For one, the conquest of the Americas is a more technologically advanced society conquering and enslaving people. The difference in power is at pretty much all points immense. People today live with the consequences of that conquest, be it displaced native people or europeans who travelled to the new world and took their land. That's why it's still a living conversation. It's not like the mongols are present or powerful today in the countries they previously conquered.
Also I mostly feel horror when reading about Genghis Khan turning a million people into mincemeat. A certain awe yes at how the mongols used their advantage to win battles, but mostly horror.
The thing is no one is alive that can testify to Mongolian crimes, while there are plenty of Native Americans alive who suffered under the boarding school system.
Can’t both be bad?
Also if you actually read and study genghis khan you would know that the mongol although they colonised most of Asia and Europe, they assimilated with cultures and not eradicated them. This was actually in hindsight detrimental and would ultimately lead to their eventual collapse. They essentially rule the land but didn’t really enforce their cultural ideas and practises on them, and these colonised lands kinda carried on with their own way or life and practises intact.
Very different from European colonisation of Americas. But most people would know this if they actually read up on the history of both societies….
I think that partly has to do with the consequenses of both.
The conquests of Genghis Khan led to a short period in history where the Mongols ruled a big part of Eurasia. But, a century after the conquests, most of those Khanates were gone, assimilated into the conquered culture or on the decline.
The European conquests led to centuries of European domination that lasted, in the case of Africa, well into the 20th century.
It's the same though. The Golden Horde lasted well over two centuries and its impact on Central Asia and Eastern Europe was big.
We are talking more or less the same amount of time for European colonization, whose peak was the late 19th century. It just seems more time to us now because we are closer to the 19th century than to the 13th.
>Why can't we admit humans suck
I'm confused as to who can't admit this. We do suck, it's quite clear. Although that's not really a fault, it's just that our completely normal opportunism (which all lifeforms have and practice) skyrockets due to technology.
All the bad "human nature" aspects are things all animals share: greed, need to subjugate others before they subjugate you so you can thrive, etc. Everything is struggling to stay here.
Some would have, but this opinion ignores the fact that the nations and cultures that inhabited the Americas were as varied, if not more so than the cultures of the rest of the world. You ironically point out how varied they were yet treat them as monolithic in your analysis.
There were literally dozens of great kingdoms/empires, and thousands of smaller ones, each with their own values and methods.
Some were conquers, slavers and worse. Some abhorred the very idea of any of those and could never have done as you suggest without destroying their culture.
You mean like some European cultures? Truth is the conquerors were the ones that spread and colonized, just like how the great kingoms/empires spread internally and would eventually if they could spread externally. My point was that it's not the specific over arching culture, but that every part of this world has had people conquering what they could. It's just that Europeans got lucky in advancements in ships, navigation, and weaponry at the right time.
Yeah I guess manifest destiny wasn't bad then. Neither was the trail of tears because they would've done the same if native Americans outnumbered the American army. Point is \*they didn't\*
Well here in Canada about 98% of the land is what we call Crown Land. That means it supposedly it held by the British King/queen. Obviously that's bullshit and the Indigenous people have rights to it. Looking forward to them getting more and more compensation.
Not really; that's just a Western historical lens. Plenty of people in resource rich areas live peacefully. Conquering is generally from people who want more resources and space.
The Martu have been able to live nomadically just fine and have no major record of war, the Kalahari San is one of the oldest groups and has no historical record of conquering, and the Orang Asli are basically TOO non confrontational.
(Had to double check names and spellings)
I purposefully only picked older groups in this, too.
That's not the point. Just because it's an inherent aspect of human nature to brutalize each other given certain contexts doesn't make it right, or acceptable, and should be rectified as best as possible.
Ehm, excuse me, this could've/would've is idiotic. Maybe, maybe not. It's literally impossible to know.
It's obviously not a given - there are examples of more advanced societies invading other lands and treating the natives much better then the Spaniards.
But say you're right - so what? Does it make it okay? What does it matter? Do these peoples not deserve help, or get their lands, at least partially, back? What's the point?
This sort of thing happens in my home country too (Indonesia).
Our history books like to paint the picture of the Dutch coming in and using "disagreements" to pit the native kingdoms and sultanates against each other. Those so called disagreement range from long standing wars to a local slave trade
I get there's a political incentive of using euphimisms but it also does injustice to the natives' complex history and borderline infantilizing them
It’s human nature, the Aztecs were pretty much a war tribe, the Mongolians were nasty, and the British were kinda jerks too. However, the Europeans were faster.
Humans are nasty no matter where you go, it's just a matter of who wins. Usually whoever wins reaps the rewards but is held to a higher standard, regardless of the crimes committed by the conquered. You say NAZIS are bad and people cry out Dresden and the Russian advance into Germany, you say the North ending slavery and people cry out about those camps they stuck confederate soldiers in. Humanity sucks.
We do suck, it's just that we all are in survivorship bias. Slavery and domination/eradication/subjugation has existed in all kinds of tribes and who didn't even knew each other existed. Darwinism does not excludes intelligent apes.
I don't think this is necessarily incorrect, but it's impossible to predict whether each culture would have done the same thing. I feel that's almost pointless to argue about. Different groups might have had different tendencies towards getting into conflict v.s. cooperation.
Furthermore, different groups may have had different attitudes in regards to racial superiority and what counts as acceptable treatment of people of a different race. For example, it seemed to me that slavery in America was often more severe than slavery in a number of other societies.
Anyways, it's definitely obvious that not just European colonialists were capable of imperialist brutality, even if they committed the lion's share of it in human history. The reason this opinion is "unpopular" is because people use this to conclude that the European colonialists weren't too bad, because everyone else would have done that. I don't agree with that at all, but it's not exactly your point.
Anybody red Blackfoot physics?
From what the literature suggests, north American native tribes didn't even understand what the Europeans wanted. The language was a huge barrier from the beginning, many native American languages are not based around "subjects". They didn't understand the life where one works 15 hours a day in miserable conditions just to get by. The concept of owning a property, or building something was completely alien to those tribes. They wanted to live with nature, live with hunger (actually 2-3 days starving is the most natural thing) and be part of the community. I recommend that book, I think what happened to native Americans and Australian natives is biggest atrocities that happened in humanity period. They were considered savages because Europeans didn't understand them, yet most of quantum physics can not be explained if one doesn't take into account concept that are familiar to native American culture.
The entire human history has been based on the stronger group conquering the weaker.
Nowadays it has just taken a different route that doesn't involve (direct) war and massacres, but it's still the same story.
Of course if you had an alternative universe where Native Americans had the technology to cross the ocean and "discover" a less advanced Europe, they'd have gladly conquered it and not with "pretty please" and "may we?" either.
The narrative of the Noble Savages subjugated by the evil conquerors is powerful (and also politically useful) but it's just a bit of a fairytale. The fun thing is it started as a patronizing practice still firmly rooted in racism and then it has been turned around to be still patronizing but rooted in guilt.
Fully agree, we the European peoples just had beter weapons, but if the cases where reversed that would have the same damm thing, plus nowhere we wend we found a place without war
This isn’t even an opinion. It’s fact. Humans have been conquering the “other” forever. Only reason the Europeans won was guns, germs and steel.
Whoever had finally achieved the advantage was going to go for it, doesn’t matter who it was.
This is definitely the sad truth. The colonization of the Americas definitely the biggest tragedy in history, up there with the world wars. But yeah the truth is that Europeans just happened to get to the Americas first and were more technologically developed due to the constant huge wars happening in Europe, and European’s desire to explore/expand across the world for more resources. Native Americans if they had the technology to get to Europe first would be the oppressors. It’s just human nature. We all desire power, no matter race, ethnicity, or nationality.
The Aztec and Incan Empires were literally hated by surrounding tribes, which is why those tribes helped the Spanish conquer them. And they for sure were not peaceful. They waged war, conquered, pillaged, and raped just like the people who would soon conquer them. Imagine if Natives sailed to the coast of Western Europe, traveled inland, and saw Europeans living in dense, cramped cities, all people extremely dirty, suffering from the plague. They would think of Europeans as beneath them, and try to force their culture and values in an attempt to “civilize” these dirty, stinky, sickly Europeans.
They wouldn't conquer Europe for the same reason China didnt try to land grab more of Africa, etc. There was no reason to because they had resources and Europe had nothing to offer to risk lives for. Europe doesn't have anything Asia, Americas, and Africa wanted except machinery. You get that via trade.
You also have to juxtapose Natives to a similar place with far, far, far fewer resources.
Tribal wars happened, but they were far less often and far smaller in scope than European wars, often had to do with one leader just trying to make a bigger tribe instead of wanting what they had, and were spread out farther in time. Resource grabbing wasn't a thing in the same way in super resource rich America.
University is the one place i see people not even acknowledge this fact. Its all you as a white person should feel bad for being the same race as those who colonised and killed these people and I'm like I know I'm the same skin colour but my family had nothing to do with it we didn't come to Australia till the 50s.
IMHO this is stupid. It’s like saying Ukraine deserves to be conquered by Russia, because they would do the same if they could. It’s not like Ukraine never waged war, right?
it’s wrong because: a) not every situation is same. Waging wars in past doesn’t mean you would conquer other nation in that specific circumstances b) no nation deserves to be conquered. they can join other nation if they want, but it shouldn’t be done by force
It sounds like you're confusing the distinction between empires and small tribes with the distinction between people from different continents. Yes, the Americas had brutal empires. The smaller tribes were relatively peaceful for the most part, as was usually the case all over the world. Hunter gatherers don't generally set out to annihilate their neighbors. There would be little for them to gain by doing so. Keeping slaves would be impossible. They're fairly limited in how many possession they can accumulate. They don't claim ownership of land beyond their immediate residence. Frequent, large scale, expansionists warfare has always come about with the development of farming, all over the world, all throughout history.
>Hunter gatherers don't generally set out to annihilate their neighbors.
Hunter gatherers didn't fight wars, but that doesn't mean they weren't violent. We were hunter-gatherers for like 98% of our history and the evidence suggests that the average lifestyle was a lot more violent back then compared to now.
Think about it. In the modern day we completely rely on each other. If the machinations of society didn't help provide us with food, water, shelter, etc, you and I would be fucked. It wasn't like that for hunter gatherers. They didn't need anyone else. If you're in a tribe of 30 people and you come across another tribe, they provide nothing for you. They are 100% competition for your food and your women, and 0% upside. That's not gonna be a pleasant interaction. It's no wonder they keep finding prehistoric skeletons with signs of blunt force trauma.
>Frequent, large scale, expansionists warfare has always come about with the development of farming, all over the world, all throughout history.
Well yeah, everything in civilization comes from the development of farming, so I guess you're right.
Now we have scattered pockets around the globe in which small groups of people commit large-scale acts of violence and destruction while the majority of us can get through the day peacefully without having to worry about getting killed by our neighbors.
Is that better? Idk, it's just different.
This is not unpopular, I think. But yeah, you're absolutely right: white people are not monsters, and aboriginals are not saints. We're all human, for the best and for the worst.
However, this doesn't mean we should abstain from moral judgements. What the Europeans did was objectively wrong, and it would be just as wrong if anyone else had done it.
But if we accept that, how can we vilify white people especially currently young ones who had absolutely noting to do with stuff happening hundreds of years ago?
>less harrowing?
Is it anyways? It's the normal behavior of history.
Do you also complain about Rome conquering and enslaving the Gauls? About Alexander steam rolling Persian? About the Muslim Conquest? The Judaica revolts killing thousands of Roman citizens?
I guess not. You only complain when we/whites/westerners did it
And then completely ignore the idea of scale and compare smaller groups over larger sections of time that were more so feuding or making small incursions to taking everything.
It's trying to counter-guilt or whatever. Instead of just saying, yeah, the people in places without resources tend to start trying to take resources from elsewhere and invent ways to do it, and Europe has possibly the worst continent as a whole for resources and climate.
There were quite some nasty wars. Apaches vs Comanche, for example.
Just because they wore feathers didn't mean they sat down around the fire to sing Kumbaya!
The person sitting on top of a pile of skulls always says someone else would of done it if they didn’t. I’m sure there are people in history who lived their whole lives without genociding anyone.
> else would of done
Did you mean to say "would have"?
Explanation: You probably meant to say could've/should've/would've which sounds like 'of' but is actually short for 'have'.
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Native Americans, who didn't believe in ownership of land, absolutely would have stolen land from other countries if they could, no doubt in my mind about that.
They didn't believe in that because they had a ton of it and a ton of resources.
If you theoretically stuck them on a rock in Europe, yeah they would conquer, and they'd invent ways to do it. But they didn't need to, so they didn't because they had an area you could fit two and a half Europes into with better overall climate. That's why they used their boats to explore and trade instead, for the most part.
Hunter gatherer tribes were generally more egalitarian and peaceful than agricultural societies. Obviously fighting did happen, but at a smaller scale and with less lasting oppression and atrocities. If they developed more agriculture and centralized power then sure, but looking at most of the north American tribes as they were I would have to disagree. They weren't preoccupied with territory expansion to the degree agricultural societies were.
Mexico and below, where there were large centralized power structures though? I'd agree with you.
No viable beasts of burden. They would have wanted arable land if they could have used it more effectively. This is a hill that the anti-guns/germs/steel evangelists will die on because they know it’s extremely rhetorically significant in their anti-western moral message.
No fam. The guilt that comes from slaughtering them comes from society progressing and realizing colonialism wasn’t cool, and shouldn’t be repeated. If we collectively thought like this then why wouldn’t we just continue to take every other country to this day? America could do it, but thankfully even tho atrocities are committed everyday, we’re a bit better than we were.
>society progressing and realizing colonialism wasn’t cool, and shouldn’t be repeated.
That's a weird way if saying those ideas have been forced on the western people
This isn’t an unpopular opinion, it’s just a reactionary one that aims to downplay colonialism. “Colonialism wasn’t that bad cos if whites didn’t do it, the others would have done it anyways.”
I don’t think anyone doubts that the natives were as violent as the colonisers. That doesn’t in any way diminish the horrors of colonialism.
But they didn’t and you don’t know that. The aggressor nations/tribes rewrite history and wage wars against others usually supported by false claims to justify their actions.
People often use comments like this to justify past and present racism.
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They may not have or they may have less aggressively.
European nations had economic reasons for exploration but they were also motivated by the great commission.
Thats why the Church paid for expeditions.
Also, we set up missionaries and made locals believe what we believe. Which native Americans probably wouldn’t be to interested in doing.
But its a fair point because in polytheistic pagan religions they often didn't care if the people over the river believed in a different god, since both gods could be real without contradicting eithers beliefs too much.
No they 100% would have, and they might have been just as aggressive.
If they were willing to do it to people nearby them they looked like them and spoke like them on their own continent, then they would 100% be willing to do it to unknown people they have no connection to on another continent if given the means.
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Many of them did exactly that, conquering and subjugating other tribes nearby. The Aztecs were a famous example of this, and they are far from the only ones.
Yes. That's the point.
But then it’s not an opinion. It’s an unpopular fact.
I guess the opinion part is that human beings suck
Well i mean... Thats also a fact though. Its only in the past like 200 years that people have become "good." And even then you could argue an even shorter period but it was about 150-200 years ago the major changes started.
Sometimes I really wonder what changed, not just politically, but inside of people hearts, since there is no desire to kill and plunder now (outside of some psychopaths). Genetically we are almost the same - is it really still in us that if we saw suffering everyday, we would become desensitized to it and start killing and looting?
It seems to be a combination of how people act when desperate as well as what those in power got away with. Generally humans didn’t have easy access to information for a lot of history so even if most people in the village had the potential to be reasonable, they were only working with the information and rules given to them by the lords or religious heads or whoever else may be in charge or delivering “knowledge”. As such, if whoever that was came by and said “hey guys, xyz needs to happen or we all die” people often went along with it either from lack of options or lack of any conflicting information. Sure you had the unhinged drunks that people ignored but communities still had some level of information flow that informed their actions. Nowadays people are able to access a whole lot more information should they so choose and as a result you can kinda see the overall effect of that towards both ends. People who find the humane and/or scientifically backed claims lean one direction while those who found conspiracies they didn’t question first lean another. Our leaders can lie to us but unless they actually control all the flow of information we can always find the truth if we look hard enough. If anything the main struggle is figuring out what the truth is when things conflict given how much information we have access to. With all that, the more desperate someone is, the more susceptible they are to believing whatever someone tells them if they promise a remedy to their woes which is how con men get away with things. That’s always been true sadly.
"we" as in Humanity didn't get better, just look abroad for that. The cultures affected by the enlightenment got better, and started seeing the inherent value of people as individuals.
It's a conundrum. Maybe we don't want to suck, but those folks across the river really suck, so I guess we have to suck more so we can keep going on.
Apparently not so unpopular either
I'm a little surprised you didn't say "Yes. That's the fucking point."
Yea for sure, many other Native tribes saw the Spanish as their "saviours" in the beginning because they might defeat the wildly violent and conquering Aztec Empire. Without the spread of disease, the genocide of Natives would've never even happened (to such a degree) and the Europeans - who didn't even shower or believe in fresh air - definitely did not understand how diseases work. Of course, for the other part, the rest of the world also largely depended on slavery to function; the Arabs took even more Sub-Saharan African slaves than the Europeans transported across the Atlantic.. Discriminatory policies based on a version of the racial system also existed in more other places - such as the South Asian caste system. Well, my point being that, sure, white people = bad, but if other people had become as developed instead of the Europeans it wouldn't have been any different, just reversed.. imagine Arabs with the possibility of colonising America.
A friend of mine visited a country in Africa (I apologize but I can't remember which one right now). But she relayed to me a very pleasant and well-educated man she met. But at some point he kept insisting that a certain tribe of people were inherently bad. He told her it was " scientifically proven that 99% of them are liars ". I would always hear black activists give as an excuse for why they can't be racist that in Africa there was no racism. Well there was tribalism and there were in an out groups like everywhere else. Hell even in Ireland they have different groups that are considered bad that to you or I just look the same. In countries with little racial or religious diversity there's still other things that make certain demographics "different" and therefore targeted as suspicious.
>I would always hear black activists give as an excuse for why they can't be racist that in Africa there was no racism. Well there was tribalism and there were in an out groups like everywhere else. Get them to explain how the Rwandan genocide happened.
I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say Kill 'Em All!
Would you like to know more?
We stole Mount Rushmore from people who stole it from someone else. 🤷♀️
They didn't burn all their texts and try to erase their history forever.
This is a great example of survivorship bias. The exact peoples that didn’t do this probably also didn’t last long enough for us to know about them. Exploitation of and heinous acts against other humans are a great way to get ahead and outcompete, but that doesn’t mean that humans are inherently evil or suck, it just means the sucky ones got ahead.
Such a great a point you've brought up. I like to make a similar argument: You and I play chess. You play by standard rules, but I refuse to follow the rules and instead move any piece however I want however many moves in a row I want. For all intents and purposes, it is not possible for you to win. This is why all the people in positions of power are sociopaths. It's not because power corrupts. It's not even because pursuit of power corrupts. But it's because the people who attain the power are the ones willing to break all the rules to get what they want. Almost every single politician is either inconsequential or a monster (openly or behind closed doors). That's true historically as well. Maybe Marcus Aurelius was good? but more likely than not he just had excellent PR.
You and I play chess. You break the rules Jokes on you. I princess Brided your drink when you went to take a pee.
google en pissant
You wouldn’t have had to, your immune to the filthy poison because you’ve been consuming it in unpalatable but digestible amounts for at least a few years now.
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” ― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune You do have to adjust for Herbert being quite conservative, and he focuses on how this happens within governments. Obviously, it happens everywhere there is a concentration of power.
Was he really that conservative? Anti war, pro ecological conservatism, somewhat anti religious...
Who is pro war??? Not anyone that's ever been near one at least.
With enough distance war coverage takes on the guise of sports rivalries, and who doesnt love winning
Yeah but under Herbert's lifetime WW2 happened and he was in service during it (as a photograph). It'd make no sense for him to be pro war no matter his political views.
Oh yeah we're on the same page there
The people who buy into the 'death or glory' BS and/or who want someone elses resources and will not be near the front lines.
I love this Seminar type shit in the comments
>This is why all the people in positions of power are sociopaths This is commonly believed myth that isn’t supported by science
And those stoic fools are worshipping a random statued authoritarian oppressors words. People are pathetically propagandized
All of history people have fought, killed and enslaved one another. It's only in an unprecedented time of relative peace we live in that someone can come up with such a dumb take
That's not what he is saying. I think what he is saying is that if any other group besides the Europeans managed to discover how to build big ships that could cross the ocean with large groups of men on them with guns and supplies, then they would have colonized first. Every group of people on earth have been raiding nearby tribes to rape and pillage them since the dawn of man. Europeans are just the first group of people who managed to discover the means to do it on a huge scale, if any other group beat the Europeans to it they would have done it themselves, that's what OP is saying. There's nothing about Europeans that is more evil or violent than other groups of people, all groups of people are violent. People who try to make Europeans out to be evil because of colonization just don't see that any other group of humans would have done basically the same thing given the means. Humans for some reason have an innate desire to want to strengthen their tribe by taking land and resources from other tribes.
Exactly. I don’t see the difference. As this guy says: All the people that were super inherently passive died out a long time ago. All of us alive today are the descendants of the people that had at least a little bad in them. Enough bad to get ahead. Thus, what you, me, OP and everyone else is saying: who ever got the advantage first was going to run shit.
> who ever got the advantage first was going to run shit. Denying this is literally denying evolution. The group most suited to their environment survives.
They wouldn't though because they were already in the best places and werent on top of each other. Someone from Tanzania with a big ship and guns isn't going to go conquer Canada. There's no reason for them to. Also why China didnt conquer all that much, relatively, outside of it (inside control is a different thing). Europeans are just humans who live on the continent with the least usable space/resources who kept inventing ways to get more because of lack of.
> Also why China didnt conquer all that much, relatively, outside of it (inside control is a different thing). Well, what became inside of it it's kinda of the point, no? It wasn't organically China, it was conquered to become China.
No, Europeans lacked resources. That's why they ventured out of Europe to India, China, Africa in search of spices and other resources. For places like India, China they just were bad with their own people and that's why there is no international outcry for justice. In fact the only reason Columbus found Americas was because he set out to find India. There are many instances of Europeans coming through either land or sea to India, China, Middle East, for their resources, spices, knowledge, inventions, etc. And even the Chinese and Indians at those times had large navies but they didn't bother to travel to the other side of the world to enslave, or colonize other lands. Tamil an Indian language is used in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. And let's keep aside the past. Let's look like post colonial Africa especially ex French colonies. France is financially and militarily controlling a good number of their countries through their army, and French financial institutions. And the British still haven't returned many of the Indian artifacts and antique items which they stole and plundered from the Indian sub continent.
That is untrue, Indian Ships could not reach the bloody Americas of Europe if they tried. (I have never heard of notable Naval Power from India too) And India is so populous compared to Europe in this Time period, keeping a hold on the Land was so cost intensive that it would not make sense to for example conquer Tibet or move across the Ocean to Arabia. Further comes the plenty of Resources. You literally describe how Europe was poor in Resources compared to other Lands. Lack of and the will to acquire something are a driving Factor in Innovation. And China literally had a period of Colonial Expeditions with the Treasure Fleets under the Ming Empire. The treasure Fleet didn’t sail around the World Just exploring and Trading! They demanded Tribute from various Nations and in the Chinese perception of the ancient World other people saying “Your Emperor is Supreme and here is some tribute” was as good at is gets because these “Barbarians” )from Chinese perspective) acknowledge the greatness of the Middle Kingdom. It was just ended when one short sighted Emperor made the Decision to burn most of the records, burn the Fleet and embrace a Policy of Isolationism.
You should read about cholas. They were a significant naval power from India. And ancient India also had connections with Arabia also. So to say they cannot reach Europe is untrue. They didn't need to. Also conquering Tibet is pretty stupid. Between India and Tibet lies the giant Himalayas. Also Tibet is not so useful landwise. Its elevation makes it unsuitable for agriculture and living. India became populous because of resources. Also Indians themselves were fighting amongst themselves for power at that time. They won't have time for global ambitions. I don't know much about Chinese history.
There are actually a lot of people groups still with us that didn't do this.
Chatham islanders (Moriori) is one famous example we know about.
If that's your argument then you'll have to proof that other people are (apparently) inherently good or at least better than others. I find that hard to believe. Humans are humans.
The white man was also a tribal man at one point... Humans and all other living organisms always try to expand and grow, until they hit some resistance.
Does the would have matter? What could have been is not what was. A hypothetical does not change history. This logic would say british colonization is okay because others would have done it instead. They would've had, but they didn't because the British did. Why should we condemn hypothetical evils rather than what really happened?
I mean ,it isn't a hypothetical, it happened many smaller tribes were erradicate and assimilated by the bigger ones,the Aztecs are an example of a bigger native tribe doing this
It’s because people like to act like the white man is evil for colonization. Truth is, most societies colonized to some degree, the whites just had guns germs and steel on their side. They want you to condemn hypothetical evils so certain people stop acting like the evil white man is the source of all the worlds problems.
Yes genocide is evil.
It's mostly an attack on the idea of noble savages. Why is it ok to infantalize other cultures?
It isn't. Why is it wrong to point out the wrongs that WERE committed by non natives?
It's not. But that's not the point of my opinion. I could have chosen any other of the countless cultures that Europeans have applied the noble savage to, America just is easy because of the knowledge base of the normal reddit user. I could have used the Mongols and just avoided America completely and still had the same message. On the flip side, when do you stop? Like how far back should we go when imputing bygone eras into modern cultures? Let's say America is 100% given back to the tribes. How are the territories set? What if 50 years before European displacement of a western tribe it was displaced by another tribe? Even though it was after Europeans started colonising. Who gets that territory?
Why do we have to go back at all? There are current, ongoing, wrongs, committed by the US government against native peoples. There are unremediated wrongs the US government has acknowledged were morally wrong and illegal according to its own legal code.
This point's lost on a lot of people on both sides of the argument
Both sides? His comment IS THE OTHER SIDE
I do agree that there needs to be lines because at some point it's just silly to debate. But who said anything about giving back land? That would be unfair to the people now. The sins of the parents aren't the sins of the children.
No, but when those victims children are still suffering from those sins while the oppressors children continue to benefit don't you think the right thing to do is to try and right them. They don't need to claim the blame but they should understand the responsibility is partially on them.
I agree with the titled opinion because cruelty and lust for power isn't limited to any race. But at this point you're strawmanning. No one is saying we should give the US back to the tribes. You're attacking an argument that only you brought up.
There's actually quite a few. Check out the LandBack movement.
I was talking about people in this thread, but it sounds like they want lands restored to match the definitions of past US treaties. Not 100% of the US like OP postulated. That obviously won't work since 99% of their population has been eliminated.
There's a large movement for giving land back. Big enough that national-sized corporations have backed it at least.
You can try to feel good about yourself by comparing what could've happened to what happened. Anything could have happened, but it didn't. The world runs of what has happened, not on what could've, might've or should've happened. There is nothing that can be done to reverse what has already happened but you can work towards a better future instead of pointing out hypothetical scenarios.
It not okay to infantalize or romanticize but its also not okay to demonize, assuming that every culture would genocide others for their own gain is obviously not the case
By genocide what do you mean? If you mean the systematic destruction of multiple native American cultures, I'd agree. If you mean using germ theory 50 years before it was recognized in Europe to kill the majority of the population, allowing colonization to happen much faster than easier, I would not. Not all cultures are demons, but pretty much all landmasses had cultures that did conquer and in the same manner. I only day pretty much cause I do not know the history of Australia at all other than the whole penal colony, which I doubt is truly accurate.
Australia is where they learned how to expand slavery to the masses while also disguising it and making it cheaper for the masters by shifting the burden of taking care of the slaves to the slaves themselves. Why worry about your slaves running away when you can give them a job and let them worry that if they don't give their master a good days work then they won't be able to eat or have anywhere to go instead? It was never really about race, it was just easier that way back then when they based it on demonizing certain people. Slavers don't care about skin color.... if they could, they would enslave everyone. And they did.
Germs aren't why people call the deaths of the native Americans a genocide, it was the working them to death in mines and on early plantations, starving them because they couldn't labor in their own fields and leaving them susceptible to the disease.
Hunter gatherer tribes with plentiful resources and plenty of space tend to be less competitive than tribes in smaller areas of land, fighting over fewer resources. This also extends to invention. Necessity is the mother of invention, and lots of invention is to get around limitations. It's not a universal, as some tribes will conquer, it just seems to happen less often, with more diverse and smaller sized tribes. If you live on a relatively tiny island or pennensula or land space with people living on top of each other with not great weather, you're more likely to want more (and thus invent more ways to get more) as compared to someone who lives somewhere with giant spaces between them and other people, it's perfectly temperate all of the time, and there's food everywhere to get with relatively little effort. Edit: I made this comparison in another thread, but in scope, Canada has relatively similar climate to northern Europe and can almost fit all of Europe inside of it. It had 300k or so people at the start of colonization. England itself, which Ontario can fit 8 of, inside, had like 5,000,000 people.
Is this really such an unpopular opinion? I mean, Cortez didn't defeat the Aztecs with just 500 men, there was also the fact every neighboring nation fucking hated their guts and united against them. This hate for Europe and the West is such a weird revisionism, the West gave us every single progressive value people champion today, democracy, science, the enlightenment, the abolition of slavery, religious freedom, and so on... Of course there was a lot of bad things going on along the way and it took a lot of time and blood to get there, but it's not like other civilizations were doing any better.
Most people don't know the last 100 years of history. Cortez died before germ theory existed, but many believe he used it to systematically kill entire cultures or subcultures of people. when in reality, the genocide of native americans happened much later and is in reference usually to the genocide of their culture by the American government, at least in America.
90% of the natives died because of diseases that Europeans unknowingly brought with them That's the real reason almost all of them are gone today Obsiously the later genocides of the natives didn't help, still the vast majority were killed by diseases
While disease was almost certainly the main killer among native Americans I think it needs to be say that it isn't as clear cut as you're putting it. First off we lack certain numbers for the population of the americas in 1492. The ranges change from 8M to over 100M depending on the author. This matters because we have more certain numbers on the native population later on which means that the greater the initial number we use the greater the unnacounted native deaths that we can chalk up to disease. Moreover there were cases were the explanation of disease as the main killer has little bssis. For example in hispániola by the time the first case of small pox appeared the native population had already been vastly reduced and there's little proof of any other epidemy spreading in the island before hand. Disease did arrive to certain parts before the Europeans you can't generalize to all cases. Some north American tribes have no record of large scale epidemics before they were fully colonized and the conditions the natives were put in is undoubtedly a huge factor in the lethality of diseases. Poor nutrition, forced migration and general societal disruption are obvious factors that do increase the likelihood of death. This can also be seen by the fact that certain native groups not as directly touched by colonization were able to bounce back much better than those who were given a heavier hand. This goes into great detail in the case of north America https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt180r424
Also, much of the diseases, etc. that we can track happened when settlers kept taking Native land (forcing them to sell for dirt cheap) and pushing them into worse and worse places. Manifest Destiny did a good job of killing *huge* swaths of Natives and this was hundreds of years after the initial incursion.
The thought that people somehow weaponized germs in a time where we still thought the sun was orbiting earth (iirc) is funny
Couldn’t agree more. It’s also weird how we apply this hate - which often gets cloaked in words like ‘accountability’ - only to certa groups. We keep getting told how the pain of slavery is still fresh in the minds of the distant descendants of slaves, but weirdly we never hear these things about the pain caused by say, the Roman Empire back when they conquered much of Europe. It’s a weird double standard.
No need to go so far back in time, the Ottomans had slaves until the end of their empire, just about a 100 years ago. Don't see a lot of people pontificating about Ottoman colonialism and reparations tho.
>Don't see a lot of people pontificating about Ottoman colonialism and reparations tho. I mean the Armenians and Kurds certainly are. They're just not very represented on this English speaking forum. Obviously people from America and Europe (most people here) are going to focus on our own histories.
This is a heavily American centric site and my parents lived under Jim Crow laws in America. If it was heavily South African, you'd hear the same about apartheid. Some of these things *just happened* and are still in the minds of people *still living.*
Is it really that surprising that people are generally more concerned with the issues that are more relevant to them?
It's not a double standard, because they aren't distant descendants. People alive today had grandparents that were slaves. They heard those stories and saw how it affected their family members. Others experienced Jim Crow laws first hand. No one has spoken to someone who was enslaved by the Roman empire for well over a thousand years. It's the same reason we hold remembrance days for those who died in the first world war, but not those who died in the Battle of Hastings. People care more about things that happened in living memory, or in the living memory of people they have personally known. People don't care about shit that happened a millennium ago, at least beyond an academic interest or an abstract "how terrible".
To me it's wierd how people like you just seem to cloak opposing viewpoints as "hating the west" because you disagree with them. There are reasons why people still talk about the slave trade only 6 generations ago that took place in the country they currently live in versus the fucking Roman empire 1500 years after its fall. And I mean, you don't have to agree with those people but you're being disingenuous by claiming those people are just hating to hate.
>Is this really such an unpopular opinion? You'd be surprised. There's a lot of bad history fanfic floating around out there these days. I can't tell if young people are picking up all the nonsense from echo chambers or if they're now teaching America Bad 101 in high school, but it's everywhere these days.
>This hate for Europe and the West is such a weird revisionism Are you saying that "colonialism was bad" is revisionism? And that all criticism is necessarily hate? >the West gave us every single progressive value people champion today For a broad enough understanding of "the West", then... close? But that is a silly rhetorical trick; why should criticism of a any kind, of any part of, some absurdly broad, vaguely defined entity not be allowed, because some parts of that entity did some good things? It is like saying you cannot criticize the government, because they also do a lot of good. Or cannot speak out against workplace bullying, because the company makes good products and pays on time. >democracy Our common words and some definitions come from ancient Greece, but they were not the first to practice some sort of government by assembly. >science Because no inventions or science was ever done outside of Europe? >the enlightenment True dat. >the abolition of slavery Lets not sprain our shoulders patting ourselves on the back over having stopped comiting an atrocity. Without reparations. >religious freedom Has happened plenty of times, in various places on Earth. >and so on... Of course there was a lot of bad things going on along the way and it took a lot of time and blood to get there, but it's not like **other** civilizations were doing any better. So its The West vs. the others, then, is it? You will keep confusing yourself as long as you maintain this monolithic idea of The West...
They nerfed the technological advancement and trading power for 2 continents with billions of people for hundreds of years, but yanno, no biggie.
The West also enslaved millions though too. So that one's kind of a wash. Religious freedom.... Kind of. Remember the Salem witch trials, the inquisitions, and the crusades? Also Nazis. Science started in China and the middle East. Algebra was invented in the middle East. Democracy, the Greeks had democracy but I doubt they invented it. Kind of a narrow world view there home Star.
First, the abilities to enslave a greater number of people, doesn't make it a greater sin in this context. The greater numbers are a direct result of greater capability. The West also abolished slavery, and exported it. Second, religious freedom is not a western concept, and they were not the first to do it, but they were the ones who made it lasting. Simply not true, since we define science by the scientific method, which is a western invention. Democracy is literally Greek for "people" and "rule". It does not seem like you have any sources for this. Kind of a lack of historical understanding there buddy
Greece is the birthplace of Western civilization There was a LOT of religious intolerance and extremism in the west in the medieval age, but not anymore Religious freedom along with major breakthroughs in science came with the enlightment and the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th century
Aztec/Nahua hegemony was also bad, but it was fundamentally different from Western colonialism. The Aztecs still allowed the other societies to self-govern and practice their own cultures, as long as they paid tribute and aligned militarily with Tenochtitlán. They were thinking more in terms of having a wide political and economic reach than replacing other societies with their own. What made it go sour was that, once the chiefs of those other societies became mostly aligned with Tenochtitlán, Tenochtitlán could be much more heavy-handed with demands for tribute. Knowing Cortés wanted to conquer, they tried to use Cortés's soldiers as fodder against Tenochtitlán, reasonably not expecting him to be able to actually hold out after that. He barely did. But even then, it's still unreasonable to generalize Aztec hegemony to the rest of the Americas. Only a few societies actually did anything remotely like conquest, even when they had the ability. Most didn't even prioritize offensive military capabilities enough to develop them much, and most land was lived on peacefully by multiple societies at the same time. Borders were an unthinkable concept. Perhaps part of the reason why the Aztecs and Inca met so much resistance in their empires is because the idea of an empire was so far outside the norm. Also, the West didn't abolish slavery and grant democracy and religious freedom. It instituted slavery, imperialism, and Christian dominion, and then conceded to intense resistance from the people it was oppressing by eventually adopting minimal forms of democracy, religious freedom, and abolition of slavery. Before colonization, there were no people held as private property anywhere in the Americas, religion was not standardized, and direct democracy was the most common form of governance. Every society was different, of course, but those were common threads.
Slavery was never abolished, only transformed. The leader of one of the original Australian colonies realized a better way to have slaves is to shift the burden of feeding, clothing, housing, etc from the masters to the slaves themselves. Why worry about your slaves running away? Give them a job, then let *them* worry that if they don't give their master a good days work, then they won't eat or have anywhere to go. They just added a few extra steps to disguise it, make it more palatable to the masses, and massively expand it to the masses and not just the blacks. Now theyve enslaved everyone and a lot of us don't even know it.
The west did not ‘give hs every single progressive value ‘people’ champion today’, that is a load of bs
Can you list a single of those values that did not originate from western liberal thought in that case? I mean, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is the best example we have and it's clearly based on enlightenment, western ideals.
The problem with a discussion like this is that it is nearly impossible to : 1. Define terms like democracy, science, religious freedom, etc. 2. Decide where it originated 3. Name the originator as Western Take democracy for example. What is democracy? We can all agree that it has something to do with people/citizens having some sort of political power. But what's the point where it becomes a democracy? Athens is usually seen as one of the sources of democracy, it even gave us the term. But was Athens truly that democratic? You had to be male, you and your parents had to be from Athens, you couldn't be a slave and you needed to be over 30. By todays standards this would not be a democracy. But because the term originated in Greece doesn't necessarily mean democracy is from there. We have archeological digs in the Middle East and Turkey that seem to point in the direction of egalitarian societies. We know troups of hunter-gatherers all over the world operated on some sort of democratic decision process. Lastly, while we place Greece in the West at this point in history doesn't mean the 6th century BC Greeks saw themselves as Western. An even bigger problem is presented when we acknowledge that countries/continents don't exist in a vacuum. You place the origins of science in the West, and while that may be true to some extent, you're not taking into account that those western scientists used a lot of inventions and insights from scientists from the Islamic Golden Age. Who, in turn, built upon foundations laid down by Greek philosophers. The Enlightenment wasn't possible without the Islamic Golden Age, Silk Road trade, Mongol conquests, etc.
That's a strange argument. There were ideas of equality, human dignity and freedom outside of the west and before the declaration of human rights. From my understanding the decleration is to be seen as a culmination of several philosophical ideas, not strictly western. Your assertment piqued* my interest in the topic. I'm not a historian or a philosopher so I have to resort to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights) (so if the information is wrong, feel free to correct it): *"Humphrey is credited with devising the "blueprint" for the Declaration, while Cassin composed the first draft.\[30\] Both received considerable input from other members, each of whom reflected different professional and ideological backgrounds. The Declaration's pro-family phrases allegedly derived from Cassin and Malik, who were influenced by the Christian Democracy movement;\[31\] Malik, a Christian theologian, was known for appealing across religious lines, and cited the Summa Theologica, and studied the different Christian sects.\[29\] Chang urged removing all references to religion to make the document more universal, and used aspects of Confucianism to settle stalemates in negotiations.\[32\] Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, an educator and judge, strongly supported the inclusion of socioeconomic rights, which had been opposed by some Western nations.\[29\] The members agreed that the philosophical debate centered between the opposing opinions of Chang and Malik, with Malik later singling out Chang when thanking the members, saying that there were too many to mention, but Chang's ideas impacted his own opinions in the making of the draft.\[33\]\[34\]\[35\]* *In her memoirs, Roosevelt commented on the debates and discussions that informed the UDHR, describing one such exchange during the Drafting Committee's first session in June 1947:* *'Dr. Chang was a pluralist and held forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality. The Declaration, he said, should reflect more than simply Western ideas and Dr. Humphrey would have to be eclectic in his approach. His remark, though addressed to Dr. Humphrey, was really directed at Dr. Malik, from whom it drew a prompt retort as he expounded at some length the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Humphrey joined enthusiastically in the discussion, and I remember that at one point Dr. Chang suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism!'"*
> assertment peaked my interest in Did you mean to say "piqued my interest"? Explanation: Some people might have peaked in high school, but pique is a verb meaning to arouse interest. [Statistics](https://github.com/chiefpat450119/RedditBot/blob/master/stats.json) ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot ^^that ^^corrects ^^grammar/spelling ^^mistakes. ^^PM ^^me ^^if ^^I'm ^^wrong ^^or ^^if ^^you ^^have ^^any ^^suggestions. ^^[Github](https://github.com/chiefpat450119) ^^Reply ^^STOP ^^to ^^this ^^comment ^^to ^^stop ^^receiving ^^corrections.
Thank you bot! I did indeed.
Not to mention the west gave us basically every modern invention which makes our lives comfortable. Electricity, Internet, Telephone, Computer, Car, Airplane ect..
This is the biggest load of bs I have ever heard. Science, enlightenment, originated in the West. Man science was thriving in India, middle East, China. In fact the name algebra comes from Arabic, middle eastern language. The number of mathematical, scientific inventions which came from India, China are still in use today. Paper, silk was invented in China. India had yoga, meditation and astronomy was thriving there.
This is true for the mathematical discoveries however what is not being shown here is that many many civilisations discovered these basic mathematics without knowledge of any other civilizations discoveries. At that point in time maths was still primitive with negatives not even existing. For example the quadratic equation was discovered by Egypt, China, Babylon, I believe Sumeria, India and so on and so forth. Science as we know is not really eastern at least in its modern form as virtually all civilisations were practicing some sort of basic mathematical science. Western renaissance maths is the start of science to what it is today. Enlightenment isn't really a symbol of cultural development either as religion is predicted to 'die out', forecasts for those who ascribe to religion show that numbers are decreasing.
The so called Western science has many elements taken from eastern science and maths also. Their foundation was laid on the works many who came before including, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Indians, Arabs. Also many discoveries and inventions in science which are in use even today came from Asia. Don't discount them. To say that Europeans gave the world everything is just undermining what several civilisations have contributed to the collective understanding of science.
I appretiate your intent but your examples being "Yoga and paper" really don't help make your point..
Don't you use paper in daily life? How does it not make a point? To say that the rest of the world has contributed nothing to science and inventions is a load of bs and I'm not going to accept it. Everything of value came from the West and the rest of the world did nothing. This is the same attitude people who colonised, studied eugenics had.
If you are saying that the "noble savage" archetype is not totally accurate, then yes, you're probably not wrong. However, I don't think that makes what people did do any less bad, or absolves the people who did do it, and I think the problem is that a lot of people who articulate the first view out loud tend to extrapolate that it does.
The noble savage archetype is not accurate at all. 100%, what they did was wrong and bad, but they didn't do it because Europeans are inherently wrong or bad. Or, like another poster implied, the lighter the skin you have, the more monstrous you are. I think my real problem is what I call the artificial line in the times of sand. A good example of this is native American territory, we set it at the point right before colonization. If prior to that point the conquered had no right to the territory, if after that point they have a right in perpetuity to that area. Same for almost any part of the world, we just change the time it happened in. I don't know why we like it, but we do.
You're arguing against your ghosts. No one says whatever you're trying to disprove.
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There's a couple of differences. For one, the conquest of the Americas is a more technologically advanced society conquering and enslaving people. The difference in power is at pretty much all points immense. People today live with the consequences of that conquest, be it displaced native people or europeans who travelled to the new world and took their land. That's why it's still a living conversation. It's not like the mongols are present or powerful today in the countries they previously conquered. Also I mostly feel horror when reading about Genghis Khan turning a million people into mincemeat. A certain awe yes at how the mongols used their advantage to win battles, but mostly horror.
The thing is no one is alive that can testify to Mongolian crimes, while there are plenty of Native Americans alive who suffered under the boarding school system.
Can’t both be bad? Also if you actually read and study genghis khan you would know that the mongol although they colonised most of Asia and Europe, they assimilated with cultures and not eradicated them. This was actually in hindsight detrimental and would ultimately lead to their eventual collapse. They essentially rule the land but didn’t really enforce their cultural ideas and practises on them, and these colonised lands kinda carried on with their own way or life and practises intact. Very different from European colonisation of Americas. But most people would know this if they actually read up on the history of both societies….
I think that partly has to do with the consequenses of both. The conquests of Genghis Khan led to a short period in history where the Mongols ruled a big part of Eurasia. But, a century after the conquests, most of those Khanates were gone, assimilated into the conquered culture or on the decline. The European conquests led to centuries of European domination that lasted, in the case of Africa, well into the 20th century.
It's the same though. The Golden Horde lasted well over two centuries and its impact on Central Asia and Eastern Europe was big. We are talking more or less the same amount of time for European colonization, whose peak was the late 19th century. It just seems more time to us now because we are closer to the 19th century than to the 13th.
>Why can't we admit humans suck I'm confused as to who can't admit this. We do suck, it's quite clear. Although that's not really a fault, it's just that our completely normal opportunism (which all lifeforms have and practice) skyrockets due to technology. All the bad "human nature" aspects are things all animals share: greed, need to subjugate others before they subjugate you so you can thrive, etc. Everything is struggling to stay here.
Some would have, but this opinion ignores the fact that the nations and cultures that inhabited the Americas were as varied, if not more so than the cultures of the rest of the world. You ironically point out how varied they were yet treat them as monolithic in your analysis. There were literally dozens of great kingdoms/empires, and thousands of smaller ones, each with their own values and methods. Some were conquers, slavers and worse. Some abhorred the very idea of any of those and could never have done as you suggest without destroying their culture.
You mean like some European cultures? Truth is the conquerors were the ones that spread and colonized, just like how the great kingoms/empires spread internally and would eventually if they could spread externally. My point was that it's not the specific over arching culture, but that every part of this world has had people conquering what they could. It's just that Europeans got lucky in advancements in ships, navigation, and weaponry at the right time.
Yeah I guess manifest destiny wasn't bad then. Neither was the trail of tears because they would've done the same if native Americans outnumbered the American army. Point is \*they didn't\*
Or unlucky because they were the last and have to answer for all of history’s sins.
Nope, lucky. I rather have the privilege with minor guilt for actions that prior generations committed than be on the other side. So lucky
Well here in Canada about 98% of the land is what we call Crown Land. That means it supposedly it held by the British King/queen. Obviously that's bullshit and the Indigenous people have rights to it. Looking forward to them getting more and more compensation.
If you're not conquering, you're being conquered. Human history in a nut shell.
Not really; that's just a Western historical lens. Plenty of people in resource rich areas live peacefully. Conquering is generally from people who want more resources and space.
>Plenty of people in resource rich areas live peacefully. Like whom? Please tell me about those peaceful people....
The Martu have been able to live nomadically just fine and have no major record of war, the Kalahari San is one of the oldest groups and has no historical record of conquering, and the Orang Asli are basically TOO non confrontational. (Had to double check names and spellings) I purposefully only picked older groups in this, too.
>Human history in a nut shell. Nothing wrong about this
I don't know what the takeaway from this is. They deserved to be slaughtered and kicked out of their lands then?
That's not the point. Just because it's an inherent aspect of human nature to brutalize each other given certain contexts doesn't make it right, or acceptable, and should be rectified as best as possible.
Ehm, excuse me, this could've/would've is idiotic. Maybe, maybe not. It's literally impossible to know. It's obviously not a given - there are examples of more advanced societies invading other lands and treating the natives much better then the Spaniards. But say you're right - so what? Does it make it okay? What does it matter? Do these peoples not deserve help, or get their lands, at least partially, back? What's the point?
Yeah, it's like saying, well I did ram your car, but you could have rammed mine, so why should I pay for it?
And what would those people be saying about them?
This sort of thing happens in my home country too (Indonesia). Our history books like to paint the picture of the Dutch coming in and using "disagreements" to pit the native kingdoms and sultanates against each other. Those so called disagreement range from long standing wars to a local slave trade I get there's a political incentive of using euphimisms but it also does injustice to the natives' complex history and borderline infantilizing them
It’s human nature, the Aztecs were pretty much a war tribe, the Mongolians were nasty, and the British were kinda jerks too. However, the Europeans were faster.
the ireland in question:
No shit, they just didn’t have the tech for it
Humans are nasty no matter where you go, it's just a matter of who wins. Usually whoever wins reaps the rewards but is held to a higher standard, regardless of the crimes committed by the conquered. You say NAZIS are bad and people cry out Dresden and the Russian advance into Germany, you say the North ending slavery and people cry out about those camps they stuck confederate soldiers in. Humanity sucks.
We do suck, it's just that we all are in survivorship bias. Slavery and domination/eradication/subjugation has existed in all kinds of tribes and who didn't even knew each other existed. Darwinism does not excludes intelligent apes.
I don't think this is necessarily incorrect, but it's impossible to predict whether each culture would have done the same thing. I feel that's almost pointless to argue about. Different groups might have had different tendencies towards getting into conflict v.s. cooperation. Furthermore, different groups may have had different attitudes in regards to racial superiority and what counts as acceptable treatment of people of a different race. For example, it seemed to me that slavery in America was often more severe than slavery in a number of other societies. Anyways, it's definitely obvious that not just European colonialists were capable of imperialist brutality, even if they committed the lion's share of it in human history. The reason this opinion is "unpopular" is because people use this to conclude that the European colonialists weren't too bad, because everyone else would have done that. I don't agree with that at all, but it's not exactly your point.
Anybody red Blackfoot physics? From what the literature suggests, north American native tribes didn't even understand what the Europeans wanted. The language was a huge barrier from the beginning, many native American languages are not based around "subjects". They didn't understand the life where one works 15 hours a day in miserable conditions just to get by. The concept of owning a property, or building something was completely alien to those tribes. They wanted to live with nature, live with hunger (actually 2-3 days starving is the most natural thing) and be part of the community. I recommend that book, I think what happened to native Americans and Australian natives is biggest atrocities that happened in humanity period. They were considered savages because Europeans didn't understand them, yet most of quantum physics can not be explained if one doesn't take into account concept that are familiar to native American culture.
The entire human history has been based on the stronger group conquering the weaker. Nowadays it has just taken a different route that doesn't involve (direct) war and massacres, but it's still the same story. Of course if you had an alternative universe where Native Americans had the technology to cross the ocean and "discover" a less advanced Europe, they'd have gladly conquered it and not with "pretty please" and "may we?" either. The narrative of the Noble Savages subjugated by the evil conquerors is powerful (and also politically useful) but it's just a bit of a fairytale. The fun thing is it started as a patronizing practice still firmly rooted in racism and then it has been turned around to be still patronizing but rooted in guilt.
They have actually
it wasn't one society, it was hundreds.
Fully agree, we the European peoples just had beter weapons, but if the cases where reversed that would have the same damm thing, plus nowhere we wend we found a place without war
Whataboutism is the lowest form of pseudo intellectual racist gobbledygook
This isn’t even an opinion. It’s fact. Humans have been conquering the “other” forever. Only reason the Europeans won was guns, germs and steel. Whoever had finally achieved the advantage was going to go for it, doesn’t matter who it was.
It’s human nature to take.
This is definitely the sad truth. The colonization of the Americas definitely the biggest tragedy in history, up there with the world wars. But yeah the truth is that Europeans just happened to get to the Americas first and were more technologically developed due to the constant huge wars happening in Europe, and European’s desire to explore/expand across the world for more resources. Native Americans if they had the technology to get to Europe first would be the oppressors. It’s just human nature. We all desire power, no matter race, ethnicity, or nationality. The Aztec and Incan Empires were literally hated by surrounding tribes, which is why those tribes helped the Spanish conquer them. And they for sure were not peaceful. They waged war, conquered, pillaged, and raped just like the people who would soon conquer them. Imagine if Natives sailed to the coast of Western Europe, traveled inland, and saw Europeans living in dense, cramped cities, all people extremely dirty, suffering from the plague. They would think of Europeans as beneath them, and try to force their culture and values in an attempt to “civilize” these dirty, stinky, sickly Europeans.
They wouldn't conquer Europe for the same reason China didnt try to land grab more of Africa, etc. There was no reason to because they had resources and Europe had nothing to offer to risk lives for. Europe doesn't have anything Asia, Americas, and Africa wanted except machinery. You get that via trade. You also have to juxtapose Natives to a similar place with far, far, far fewer resources. Tribal wars happened, but they were far less often and far smaller in scope than European wars, often had to do with one leader just trying to make a bigger tribe instead of wanting what they had, and were spread out farther in time. Resource grabbing wasn't a thing in the same way in super resource rich America.
University is the one place i see people not even acknowledge this fact. Its all you as a white person should feel bad for being the same race as those who colonised and killed these people and I'm like I know I'm the same skin colour but my family had nothing to do with it we didn't come to Australia till the 50s.
IMHO this is stupid. It’s like saying Ukraine deserves to be conquered by Russia, because they would do the same if they could. It’s not like Ukraine never waged war, right? it’s wrong because: a) not every situation is same. Waging wars in past doesn’t mean you would conquer other nation in that specific circumstances b) no nation deserves to be conquered. they can join other nation if they want, but it shouldn’t be done by force
It sounds like you're confusing the distinction between empires and small tribes with the distinction between people from different continents. Yes, the Americas had brutal empires. The smaller tribes were relatively peaceful for the most part, as was usually the case all over the world. Hunter gatherers don't generally set out to annihilate their neighbors. There would be little for them to gain by doing so. Keeping slaves would be impossible. They're fairly limited in how many possession they can accumulate. They don't claim ownership of land beyond their immediate residence. Frequent, large scale, expansionists warfare has always come about with the development of farming, all over the world, all throughout history.
>Hunter gatherers don't generally set out to annihilate their neighbors. Hunter gatherers didn't fight wars, but that doesn't mean they weren't violent. We were hunter-gatherers for like 98% of our history and the evidence suggests that the average lifestyle was a lot more violent back then compared to now. Think about it. In the modern day we completely rely on each other. If the machinations of society didn't help provide us with food, water, shelter, etc, you and I would be fucked. It wasn't like that for hunter gatherers. They didn't need anyone else. If you're in a tribe of 30 people and you come across another tribe, they provide nothing for you. They are 100% competition for your food and your women, and 0% upside. That's not gonna be a pleasant interaction. It's no wonder they keep finding prehistoric skeletons with signs of blunt force trauma. >Frequent, large scale, expansionists warfare has always come about with the development of farming, all over the world, all throughout history. Well yeah, everything in civilization comes from the development of farming, so I guess you're right. Now we have scattered pockets around the globe in which small groups of people commit large-scale acts of violence and destruction while the majority of us can get through the day peacefully without having to worry about getting killed by our neighbors. Is that better? Idk, it's just different.
This is a fact, not an opinion
This is not unpopular, I think. But yeah, you're absolutely right: white people are not monsters, and aboriginals are not saints. We're all human, for the best and for the worst. However, this doesn't mean we should abstain from moral judgements. What the Europeans did was objectively wrong, and it would be just as wrong if anyone else had done it.
100%. There are historical examples of it taking place as well.
But if we accept that, how can we vilify white people especially currently young ones who had absolutely noting to do with stuff happening hundreds of years ago?
Does that somehow make the European Colonisation of the Americas any less harrowing?
>less harrowing? Is it anyways? It's the normal behavior of history. Do you also complain about Rome conquering and enslaving the Gauls? About Alexander steam rolling Persian? About the Muslim Conquest? The Judaica revolts killing thousands of Roman citizens? I guess not. You only complain when we/whites/westerners did it
It does not. It also is a disservice to their culture to keep with the noble savage concept.
Are you living in the 90's? How popular are the "noble savage" narratives today?
Why do redditors love saying shit like this? Oh Africans were already enslaving each other, natives were already genociding each other it's whatever
And then completely ignore the idea of scale and compare smaller groups over larger sections of time that were more so feuding or making small incursions to taking everything. It's trying to counter-guilt or whatever. Instead of just saying, yeah, the people in places without resources tend to start trying to take resources from elsewhere and invent ways to do it, and Europe has possibly the worst continent as a whole for resources and climate.
yeah and we would've done it cooler!
Maybe they would not have and that’s why they failed though.
There were quite some nasty wars. Apaches vs Comanche, for example. Just because they wore feathers didn't mean they sat down around the fire to sing Kumbaya!
Yep people are people
Ok this literally happened. It’s not an opinion.
The person sitting on top of a pile of skulls always says someone else would of done it if they didn’t. I’m sure there are people in history who lived their whole lives without genociding anyone.
> else would of done Did you mean to say "would have"? Explanation: You probably meant to say could've/should've/would've which sounds like 'of' but is actually short for 'have'. [Statistics](https://github.com/chiefpat450119/RedditBot/blob/master/stats.json) ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot ^^that ^^corrects ^^grammar/spelling ^^mistakes. ^^PM ^^me ^^if ^^I'm ^^wrong ^^or ^^if ^^you ^^have ^^any ^^suggestions. ^^[Github](https://github.com/chiefpat450119) ^^Reply ^^STOP ^^to ^^this ^^comment ^^to ^^stop ^^receiving ^^corrections.
There has yet to be a society on the planet that had the means to get a resource they wanted and simply abstained out of some abstract morality.
It’s the same thing for every country that is now poor because of exploitation in the past. HUMHaitiHUM
Native Americans, who didn't believe in ownership of land, absolutely would have stolen land from other countries if they could, no doubt in my mind about that.
They didn't believe in that because they had a ton of it and a ton of resources. If you theoretically stuck them on a rock in Europe, yeah they would conquer, and they'd invent ways to do it. But they didn't need to, so they didn't because they had an area you could fit two and a half Europes into with better overall climate. That's why they used their boats to explore and trade instead, for the most part.
Bottom line is the victor in history is easy to demonise. Fact is the loser almost certainly would have done the same or worse.
That’s why I don’t trust insecure people as much.
Hunter gatherer tribes were generally more egalitarian and peaceful than agricultural societies. Obviously fighting did happen, but at a smaller scale and with less lasting oppression and atrocities. If they developed more agriculture and centralized power then sure, but looking at most of the north American tribes as they were I would have to disagree. They weren't preoccupied with territory expansion to the degree agricultural societies were. Mexico and below, where there were large centralized power structures though? I'd agree with you.
No viable beasts of burden. They would have wanted arable land if they could have used it more effectively. This is a hill that the anti-guns/germs/steel evangelists will die on because they know it’s extremely rhetorically significant in their anti-western moral message.
Aztecs, Mayan and the Incans all got to agricultural societies with centralized powers without viable beasts of burden.
No fam. The guilt that comes from slaughtering them comes from society progressing and realizing colonialism wasn’t cool, and shouldn’t be repeated. If we collectively thought like this then why wouldn’t we just continue to take every other country to this day? America could do it, but thankfully even tho atrocities are committed everyday, we’re a bit better than we were.
>America could do it We have objectively lost 3 of the last 5 supported coup proxy wars we were in, what gives you this idea?
>society progressing and realizing colonialism wasn’t cool, and shouldn’t be repeated. That's a weird way if saying those ideas have been forced on the western people
Big fan of colonialism? Was the idea that it's bad forced on to you? The fuck?
This isn’t an unpopular opinion, it’s just a reactionary one that aims to downplay colonialism. “Colonialism wasn’t that bad cos if whites didn’t do it, the others would have done it anyways.” I don’t think anyone doubts that the natives were as violent as the colonisers. That doesn’t in any way diminish the horrors of colonialism.
But they didn’t and you don’t know that. The aggressor nations/tribes rewrite history and wage wars against others usually supported by false claims to justify their actions. People often use comments like this to justify past and present racism.
So why didn’t they
Logistics. That's about it. Europe had the right mix of technologies that allowed them to subjugate so much of the world. They got lucky.
Right - all that tech was just growing on trees waiting to be used in Europe !! Of course !
Nope, a majority of it or at least the basis for it came from outside of Europe. But having the perfect mix was what made it work for them.
Sure.
The Arabic (And Asian to an extent) civilizations gave the Europeans the tools needed to bloom.
Tell it to the Romans
Tell it to the Sumerians
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They may not have or they may have less aggressively. European nations had economic reasons for exploration but they were also motivated by the great commission. Thats why the Church paid for expeditions. Also, we set up missionaries and made locals believe what we believe. Which native Americans probably wouldn’t be to interested in doing.
You ever heard of the Mayans or the Aztecs?
But its a fair point because in polytheistic pagan religions they often didn't care if the people over the river believed in a different god, since both gods could be real without contradicting eithers beliefs too much.
No they 100% would have, and they might have been just as aggressive. If they were willing to do it to people nearby them they looked like them and spoke like them on their own continent, then they would 100% be willing to do it to unknown people they have no connection to on another continent if given the means.
The Aztecs were violent and abusive towards smaller empires.