this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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I know this will get heavily down voted... But as if they didn't kill each other with bows, disease and in the name of religion? This seems pretty universal in history. Idk.
There's really worlds of difference between these things. Of course, humans fight and kill each other, but what colonists did is far different than what indigenous people did to one another.
The settlers were and are devoted to the eradication of a people. Much of their culture, language, and achievements were outright destroyed in the name of God and racial superiority. This is not something that you can accuse indigenous people of. Scientific racism is an invention of Europe. Capitalism, too, emerged out of the historical context of Europe which requires colonists to support. These are not universal human traits.
Settlers took the names and languages and children and tried to "assimilate" them (read: erase). To this day, these people are being strangled out of existence. There are people here on Lemmy who live on reservations and discuss the struggle to this day.
I'm responding to you in good faith here, but to be honest, I don't think there's any other way to read this than justification for genocide because "they would have done the same." That's not a grounded claim. You should reflect on why your knee jerk reaction is to respond this way and consider if you'd rather stand with the colonizers or the colonized.
I would just challenge you to research some native history. They were savages in the same way the colonists were. In the same way that many conquering people were. Including vikings ,Romans, Chinese, Mongols etc. all in the name of their own religions and ideology. The native were constantly at war with one another over religion and land. They practiced some evil forms of torture some even conducted human sacrifice. And yes they did wipe out each other's culture. If you were not one of their tribe or allies tribe you were an enemy.
Yes the scale is the difference. The US settlers purged them and that was wrong but history shows that any conquering nation probably would have done the same. And any one of these tribes if they had invented the technology to wipe the other tribe out probably would have done the same. Not saying it's right. It's wrong but that's how evolution has driven the human species. The person with the biggest guns and beat technology conquers the most.
I completely agree it's wrong to treat anyone as less. And any current discrimination against these people is evil and wrong. It doesn't change that this post is over simplified and simply an appeal to emotion to get up votes - "white man bad". The US settlers weren't any more or less evil than anyone else and I would wager that the vast majority of them were doing what they thought was the best thing at the time.
And you reply in the same way accusing me of "justifying genocide". If we can't talk about these things with nuance then that's the real problem. We can bring some nuance to this and realize that what happened this is wrong and we can enact policy to change that. We have enough surplus to provide for everyone.
I also think one thing many do not consider in these kinds of talks is where would you fallen in this situation if you were there? If you had to choose between your family, starving to death or killing the "others". Id you refused I'm sure you would have just been another senseless death to the conquering force. I'm sure you would do what you had to do just like millions have in the past. It's really survival of the fittest. We are just completely removed from this empathy because most of us have not starved or been tortured or seen people brutally murdered in front of us.
No, I think the real problem has very little to do with our discourse. I think the real problem is that there are indigenous people to this day being stamped out and suffering under colonialism and imperialism to this day, and that the dominant western ideology is to respond "well, this is human nature, and you would have done the same to me."
If you want to talk about nuance, your view is not nuanced. Your ideas hinge on "human nature" (a claim) and ignore the differences in the way civilizations have interacted over time. It doesn't have anything to do with "white man bad" or "red man benevolent." It has everything to do with the system of natural and social incentives that cultures have. The economic systems that emerged in Europe created the groundwork for the colonization of the world. Yeah, it COULD have emerged elsewhere, but it didn't, and these crimes fall squarely on the colonizers, not the colonized for commiting an imaginary crime. This worldwide colonization had a particular character that is not the same as what happened before it.
Another hypothetical situation stacked in favor of justifying the "human nature" argument. Colonization is not a matter of life and death. People won't die if they don't colonize other people. There are plenty of people throughout history who didn't just go along with their nations crimes and attempted to stop it.
But let's get to the heart of the matter. One must either imagine that all of the killing, murders, and genocides throughout history were either a product of a historical moment or the nature of humanity. If one believes that this is all human nature, I can't imagine that they'd be fit to solve the ongoing genocides today because it's all "survival of the fittest". By that logic, we're just figuring out who deserves to live.
And that's the real problem. These things are ongoing and regardless of how you interpret the past or whether "they would have done the same", we cannot change the past and there are things we can do now for colonized people.
Btw, knock it off with "I'm gonna get downvoted for this" and "you're just farming upvotes". We're on a 2 day old communist Lemmy post with like 4 upvotes. Nobody is paying attention to this except us.
Edit: god dammit I spent so much time writing this and by the time I got reply, they got banned lmao