What Killed the American Indian? Not the the pipeline.
What with all this squawking going on about the Dakota Pipeline and so many people trying to say that the Europeans deliberate massacred hundreds of of millions of Indians to take their land I decided to set the record straight. In truth the genocidal maniacs who killed most of the Native Americans were these dirty bastard, diseases. We didn’t put the full power of the state and science behind the mechanical slaughter of human beings. We didn’t conduct medical experiments on Native Americans the way Germany did Jews and Roma. We moved into a continent that was largely depopulated by disease.
The US is guilty of a LOT of horrors. So before you may feel tempted to strawman me, read a lot of what I write. Americans are horribly ignorant of the crimes committed to bring them to this place and time with all the wealth they have. Treaties were continuously broken with Native Americans. Africans were enslaved. Vietnamese were killed with impunity.
I admit it and know the history.
But Americans didn’t commit industrial genocide. Americans didn’t put the full resources of state and science behind the mechanical slaughter of human beings. Americans didn’t conduct medical experiments on Native Americans the way Germany did Jews and Roma. Americans inherited a continent that was largely depopulated by disease.
And that’s the main point. Disease wiped out most Native Americans. Thereafter, the few surviving tribes that were encountered, were displaced and frequently attacked, making their lives miserable. What happened to the Native Americans is a debt the US will never fully repay, but the US did not commit willful genocide.
If anybody in the Americas did, that would be Spain. Spain conducted some of the worst and intentional programs of destruction against the Aztecs and Incas imaginable. Now, do I think that Spaniards should have to wander the halls wailing in agony? No. That was a long time ago and when it happened, it was sadly standard operating procedure for nation-states, including (GET THIS!) Incas and Aztecs!
But when Germany and Japan committed their horrors, they were members of nations that were supposed to not behave that way any longer. And of course, there is some finely spun racism too — Germany committed her crimes against white people. That kind of horror hadn’t happened ever on the continent of Europe at that scale, with that level of industrialization.
Nevertheless, what the US did —while wrong on a hundred levels— cannot compare to what the Germans did.
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