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No one's suggesting otherwise. Every culture has blood in their past, "civilization" is the slow process of collectively maturing to avoid those conflicts.
by losteric 9y ago
No one's suggesting otherwise. Every culture has blood in their past, "civilization" is the slow process of collectively maturing to avoid those conflicts.
- oh_sigh 9y agoOP was lamenting genocide, and then wondered what the world would be like if the Europeans never came. That seems to me to imply that OP believes Europeans are solely responsible for Indian genocides, which is what I was responding to
- losteric 9y agoIndian? You mean native Americans? Europeans are solely responsible for bringing new diseases to South America - that wiped out most of the population, far more than swords and guns. Britain also killed a lot of people in India, but they didn't commit genocide.
- wavefunction 9y agoOf course the actual Indians had their own genocidal maniacs, like Ashoka the Great
- oh_sigh 9y agoI never said Europeans weren't responsible for genocide. And "Indian" is an accepted, defined way to reference Native Americans. See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Indian https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Indian
- spicymaki 9y agoYou are confused. Honestly if Europeans never came to the Americas there would not be losses of up to 98% of the indigenous population (depending on location). Even if disease "accidentally" killed 80%, the rest were murdered due to greed and evil. Those events have been well documented, unlike the "rarely kept records" in your previous comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples#/media/File:De_Bry_1c.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples... After the Europeans could not find enough surviving Native Americans to enslave, they went to Africa next to start another round of cruelty. There is no honest comparison to be made between warring tribes and European conquest.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> After the Europeans could not find enough surviving Native Americans to enslave, they went to Africa next to start another round of cruelty. This is off. The problem wasn't that there weren't enough natives, but that they tended to die quickly when enslaved.
- abusoufiyan 9y agoSo, does that mean that cultures currently engaged in war are less civilized than cultures currently disengaged from war?
- losteric 9y agoI would argue that cultures engaged in war as a means to resolve tension are less civilized, and those engaged in war without tension are even worse... Similarly, totalitarianism is a less civilized form of organization than, say, successful democracies.