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Someone else compared 84k death to 3k death in this thread, so it seems to have a good historical and archaeological basis. The figures can be discussed, but a

• eropple 4y ago
  I am not keying on that piece of flak shot in the air to cover the genocide normalization. Instead I ignored it, because it's rhetorical redirection. The claim at hand is the one I quoted: however bad they were, they were infinitely less brutal than native civilizations. Using the Spanish Inquisition as a rhetorical high-score of the violence that Spanish forces exported, instead of the actual colonial operations in question is dishonest and shitty. Under no meaningful comparison can you claim that native civilizations were less brutal than the Spanish (and to a lesser extent, Portuguese and later French and British) extraction operations. "Look! The Inquisition! Three thousand people, that's it!" Columbus's second voyage kidnapped 500 Taino from Hispaniola alone and 300 of them died on the way back to Europe, and that was just the start of things. By 1542, las Casas--a Spaniard--estimated that the Spanish had killed between twelve and fifteen million natives, and while that number is probably not well-sourced by las Casas, modern research suggests that that number, if it is inaccurate, is likely to be so on the low end when you tally up the whole thing. "Look! Three thousand! The Aztecs! But the Aztecs!" The Mexica? Yeah, they sucked a whole lot. It's not a huge surprise that the Tlaxcaltecs and others thought the Spanish were a good bet, because the Mexica were downright vile. So yanno, let's scratch the whole thing off, call that one fair-is-fair (it's not but okay). Now how about the other millions to tens of millions killed by the Spanish alone and forced into slavery? Because these genocide-softpedaling assertions are hiding the ball. Here's las Casas himself. Read it, if you have the stomach. “They [the Spanish] forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders, shouting, ‘Wriggle, you little perisher.’ What was that about the implied nobility of destroying a culture that has a problem with child sacrifice? Shit, this wasn't even for any reason in particular, it's nihilistic murder for the heck of it. And the Taino, to the best of my knowledge, didn't practice any form of human sacrifice at all. What's your high-minded lesswrong-dot-com excuse here?
  • chestertn 4y ago
    • eropple 4y ago
      "Critics have claimed it's exaggerated". Okay. You'll note that the only citation to that claim is a political science professor in a political science journal who's asserting that las Casas exaggerated in order to establish a rationale for the Spanish crown to intervene. Even if true? How fucked up did it have to be on-the-ground to make that seem like the right tactic? Even if I steelman this attempt at an argument to its fullest, "exaggerated" doesn't mean "didn't happen"--if you go actually read the article that Wikipedia page cites, von Vacano does not claim that it's false--and we have other contemporary accounts of the Spanish acts of genocide on Hispaniola alone. Somewhere in the mid hundreds-of-thousands to a million Taino, depending on which ends of the estimate make sense to you, lived on Hispaniola when the Spanish showed up. By 1650, they were gone. I wonder what happened? Maybe it was ghosts.
      • chestertn 4y ago
        [flagged]