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Because it's not what most people expect. There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can
by vintermann 1y ago
Because it's not what most people expect.
There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.
- rayiner 1y ago[flagged]
- BigTTYGothGF 1y ago> Was Spanish colonization “evil?” It's hard to look at the on-the-ground details and come to any other conclusion.
- rayiner 1y ago[flagged]
- Larrikin 1y agoBefore anyone wastes their time, this is the same start of the other bad faith argument that the enslavement of Africans was for their own good and they were better off being slaves than being in Africa.
- rayiner 1y ago[flagged]
- jacobolus 1y agoProbably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement .... After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how. European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?
- WalterBright 1y agoThe Black Death killed approximately 30–60% of Europe's population between 1347 and 1353.
- rayiner 1y agoExactly. Your average European alive today likely is better off because half their ancestors died of the plague.
- Tor3 1y agoSo the general theory is that if you kill half of the population the descendants will be better off? What's the mechanism, and what happens if you follow that to its conclusion?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 1y agoThere is a whole body of research on this: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...
- Tor3 1y agoThat's only about the black death, and some specific reasons for why that helped, kind of, _some_ parts of Europe. First, it definitely didn't help everyone - Norway, for example, lost all economic power and went into the 400 year night, as it's called (it was under Denmark). And secondly, it's a single case. You can't create a general rule from that. It's vastly different to compare that case to when e.g. 95% of the population died out in certain places during the Spanish conquest. And, again, take that "rule" to its logical conclusion: How many people will inhabit the Earth after a while, and under what conditions will they live?
- 1y ago
- Larrikin 1y agoProve that without any colonization they would be worse off.
- extropic-engine 1y agoNo, they are not better off. I have provided as many facts for my argument as you have for yours.
- BigTTYGothGF 1y ago> Aren't the people who survived Spanish colonization better off than they would have been? "The ends justify the means" is certainly a valid metric by which to judge things, but an honest application of it leads one to conclusions such as "Mao Zedong was the greatest humanitarian to have ever lived" (as seen here: https://i.imgur.com/3QUXVi3.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/3QUXVi3.jpeg).
- rayiner 1y agoMao is bad because he delayed the growth that China was capable of achieving and did achieve after Deng Xiaoping. 40 years after the communist revolution in 1990, China was still as poor as India per capita. In the 35 years since then, China became five times richer per capita than India. If the Chinese republicans had maintained power continuously since 1912, there's a good chance that China would be as developed as South Korea or Japan today. It's valid to ask a similar question about the Americas. What would life be like for people today? It's probable that the Aztecs or their descendants would have taken over the Americans, since they were by far the most technologically superior. Would they have evolved into a prosperous industrialized society today?
- vacuity 1y agoI find it reasonable to assume that any civilization will gradually adapt to meet demands, given whichever constraints burden it. Europe (and the US) had opportunities (partly due to colonialism) to become industrialized and prosperous, and it has taken those opportunities. So it is with China. Africa has opportunities, but colonialism has made progress difficult. In the long term, I think cultural/societal differences are not the deciding factor, so much as the geopolitical environment shapes society. The formation of mountains doesn't much care about the contemporary scale of human construction projects, either. You seem to be saying that colonialism advanced society even for the oppressed, but the causality of history is complicated. As far as we know, you may as well say that the extinction of the dinosaurs as it happened was essential for human proliferation. Maybe the dinosaurs would've gone extinct at some point, or diminished greatly, or maybe the dinosaurs and humans would coexist. Just because a somewhat plausible scenario presents itself does not mean it is compelling. You have brought up counterfactuals, so use your imagination seriously, instead of taking the easy way out. If you have a motivating belief on the matter, it is untoward to speak as if you are unbiased and objective.
- hitarpetar 1y agono, they're not, this whole line of thought is explicitly white supremacist. shame on you
- Throaway195 1y agoLatin America is a horrifically corrupt and inequal place, so, no, probably not!
- BigTTYGothGF 1y ago> How so? Just speaking personally I have a pretty dim view of genocide and slavery.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoThis is an alt history story idea I've had rattling around in my head for years. It starts off in 1492 with a dejected Columbus complaining about Isabella and Ferdinand not seeing his vision. Jump cut 300 years later to 1776, when Europeans first learn about the New World - when an Aztec galley lands in Cornwall.
- wang_li 1y agoThe Meso-American civilizations routinely engaged in human sacrifice. Tens of thousands of people per year were murdered. These weren't peaceful monks quietly engaging in scholarly pursuits. Even if you don't personally drag victims to the top of the pyramid and cut their heads off or hearts out, if you stand around and watch, you're part of the problem. I'd be interested in how you compare the details of what pre and post colonization looks like and why you weigh post colonization as evil.
- x3al 1y agoWitch hunts in Europe and, to lesser extent, in colonized parts of America weren't that different.
- throwaway665667 1y agoWitch hunts were capital punishment inflicted on pagan worshipers, not human sacrifices, and they were several tens of thousands in the span of three centuries. Executions in Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined are estimated to have been 1000 in total. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt#Execution_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt#Execution_statistic...
- vintermann 1y agoYes, that's probably the excuse that got the guy off the hook for burning the entire written history of those civilizations. But it was not actually a good excuse. Burning those books was still wrong. Even people around him understood how wrong it was. We do not have to view colonialism from the stratosphere, we can judge the actions individually down at the ground. We know why he wanted to focus on other things than the things he was actually personally responsible for, but what's your motive? Got a project of your own to defend?
- throwaway665667 1y agoReally crazy how we are taught from an early age the horrors of the holocaust and other genocides, and aboutour moral superiority compared to those that didn't intervene back then... "Never again. If this this happened today we know better to stop it"... And then look at tens of thousand of people being mass murdered by a genocidal civilization and complain that Spain intervened because... a priests burned books (something that I absolutely do not condone of course)? Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too? Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
- BurningFrog 1y agoThe colonization of the new world was largely an immunological accident. When meeting Europeans, 90% of the Americans would catch some European disease and die. This was widely seen as the will of god(s) by both sides. Often the disease spread faster than the Europeans, so when they got to an area most people were already dead. The following conquest is seen as barbaric and unjust by us modern people. But for the people of the time, it was just how the world worked. The Aztecs would have been overjoyed to conquer Spain the same way.
- vacuity 1y agoYou're right, but I think too that the Europeans happily took the deaths as an opportunity and justified it.
- pegasus 1y agoWe truly have no clue, nor could we pretend to infer an answer to this. Anyone who pretends otherwise needs to get off their high horse.
- IAmBroom 1y agoI suppose it depends on whether or not you view genocide and forced religious conversion as evil.
- AngryData 1y agoNobody can know, but it is hard to believe it could be any worse than it already is, and so most scenarios they would probably be better off.
- rayiner 1y agoDo you think the Aztecs would have invented vaccines and the internet by now if left to their own devices?
- AngryData 1y agoPossibly, although I think the Aztecs specifically was likely doomed from the start because they were a very young society and a brutal military conqueror and everybody they dealt with hated them, but you never can know. However the Aztecs were far from the only significant America Native society or civilization. There were many others, especially to the South, that we know were far more stable societies and governments producing more advanced goods and had high levels of trade amongst each other. South America was essentially in their own bronze age at the time and their gold and precious metal work was beyond what anybody in Europe was able to replicate at the time.
- jacobolus 1y agoIf Europeans hadn't made it to North America, it's likely that nobody would have invented vaccines or the internet by now. European history would have been unrecognizably different.
- testdelacc1 1y agoGlad you asked. Check out the Nobel Prize winning work by Acemoglu in his book Why Nations Fail. He makes a compelling case that the encomienda system put in place by the conquistadors impoverished South America at the time and continued to impoverish its victims in the future as well. So yes, extremely evil even by the standards of settler colonialism.