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  • They were driven out

    They were killed. It's crazy how genocide enjoyers will sneak in the subtlest genocide apologia every chance they get.

    • Erm, yikes! I'm pretty sure that's not true. This is what we learned in history class:

      • That's fake right? This isn't really a children's schoolbook, right?

        Though as an Australian, we're taught that our country was "uninhabited" and the Aboriginals "didn't use most of the land and left it for the settlers." So...yeah, we've probably got a couple of these books floating around here too.

  • The people telling you communism goes against human nature also tell you it's human nature for a nation to slaughter people for land. Just normal human nature shit.

    Jesus what a fucking terrible argument. I'm sure the native americans were just happy white people weren't killing other white people. "At least it's intentional," they thought as they were being driven from their land.

    • Every time I hear someone try to claim things are human nature (greed, cruelty, selfishness, etc) I just interpret it as a confession of that person having those traits and an attempt to project that unto the rest of society to feel better about it.

      • One thing I like to do to really leave the libs shooketh to deconstruct that argument of "But greed will always be a part of humanity!!" is by telling them that if we look over history, murder has always been a feature of humanity.

        But do we award the murderers with the most money, political power, and prestige in society? (I know exactly where your mind goes to when I say this but stick with me for a minute and remember that this is when I'm talking on the role of Lib Whisperer.) Or as a society do we actively take steps to mitigate the murderous impulses of humanity by disincentivising it, condemning it, and punishing those who commit murder?

        Why then would you do something different with a negative and destructive impulse like greed? Why would you reward it, encourage it, and give the most political power and the most prestige to the greediest people in society?

        Who would want to live in that sort of world?

        If they object to this notion because they are suffering from a deficit of imagination, you can point to the potlatch ceremony, in which certain societies would give the most prestige in their communities to the people who gave the most to the community in these ceremonies, where people would sometimes even effectively bankrupt themselves in the pursuit of prestige within their communities.

        I usually tell a person like that they should stop making pronouncements about all of humanity because they've clearly never stepped outside their comfortable little bubble long enough to realise that, shockingly, different societies do things differently and whatever they say about humanity is just a reflection of their own narrow cultural biases.

  • "The native American Genocide wasn't that bad, because they weren't considered human"

    • Sincere post - am I doing something harmful to myself or my psyche? Am I being too insular in staying away from the mental sewer pipes of

      , twitter, etc in search of places where I don't see this shit? Should I desensitize myself a little to people like this? Because I tend to avoid people like this. In real life, I'm careful to only stay close with people who are, at their core, kind and loving and empathic. I also do this online.

      I hate this person. I truly do, and every other sniveling, servile, cowardly, shithead like them. I don't like hating this person, and I don't like hating people at all. I'll always hate

      , but it's no moral crime to hate your oppressor. For this person, my hatred feels more real and visceral and it makes me uncomfortable.

      A few years ago I visited White Sands National Park. To get there I had to drive through Alamogordo, a town that seems to mostly exist to service the nearby air force base. On the main tourist track that leads to the park, I passed a kind of mini strip mall set up alongside the road. It was all run-down buildings or shacks or roadside tents covered in native American symbolism with shitty names that I don't care to repeat, selling trinkets and baubles. The people working there all looked, at a glance, to be native American as well. An entire culture reduced to selling bits of "authentic Indian silver" or whatever to scratch out a living. The survivors of a genocide trying to make some money off of the bits of their culture that can be commodified. This is my first time ever discussing that sight, and it's still hard to articulate it. The feeling was so heavy, so suffocating, such a powerful sense of wrongness and injustice that it defies my limited powers of this language to communicate. An entire continent of people - dozens of cultures and languages and histories and peoples slaughtered and displaced and deposited at the edges of a new society that would prefer them gone and relegated to black-and-white photos.

      So, GBU_28 is trying to handwave away what America did because Ghengis Khan did it as well. Native Americans weren't "noble savages" by any means. I'm sure they fought and inflicted cruelty and callousness on their fellow man just as all peoples have done. But we stole this place. In its entirety. This entire nation, as well as its equally savage brother-country to the north, ground up the first peoples' bones to use in the foundational concrete. Mods remove this if it's too much, but I truly hope that GBU_28 suffers in this life. I'm fully convinced that this person who I've never met and I never will should truly be subject to the worst agonies and miseries conceivable by the human mind. No physical or emotional torment could compare with what they're trying to "yada yada yada" away.

      It can't be good for me.

  • The difference is that China did it to their own people

    The classic Nazi talking point, I love this one!

    Stalin is worse than Hitler because Stalin killed his own people!

    Also the PRC was founded in 1949, I really don't understand how someone can bring up the Mongol Empire and link that to Mao Zedong.

    • The classic Nazi talking point, I love this one!

      Umm achually they identify as a socialist, they're just "anti-authoritarian". You tankies wouldn't understand

      • This one gets me the most.

        "Tankie" literally just is a slur for socialists in modern parlance. It's basically just like calling someone "Anarkiddie"

        It means fucking nothing and is used as a lazy reason for dissmissing one's views and goals.

  • For me the concern in discussions like this is that it seems like the implication is that if Americans aren't constantly ripping our hair out and rending our clothes over the genocide of the American Indians, we have no right to decry modern genocides, or something?

    It was absolutely evil what the US government and the governments of the several States did to the American Indians. Just like it was evil what the US government and the governments of the several States did to black Americans. And it was evil when the US government decided to drop nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians twice after Germany was defeated, instead of for example near Japan but with no human fatalities. And on and on.

    But that doesn't make it not evil or less evil what, for example, Putin is trying to do to Ukraine right now. Or the various military coups in Africa right now. Or the profiteering off curable diseases that multinational corporations are doing right now.

    And an American ought to be able to criticize those things and call for peace without having to list every evil thing America has ever done first. And the evil things that America has done shouldn't prevent individual Americans from calling out evils that they see.

    This false implication that not calling out America's past evil is the same as supporting it is chilling to good discussion.

    • it seems like the implication is that if Americans aren't constantly ripping our hair out and rending our clothes over the genocide of the American Indians, we have no right to decry modern genocides, or something?

      Yeah, but the issue isn't that they aren't ripping their hair out and decrying the crimes of the American empire, it's that these crimes are being presented as something in the past and not something ongoing (which they are).

      The implication that killing "the other" is less bad than killing "your own" is also a major dog whistle.

      You also need to approach, specifically in this instance, mass death from famine not from a position of "this was an intentional genocide", but from the historical perspective of the pain and suffering caused by transition from agrarian feudal society to industrial society.

      The famines in Russia and China are always treated with a different pair of gloves compared to the famines caused by American industrialization (mostly pushed onto the native population and the stealing of land was used to feed a growing industrial proletariat), British industrialization (the Irish potato famine and at least a half dozen Indian famines that pushed the grain shortages on to "the other" to protect their own industrial proletariat).

      Another thing to pay attention to is always the response to these famines within the context of a given socio political order. Both Manifest Destiny and British colonialism ignored the effects of the famine because the people it primarily effected were enemies of the imperial cores. Whereas both Russia and China experienced famines that harmed their own industrial output and forced them to reconcile the massive issues within their political structures. To the point that famines which used to be common were all but eradicated after massive political pressure to fix the issues that caused them.

      The green revolution has given us ground to stand on as productive output per labor hour in the agricultural sector has massively improved and allowed for a majority of labor to be in industrial and service sectors, but now that we're experiencing the effects of climate change we're gonna start seeing the conditions for mass famine re appear.

      And I guarantee that the US empire and Western powers will do what they always do and force the hand of their neo-colonies to absorb the mass suffering caused by grain shortage to maintain the proletariat in the core.

      This isn't something that's "in the past", it's still standard operating policy all across the Western world. To siphon land and grain from imperial subjects and cause destitution and starvation to maintain profitable industry for their domestic bourgeoisie.

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