• Knightfox@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Those are casualties from combat. My numbers were the resulting spread of disease

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas

      What the US did was deliberate and with the intent of eradicating natives, what others did was collateral damage

      Care to point to something specific? Also, you wanna explain that collateral damage part a bit better?

      The US is responsible for the deliberate murder of a lot of Native Americans, but even if we put the biological warfare aside, Europeans deliberately killed magnitudes more.

      • diprount_tomato@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Collateral damage is dying due to the unintentional spread of diseases.

        Deliberate damage is sending the natives cloths that have been intentionally infected, then killing off their main source of food, then wiping out entire groups and then claim the natives are the savages when they fight back, while there were rewards for hunting natives like they were wild animals, and then confining the remaining few in bantustans or as the US called them “reserves” (know what wildlife reserves are?) that are put in areas chosen to deprive them from enough resources and where alcoholism was instigated by the government as a way to keep them weak. The people who made all of this possible are now regarded as national heroes.

        And no, not even the English killed as much as the US.

        • Knightfox@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          I originally had a really long message refuting individual points, but I thought I’d take it back a step because at it’s root we’re arguing who caused the most genocide which really sucks.

          I’m not sure where you’re from, but based on your posts I’m gonna guess not the USA mainly because your argument really is missing a lot of important information.

          Despite your opinions to the contrary most people in the USA know about the Native Americans, it’s a massive portion of our basic education. You’ll also have a hard time finding an American who thinks what was done to the Natives was ok. The people who caused the whole thing are not considered National Heroes, contrary to your statement. Most Americans think quite poorly of the likes of Custer and Jackson.

          Your post in general seems to just be an anti-American post, while making large stereotypes and ignoring Europe’s own involvement in the Americas and the rest of the world. Next time save yourself the time and just say what you really want to say, you hate the USA.

          • diprount_tomato@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Americans don’t consider the founding fathers and Lincoln to be heroes?

            Also, feeling bad about something you’re perpetuating is worthless. It’s like killing someone but doing it with your eyes closed because you feel bad

            • Knightfox@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              Americans don’t consider the founding fathers and Lincoln to be heroes?

              See this is what I’m talking about when I said that your posts are missing information. The founding fathers are a huge group of people with a wide variety of background and involvement in various things. Some were slave owners, some were abolitionists, some were farmers, some ran mills, some literally were just popular people. Outside of a handful, most aren’t really well remembered because their actions were important for a specific thing and as a collective (signing the Declaration of Independence and creating the US Constitution). Outside of this their cohesion is a bit of a mess.

              Furthermore, the founding fathers of the Declaration of Independence and the founding fathers of the US Constitution had some overlap, but those groups were more than 10 years apart. I know a lot of Europeans blend things within a short period as being the same since the history of those regions is so long, but in the USA it can be extremely different. The founding fathers in 1776 and 1790 were fighting Native Americans, but a large portion of that was as part of the Revolutionary War. The Native tribes actually fought on both sides of the war and were hurt by the British and Americans alike (the Natives also had their share of shitty actions as well).

              In the late 1700’s and early 1800’s there were some abuses which the founding fathers would have been involved in, but conflicts at this time were much more balanced. Some reservations were setup, but reservations at this time are different from your earlier usage, it was more like agreeing upon the boundaries of the natives land. The Native tribes treated for land individually while the USA treated as a group, so each group delineated their land separately from each other and then the US got everything in between.

              The main atrocities were committed in the mid-late 1800’s (~1830 - 1890) of which Lincoln was only a really small, but very impactful portion. More significant was the likes of Andrew Jackson who effectively dumped gas on the handling of the Natives and until Trump was widely considered the worst President by modern opinion. Jackson is also probably the cause for the change in usage of Reservations as they became purely about dislocating people from their land.

              Earlier I said that short spans of time need to not be blended together, part of that is because the USA was rapidly expanding through Manifest Destiny. Lincoln wasn’t a founding father, but his involvement was mostly focused around his short Presidency and the Civil War. Lincoln did have some involvement with Native Americans, but most of it was through the lens of the American Civil War. Lincoln handled the Dakota War of 1862 which took place in Minnesota. Minnesota had recently become a State, it had been a territory since 1849, but the cause for the Dakota War was bad treaties which Congress signed in 1851 (2 years after Lincoln had left congress and 10 years before he became president).

              Lincoln swiftly moved to crush the Dakota War which had ~150 casualties to keep his focus on the Civil War. Lincoln did agree with Manifest Destiny and did allow settlers to continue moving west, but his tenure saw comparatively little abuse of Native Americans. During the Dakota War the Natives were eventually captured and given trial, Lincoln pardoned 264 of the 392 natives and the rest were hung. Here is a decent read about Lincoln’s relationship to Native Americans (https://www.history.com/news/abraham-lincoln-native-americans).


              As to your second comment

              Also, feeling bad about something you’re perpetuating is worthless. It’s like killing someone but doing it with your eyes closed because you feel bad

              I never said anyone felt bad, I said it’s shitty to debate who committed more genocide, you can call the destruction of 90% of the population collateral damage all you want, but it is what it is. You can say that England or Europe didn’t do what the USA did (biological warfare aside), but you’re factually wrong and need to read up on it a lot more.

              If you’re talking about the modern treatment of Native Americans it’s really not the issue that it once was. Historically misrepresentation, discrimination, and reparations were the big issues for Native Americans. Now it’s more to do with their low total population and pseudo self isolation. Things like environmental impacts, mistaken appropriation, lack of resources or economic growth on reservations are the bigger issues for Natives and are more specific to Native Americans which live on the reservations and isn’t the case for every reservation.


              I think that’s my main thing, you really just don’t know what you’re talking about, but you want some outlet to say how much you hate the USA. Go read up, there are plenty of reasons to hate the USA, but your argument here is pretty poor.

              Here’s some recommended reading on shitty things Europeans did to the Native Americans in the USA

              • Pequot War (~13k massacred Pequots)
              • Kieft’s War (1600 massacred natives)
              • Beaver Wars (Casualties unknown, but this is when accidental exposure to small pox really took off)
              • Siege of Fort Pitt and Henry Bouquet (One of the earliest known cases of intentionally spreading small pox, Bouquet was a Swiss mercenary working for Britain and wrote about doing it)
              • King Phillips War (2,800 massacred natives)
                • Knightfox@lemmy.one
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                  1 year ago

                  Which millions exactly? There were only ~600,000 Native Americans in what is now the USA in 1800, Europeans had killed all the others through various wars and disease.

                  If you actually look at the casualties from the 1800’s Indian wars the grand total is <40,000. Some died of starvation or poor conditions, but the vast majority died from incidental exposure to small pox and measles just like when the Europeans exposed the natives when they arrived.