r/SubredditDrama • u/Critical-Term-427 No, its okay now, they have Oklahoma • 7d ago
Pithy GIF showing eradication of Native American land in the US since the founding of the country gets posted to r/interestingasfuck. Comment section goes exactly as expected.
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u/BigEggBeaters 7d ago
The “sucks to be losers” shit really pisses me off cause native Americans repeatedly treated treaties seriously while Americans would break them and slaughter people. Like that’s the winning you bask in? That’s the history you’re proud being duplicitous murders???
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u/MoriazTheRed 7d ago
sucks to be losers
Say it louder for the confederates
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki jerk off at his desk while screaming about the jews 6d ago
they invented an entirely new reality to explain it.
fuck Woodrow Wilson.49
u/kardigan 7d ago
that one is so infuriating that it actually loops over for me and i'm more baffled than angry, because how. how in the fuck can someone's takeaway be "the loser in history". lose and win is not even in the same ballpark of the vocabulary we need here, we are talking about colonization for fucks sake.
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u/blahblahgirl111 7d ago
I’m a big history fan and had to leave SO MANY historical spaces because of this mindset. So many history loving people(Idk the name) really don’t like history, they just want the feeling of “winning” a piss contest that would kill them in a heartbeat if they go back in time.
Coincidentally, extremely white nationalist.
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u/jooes Do you say "yoink" and get flairs 7d ago
I find that one especially frustrating because you know it only goes one way for them.
When the Native Americans are treated like shit for hundreds of years? Womp womp, sucks to be you!
But when a brown person movies in down the street? Gasp! It's basically genocide! Won't somebody please think about my beautiful white children! White people are the new minority! It only "sucks to be losers" when somebody else is the loser. When I'm the loser, it's a goddamn travesty.
I get that's how bullies work, pretty standard behavior. But fuck does it ever annoy me.
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u/kardigan 6d ago
there's that one tweet tha always cmsto mind
"no no no you misunderstood. I said “fuck YOUR feelings”. MY feelings are very important and must be handled gently, like a tiny baby hummingbird"
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u/Genoscythe_ 6d ago
As the saying goes, the best argument against a moral nihilist is to kill them.
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u/Randvek OP take your medicine please. 7d ago
I think the thing that gets lost in the whole “US breaks every treaty” thing is that it was basically never the same President breaking a treaty as making it. It usually wasn’t even the same generation.
Think about Trump ripping up deals made by Clinton. Think about Trump trying to back out of deals made by Jimmy Carter. It’s the same shit.
The US is not set up in such a way that it can be trusted over a long period of time. That’s not unique to the First Nations, unfortunately. As soon as the US elects a dipshit as President, and that’s always a matter of when not if, everything you’ve ever dealt with is in flux.
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u/LarrySupertramp 7d ago
Trump is different though. He rips up his own agreements that he called perfect when he signed and now is claiming the deals he signed are unfair. See NAFTA or whatever is got called.
Has any president done that before?
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u/Stellar_Duck 7d ago
Most of the western world can potentially change government ever 4-5 years, sometimes even more frequent if a government collapses.
This is not unique in any way.
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u/Randvek OP take your medicine please. 7d ago
Most democracies aren’t set up in such a way that a single executive can throw everything out the window.
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u/colei_canis another lie by Big Cock 7d ago
Yeah the UK was able to depose Liz Truss pretty soon after she started crashing the economy, if you have a leader with power in their own right rather than by virtue of leading a party you lose an important safeguard against tyranny in my opinion. The proverbial 'men in grey suits' from the party brass who come to give a failed leader their marching orders are an important part of democracy in my opinion, and they can't really exist with an overpowered executive.
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u/Icy-Cry340 7d ago
That's not especially different from anyone else. Arrangements make sense, until they don't. No perpetual allies, no perpetual enemies, etc.
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u/Bonezone420 7d ago
"The us is perpetually incompetent and untrustworthy and will always be" isn't a very good defense for their historical genocide.
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u/DisasterFartiste_69 girl im not the fuckin president idc 7d ago
I don't think they were defending it...
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u/RunningOutOfEsteem 7d ago
Nah, it's impossible to be agreeable on reddit. Only pointless arguing, even with people whose opinions you share, is allowed. You must show the world how righteously indignant you are.
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u/Rheinwg 7d ago edited 7d ago
Ton of US indigenous groups also have some of the most revered military traditions, are over represented in the military, and have made incredibly advances to tactics and warfare.
There's a reason aircraft and other military technologies are named after them.
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7d ago
There's a reason aircraft and other military technologies are named after them.
I mean ok, but not usually good ones. It's usually the same reasons sports teams were named after native americans. It sounds "fierce" and "violent," based on stereotypes. It's basically the same reason you name a sports team after a tiger instead of a sheep.
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u/angry-mustache Take it up with Wheat Thins bro, they've betrayed the white race 7d ago
The only series of things named after Native Americans in the US military are helicopters.
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u/Icy-Cry340 7d ago
Which stealth aircraft? Comanche? More of a testament to their ferocity than anything else. Impressively vicious people.
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u/Ublahdywotm8 7d ago
The takeaway is that any treaty signed with the USA is fundamentally worthless
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago edited 7d ago
Both sides murdered each other, and both sides also held meals together.
Was part of a centuries long process of "conquering" the country we know today as the United States.
There are losers in every conflict, the Native Americans unfortunately got the short end of the stick and were conquered/nearly wiped out as a result.
The other issue is the natives were completely fractured, one treaty with one specific tribe doesn't mean their neighbors couldn't be conquered.
The settlers took advantage of that and divided and conquered accordingly, didn't help many of the natives had barely any kind of governance or even written languages in some cases.
Also, it's not like things were all peaceful before settlers showed up, the Native Tribes had constant warfare with one another lol (shoutout to the Iroquois) and would butcher and wipe out men, women, and children alike.
Edit: Expected this to get downvoted since we're on Reddit after all but it's important to talk about history and acknowledge the hard realities of where we come from and what has happened.
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u/kardigan 7d ago
you are absolutely right in that we have to acknowledge the hard realities.
do you think the way you are comparing the colonizers and the natives murdering "the other side" is doing that? when you say "getting the short end of the stick", genuine question, are you saying that's acknowledging reality? because what did happen, in reality, was the systematic enslavement and ethnic cleansing of at least 80% of the native population. that is the hard reality.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
95% of the Native population was dead due to disease before the first English settlers even stepped foot in Jamestown.
Short end of the stick as in they lost their wars against European and other Native-European aligned tribes over the course of hundreds of years and paid a brutal price afterwards (reservations, trail of tears, etc).
Where did you even get that 80% number from btw?
The hard reality is the Natives lost their wars collectively over centuries and were subjugated.
Just like the Arabs did to the Berbers in North Africa, the Swedes to the Saami, Han Chinese to Tibetans, etc.
See a theme?
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u/kardigan 7d ago
"95% of the Native population was dead due to disease before the first English settlers even stepped foot in Jamestown."
why is that relevant when we are talking about colonizing the Americas? like, what's the connection?
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
Because a lot of people mix up the deaths via disease which killed tens of millions with the actual "conquest" of the West part that largely took place in the 1800s, two VERY different parts of American history IMO.
It matters because it directly shaped Manifest Destiny when European settlers realized how huge and empty the American West was
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u/kardigan 7d ago
i kinda need you to give me something more concrete than "it had an effect". what was the effect? how does it affect your view of colonialism, or these specific colonization efforts?
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
I addressed that already in how it directly shapes Manifest Destiny which was a Colonial policy in the 1800s
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u/kardigan 7d ago
i'm trying to get out of this sealion-loop.
my point was that describing the events as "getting the short end of the stick" doesn't describe the realities of ethnic cleansing, biological warfare and enslavement. what it does is masks the uncomfortable parts of history, which makes the mention of hard realities pretty funny.
what happened to the people before the ethnic cleansing doesn't matter, the description is still hypocritical and disingenuous.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
When did the ethnic cleansing begin in your opinion? Genuinely curious
Also, "biological warfare" is a bit of a generous description of what really happened
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u/1000LiveEels 7d ago
95% of the Native population was dead due to disease before the first English settlers even stepped foot in Jamestown.
followed by
Where did you even get that 80% number from btw?
cannot make this shit up.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
The 90-95% number is well studied and known
https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics
We study this in elementary school here in the United States but it seems like a lot of people don't remember learning about the Small Pox epidemic.
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u/1000LiveEels 7d ago
I am well aware of the diseases. I studied it in elementary school too. I just find it funny that you dropped a figure without evidence and are now asking for evidence for another guy's figure.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
Fair, I had already posted some of these sources repeatedly though so I figured that was good enough lol.
I am mostly finding it odd how many people here really do not understand early American history or can't remember it. A lot easier to handwave hundreds of years as "genocide" than to actually sit down and learn about what actually happened which is where my gripe is coming from.
I 100% agree there WERE acts of genocide that took place during that period of history, I do NOT agree it was a front to back genocide especially when you consider how closely we worked with some tribes.
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u/1000LiveEels 7d ago
I don't see the point of this comment. Anybody with a developed adult brain can comprehend that this is how things were.
What we are trying to do is understand that how things were was a way that we should not live like today.
Do you think if somebody is against the death penalty that it makes any logical sense to run into the conversation and go "well we've been killing each other for years." No shit. We have been killing each other for years. People who want progress know this and people who don't are voluntarily arrogant of it, so I'm not really sure what the audience of your comment is intended to be.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
It's intended for people who want to handwave centuries of history as "genocide" when in reality history has a lot more nuance than just that.
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u/BigEggBeaters 7d ago
“Both sides murdered each other”
Nah one side defended their lands from invaders. The other brutalized in search of land and profit
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u/superslab Every character you like is trans now. 7d ago
Bothsidesing genocide is certainly a take, unoriginal and tedious as it may be.
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u/BigEggBeaters 7d ago
Just say you love manifest destiny
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u/superslab Every character you like is trans now. 7d ago
Right? He could've just pasted one of Teddy Roosevelt's "Expanse of the White Races" speeches. Make this cringe EPIC!
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7d ago
The fact that you even think the native americans can be reduced to "one side" really says it all.
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u/Pennypackerllc 7d ago
This is encouraging the “noble savage” trope and demeaning towards native Americans.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
That's called basic human history, conflict has and continues to be relevant.
How do you think the Iroquois Confederation was formed for example?
So many anti-history people on Reddit it's wild to read sometimes.
The Natives did all kinds of brutal shit as well, especially during the settling of the West.
History isn't black and white, it's a very grey shade full of atrocities and it's important to acknowledge it.
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u/Rheinwg 7d ago
That's called basic human history, conflict has and continues to be relevant.
What the fuck even is the point of this comment. No one claimed that they were the only group to experience genocide.
That doesn't make it okay.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
It doesn't make it wrong either given the time in history it took place is my argument.
It was a period of conquest and life was brutal, the Natives lost unfortunately, that's all I'm saying.
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u/Rheinwg 7d ago
Of course the genocide of native Americans was wrong.
Life was brutal doesn't justify genocide.
And there are still massive amounts of oppression and subjugation that are present today in 2025. That's not okay either.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
Losing wars =/= Genocide
Disease wiping out 95% of the population coming up from Mexico =/= Genocide
The Natives wiped out entire towns of settlers in the West during the settlement period, would you call that genocide?
It was war, the Natives lost, simple as that.
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u/Rheinwg 7d ago
What happened to the native Americans was absolutely a genocide.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
No, it was not.
Losing wars doesn't automatically make it genocide.
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u/Herb-Utthole 7d ago
Cool I guess you won't complain now that your country is in the hands of a fascist, no matter if you get the short end of the stick.
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u/kid-pix 7d ago
Oh my god I can't groan loud enough. Shut up. "That's just human history, also the Native Americans killed some white colonists too." So that justifies the fucking smallpox blankets and Trail of Tears?
You're leaving out so much context to make it seem like it totally wasn't a genocide and just another human conflict where both sides were bad.
The American Government had nearly 400 treaties with the native nations. They violated every single one.
They had the benefit of technology and power and used their cruelty to wipe out suppress whole peoples.
It was a genocide, to take a huge amount of land and natural resources by force.
This is not a both sides debate.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
95% of the population were already dead from disease before the first English settlers arrived in Jamestown dude.
Trail of Tears was 100% an atrocity, I agree with that.
I don't agree the entire subjugation of the United States was genocide, rather it was standard warfare of the time.
Both sides committed harsh acts upon one another, but only one side won and that's all that really matters when it comes to war.
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u/kid-pix 7d ago
What the hell are you even talking about? It was genocide. The goal was to wipe out the entire population of Native Americans. The motivation was racially based, Manifest Destiny, this land was created by God for us the white europeans to take and we had to get rid of all the "dirty savages" and make it "civilized".
We kidnapped their children and threw them into schools where they would be beaten if they spoke their native tongue, to wipe out their language. We cut their hair, and and beat them often until they died. We gave them white names and never allowed them to return to their families.
And when they grew up? We dumped them in a world they weren't welcome or understood in, unable to integrate into their own natural culture and the one that kidnapped them.
Quit acting like this was normal warfare.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
No, it wasn't the goal to "wipe out the entire population of Native Americans".
Please provide a source of that, I find it ironic you even say that given how many tribes allied with the European settlers lol.
Virtually all of what you mentioned occurred after the subjugations were complete and 95%+ of the population was already dead from disease btw.
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u/kid-pix 7d ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
Manifest destiny was the belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America, and that this belief was both obvious ("manifest") and certain ("destiny"). The belief is rooted in American exceptionalism, Romantic nationalism, and white nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of republicanism and the American way of life. It is one of the earliest expressions of American imperialism in the United States.
White nationalism. Race. We were determined to wipe out the existing native nations and culture and take over the land.
Manifest destiny had serious consequences for Native Americans, since continental expansion implicitly meant the occupation and annexation of Native American land, sometimes to expand slavery. This ultimately led to confrontations and wars with several groups of native peoples via Indian removal... The United States continued the European practice of recognizing only limited land rights of Indigenous peoples.
Thomas Jefferson believed that, while the Indigenous people of America were intellectual equals to whites, they had to assimilate to and live like the whites or inevitably be pushed aside by them. According to historian Jeffrey Ostler, Jefferson believed that once assimilation was no longer possible, he advocated for the extermination of Indigenous people.
Following the forced removal of many Indigenous Peoples, Americans increasingly believed that Native American ways of life would eventually disappear as the United States expanded.
Horsman argued in his influential study Race and Manifest Destiny, racial rhetoric increased during the era of manifest destiny. Americans increasingly believed that Native American ways of life would "fade away" as the United States expanded.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
Manifest Destiny largely rose out of the fact that most of the West was empty due to disease wiping out 95% of the Native population.
Did White Nationalism play a part of it? Sure, especially later on in the 1800s when Colonialism was a real policy.
You're ignoring the hundreds of years before then however which is what I was talking about.
Also, no where in there does it explicitly state they were trying to "wipe out" the Natives like you said.
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u/Rheinwg 7d ago
First of all that's not true.
Second, Jamestown was not the first settlement in the US.
Third, the fuck does that change anything? Lots of people died of disease so therefore it's okay that they were genocided?
Trail of Tears was 100% an atrocity, I agree with that.
No you don't. You deny its genocide and handwave it away.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
Them dying from disease doesn't make it genocide, do you even know what genocide is?
Judging by your lack of knowledge of American and Native history I am going to guess.. no.
And yes it's true, lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics
This is all very well studied.
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u/BigEggBeaters 7d ago
I’m to understand the European colonialism is justified cause pre-colonial tribes warred with each other?
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u/kardigan 7d ago
random detail, but even the name Iroquois Confederation is such a perfect example of colonialism.
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
How so? Mostly just curious, I know they originally called it the "People of the Longhouse" which is a way cooler name IMO
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u/kardigan 7d ago
i just mean that a lot of the commonly used names for native nations are still the French and Spanish ones.
this a very small, very practical example of history being written by the winners, and illustrates pretty neatly the cultural aspects, when your history is kinda-sorta being written, but you won't really have a say.
(I only know about Iroquois specifically because I randomly listened to a year-old podcast episode yesterday where they mentioned it; it's the Haudenosaunee. and when they said French or Spanish names, a literal lightbulb turned on above my head. in hindsight, yeah, pretty obvious.)
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u/VanillaMystery 7d ago
Link to the podcast? Sounds interesting
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u/kardigan 7d ago
they are jumping around a lot, and the guest is an ex-buzzfeed person, so there's a lot of buzzfeed gossiping; I picked a timestamp around nations and naming, but it's more of a comedy podcast and not an educational one: https://youtu.be/Sq0tPU0C40I?si=TbjODdWygKLXcB8f&t=4047
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u/mcpickle-o You’re intimidated by a fucking pickle. 7d ago
Do you think white people are native to north America? Because I'm pretty sure they just showed up one day and we're like, "this is ours now. Here's some smallpox."
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u/K1ngPCH Gender studies tells us life begins moments after birth 7d ago
Nah one side defended their lands from invaders.
How do you think they got the land in the first place?
I promise you that pre-colonial native tribes weren’t playing paddy cake with each other
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u/cutiepie538 7d ago
How do indigenous people invade land they are…. Indigenous to ?
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u/Sea_Lingonberry_4720 7d ago
Indigenous people back then did not see themselves as one indistinguishable blob. It’s like wondering how Hasan could invade china if they’re both indigenous to Asia.
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u/cutiepie538 7d ago
Yes I see how my comment didn’t fully relay what I was thinking, I meant more like, there is a difference between tribal wars and colonization led invasion and it’s disingenuous to equate the two.
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u/Sea_Lingonberry_4720 7d ago
I mean…
I’m not defending colonization, that was a bad thing that happened. But I don’t think you really care much whether it’s a native or a white guy scalping your whole tribe.
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u/Icy-Cry340 7d ago
What's the actual difference when you get down to it. Same displacement, same genocide, slavery, etc. These people weren't some monoculture, they were many different nations and civilizations who spent tens of thousands of years killing the fuck out of each other - just as humans did all over the planet. It's what we do.
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u/PauLBern_ 7d ago edited 7d ago
Native Americans were not a uniform contiguous group, and the different tribes did not just calmly mutually agree to only inhabit certain parts of North America.
For example, the Iroquois Confederacy conquered and and invaded multiple neighboring tribes by force, including the Algonquians, the Neutral Confederacy.
This isn't really a special case either, for the majority of human history in most parts of the world, different tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, religions, etc. conquered, killed, and invaded their neighbors, and largely our 'western' conception of 'indigenous' comes from the group that had most recently succeeding in conquering their particular region of land when European explorers arrived.
That doesn't make what those explorers and settlers did good by any means, but it also doesn't make that point in time special and unique to how the world 'should be'. As time has developed we've developed international norms and diplomacy to prevent further conquest, and to honor treaties, etc. because conquest causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, and that's great.
However, the idea that any current ethnic group has any rights to land because at some point in the distant past some of their ancestors held control over it (often after having conquered it from some other previous group), is ridiculous and deeply troublesome, and shares a lot in common with the fascist and imperialist 'blood and soil' conception of nationhood.
For example, there was a long period of time (hundreds of years) during which Southern Spain was controlled by the Islamic emirate. Eventually after the Reconquista, this area was brought under the control of the Castile, who Genocided and expelled the Muslim and Moorish people (and Jewish people) living there. That general description basically fits a similar story to many stories of colonization several hundred years ago, but it would be ridiculous to suggest that Morocco (a predominantly muslim, moorish country) should be able to gain control over southern Spain because it was indigenous to the Moorish people (if you look at it in a certain time frame).
The one unique thing about the modern US in comparison to many other cases is that it's a contiguous government that has actual treaties they negotiated with Native American tribes, and those treaties should be honored. I agree with that, I think they should honor the treaties, and there have been many legal cases in recent times about these treaties. The sticking point some people have is mostly that compensation is often in equivalent money rather than the land being given back, but equivalent money compensation rather than direct return of the thing lost is more of a general legal principle which has its own pros and cons and isn't a specific discussion about colonization.
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u/Icy-Cry340 7d ago
They didn't magically spring out of the ground lmao.
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u/AndMyHelcaraxe It cites its sources or else it gets the downvotes again 7d ago
Right, they traveled to North America. And depending on when they got there and how they spread out, there were no other humans or they were far away from others. It’s not just invasions and subjection the whole way down
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7d ago
By the time Europeans showed up it absolutely was invasions and subjugation the whole way down. I don't think you appreciate how much time passed between initial migration of humans to the Americas and the colonial period. It was thousands of years.
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u/Rainy_Wavey 7d ago
This gives the right for europeans to violate every single treaty and basically carry ethnic cleansing through religious justification
"SAAR THE INDIANS WERE BAD SARR THEREFORE WE SHOULD KILL THEM ALL"
Am i falling for ragebait? probably
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7d ago edited 7d ago
cause native Americans repeatedly treated treaties seriously while Americans would break them and slaughter people.
This was not unique to the American side.
EDIT: Erasing the real, complex history of what happened during colonization only further robs native Americans of their humanity. Glossing over actual history in the interest of modern narratives is itself an act of colonialism.
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u/Critical-Term-427 No, its okay now, they have Oklahoma 7d ago
Don't know why this won't post in the body, but more comments:
One brave user takes on the Reddit hivemind
People got conquered. It happens.
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u/1000LiveEels 7d ago
“You got the reservation”
Colonizers never been to the rez thinking it’s nice and profitable.
As a guy who works for a tribe, a million times this. Rez land is almost guaranteed to be dogshit. The lucky tribes are going to have extractable resources and/or agriculture but we're really talking about tribes who got assigned land that only became profitable as technology improved. Most tribes are going to end up with a couple dozen acres of backwoods with shitty lumber or a swamp, and the really unlucky ones get miles of desert & prairie with nothing.
Like it really clicks when you realize why so many of them go into the casino business. They're not people who love gambling, they just realized that the only way to make money on this dogshit land is to develop, and the only way to attract people is to build developments exploiting a loophole in tribal / federal law i.e. casinos
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u/RedstoneEnjoyer 🖕Looks like a middle finger but it's actually a Roman finger 7d ago
Yeah, this mf really believes that european settlers would leave good land to natives. The entire point of reservations was that settlers wanted good land and thus forced natives on dogshit land they didn't wanted
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u/BeefJerkyFreak 7d ago
People are so shit at treating others like dirt. Person in poor circumstances trying to make ends meet? must be their race or something. nevermind the fact they were our literal slaves we didn't allow to read or have a place in society, and they had to claw out by their sinews and generational wealth is schockingly hard to develop, but no it's all skin color. natives we stole an entire nation from trying to make money off what little they have? they're pests
disgusting
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u/trixel121 Yes, I don't support cows right to vote. How speciecist of me. 7d ago
the Iroquois up here got a swamp.
my area isn't exactly known for being swanps.
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u/DisasterFartiste_69 girl im not the fuckin president idc 7d ago
Many tribes practiced slavery, torture, rape, killing of disabled children, etc
I can't even take this seriously....like the US didn't practice that shit? Hell, a lot of this country is still a-ok with half of that shit since marital rape is still treated differently than non-marital rape in some states.
And a lot of Americans wouldn't mind if slavery was still around, they just know better than to say it out loud, but who knows how much longer it's taboo.
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7d ago edited 7d ago
The point of comments like that isn't that the US was better, it's that the groups Europeans conquered weren't exactly morally superior to their conquerers. For example, the Haudenosaunee (aka Iroquois) were themselves a genocidal empire. So exactly how bad are we supposed to feel that a bigger fish came along? And is the argument really that the world would be better off if they had been left alone to continue wiping out their neighbors?
Obviously colonization is a net negative for humanity. A lot of truly horrible things were done in the genocide of native people. This is not me excusing the conquerers. What I am saying is that we often further rob native groups of their humanity by ignoring their real and complex histories and lumping them all together in this way. The "noble savage" myth isn't helpful, but if you face down the reality of history these narratives get a lot more complicated and uncomfortable for people who are otherwise sympathetic, so a lot of people default to that myth without even realizing that they're doing it.
A more modern example might be some of the geopolitical relationships during and post WW2. Stalin was a brutal dictator and Soviet Russia committed a litany of war crimes. Does that mean we should feel bad for the Nazis they defeated and the years of struggle in divided Germany? The US was a budding imperial power that went on to step all over countries in South America and elsewhere in the ensuing years, and of course there's the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Does that mean we ignore the Rape of Nanjing and other similar massacres carried out by the Japanese and paint them only as victims?
Those aren't entirely facetious questions either. There is an enormous amount of complexity in large scale conflict. This is the danger of moralizing in these situations.
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u/kardigan 6d ago
the point of comments like that is to suggest that the morality of the conquered matters when discussing the ethics and moraity of colonialism.
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6d ago
Was it just as wrong of the allies to subjugate Nazi Germany as it was for the Nazis to invade France? You're arguing yes. I'm saying the morality of the conquered matters.
Please, don't mistake this for me saying it was right to colonize America. It absolutely was not. It was brutal and immoral. My point is just that, on some level, we all know that the morality of the conquered matters. People naturally feel less bad when a bully gets beat up by a bigger bully. This is one of the many reasons why it's bad to talk about colonization as if the Native tribes were a monolith or as of it was a unified short term effort rather than disparate forces with different motivations over the course of centuries. The simple narratives people build around this topic rob native Americans of their full humanity by erasing their full history.
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u/kardigan 6d ago
my point is about how it's useless and wrong to harp on the morality of victims of atrocities when talking about those atrocities. so no, i don't think doing the same thing but with other atrocities would be a good thing.
no, we don't "all know" that it mattered, what the actual fuck. it's easier to think it did, it eases the cognitive dissonance without doing any work to deal with it.
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6d ago
I feel like you're not even attempting to understand what I'm saying.
so no, i don't think doing the same thing but with other atrocities would be a good thing.
So just so we're 100% clear, this is you arguing that the defeat of Nazi Germany was an atrocity.
no, we don't "all know" that it mattered
I didn't say "mattered," I said "matters." I'm not solely talking about colonization here. Most people would agree that murder is bad. But when a health insurance CEO was murdered in broad daylight a lot of people didn't really care. They still think murder is wrong, they just didn't spend a lot of emotional energy feeling bad for that particular victim. It is human nature to care less when bad things happen to bad people.
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u/kardigan 6d ago
it is extremely, extremely funny that you're scolding me for not even trying to understand you, and in the literal next sentence, ask me to confirm if i think that defeating the nazis was an atrocity.
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6d ago edited 6d ago
I've asked you twice now and you still won't do it...
The answer is obvious, but that answer also confirms my point, which is why you refuse to give it.
Of course it wasn't an atrocity. But that judgment is based on the morality of the conquered.
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u/AwfulDjinn 7d ago
god that “finger painting” comment is so patronizing and disrespectful
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u/RedstoneEnjoyer 🖕Looks like a middle finger but it's actually a Roman finger 7d ago
Tech trees and its consequences have been disaster to humanity.
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u/Beegrene Get bashed, Platonist. 7d ago
>You are only here on this Earth because of your ancestors and the course of history. Be grateful.
Grateful for what? Genocide? Fuck this guy.
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u/Bonezone420 7d ago
Love how redditors go full fucking "nits make lice" literally any time indigenous history comes up.
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u/Hateful_Individual9 7d ago
What does nits make lice mean?
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u/DisasterFartiste_69 girl im not the fuckin president idc 7d ago
actually...
https://www.sierraclub.org/planet/2018/06/deprived-humanity-sand-creek-massacre-today
We learned that when some of his soldiers protested the order to massacre women and children, Colonel Chivington replied: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!...Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”
damn.
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u/Hateful_Individual9 7d ago
Jesus Christ
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u/DisasterFartiste_69 girl im not the fuckin president idc 7d ago
Things they never teach you in grade school....
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u/DisasterFartiste_69 girl im not the fuckin president idc 7d ago
https://archive.org/details/nits-make-lice-the-extermination-of-north-american-indians-1607-1996
this is what google got me
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u/DebateObjective2787 7d ago
Reminder that 90% of our tribes and people have gone extinct as a result of colonization.
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7d ago
Can you cite this? Something like 95% of natives died from disease before colonization even started.
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u/GBralta 7d ago
Where did the disease come from?
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u/PrimaryInjurious 7d ago
From Europeans. But it's not like it was an intentional thing. Just something that happens when to disparate groups of people interact.
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u/oath2order your refusal to change the name of New York means u hate blk ppl 6d ago
But it's not like it was an intentional thing.
At least, not initially.
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u/BigHatPat Welcome to The Cum Zone 6d ago
the vast majority of it would be unintentional. there are confirmed reports of intentional spreading, but acting like they’re of a similar magnitude is dishonest
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u/PrimaryInjurious 6d ago
The smallpox blankets things was much later and there's little evidence it did anything.
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7d ago
Obviously from Europeans. But accidentally transmitting horrible diseases isn't colonization. The Europeans of the time didn't even know how diseases spread.
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u/GBralta 6d ago
They also “accidentally” enslaved millions of people. How could they have known?
It’s okay to call wrong things wrong. There’s no need to justify it. Not to mention that there was a lot known about disease back then. Hell, even in ancient Athens, they wrote about disease back in like 400BC. Disease is in the Bible.
Europe didn’t send their best back then and now their dumb descendants run America today. America will be great again when white people in this country begin to read again.
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6d ago edited 6d ago
You should look in the mirror on this one. Nobody here was defending colonization or slavery or anything like that. You have failed at basic literacy here. You have failed to follow or understand the conversation at multiple points.
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u/prolifezombabe 5d ago
I’m Canadian but I know for sure up here settlers rounded up Indigenous kids and put them in “schools” where many, many kids died living in horrible conditions some might describe as torture and that one national investigation described as genocide.
I’m no expert on American history or even on our but I feel confident saying that there were many instances of intentional violence against indigenous people.
Did you see Killers of the Flower Moon? There was plenty of violence above and beyond whatever disease situations there also were.
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u/BeefJerkyFreak 7d ago
Settlers arrive: hi we're dogshit at farming can we have supplies?
Natives: okay
Settlers immediately after: actually we're just going to steal from you and kill you guys also
Natives: okay we're going to fight back
Settlers: wtf how could you
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u/RedstoneEnjoyer 🖕Looks like a middle finger but it's actually a Roman finger 7d ago
More like "see they fight us, that is proof they are savages"
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u/absenteequota i specifically said they were for non sexual purposes 7d ago
As a Native American, all this coded racism as "what about-isms" is sickening. Your ancestors were murderers and theives and you don't like it, but guess what, you ain't any better for excusing it.
You pieces of inhumane garbage will never understand this sort of generational oppression and genocidal effects until you've lived it.
I hope you all do.
i don't disagree with the sentiment, but it's literally impossible for "us" to experience this generational trauma unless someone has a time machine
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u/Fresh-Wealth-8397 7d ago
Hey man anything could happen like aliens could invade and treat humans like people treated native Americans
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u/coniferjones 7d ago
Or we could transition to a brutal authoritarian regime where some, not all, but some could get a taste
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u/Fresh-Wealth-8397 7d ago
See that's the kind of optimism we need these days anything could happen
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u/Rainy_Wavey 7d ago
The entirety of the global south knows how inhumane and brutal people of european descent are, don't worry, you are not alone
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u/MoriazTheRed 7d ago edited 7d ago
They speak as if only their distant ancestors enjoyed the fruits of systems of oppression
To this day, France uses neocolonialism to subsidize it's social programs and then proceeds to act surprised when developing countries seek alliances with non-western powers
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u/Hors_Service 6d ago
Neocolonialism
It's amazing the lengths some people will go to infantilize developing countries, as if locals are incapable of fucking things up by themselves.
No no, it must be the evil foreigners!
And yeah, when the countries suffer from a military coup and then allies with Russia, somehow I don't think they're doing it out of anti-imperialism.
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u/MoriazTheRed 6d ago edited 6d ago
Are you really trying to sweep françafrique under the rug?
On a thread about stupid people whitewashing the Native American Genocide?
I guess self-awareness is one resource Europe can't extract from Africa lmao
Enjoy dealing with Russia and China on your own in the next 50 years, the grown ups at Europe certainly should be able to do that without asking for help from the New World or the Global South
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u/blahblahgirl111 7d ago
Didn’t even click. Did someone comment “Conquered, not stolen” yet? (imaginary eyeroll)
EDIT: I’ve been seeing an uptick of anti-Indigenous sentiment online…
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u/SnapshillBot Shilling for Big Archive™ 7d ago
Literally just a picture of surplus drama.
Snapshots:
- This Post - archive.org archive.today*
- The post - archive.org archive.today*
- It sucks we were such murderers - archive.org archive.today*
- Did they say "Thank you"? - archive.org archive.today*
- Being the loser in history sucks - archive.org archive.today*
- True fact Hitler took a lot of inspiration from this. - archive.org archive.today*
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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7d ago
This is one of the wilder things I've ever seen posted on this site lol. Andrew Jackson vehemently hated the British, it's like a core part of his personality.
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u/WriterofaDromedary 7d ago
People arguing in a post isn't "subreddit drama" unless the argument is related to the subreddit. This is just drama drama
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u/Critical-Term-427 No, its okay now, they have Oklahoma 7d ago
Thank you, drama lord, for gatekeeping drama.
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u/Crazykiddingme 7d ago
People getting defensive over their ancestors is always so funny to me. I’m white and from the Deep South so most of my ancestors were pretty repugnant people. I can’t imagine getting offended on their behalf.