Fair enough. I don't think purposely eliminating culture is ever justified. But I think culture is just art and funny hats. You don't get to justify poor morals based on your culture. That's what laws are for.

I agree the residential schools were bad, if that's all you're saying. Claiming wild behavior from native tribes ended in the 1700s is pretty far off the mark tho. The Comanche weren't defeated until the late 19th century.

yeah i can agree with this for sure. bad behavior didnt end in the period of north america before canada and the usa existed. it was for sure a long standing conflict. the whole conversation was just me saying nothing that was done justified cultural destruction, and elite stated human sacrifice justifies that. seems to still be thinking that, which i deem sad. destroy a cultures way of life because someones great great great great grandpa killed someone during a war.

now on the topic of aztecs, i'd say thats as close as we get to a culture that we are justified in completely destroying. interestingly enough the mayans, incas, and hopi in the 1500s (their neighbors) would agree with us. fuck the aztecs, they sucked. we can still keep their art and cultural practices for learning purposes tho, its at least interesting for anthropology.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Oct 29 2024 01:54pm

My point here is simply to say that there does exist rational and moral justification for destroying a culture, I'm glad you now agree with me on that point

I also support the preservation of artefacts - for display in a museum, not actual use

This post was edited by El1te on Oct 29 2024 02:35pm

The Gauls and Thracians and everyone else around Rome in the first century BC would have agreed if you said Roman culture should be completely destroyed too though. Obviously no one likes their neighbors in a time when everyone was constantly at war, I don't think that says anything about whether or not their culture had value. Gauls and Thracians were just as bad as Romans, probably worse. I know less about south american history, but I would have to guess that the same thing applies to them. Again, there were no good guys. It's very revisionist to imagine that the losers were peaceful by nature. Being weaker doesn't suggest that you're better in any other way.

Very recent western phenomenon (by recent i mean this century, probably even narrowed to last 30-50years really)

There's apologies and moving on and then there's this nonsense of constant collective guilt that seemingly is never settled. My ancestors suffered more recently than these people. Suffered under Soviets, suffered under WW2/German occupation, suffered under Ottoman rule, and so on, all of these events happening more recently than these native grievances. If you go to Eastern Europe, you won't generally find forever grievers trying to milk fill in the blank white Europeans because in the real world no one gives a fuck. You think the Turks or Russians will pay reparations or self flagellate for their wrongs? LOL.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Oct 29 2024 03:03pm

Marxist dogma

I dont fully understand, what is the rationale that this is in the news now?

there is nothing to apologise for, superior cultures taking over is how we went from cavemen to the undisputed apex predator

Biden gave a speech apologizing for it



I don't think tribes were thriving in north america at any point in history. The high water mark was carving pueblos when western europe was building cathedrals. Pretty much their whole history was barely clinging to subsistence hunter gathering. They never remotely approached the civilizations of south/central america. And while its true that encroachment by the europeans displaced them, we have every reason to believe they were in constant conflict and displacement due to intertribal warfare before our arrival.

They led totally shit lives. We didnt cause that. They had cultures based on warfare and slavery. Short lives filled with hardship, women as property. They had not developed the early systems of civilizations yet, no written languages or agriculture.

How could europeans have coexisted at this point without destructive influence? Even if we had segregated ourselves, rejected expansionism and manifest destiny, our presence on the continent introduced horses, guns and disease. The tribes sped up killing each other and dying off to epidemics without the need for a genocidal campaign. I'd say from a moral lens that by the sheer fact of our disruptive existence we had a responsibility to intervene to uplift indian tribes. Echo the modern neoliberalism/neoconservativism mantra, that isolationism is immoral because we have a duty to intervene when nobody in the world lives in a vacuum. Then the question is whether intervention serves a common good or makes matters worse. If Indians lived in misery and were dying off, were we doing more good or harm by stamping out their culture to save their people?

Most significant to Europeans was the seeming ruthlessness and terrorism of the Indian way of war. This was a paradox. European wars of religion had unleashed nauseating levels of savagery. Men, women and children had been slaughtered in the thousands and without mercy within living memory and sometimes within the personal experience of French and English colonists of the seventeenth century. Europeans grew up in conditions of brutal hardship, recurrent starvation and casual cruelty. Most babies died in infancy. Forty represented old age. In France, minor criminals - men and women - were flogged or branded in public. Serious offenders were tied to a cart-wheel and cubbed to death. Torture was a routine judicial procedure. Religious heretics and witches could be burned at the stake and sometimes were.


Scalping, systematic torture of prisoners, and the refusal to distinguish sex or age in the victims of an Iroquois raid confirmed to the French that their enemies were savages. The Indian
indifference to European taboos on cannibalism or the mutilation of corpses was especially shocking and it was too much to expect that newcomers would accept that such conduct grew out of native beliefs and principles.
- A military history of canada by desmond morton

Tl;dr: El1te is right and everyone else is wrong. Ill post more insightful tidbits as the thread moves along.

This post was edited by zorzin on Oct 29 2024 05:52pm