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Comment by iamcasen | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to me how little is known about the native Caribbean peoples. When I read stories about a thriving island population, the Maya and Mexica empires, and the new discoveries being made with Lidar in the jungles, I just feel a sense of loss.

What would the Americas -- the world -- look like today if the Europeans never came here? Or at least, came and engaged respectfully.

Think about it, much of what is considered traditional european food actually came from the Americas: potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate. Italian cuisine wouldn't exist without the Americas.

And now that the whole world has benefited, where are the people who gave it all to the rest of us? Eradicated from existence.

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Respectfully would have eliminated a massive amount of atrocities, but the end result would have been similar: most of the native popularion dead in the first 150 years of contact. The Americas went from 50-100 million people to fewer than 5 million natives because of disease.

>The Americas went from 50-100 million people to fewer than 5 million natives because of disease.

Disease which was quite forcefully spread by Europeans as an act of warfare....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

As atrocious as it was, it was pretty late. The largest pandemics were probably hundreds of years prior. Some believe the herds of buffalo etc was a sign of an ecosystem in great change, where the change was extinction of societies that previously tended the land.

For a while, years ago, I was on an "alternative history" fiction kick. Most of it is dreck, but one diamond in that rough was Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus[1]. Without giving too much away, it's about a group of future historians that use time-travel to study past cultures, and discover that they can not only view past events, but influence them as well. It's got a couple of interesting semi-plausible what-ifs of different ways the Columbian Exchange might have worked out, under different parameters.

[1] http://amzn.to/2CvPY10

Keep in mind that native American groups were conquering, enslaving, and destroying other cultures as well - but they rarely kept records of it. It is not as if there was universal peace in the pre-Columbus Americas.

No one's suggesting otherwise. Every culture has blood in their past, "civilization" is the slow process of collectively maturing to avoid those conflicts.

OP was lamenting genocide, and then wondered what the world would be like if the Europeans never came. That seems to me to imply that OP believes Europeans are solely responsible for Indian genocides, which is what I was responding to

Indian? You mean native Americans? Europeans are solely responsible for bringing new diseases to South America - that wiped out most of the population, far more than swords and guns.

Britain also killed a lot of people in India, but they didn't commit genocide.

Of course the actual Indians had their own genocidal maniacs, like Ashoka the Great

I never said Europeans weren't responsible for genocide.

And "Indian" is an accepted, defined way to reference Native Americans. See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Indian

You are confused.

Honestly if Europeans never came to the Americas there would not be losses of up to 98% of the indigenous population (depending on location). Even if disease "accidentally" killed 80%, the rest were murdered due to greed and evil.

Those events have been well documented, unlike the "rarely kept records" in your previous comment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples...

After the Europeans could not find enough surviving Native Americans to enslave, they went to Africa next to start another round of cruelty. There is no honest comparison to be made between warring tribes and European conquest.

> After the Europeans could not find enough surviving Native Americans to enslave, they went to Africa next to start another round of cruelty.

This is off. The problem wasn't that there weren't enough natives, but that they tended to die quickly when enslaved.

So, does that mean that cultures currently engaged in war are less civilized than cultures currently disengaged from war?

I would argue that cultures engaged in war as a means to resolve tension are less civilized, and those engaged in war without tension are even worse...

Similarly, totalitarianism is a less civilized form of organization than, say, successful democracies.

This is a popular talking point for folks who don’t want to talk about the effects of European colonization. It’s so absurd that it’s kind of hard to unpack; which makes it kind of effective.

Nobody ever in any circumstances is stating or implying that native peoples did not engage in war, murder, etc before and during the arrival and colonization by Europeans. But that’s not the point. Native peoples died of natural causes while diseases Europeans introduced wiped them out en masse. The natural causes are not the point of the discussion.

The reality is there is a history of European empires colonizing and wiping out native peoples. If we refuse to look at this critically and learn from it then we have not improved beyond our ancestors. when this topic gets brought up, don’t bring up straw men based distractions. Engage in the discussion meaningfully with an open mind.

> Nobody ever in any circumstances is stating or implying that native peoples did not engage in war, murder, etc before and during the arrival and colonization by Europeans

This is just demonstrably false (see, for one artistically valuable but hilariously naive example, the song "Cortez the Killer" by Neil Young), but will certainly be met by goalpost-moving of "nobody serious is saying that..."

It was a stupid way to phrase what I meant which is that when this silly response (“Native people killed each other you know!”) it’s almost never in response to someone saying “Native people never killed each other.” It’s in response to someone saying “European colonization of the Americas had disastrous effects on native peoples.” My point being when people are saying that, they aren’t saying or implying that native people didn’t kill each other. One does not follow the other.

I could have worded it better, but like I said original this particular silly talking point is hard to unpack and respond to since it’s such a non-sequitur.

You're conveniently implying that Europeans intentionally brought smallpox and other diseases to North and South America, as if it was a choice, which is ridiculous. That's like blaming the rats or the residents sanitary practices for spreading the black death which devistated European populations as well.

“The spread of disease from European contact was not always accidental. Europeans arriving in the Americas had long been exposed to the diseases, attaining a measure of immunity, and thus were not as severely affected by them. Therefore, disease could be an effective biological weapon.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

The quote is from the section Disease as a weapon against Native Americans

The second two sentences in that quote do nothing to support the first. It's a total non sequitur.

Just because it was used on a few isolated occasions, but even then it was already well advancing on it's own. It was already a natural phenomenon.

The westerns saw the absolute devastation by their mere presences was causing unintentionally and occasionally decided to use it to their advantage purposefully...but I highly doubt that absent those occasions that we would have seen much different outcomes.

Absent total non-contact for the next two centuries...

1. I am implying no such thing. I didn’t bring up what was deliberate vs what wasn’t or anything of the sort. I said we should look at the results of colonization and learn from it. That’s it.

2. As already mentioned in the other response to your comment there are multiple documented cases of deliberate infection, if that’s where you want to go.

"Multiple documented cases" != the devastation of populations on every single island, and north and south America regions,

95-99% of the time they just had to show up for it to happen

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