From: gary@isis.cgd.ucar.edu (Gary Strand)
Subject: Re: Genocide and degrees of morality?
Organization: Climate and Global Dynamics Division/NCAR, Boulder, CO
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 07:39:29 GMT

k > Karen (branwen@sage.cc.purdue.edu)

k > A poster just claimed that he believes the genocide of the American Indian
    at the hands of Anglo-Americans was less immoral than that which was en-
    gaged upon the Jews by Hitler!

  Lest we forget, more than just "Anglo-Americans" participated in the near-
  destruction of the Indian way of life. The Spaniards and Portuguese did a
  fine job of decimating Central American and South American native cultures,
  and more than a few tribes helped the whites get rid of their enemies. It's
  *not* the case that all the tribes lived in peace with each other, so there
  was plenty of motive for aiding the white man in his quest for land.

  Also, I would hesitate to call the spread of Europeans across the Americas
  and the resultant decimation of the native cultures as "genocide". The Nazis
  were bent on exterminating the Jews just for being Jews. This is callous,
  but most Indians were simply "in the way" for the European colonists. The
  ends may have nearly been the same, but the underlying thinking was differ-
  ent, and it took a few centuries for the Europeans to dominate the Americas,
  whereas the Nazis were "efficient" enough to kill millions of Jews (and lots
  of others) in barely a decade. 
  
k > Why would this be true?

  Having said what I did above, I think the original argument you refer to is
  bogus. It becomes incredibly difficult to determine which of a set of immor-
  al acts is the most immoral when all are incredibly evil. Is Ted Bundy worse
  than the Son of Sam? Jack the Ripper? Was Stalin worse than Hitler? Mao? Pol
  Pot? 

  It's easier to make The Holocaust the most evil thing ever perpetrated on
  humans by other humans since the evidence is so recent and so familiar. I
  shudder and feel revolted when I see films of the concentration camps, not
  because I'm Jewish (I'm not) or that I know people who died or lived through
  the experience, but because these horrible pictures and films are *real*, 
  and are only a few decades ago. It's incredible that such a thing happened,
  practically yesterday, and right in the heart of Europe. It's possible to
  talk to many people who experienced it, and get a real feeling for just how
  terrible it was.

  The same cannot be said of the decimation of the American Indian. Those who
  were forced onto reservations and witnessed massacres and battles are long
  gone. We have pictures, but it's hard to identify with them. It ended (for
  all intents and purposes) more than a century ago.

  However, in short, I agree with your following statement:
  
k > This statement was ludicrous.  

k > The Indian Genocide, in my opinion, was all the more immoral because it 
    was successful, was engaged upon predications that even the frontiersmen
    themselves didn't believe, and was justified in spite of, not because of,
    the religious beliefs of the practitioners.

  Actually, more Americans define themselves as being of Indian ancestry than
  ever before. Not quite a total elimination of their existence, I'd say.

k > Genocide is never moral.  And there are not "shades of grey" when it comes
    to genocide.  The systematic destruction of a peoples is immoral and un-
    conscionable.

  Again, I question the use of the term "genocide". It certainly applies to 
  The Holocaust, because it's sole intent was the destruction of humans the
  Nazis believed were inferior (sub-human, really). I don't believe the same
  principle was underlying the near-eradication of Indians in the Americas.
  Like I said, the colonization of the Americas began as a quest for power
  and resources between European countries, not as an exercise in killing 
  the natives for the purpose of killing them. That happened most of the time,
  but it was not *the* reason.

k > Additionally, the poster claimed that America prospered far greater than
    Europe because it was the pioneer in industrial development.  This is not
    true.

  Agreed. The Industrial Revolution isn't a definite thing, but it started in
  Britain and Europe when the US was still very agrarian and only a few years
  old. 

k > Most if not all of the industrial advancement in America was on the coat-
    tails of British and German science and technology.  

  I wouldn't go quite that far. Americans created a vast array of processes and
  products, for example, Eli Whitney's invention of standardised parts and even
  Henry Ford's use of the production line. It's true that all inventions have
  previous inventions and ideas from which they're derived, but the US took
  these European ideas and enacted them on a tremendous scale, so large that it
  becomes difficult to determine if the idea is merely a change of scale or is
  truly an innovation. As it was, by WWI, the US was easily the equal (and in
  many cases surpassed) the entirety of European industrial output.

k > What did allow America to prosper was the lack of native wars America had 
    to fight.

  Actually, the 1800s were the most peaceful period in European history. Com-
  pared to the previous centuries, and the 20th century, Europe was quite sta-
  ble and prosperous.

k > America never had to rebuild what was destroyed in war once the Industrial
    Revolution hit.  The Civil War ended before the I.R. had a chance to real-
    ly kick in.

  The US Civil War certainly jump-started the IR in the US. Even at the begin-
  ning of the Civil War, the entire "GNP" of the Confederacy was only 1/4th
  of the economic output of New York *alone*. The IR was well on its way when
  the Civil War kicked it into warp speed, so to speak.

k > America prospered for the same reason a life insurance policy pays well--
    uninterrupted, steady growth.

  It helped to have two huge oceans and two peaceful and impotent neighbors
  too. Of course, Europe "sloughed off" its "huddled masses" and "wretched 
  refuse" to the US at this time (late 1800s and early 1900s) and that help-
  ed drive the American economy of that period and for decades afterward.
  We took in their "undesirables" and they built a great deal of the US.

k > Europe had to repair the damages of a number of post-industrial wars; wars
    in which the United States saw only one local battle--Pearl Harbor.

  Wars in which they were the instigators and principle actors. It was a hard
  and painful lesson for them, to be sure.

k > America has prospered til now because it did not suffer.  

  It's still prospering. If you hadn't checked lately, Japan and Germany are
  no better off than the US economy-wise. Japan's "bubble" economy has burst,
  their population growth rate is abysmally low, and Germany is preoccupied
  with building it's eastern half up to 1990s-21st century standards. There's
  a recent book called "America's Third Century" (I think) that makes the
  claim that the US dominance of the world economy will continue into the 21st
  century. The US still has a lot of things going for it.

k > Christian morality has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found
    difficult, and not tried (that is a paraphrase of a quote to whom I am
    uncertain to attribute).

  The only Christian who could really follow its edicts died 2000 years ago.
  There's lots of good ideas in Christianity (even those ol' 10 Commandmants
  are a pretty damned good set of rules) but they have been swamped from time
  to time (most of the time, actually) by the "frailty" and "imperfection" of
  ordinary humans. I don't have much faith (ha) that organized religion can
  "save" us from ourselves. 

  An analogy to your paraphrase might be the following: Why use pebbles to 
  count (tried and found difficult) when we've got nifty calculators to do 
  that tedious task? Basically, how long do you keep at it before you trash 
  it and try something else?

--
Gary Strand                      Opinions stated herein are mine alone and are
strandwg@ncar.ucar.edu            not representative of NCAR, UCAR, or the NSF
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory