From: nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu (Nathan Engle)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.president.clinton
Subject: Re: Columbus vs Indians (was Re: PC lives)
Date: 28 Dec 92 18:32:50 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Psych Department, Indiana University

libwca@emory.edu (Bill Anderson) writes:
>briand@anasazi.com (Brian Douglass) writes:
>: Yeah sure, and while we're at it, lets add on Cooke and what he did to the
>: Hawaiians.  He's a white male and new exactly what pox, VD and other
>: wonderful diseases his men had would do to the natives, thereby clearing the 
>: way for Hyatt and Hilton to eventually steal their land and sell it to the
>: Japanese. 8-;
>: 
>: (Just for those that don't get sarcasm, I'm agreeing with Nathan.  It's a
>: pretty cowardly thing to lay the blame on a single man when two cultures 
>: clash and one is decimated out of sheer ignorance.)

>It wasn't just ignorance; the Spanish (and the English, for that
>matter) killed quite a few Indians on purpose, and enslaved many
>more, and in fact, smallpox was often used as a weapon.

    Ironically enough, in McNeill's _Plagues_and_Peoples_ McNeill 
speculates that one of the major motivations for the enslavement of 
Indians and the later influx of African slaves may have been that the 
collapse of native populations left the Spanish conquistadors in a
manpower crunch. Thus, in at least one respect, smallpox was very much 
a double-edged weapon for Europeans in the New World.

>  The extent
>of the deliberate massacres has been exagerated, but the fact
>remains that the Spanish conquest of Central and South America was
>extremely brutal.

    This is true, but conquest has a long-standing historical tradition 
of brutality ever since Sargon's conquest of Mesopotamia around 2300 BC. 
If the Old Testament is to be believed, then the conquest of Palestine by 
the Hebrews was also extremely brutal. How many Canaanites are left to 
stage mock trials of Moses?

>And yes, many of the native inhabitants were just as brutal; why
>that is often seen as an excuse for the Europeans is beyond me.

    I'm not convinced that this can be a simple matter of assigning blame 
or making excuses. Passing judgement on historical figures is bound to go 
on for as long as there are people studying history, but the subject will 
always boil down to this: there isn't a single square foot of occupied land 
anywhere on this planet that hasn't been conquered or changed hands in one 
way or another during the past 4,000 years. Each new empire is built on 
the foundations of those which came before it. 

    I would certainly agree with you if you want to make the point that 
Europeans have been brutal and  efficient conquerors, but I'm not prepared 
on that basis to return everything we have to the previous occupants who 
were brutal and efficient conquerors in their own time. Once you open that 
can of worms you're not going to reach an end until you run out of recorded 
history from which conquerors and their victims can be identified.

--
Nathan Engle                        Software Juggler
Psychology Department               Indiana University
nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu      nengle@copper.ucs.indiana.edu
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.president.clinton