From: gary@colossus.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 18:15:42 GMT

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

k > Genocide:  The systematic killing of a whole people or nation.

  Agreed, but can you see that what the Nazis did to the Jews and what the Eur-
  opeans did to the American natives are two different things?

k > The American Indian is dead. There are none. There are reservations, where
    decendents of the American Indian live, but Anglo-Americans (with a little
    help from their Portuguese and Spanish predecessors) have killed the Amer-
    ican Indian.

  I disagree. There are plenty of remnants of the various Indian cultures, a
  good many nearly completely intact. Go to New Mexico or Arizona sometime.

  Do you believe that any change from the Indian cultures of pre-1492 is the
  same as the extinction of those cultures? If this so, then all cultures of
  that same time period are now dead. The cultures of the peoples around the
  world have changed a great deal in the last 5 centuries. I don't consider
  British culture or French culture or Chinese culture to be dead, despite the
  changes they've undergone, sometimes much more rapidly than the American
  Indian culture was changed.

k > That more people can now claim to possess American Indian blood than at
    any other time in history is irrelevant. I possess 1/4 Italian blood, but
    I am no more Italian than I am Polish (of which I possess no ancestral 
    ties).

  That's certainly not the argument of the Indians. They've tried to maintain
  their identity exactly via their heritage and their ancestry, and it's near-
  ly as important to them that a person is 100% Indian as opposed to (say) 25%.
  It *is* relevant. BTW, no-one is "pure" anything anymore.

k > When a culture is destroyed, that is genocide.  

  A culture can die (or, more exactly, change into something else) but the
  people live on. You're confusing the literal killing of human beings with
  the change of a culture over time.

k > I find it abhorrent that people are able to claim the American Indian kil-
    lings was not genocide.

  It's a different kind of genocide than that perpetrated by the Nazis, and I
  question whether or not these acts, generally isolated in time and space, 
  can be considered to be genocide. Taken to an extreme, is the death of one
  single individual a "micro-genocide"? There does have to be some concentra-
  tion of times and places of the occurrence of the killings, and the number
  of deaths has to be some large number. However, all these conditions are
  necessary, but not sufficient, to declare the deaths of lots of people as
  a "genocide".

k > Better dead than red, and the only good injun is a dead injun was the rule,
    not the exception, in early white America.

  That's debatable. If we're talking 1500s-1600s, I disagree.

  I'm beginning to think that you're feeling guilty or repentant for something
  that happened long before you were born, and perhaps even before any of your
  ancestors set foot in this country.

k > Lastly, I never claimed to equate Christianity with organized religion. 
    As did Christ, I abhor organized religion as a perversion.

  "Christianity" is usually taken to mean the union of the Roman Catholic, 
  Protestant, and Orthodox faiths. It doesn't usually mean the personal rela-
  tionship with Jesus Christ that many Protestant faiths profess. Of course,
  people who have this sort of relationship tend to group together, so there
  is a *de facto* organized religion arising from them.

--
Gary Strand                      Opinions stated herein are mine alone and are
strandwg@ncar.ucar.edu            not representative of NCAR, UCAR, or the NSF
Xref: sparky talk.politics.theory:5614 talk.politics.misc:66973