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Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

monbiot.com

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Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#31

Post by breck »

It humors me when people speak so confidently about events that happened 400 years ago, and yet if you asked them to explain in detail the events of their own life a year ago would have trouble remembering.

I went to an exhibit once with real photographs from a native indian population taken in the late 1800's. The photos showed a population that looked, quite frankly, very savage and violent. These people didn't look like Pocahontus or the friendly blue creatures of Avatar.

I'm not going to state an opinion either way about the early colonization of America because frankly I have no clue about it and don't really care.

However, I do have an opinion that raw life is a brutal thing. Always has and probably always will be. It was particularly brutal back then, for both the Native Americans and the Europeans. I'd hate to have to live in either time period. The depictions we see in movies are far, far removed from reality.

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#32

Post by jafl5272 »

He only has one book as the reference for all the “history,” which makes me doubt most of it. Certainly, the claim that everybody (except Aztecs and Incas) was “peacable” (sic) is nonsense. The Apache tribes often raided each other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_indians), and the legendary Apache fighting skills were certainly not a result of living peacefully for centuries before the Europeans arrived.

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#33

Post by baxident »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

I made it about halfway this through before bailing. Yet another "western civilization is so bad" articles. Ho hum. The problem here is, as mattmaroon put it, if you buy into this logic we'd all still be chasing down antelopes on the savannah. At some point some civilizations, for whatever reason, start developing things like private property, the wheel, common law, reading, the printing press, etc. It's become fashi…

If Europeans had already developed the idea of private property, then why did we find it necessary to take the land of these ingenious populations?

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#34

Post by jobu »

cynicalkane wrote: post #29
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

I made it about halfway this through before bailing. Yet another "western civilization is so bad" articles. Ho hum. The problem here is, as mattmaroon put it, if you buy into this logic we'd all still be chasing down antelopes on the savannah. At some point some civilizations, for whatever reason, start developing things like private property, the wheel, common law, reading, the printing press, etc. It's become fashi…

Would you be OK with that if the Cebulons wiped out 90% of the human population? Because that's at least the scale of the genocide we're talking about.

You're missing the point. It's about survival, not feelings. 10% survival is better than extinction.

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#35

Post by jbooth »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

I made it about halfway this through before bailing. Yet another "western civilization is so bad" articles. Ho hum. The problem here is, as mattmaroon put it, if you buy into this logic we'd all still be chasing down antelopes on the savannah. At some point some civilizations, for whatever reason, start developing things like private property, the wheel, common law, reading, the printing press, etc. It's become fashi…

Maybe you should have read the rest of it. He's not advocating some wishy washy point of view how, because of our technology and culture, we're oppressing some other culture and creating an anglosphere by giving them pennicillin and the internet, blah blah..

He's talking about genocide. Not accidental genocide, "bring me back 100 scalps" genocide. This isn't in the realm of "theoretical cultural conquest".

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#36

Post by pradocchia »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

I made it about halfway this through before bailing. Yet another "western civilization is so bad" articles. Ho hum. The problem here is, as mattmaroon put it, if you buy into this logic we'd all still be chasing down antelopes on the savannah. At some point some civilizations, for whatever reason, start developing things like private property, the wheel, common law, reading, the printing press, etc. It's become fashi…

Blah. The colonies had a problem w/ their indentured servants going native. Presumably, Indian ways were more appealing than whatever colonial society had to offer. Thus the early American emphasis on freedom and liberty to counteract the drain.

I imagine a real Pandora would have a similar effect on society today, were transportation available.

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#37

Post by cynicalkane »

jobu wrote: post #34
cynicalkane wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be OK with that if the Cebulons wiped out 90% of the human population? Because that's at least the scale of the genocide we're talking about.

You're missing the point. It's about survival, not feelings. 10% survival is better than extinction.

I'm objecting to the bizarrely flippant tone of the post.

"You can say goodbye to a lot of what people think of when they talk about human culture"? More like "You can say goodbye to a lot of humans". But that's nothing to worry about when the remaining humans will be part of a 'better culture', right?

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#38

Post by IsaacSchlueter »

This article, and many of the comments here, hint at a deeper and more interesting phenomenon: the need to have things be either all good or all bad. That is, either (A) western civilization is good, and the things it has done were good, and the things it values are good values, etc., or (B) it's bad, and the things it has done were bad, and the things it values are bad values, etc.

Once this dichotomy is accepted, any evidence of goodness is proof of A, and any evidence of badness is proof of B. If A is accepted, then nothing can be bad, and if B is accepted, then nothing can be good. You get one guy saying "Medicine good!" and another saying "Slavery bad!" and they shout at each other forever.

In fact, A and B are both all-or-nothing cognitive distortions.

It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people.

Losing doesn't make someone good, and neither does winning.

Having nice things today doesn't mean that genocide 400 years ago was a good idea.

Being good doesn't mean we came from good people or entirely good traditions. Neither does being bad.

Having some good traits doesn't mean we have nothing left to learn, or that we can't get better. In fact, good people can even learn things from bad people, or good cultures can learn things from bad cultures. Even if modern western culture is, on the net, much better for humans than aboriginal American culture, we can still probably learn a lot from it.

There's a lot of richness between these blacks and whites. Perfection is not required for goodness.

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#39

Post by jcl »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #23
bokonist wrote: post #3

Question to HN readers who are sympathetic with this article: If you could wave a magic wand and "undo" all that was done, would you do so? So imagine all those who perished in the 1500's would be revived from the dead and restored to their ancestral lands, all those living in the Americas now would be sent back to England, Ireland, China, etc, with a one way ticket and $10K in cash to start a new life. Would you wav…

It would have almost no effect. Unless the Americas were completely isolated from Eurasia, everyone would have died anyway. The Americas were not conquered by force of arms, but by disease. A common pattern: send an expedition, which discovers cities, towns and gardens. Send another expedition years later: find nothing. I highly recommend the book 1491, which is a great historical account. There was absolutely nothin…

Why didn't it work symmetrically? Shouldn't the diseases going the other way have wiped out Europe? The only major disease I can recall coming from the Americas was syphilis.

Re: Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

#40

Post by cssteerpike »

cynicalkane wrote: post #29
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

I made it about halfway this through before bailing. Yet another "western civilization is so bad" articles. Ho hum. The problem here is, as mattmaroon put it, if you buy into this logic we'd all still be chasing down antelopes on the savannah. At some point some civilizations, for whatever reason, start developing things like private property, the wheel, common law, reading, the printing press, etc. It's become fashi…

Would you be OK with that if the Cebulons wiped out 90% of the human population? Because that's at least the scale of the genocide we're talking about.

Doesn't this misconstrue DanielBMarkham's argument, though? There's no attempt to justify the act of genocide, merely to point out that Monbiot's response to it ignores substantive differences between the relative merits of Western culture versus Native American culture, and what's more, does so willfully in service of a particular political agenda.
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