I don't think freedom can really be discussed coherently if we treat it as an absolute term. The word 'freedom' should always be proceeded by another word like 'from' or 'to'. Everyone wants to be free from something or free to do something, but beyond that there are few common denominators. Children want to be free to make their own decisions while some adults would rather be free from the responsibilities of adulthood & have most decisions made for them; though they are mutually exclusive, both of these are kinds of freedom.
I just returned from visiting my upper middle class aunt & uncle. I really didn't want to go because I knew that once I was there I wouldn't be free to eat what I wanted, sleep in to whatever time I wanted or even say what I wanted. But after just a day of eating expensive food, drinking organic coffee & sleeping in a quiet bedroom with a TV & a bed big enough for an adult, those freedoms no longer seemed so important to me.
Absolute freedom would be impossible because it would be full of contradictions. The best we can do is achieve the type of relative freedom we desire & accept whatever limits it implies.
I distinguish in the article between two kinds of freedom, following the main philosophical division between negative and positive freedoms, the freedom from coercion and the freedom to choose your identity and fulfill your authentic potential. Those correspond roughly to what I call external and internal freedoms.
We may not have absolute freedom in the sense of the ability to suspend the laws of nature and preclude any external influence on our decisions or on our formative years, but there's a kind of relative absolute freedom which I talk about in both articles, namely the sovereignty of tyrants. Their power is absolute compared to that of lesser mortals.
If the bed was big enough for an adult, how old does that make you, I wonder.
I wasn't talking about freedom to suspend nature's laws, but the fact that even natural forms of freedom can be mutually exclusive. A tyrant with unlimited power like the emperor in Star Wars must pay for that freedom with the burden of being responsible for an entire galaxy while never being able to trust or open up to another person; not even Vader. Palpatine actually sacrificed much of the freedom that the common person takes for granted in order to get his power. Now I suppose Palpy could always command one of his servants to treat him like a child & make all his decisions for him if that was what he wanted. But in that case there would always be the knowledge that he wouldn't really have to do what his 'guardian' told him to do. A real child can't openly rebel against his parents & have his own way all the time, but a tyrant with absolute power could just have his faux mommy sent to the dungeon if she gets too strict. It would be similar to the relationship between a dominatrix & her client: the dom seems to be in charge outwardly, but it's really her client who ultimately calls the shots. A tyrant could experience a simulation of the freedom from responsibility that children (mostly fail to) enjoy, but it wouldn't be the real thing.
I'm 37, but only 5'10. My roommate is 6'1. We have one queen mattress & one child's bed. So unless I want to share with him, I have to sleep in this bed that was designed for a 10 year old. I would hate to have to live like a child, but barely a day goes by when I don't long to have the body I did at 10. Not only would I fit in my bed, I wouldn't need to shave every morning. If I knew what a nuisance that would be, I probably would have had my testicles removed & just skipped puberty.
That's an interesting question, comparing the freedom of children with that of tyrants. Children are carefree but they're sheltered by their parents. Tyrants can act on their whims but they're also trapped in several ways, by their disconnection from reality, by the sycophants that likewise shelter them, by their stress, depression, or loneliness.
Real freedom is paradoxical and rare. I think we're at our freest when we're absorbed in a meta-perspective, when we fret over our choices and worry they're all pointless so we don't know which way to turn. When we face the existential conundrum, we're forced to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. That act of formative self-creation distinguishes us as individuals and even if the act has various causes, there's no sensible explanation of how that choice is made, apart from positing nonrational trust in some ultimate goal.
'Stacie Martin states that the United States has not been legally admonished by the international community for genocidal acts against its indigenous population, but many historians and academics describe events such as the Mystic massacre, The Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre and the Mendocino War as genocidal in nature. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states that US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination. The letters of British commander Jeffery Amherst indicated genocidal intent when he authorized the deliberate use of disease-infected blankets as a biological weapon against indigenous populations during the 1763 Pontiac's Rebellion, saying, "You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble Race", and instructing his subordinates, "I need only Add, I Wish to Hear of no prisoners should any of the villains be met with arms." When smallpox swept the northern plains of the U.S. in 1837, the U.S. Secretary of War Lewis Cass ordered that no Mandan (along with the Arikara, the Cree, and the Blackfeet) be given smallpox vaccinations, which were provided to other tribes in other areas.'
The chain of events behind the one supposedly authentic case of deliberate smallpox contamination began in 1757 at the siege of Fort William Henry (in present-day upstate New York), when Indians allied with the French ignored the terms of a surrender worked out between the British and the French, broke into the garrison hospital and killed and scalped a number of patients, some of them suffering from smallpox. The blankets and clothing the Indians looted from the patients in the hospital and corpses in the cemetery, carried back to their villages, reportedly touched off a smallpox epidemic.
The French lost the war and left their Indian allies holding the bag, and in 1763 Chief Pontiac and his colleagues sparked an uprising against English settlers in the Great Lakes region that had Lord Jeffery Amherst and the British forces close to despair. The Indians destroyed several of the smaller British forts, but Fort Pitt (present-day Pittsburgh, Pa.) held out under the command of Captain Simeon Ecuyer, a 22-year veteran Swiss mercenary in the British service. Smallpox had broken out among the British garrison, and during a parley on June 24, 1763, Ecuyer gave besieging Lenape warriors several items taken from smallpox patients. 'We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital" Captain William Trent of the garrison militia wrote in his journal. “I hope it will have the desired effect.
Smallpox did break out among the Indian tribes whose warriors were besieging the fort. 19th-century historian Francis Parkman estimated that 60 to 80 Indians in the Ohio Valley died in a localized epidemic. But no one is sure whether the smallpox was carried by infected blankets or by the clothing Indian warriors had stolen from the estimated 2,000 outlying settlers they had killed or abducted.
"Mostly about population estimates of Pre-Columbian North America, and how the rate of decline does not imply anything commonly considered a "genocide", and a rant at the end about when there are undeniable objective outcomes, the traditional heuristics of expertise vanish." https://www.bitchute.com/video/UIkud2agq1A/
‘The genocide of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas represents one of the greatest and most extensive human catastrophes in history. The pace and magnitude of the destruction varied from region to region over the years, but it can safely be concluded that, in the two-and-a-half centuries following Christopher Columbus’ ‘‘discovery’’ of the Americas in 1492, probably 95% of the pre-Columbian population was wiped out—by disease as well as by deliberate policy on the part of the Spanish, the French, the English, and, ultimately, the American-born heirs of those colonizing nations.
‘The process of colonization was often characterized by violent confrontation, deliberate massacre, wholesale annihilation, and, in several instances, genocide. Many indigenous peoples in North America, for instance, were completely, or almost completely, wiped out, including the Yuki of California and the Beothuk of Newfoundland…colonial expansion in North America saw attempts at clearing the land of indigenous populations; of forcibly assimilating these populations for racial, religious, or ethnic reasons; and of intimidating them so that they would seek to retreat before the advance of the colonizers, enabling Western-style economic development to take place.
‘Overall, we are looking at a horrific case (or, rather, series of cases) of mass human destruction, in which millions of people lost their lives. And the destruction did not stop once most of the people had died or been killed; in the United States, policies of population removal, dispossession of lands, forced assimilation, and confinement to ‘‘reservations’’ meant that, in a vast number of cases, even the survivors were denied the opportunity to retain their identity as distinct peoples.’
So that's where you get your news from (far-right BitChute). Yuck.
It would be more manly in your circles for you to own up to the attempted exterminations, on the conviction that the Native Americans were inherently inferior to the Europeans. Isn't that what Hitler would have said? So why this womanish attempt to cover up the massacres, forced assimilation, forced sterilization, cultural destruction, and dispossession of lands? Don't be such a pussy.
"Attempted exterminations." Like other tribes have done since time immemorial. Any other race would've actually slaughtered them, had they the capability. You want proper civilization at this stage in the game, you'll need whites.
Some of the tribes were entirely or almost completely wiped out, as I quoted: "the Yuki of California and the Beothuk of Newfoundland." And yes, the intention and the actions matter, even if complete success isn't achieved. The Nazis didn't succeed in exterminating all Jews, but they're still reviled for the attempt and for the actions they took towards that end.
If whites are so great, why didn't they succeed in exterminating the lesser, indigenous peoples? Why are you rushing to defend the human rights of those "lesser" peoples, as though they didn't deserve to be wiped out to make room for the manifest destiny of the superior, white race? You have your anonymity.
Evidently you think the indigenous Americans got a raw deal and deserved to live (since you're implying that genocide is bad), in which case what's the point of pretending we can speak of qualitative differences between "races" or peoples? I'd agree that cultures have different strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately all cultures are preposterous and absurd, so the differences become subjective.
You can say the Europeans brought higher civilization, but if it turns out that that civilization destroys the ecosystems and is thus perfectly self-destructive, wouldn't the Native Americans have the last laugh? Wouldn't their emphasis on being one with nature have been wiser than European egoism, individualism, and delusional Christianity?
The fact that lots of other societies engage in mass slaughter is neither here nor there. You’re playing Whataboutism.
To Mr. Crazy Grapefruit, you highly value the civilized culture of the United States, which at least for the most part did not follow the example of the Spanish conquistadors who went around enslaving whole indigenous peoples and cutting off people's limbs. Well, what did the United States do instead? Here is the analysis of a 19th century eye-witness, Alexis de Tocqueville, a guy who was actually very actively in favor of colonization by the U.S. and even defended massacres of indigenous civilians in colonies provided they were small massacres aimed at crushing the will of anti-imperial rebels, but he was horrified by what he saw the U.S. doing to the indigenous peoples of North America. De Tocqueville personally saw most of what he describes of the U.S. genocide of indigenous groups firsthand while travelling extensively through the American frontier, he supplemented this knowledge by reading the official Federal documents of the time, which he cites. Its worth reading what he had to say about what he saw going on around him. The picture he presents is one of genocide carried out intentionally by the government in the most hands-off manner possible, allowing individual citizens and compelling rival tribes to do the dirty work, in order to save money and avoid international criticism. All quotes are from Democracy in America, Volume I. These passages are pretty short, and they are as concise as they are damning and impossible to disprove. If you read this and still are thinking of trying to argue that technically this isn't genocide even if it just as intentionally results in the same scale of misery, death and annihilation of nations, then I am curious what your thoughts are about the passage where de Tocqueville mentions "a happy distinction which had escaped the casuists of former times"?
"The Spaniards pursued the Indians with bloodhounds, like wild beasts; they sacked the New World with no more temper or compassion than a city taken by storm; but destruction must cease, and frenzy be stayed; the remnant of the Indian population which had escaped the massacre mixed with its conquerors, and adopted in the end their religion and their manners. The conduct of the Americans of the United States towards the aborigines is characterized, on the other hand, by a singular attachment to the formalities of law. Provided that the Indians retain their barbarous condition, the Americans take no part in their affairs; they treat them as independent nations, and do not possess themselves of their hunting grounds without a treaty of purchase; and if an Indian nation happens to be so encroached upon as to be unable to subsist upon its territory, they afford it brotherly assistance in transporting it to a grave sufficiently remote from the land of its fathers.
"The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they even succeed in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity; tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity."
"See, amongst other documents, the report made by Mr. Bell in the name of the Committee on Indian Affairs, February 24, 1830, in which is most logically established and most learnedly proved, that "the fundamental principle that the Indians had no right by virtue of their ancient possession either of will or sovereignty, has never been abandoned either expressly or by implication." In perusing this report, which is evidently drawn up by an experienced hand, one is astonished at the facility with which the author gets rid of all arguments founded upon reason and natural right, which he designates as abstract and theoretical principles. The more I contemplate the difference between civilized and uncivilized man with regard to the principles of justice, the more I observe that the former contests the justice of those rights which the latter simply violates."
De Tocqueville describes the general process as follows:
"Bold adventurers soon penetrate into the country the Indians have deserted, and when they have advanced about fifteen or twenty leagues from the extreme frontiers of the whites, they begin to build habitations for civilized beings in the midst of the wilderness. This is done without difficulty, as the territory of a hunting-nation is ill-defined; it is the common property of the tribe, and belongs to no one in particular, so that individual interests are not concerned in the protection of any part of it."
"A few European families, settled in different situations at a considerable distance from each other, soon drive away the wild animals which remain between their places of abode. The Indians, who had previously lived in a sort of abundance, then find it difficult to subsist, and still more difficult to procure the articles of barter which they stand in need of."
"To drive away their game is to deprive them of the means of existence, as effectually as if the fields of our agriculturists were stricken with barrenness; and they are reduced, like famished wolves, to prowl through the forsaken woods in quest of prey. Their instinctive love of their country attaches them to the soil which gave them birth, *f even after it has ceased to yield anything but misery and death. At length they are compelled to acquiesce, and to depart: they follow the traces of the elk, the buffalo, and the beaver, and are guided by these wild animals in the choice of their future country. Properly speaking, therefore, it is not the Europeans who drive away the native inhabitants of America; it is famine which compels them to recede; a happy distinction which had escaped the casuists of former times, and for which we are indebted to modern discovery!"
"It is impossible to conceive the extent of the sufferings which attend these forced emigrations. They are undertaken by a people already exhausted and reduced; and the countries to which the newcomers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes which receive them with jealous hostility. Hunger is in the rear; war awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides. In the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each individual endeavors to procure the means of supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the immensity of the desert like an outcast in civilized society. The social tie, which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved; they have lost their country, and their people soon desert them: their very families are obliterated; the names they bore in common are forgotten, their language perishes, and all traces of their origin disappear. Their nation has ceased to exist, except in the recollection of the antiquaries of America and a few of the learned of Europe."
"I should be sorry to have my reader suppose that I am coloring the picture too highly; I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery which I have been describing; and I was the witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray."
"The ejectment of the Indians very often takes place at the present day, in a regular, and, as it were, a legal manner. When the European population begins to approach the limit of the desert inhabited by a savage tribe, the government of the United States usually dispatches envoys to them, who assemble the Indians in a large plain, and having first eaten and drunk with them, accost them in the following manner: "What have you to do in the land of your fathers? Before long, you must dig up their bones in order to live. In what respect is the country you inhabit better than another? Are there no woods, marshes, or prairies, except where you dwell? And can you live nowhere but under your own sun? Beyond those mountains which you see at the horizon, beyond the lake which bounds your territory on the west, there lie vast countries where beasts of chase are found in great abundance; sell your lands to us, and go to live happily in those solitudes." After holding this language, they spread before the eyes of the Indians firearms, woollen garments, kegs of brandy, glass necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, earrings, and looking-glasses. If, when they have beheld all these riches, they still hesitate, it is insinuated that they have not the means of refusing their required consent, and that the government itself will not long have the power of protecting them in their rights. What are they to do? Half convinced, and half compelled, they go to inhabit new deserts, where the importunate whites will not let them remain ten years in tranquillity. In this manner do the Americans obtain, at a very low price, whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of Europe could not purchase."
Footnote: "See, in the Legislative Documents of Congress (Doc. 117), the narrative of what takes place on these occasions. This curious passage is from the above-mentioned report, made to Congress by Messrs. Clarke and Cass in February, 1829. Mr. Cass is now the Secretary of War."
""The Indians," says the report, "reach the treaty-ground poor and almost naked. Large quantities of goods are taken there by the traders, and are seen and examined by the Indians. The women and children become importunate to have their wants supplied, and their influence is soon exerted to induce a sale."
According to de Tocqueville, never was an intentional genocide carried out in a more astonishingly civilized way than by the U.S. This element of civilization made the genocide more efficient and successful, not less so (which shouldn't surprise anyone). What de Tocqueville describes is a nearly perfectly civilized intentional method of genocide by means of various forms of indirect action including driving people to starvation and causing the victims to fight each other for scraps while the genocidal power watches from a short distance and carefully applies the required pressure and incentives to keep up the starving and the fighting until the desired proportion of a targeted group are dead, allows white private citizens to steal the land of anyone who manages to avoid the genocide for a while, and using state violence to enforce the genocide only when deemed absolutely necessary. The civilized element in this should be the greatest cause of horror, not a cause for admiration. At least if the genocide were less civilized it would be easier to alert people to what was happening and turn world popular opinion against it. Nearly the whole world admitted the Holocaust occurred shortly after World War II, but the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the U.S. was done so competently and cleverly that even though some especially intelligent people like de Tocqueville saw it for what it was at the time, it has taken much longer for large numbers of people outside North America to figure out that a genocide was what occurred. Now it has already happened and while a lot can be done, the genocide has long since accomplished the dramatic relative population, land and power shift which was its goal.
Alia, thanks for posting those passages. I suspect the response would be that what Tocqueville was describing societal competition which resulted in genocide or near-genocide by effect, but not necessarily by intention. The Europeans set up an advanced society that drove away and ruined the natives just as “progressive” humans in general have done for many wild animal species. Did humans intend to extinguish all the animal species we’ve killed just by extending our “civilized” borders and taking over their home territories? An apologist could say the same about competition between the European and the Native Americans’ ways of life. The one proved stronger or more dominant than the other.
The question is whether the Europeans and colonists intended indirectly to end the native way of life or whether the former thought so little of the latter that they didn’t care what happened to them, so that the natives’ extinction would be the inevitable result of the American policies, through famine, cultural assimilation, and war between the natives. Of course the Christians deemed themselves superior, so they would have thought they were doing the natives a favour by terminating their hunter-gatherer culture.
Tocqueville quotes a federal document as saying, “the fundamental principle that the Indians had no right by virtue of their ancient possession either of will or sovereignty, has never been abandoned either expressly or by implication.” But I wonder whether there’s hard evidence the government intended to use these techniques to efficiently exterminate the natives. Clearly, the colonists didn’t respect the natives or credit them with having rights to the land. The colonists were going to take over the continent no matter what. They did so relatively peacefully, as Tocqueville says. Genocide would be so obvious a result of the expansionist nature of the colonist’s culture that it’s hard to see how the result wouldn’t have been intended or at least implicitly understood as inevitable. But it strikes me as comparable to the asymmetry between expansionist civilization in general and the less flexible animal ways of life.
Thank you for your response Benjamin, part of de Tocqueville's response to the objections you raise is contained in his comparison of U.S. expansion to colonization of the Americas by the French (elsewhere in the same book). I will share a few telling passages and then give my comments.
"In Europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire of riches, and an excessive love of independence, as propensities very formidable to society. Yet these are the very elements which ensure a long and peaceful duration to the republics of America. Without these unquiet passions the population would collect in certain spots, and would soon be subject to wants like those of the Old World, which it is difficult to satisfy; for such is the present good fortune of the New World, that the vices of its inhabitants are scarcely less favorable to society than their virtues. These circumstances exercise a great influence on the estimation in which human actions are held in the two hemispheres. The Americans frequently term what we should call cupidity a laudable industry; and they blame as faint-heartedness what we consider to be the virtue of moderate desires."
"In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachments which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues. The French Canadians, who have faithfully preserved the traditions of their pristine manners, are already embarrassed for room upon their small territory; and this little community, which has so recently begun to exist, will shortly be a prey to the calamities incident to old nations. In Canada, the most enlightened, patriotic, and humane inhabitants make extraordinary efforts to render the people dissatisfied with those simple enjoyments which still content it. There, the seductions of wealth are vaunted with as much zeal as the charms of an honest but limited income in the Old World, and more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere. If we listen to their eulogies, we shall hear that nothing is more praiseworthy than to exchange the pure and homely pleasures which even the poor man tastes in his own country for the dull delights of prosperity under a foreign sky; to leave the patrimonial hearth and the turf beneath which his forefathers sleep; in short, to abandon the living and the dead in quest of fortune."
"At the present time America presents a field for human effort far more extensive than any sum of labor which can be applied to work it. In America too much knowledge cannot be diffused; for all knowledge, whilst it may serve him who possesses it, turns also to the advantage of those who are without it. New wants are not to be feared, since they can be satisfied without difficulty; the growth of human passions need not be dreaded, since all passions may find an easy and a legitimate object; nor can men be put in possession of too much freedom, since they are scarcely ever tempted to misuse their liberties."
"M. de Senonville, the governor of Canada, wrote thus to Louis XIV in 1685: "It has long been believed that in order to civilize the savages we ought to draw them nearer to us. But there is every reason to suppose we have been mistaken. Those which have been brought into contact with us have not become French, and the French who have lived among them are changed into savages, affecting to dress and live like them." ("History of New France," by Charlevoix, vol. ii., p. 345.) The Englishman, on the contrary, continuing obstinately attached to the customs and the most insignificant habits of his forefathers, has remained in the midst of the American solitudes just what he was in the bosom of European cities; he would not allow of any communication with savages whom he despised, and avoided with care the union of his race with theirs. Thus while the French exercised no salutary influence over the Indians, the English have always remained alien from them." ...
"I myself saw in Canada, where the intellectual difference between the two races [the French and English races] is less striking, that the English are the masters of commerce and manufacture in the Canadian country, that they spread on all sides, and confine the French within limits which scarcely suffice to contain them. In like manner, in Louisiana, almost all activity in commerce and manufacture centres in the hands of the Anglo-Americans."
"But the case of Texas is still more striking: the State of Texas is a part of Mexico, and lies upon the frontier between that country and the United States. In the course of the last few years the Anglo-Americans have penetrated into this province, which is still thinly peopled; they purchase land, they produce the commodities of the country, and supplant the original population. It may easily be foreseen that if Mexico takes no steps to check this change, the province of Texas will very shortly cease to belong to that government."
While de Tocqueville clearly does not recommend the French model of colonization of North America in the context of English/British and Anglo-American competition, he shows just as clearly that there was a very formidable and extremely civilized alternative model of expansionist civilization, the French model, which in the absence of the competition of the very singular model of English colonization would have been very successful in gradually colonizing North America. While he never focuses upon the question of the relative advantages of the French model of colonization of North America compared with the Spanish model, in the last passage quoted he strongly suggests the French were in his view better able to hold their own against the English and Anglo-Americans than the Spanish (for example in their loss of Florida to the U.S. and of Louisiana to France) and later the Mexicans (for example in their loss of Texas). The French may have been forced to accept British and Anglo-American governments over them, but they were able to defend their land, French law, language, significant political power and their basic rights, and retained large cultural enclaves mostly under their own control. What this means is that the relatively peaceful, non-genocidal French, who often married indigenous women with the consent and blessing of their parents, were formidable enough that they likely could have defended themselves and colonized North America if it were not for the existence of the competing English model. The French model may have been somewhat less rapidly expansive than the English, but it was still highly civilized and still exists on a large scale in Canada and to a lesser extent in Louisiana.
What this shows is that the genocide was not an inevitable result of expansionist civilization itself, but instead a result of the specific culture and mores of the English and Anglo-Americans, their fanatical opposition to marrying indigenous people, and the deliberate and continuous will of their peoples and policy of their governments over a long period of time. Take the English and Anglo-Americans out of the picture and replace them with the French, and expansionist civilization would have spread across North America much more slowly and densely, without genocide, or at least without genocide on anything remotely comparable to the scale of what occurred. That argument, at least, seems implicit in what de Tocqueville says. This is a convincing argument as near as I can tell. The Cherokee and other tribes of the East which adopted agriculture, writing, newspapers and modern technology of their own choice while still effectively independent and unconquered show another model of civilization which could have had the time to fully emerge in a more slowly expanding French North America. The experience of the Guarani in Paraguay and their integration with the Spanish to form a modern state show yet another model which actually did occur elsewhere in the Americas. The genocide which the English and Anglo-Americans carried out was by no means an inevitable result of the expansion of civilization. Even with all of the specific peculiarities of their brands of civilization, had the English and Anglo-Americans made the simple changes of being fully open to intermarriage with the indigenous peoples of North America and been open to hiring them on an equal basis, they would have opened up a path to full integration with them, and at the same time would have rapidly accelerated the spread of civilized norms, provided the children of these marriages eventually came to practice agriculture and modern industry. The English and Anglo-Americans were alone among the major colonizers of the Americas in not only generally refusing to consider intermarriage with indigenous peoples, but in consistently and zealously persecuting any couple who dared to try it. Given this background, it is very clear that the English and Anglo-American models of colonization were unusual in leaving no place for most indigenous people except to be exterminated or, perhaps, and only perhaps, converted into permanent hereditary second-class citizens incapable of safely attempting to own property or work many jobs, a condition which would be intolerable to submit to willingly for peoples who remembered total freedom and independence, who considered themselves sovereign, and who in any case generally looked upon the white lifestyle and society with disdain and viewed themselves as culturally superior. It is in this context that “genocide would be so obvious a result of the expansionist nature of the [English/Anglo-American] colonist’s culture that it’s hard to see how the result wouldn’t have been intended or at least implicitly understood as inevitable.” As I’ve shown though, there was nothing actually inevitable about the genocide. There were many other successful models of colonization, and even given the unique characteristics of the English and Anglo-Americans, intermarriage and fair play was a perfectly possible alternative to genocide for them which they rejected. To say that genocide was inevitable under these circumstances is just to say that genocide was inevitable once the English and Anglo-Americans had adopted unusually zealous customs against intermarriage and against human equality in terms of protection under the law, in terms of property, in terms of work, in terms of expectation of physical safety within white settlements, and in terms of sovereignty, because they preferred to just wipe out the indigenous peoples.
When you say “Of course the Christians deemed themselves superior, so they would have thought they were doing the natives a favour by terminating their hunter-gatherer culture” This applies to de Tocqueville, but not to those active or complicit in the genocide. De Tocqueville very much thought that the natives would be done a favor if they were civilized, and given that civilization was their best chance at any kind of survival at all, it is hard to argue with him, though the indigenous peoples of North America certainly could have civilized while retaining certain traditions and norms which were uncivilized in character such as an intense emphasis on proving worth in hunting and war, as well as many others which were fully compatible with a high degree of civilization but not with European culture. De Tocqueville’s whole horror was that the indigenous people were not permitted by the English and Anglo-Americans to civilize and indeed in many cases were already Christian, but no matter how strongly they tried to civilize and turn to agriculture and settled life, the whites just stole their agricultural land, outcompeted their farming products through superior experience, used mob violence and terror, and menaced them with tyrannical laws until finally they were forced to flee and return to hunter-gathering, driven only towards poverty, uncivilization, flight, fighting with other tribes, cultural collapse and death.
Genocide by the English and Anglo-Americans was inevitable because the English and Anglo-Americans wanted genocide. The English and Anglo-Americans wanted genocide because it seemed inevitable, so there was no additional harm in participating or in enforcing what was already inevitable. There seems to be a certain circularity to these arguments, at least if I have correctly understood what you are saying.
Thanks for that comprehensive assessment. I see your point about the lack of intermarriage or cultural integration in the English model of colonization.
I suppose what was inevitable wasn’t genocide in the literal sense (the termination of indigenous genetic lineages), but cultural “genocide,” the end of the native ways of life. What was inevitable was a clash between the native hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence, and Old World civilization once the latter discovered the former in the Americas. The Neolithic replaces the Paleolithic, as it were.
As to whether the natives deserved to be civilized or should have been thankful for the American “Neolithic revolution,” the ecological damage done by civilization seems to leave the question open in the long run.
Hmm I see your point about cultural "genocide." Indeed, I view human life as sacred by extension of the potential for expressing autonomy and artistic, spiritual and intellectual creativity which always exists in every human being (no matter how disappointing many of them may be in the present, or how limited and Pyrrhic our eventual triumphs all turn out to be). It is for this reason, as well as from a sense of empathy and of common purpose, structure and potential with other beings with the higher autonomy of personhood, that I regard genocide with horror. You have made me realize this seems to mean that I should regard cultural "genocide" with almost the same horror as literal genocide. To destroy the independence and uniqueness of mind of a person or of a people and reduce them to a dull conformity to a larger or more powerful group is to destroy something very close to the heart of their personhood. That said, cultures are always evolving, and possess a material substrate which is far more binding and restrictive than that which restrains and molds the mind of an individual. Cultures endlessly are born, change, develop and die to suit the needs and opinions of people. People endlessly are born, change, develop and die too, but there is a far more irrational and permanent cultural and intellectual loss to personhood itself and to all people when a person is killed. Perhaps when a culture is silenced or destroyed rather than simply evolving or merging freely, this causes a far greater loss which while less than the deaths of people, is nonetheless a serious enough attack on their personhood to deserve to be compared by analogy through use of the term cultural genocide.
It seems to me that this perspective will make sense to people who primarily values learning, the life of the mind and the life of the spirit, the human species and its development being a kind of library and public workshop of the mind and spirit which is in principle open to every searching person unless human beings or their memories and dreams are destroyed. I mean to say we are all the custodians of our library sections and workers in our workshops, temples and art studios, and that the books, tools and technics are within us. To kill a person is also to burn a library. In any case, thank you for making me see cultural "genocide" is more similar to literal genocide than I had seen before.
It does strike me that the massive effect of Eastern Hemisphere diseases and disruptive invasive species made the clash between indigenous hunter-gatherers and European civilization (or civilizations?) take place on a basis which had little to do with their respective strengths and weaknesses (it’s certainly true horses, guns and artillery, as well as the industrial revolution, among other European advantages, all sometimes also played decisive roles, but the advantages of the indigenous ways of life not to mention the defensive and initial population advantage had almost no opportunity to do so because of the extent of the ravages of disease, rapid ecological shifts, and the chaos they caused).
Likewise, considering that Neolithic civilization had already existed for thousands of years in Mesoamerica, South America, and also on a more limited (though still very large) scale in the U.S. Southwest Pueblo and Mississippi Valley Mississippian cultures and some other areas, it is curious that Neolithic civilization didn't penetrate far sooner and far more permanently and intensely than it did into the vast incredibly fertile regions of North America.
Perhaps these regions were so vast and so fertile that intense concentration of people upon land was rarely necessary or beneficial except for religious reasons, and was thus often seen by those without such religious traditions as merely causing corruption of the earth through concentration of sewage, disease transmission and trash accumulation which served no practical material advantage and resulted in a less worthy, less enjoyable and/or less healthy form of life. Whether this was the view of many Pre-Columbian North American indigenous hunter-gatherers or not, it seems like a pretty good argument as near as I can tell. I think only religious or philosophical factors could have outweighed these considerations in vast, fertile regions in the absence of a military threat from a very large and expansionist civilized power.
It is worth considering that the vast Mississippian Neolithic civilization likely ended around 1600 in large part due to the introduction of Eastern Hemisphere diseases and invasive species. Many indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Eastern U.S. were not descendants of this civilization, but an immense number were. It is difficult to disentangle the indigenous ways of life at the time from the already all-encompassing and almost world-destroying shock wave of the Columbian Exchange even before Europeans ever laid eyes on most of the Americas, which also means many of the hunter-gatherers had not been hunter-gatherers for all that long. The Europeans were conquering a post-apocalyptic landscape.
I think you are right that the ecological damage of civilization seems to leave the question of whether hunter-gatherer ways of life or civilization are superior open in the long run. An especially interesting question is whether civilization can reform itself to become less destructive, especially now that human survival seems to depend on it. It could be argued this would also amount to a kind of vindication of the coherence of the civilized project. On the other hand, it could be argued that this would be a case of civilization going against or sublimating its own instincts to adopt values previously primarily held by hunter-gatherers, transitioning towards a new hybrid of value systems. I'm not sure what the correct interpretation is. Perhaps the answer depends partly on how a sustainable civilization can be achieved, if indeed it can be.
You make a number of interesting points. The culture clash certainly didn't happen on an even playing field, because of the diseases, but the overall human historical trajectory has obviously been from hunting-gathering to agriculture and civilization. So the clash was inevitable.
I don't know enough about the indigenous American civilizations. I imagine their spread would have been affected by their population growth and by competition for the wealth of natural resources.
The question of how a sustainable civilization can be achieved is certainly a big one. Not sure a hybrid is possible, but we're all equally in the dark on this one.
Thanks again for your detailed and thoughtful comments.
I think you are right a clash between hunter-gathering and agriculture was inevitable. Still, the native way of life wasn't reducible to hunter-gathering or its cultural attributes, and agriculture existed on a large scale within North America, not to mention the more concentrated and technologically advanced agricultural populations farther south, so I think the end of the indigenous way of life and their politically independent development was not inevitable, and in some cases would have been very unlikely in the absence of disease and ecological disruption. If you would like to learn more about the indigenous American civilizations one book that I would recommend is Charles Mann's book 1491, as well as its sequel. These offer summaries and synthesis of recent research on the subject. Research continues to confirm the conclusions of these books and expand upon them.
Regarding a hybrid between civilization and hunter-gatherer values, one science fiction scenario on the hybrid side of the spectrum is that the internet, remote work, 3D printers, automated farming, raw materials extraction, manufacturing, distribution and services, fully automated and cheap synthetic meat and fish production, renewable energy and autonomous and remotely controlled electric vehicles, along with the ecological imperatives to consume far less physical resources, are pushing us towards a kind of high-tech post-civilization. I mean post-civilization in the sense of the feasibility of the total depopulation of cities and the practice of near-continual digital nomadism over vast distances by the majority, which renewable energy could eventually make sustainable or even reduce to insignificant cost and ecological impact. This wouldn’t be a return to the Paleolithic at all, but it would be a return to a greater focus on sustainability, an effort to live in “harmony” with natural processes which we fear and dare not provoke, living in small, tight-knit communities rather than cities, travelling around frequently over large distances often in order to commune for short periods with larger groups, and increasing reliance on contemporary technologies which, to draw from your work, have an animist quality to their interface, their structure and the ways we think and feel about them. Physical urban life might come to seem parochial, a pale imitation of the great virtual city, office and factory online, with the old urban zones converted into warehouses filled with constantly productive and self-repairing automated machines controlled from thousands of miles away, with only a few people required or wanted permanently on-site. It might turn out that few jobs would inherently exist in this economy, so many creative means of wealth redistribution would probably be needed to prop up education and consumerism in the developed world, while the developing world might have far more serious problems supporting itself.
You are right the question of how a sustainable civilization can be achieved is a very big one, and this science fiction scenario only shows how a hybrid between hunter-gatherer and civilized values might be possible. The thought-experiment leaves many big questions unaddressed about whether the "post-civilization" it describes would be capable of sustainabilty.
That is indeed an interesting hybrid scenario. It reminds me of Terence McKenna's idea of the Archaic Revival, although he couched the transition in psychedelic terms. Morris Berman's book, Wandering God, also comes to mind.
Normally, when I think of a post-scarcity economy, I think of the sci-fi take on posthumanism. But the way we're able to work more from our homes these days, the technological advances could indeed give us the freedom to survive on our own outside the big cities. Indeed, the Democrats in the US have a political reason to leave their urban zones, because of the Electoral College. If they moved to the rural areas in red states, the Republicans would be wiped out at the ballot box and would be forced to reform their party.
There was also a Star Trek episode (Voyager or Next Generation, I think), which featured an advanced, nomadic alien species whose members traveled alone in spaceships. Indeed, we're seeing hints of this in the tiny house and suped-up van movements. (Check them out on YouTube if you're not familiar with them).
I wrote something on post-scarcity economies that might interest you:
I don't think freedom can really be discussed coherently if we treat it as an absolute term. The word 'freedom' should always be proceeded by another word like 'from' or 'to'. Everyone wants to be free from something or free to do something, but beyond that there are few common denominators. Children want to be free to make their own decisions while some adults would rather be free from the responsibilities of adulthood & have most decisions made for them; though they are mutually exclusive, both of these are kinds of freedom.
ReplyDeleteI just returned from visiting my upper middle class aunt & uncle. I really didn't want to go because I knew that once I was there I wouldn't be free to eat what I wanted, sleep in to whatever time I wanted or even say what I wanted. But after just a day of eating expensive food, drinking organic coffee & sleeping in a quiet bedroom with a TV & a bed big enough for an adult, those freedoms no longer seemed so important to me.
Absolute freedom would be impossible because it would be full of contradictions. The best we can do is achieve the type of relative freedom we desire & accept whatever limits it implies.
I distinguish in the article between two kinds of freedom, following the main philosophical division between negative and positive freedoms, the freedom from coercion and the freedom to choose your identity and fulfill your authentic potential. Those correspond roughly to what I call external and internal freedoms.
DeleteWe may not have absolute freedom in the sense of the ability to suspend the laws of nature and preclude any external influence on our decisions or on our formative years, but there's a kind of relative absolute freedom which I talk about in both articles, namely the sovereignty of tyrants. Their power is absolute compared to that of lesser mortals.
If the bed was big enough for an adult, how old does that make you, I wonder.
I wasn't talking about freedom to suspend nature's laws, but the fact that even natural forms of freedom can be mutually exclusive. A tyrant with unlimited power like the emperor in Star Wars must pay for that freedom with the burden of being responsible for an entire galaxy while never being able to trust or open up to another person; not even Vader. Palpatine actually sacrificed much of the freedom that the common person takes for granted in order to get his power. Now I suppose Palpy could always command one of his servants to treat him like a child & make all his decisions for him if that was what he wanted. But in that case there would always be the knowledge that he wouldn't really have to do what his 'guardian' told him to do. A real child can't openly rebel against his parents & have his own way all the time, but a tyrant with absolute power could just have his faux mommy sent to the dungeon if she gets too strict. It would be similar to the relationship between a dominatrix & her client: the dom seems to be in charge outwardly, but it's really her client who ultimately calls the shots. A tyrant could experience a simulation of the freedom from responsibility that children (mostly fail to) enjoy, but it wouldn't be the real thing.
DeleteI'm 37, but only 5'10. My roommate is 6'1. We have one queen mattress & one child's bed. So unless I want to share with him, I have to sleep in this bed that was designed for a 10 year old. I would hate to have to live like a child, but barely a day goes by when I don't long to have the body I did at 10. Not only would I fit in my bed, I wouldn't need to shave every morning. If I knew what a nuisance that would be, I probably would have had my testicles removed & just skipped puberty.
That's an interesting question, comparing the freedom of children with that of tyrants. Children are carefree but they're sheltered by their parents. Tyrants can act on their whims but they're also trapped in several ways, by their disconnection from reality, by the sycophants that likewise shelter them, by their stress, depression, or loneliness.
DeleteReal freedom is paradoxical and rare. I think we're at our freest when we're absorbed in a meta-perspective, when we fret over our choices and worry they're all pointless so we don't know which way to turn. When we face the existential conundrum, we're forced to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. That act of formative self-creation distinguishes us as individuals and even if the act has various causes, there's no sensible explanation of how that choice is made, apart from positing nonrational trust in some ultimate goal.
Natives were never genocided. There's more now than ever before. Smallpox blankets are a proven myth.
Delete'Stacie Martin states that the United States has not been legally admonished by the international community for genocidal acts against its indigenous population, but many historians and academics describe events such as the Mystic massacre, The Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre and the Mendocino War as genocidal in nature. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states that US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination. The letters of British commander Jeffery Amherst indicated genocidal intent when he authorized the deliberate use of disease-infected blankets as a biological weapon against indigenous populations during the 1763 Pontiac's Rebellion, saying, "You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble Race", and instructing his subordinates, "I need only Add, I Wish to Hear of no prisoners should any of the villains be met with arms." When smallpox swept the northern plains of the U.S. in 1837, the U.S. Secretary of War Lewis Cass ordered that no Mandan (along with the Arikara, the Cree, and the Blackfeet) be given smallpox vaccinations, which were provided to other tribes in other areas.'
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples#United_States_colonization_of_indigenous_territories
The chain of events behind the one supposedly authentic case of deliberate smallpox contamination began in 1757 at the siege of Fort William Henry (in present-day upstate New York), when Indians allied with the French ignored the terms of a surrender worked out between the British and the French, broke into the garrison hospital and killed and scalped a number of patients, some of them suffering from smallpox. The blankets and clothing the Indians looted from the patients in the hospital and corpses in the cemetery, carried back to their villages, reportedly touched off a smallpox epidemic.
ReplyDeleteThe French lost the war and left their Indian allies holding the bag, and in 1763 Chief Pontiac and his colleagues sparked an uprising against English settlers in the Great Lakes region that had Lord Jeffery Amherst and the British forces close to despair. The Indians destroyed several of the smaller British forts, but Fort Pitt (present-day Pittsburgh, Pa.) held out under the command of Captain Simeon Ecuyer, a 22-year veteran Swiss mercenary in the British service. Smallpox had broken out among the British garrison, and during a parley on June 24, 1763, Ecuyer gave besieging Lenape warriors several items taken from smallpox patients. 'We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital" Captain William Trent of the garrison militia wrote in his journal. “I hope it will have the desired effect.
Smallpox did break out among the Indian tribes whose warriors were besieging the fort. 19th-century historian Francis Parkman estimated that 60 to 80 Indians in the Ohio Valley died in a localized epidemic. But no one is sure whether the smallpox was carried by infected blankets or by the clothing Indian warriors had stolen from the estimated 2,000 outlying settlers they had killed or abducted.
"Mostly about population estimates of Pre-Columbian North America, and how the rate of decline does not imply anything commonly considered a "genocide", and a rant at the end about when there are undeniable objective outcomes, the traditional heuristics of expertise vanish."
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bitchute.com/video/UIkud2agq1A/
‘The genocide of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas represents one of the greatest and most extensive human catastrophes in history. The pace and magnitude of the destruction varied from region to region over the years, but it can safely be concluded that, in the two-and-a-half centuries following Christopher Columbus’ ‘‘discovery’’ of the Americas in 1492, probably 95% of the pre-Columbian population was wiped out—by disease as well as by deliberate policy on the part of the Spanish, the French, the English, and, ultimately, the American-born heirs of those colonizing nations.
Delete‘The process of colonization was often characterized by violent confrontation, deliberate massacre, wholesale annihilation, and, in several instances, genocide. Many indigenous peoples in North America, for instance, were completely, or almost completely, wiped out, including the Yuki of California and the Beothuk of Newfoundland…colonial expansion in North America saw attempts at clearing the land of indigenous populations; of forcibly assimilating these populations for racial, religious, or ethnic reasons; and of intimidating them so that they would seek to retreat before the advance of the colonizers, enabling Western-style economic development to take place.
‘Overall, we are looking at a horrific case (or, rather, series of cases) of mass human destruction, in which millions of people lost their lives. And the destruction did not stop once most of the people had died or been killed; in the United States, policies of population removal, dispossession of lands, forced assimilation, and confinement to ‘‘reservations’’ meant that, in a vast number of cases, even the survivors were denied the opportunity to retain their identity as distinct peoples.’
https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1209&context=gsp
https://www.history.com/news/native-americans-genocide-united-states
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/naming-americas-own-genocide/
Cry me a river to Wounded Knee.
ReplyDeleteThe 'millions' were killed by disease. Germs made all the difference. As explained in the video.
ReplyDeleteSo that's where you get your news from (far-right BitChute). Yuck.
DeleteIt would be more manly in your circles for you to own up to the attempted exterminations, on the conviction that the Native Americans were inherently inferior to the Europeans. Isn't that what Hitler would have said? So why this womanish attempt to cover up the massacres, forced assimilation, forced sterilization, cultural destruction, and dispossession of lands? Don't be such a pussy.
"Attempted exterminations." Like other tribes have done since time immemorial. Any other race would've actually slaughtered them, had they the capability. You want proper civilization at this stage in the game, you'll need whites.
DeleteSome of the tribes were entirely or almost completely wiped out, as I quoted: "the Yuki of California and the Beothuk of Newfoundland." And yes, the intention and the actions matter, even if complete success isn't achieved. The Nazis didn't succeed in exterminating all Jews, but they're still reviled for the attempt and for the actions they took towards that end.
DeleteIf whites are so great, why didn't they succeed in exterminating the lesser, indigenous peoples? Why are you rushing to defend the human rights of those "lesser" peoples, as though they didn't deserve to be wiped out to make room for the manifest destiny of the superior, white race? You have your anonymity.
Evidently you think the indigenous Americans got a raw deal and deserved to live (since you're implying that genocide is bad), in which case what's the point of pretending we can speak of qualitative differences between "races" or peoples? I'd agree that cultures have different strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately all cultures are preposterous and absurd, so the differences become subjective.
You can say the Europeans brought higher civilization, but if it turns out that that civilization destroys the ecosystems and is thus perfectly self-destructive, wouldn't the Native Americans have the last laugh? Wouldn't their emphasis on being one with nature have been wiser than European egoism, individualism, and delusional Christianity?
The fact that lots of other societies engage in mass slaughter is neither here nor there. You’re playing Whataboutism.
To Mr. Crazy Grapefruit, you highly value the civilized culture of the United States, which at least for the most part did not follow the example of the Spanish conquistadors who went around enslaving whole indigenous peoples and cutting off people's limbs. Well, what did the United States do instead? Here is the analysis of a 19th century eye-witness, Alexis de Tocqueville, a guy who was actually very actively in favor of colonization by the U.S. and even defended massacres of indigenous civilians in colonies provided they were small massacres aimed at crushing the will of anti-imperial rebels, but he was horrified by what he saw the U.S. doing to the indigenous peoples of North America. De Tocqueville personally saw most of what he describes of the U.S. genocide of indigenous groups firsthand while travelling extensively through the American frontier, he supplemented this knowledge by reading the official Federal documents of the time, which he cites. Its worth reading what he had to say about what he saw going on around him. The picture he presents is one of genocide carried out intentionally by the government in the most hands-off manner possible, allowing individual citizens and compelling rival tribes to do the dirty work, in order to save money and avoid international criticism. All quotes are from Democracy in America, Volume I. These passages are pretty short, and they are as concise as they are damning and impossible to disprove. If you read this and still are thinking of trying to argue that technically this isn't genocide even if it just as intentionally results in the same scale of misery, death and annihilation of nations, then I am curious what your thoughts are about the passage where de Tocqueville mentions "a happy distinction which had escaped the casuists of former times"?
ReplyDelete"The Spaniards pursued the Indians with bloodhounds, like wild beasts; they sacked the New World with no more temper or compassion than a city taken by storm; but destruction must cease, and frenzy be stayed; the remnant of the Indian population which had escaped the massacre mixed with its conquerors, and adopted in the end their religion and their manners. The conduct of the Americans of the United States towards the aborigines is characterized, on the other hand, by a singular attachment to the formalities of law. Provided that the Indians retain their barbarous condition, the Americans take no part in their affairs; they treat them as independent nations, and do not possess themselves of their hunting grounds without a treaty of purchase; and if an Indian nation happens to be so encroached upon as to be unable to subsist upon its territory, they afford it brotherly assistance in transporting it to a grave sufficiently remote from the land of its fathers.
"The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they even succeed in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity; tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity."
"See, amongst other documents, the report made by Mr. Bell in the name of the Committee on Indian Affairs, February 24, 1830, in which is most logically established and most learnedly proved, that "the fundamental principle that the Indians had no right by virtue of their ancient possession either of will or sovereignty, has never been abandoned either expressly or by implication." In perusing this report, which is evidently drawn up by an experienced hand, one is astonished at the facility with which the author gets rid of all arguments founded upon reason and natural right, which he designates as abstract and theoretical principles. The more I contemplate the difference between civilized and uncivilized man with regard to the principles of justice, the more I observe that the former contests the justice of those rights which the latter simply violates."
ReplyDeleteDe Tocqueville describes the general process as follows:
"Bold adventurers soon penetrate into the country the Indians have deserted, and when they have advanced about fifteen or twenty leagues from the extreme frontiers of the whites, they begin to build habitations for civilized beings in the midst of the wilderness. This is done without difficulty, as the territory of a hunting-nation is ill-defined; it is the common property of the tribe, and belongs to no one in particular, so that individual interests are not concerned in the protection of any part of it."
"A few European families, settled in different situations at a considerable distance from each other, soon drive away the wild animals which remain between their places of abode. The Indians, who had previously lived in a sort of abundance, then find it difficult to subsist, and still more difficult to procure the articles of barter which they stand in need of."
"To drive away their game is to deprive them of the means of existence, as effectually as if the fields of our agriculturists were stricken with barrenness; and they are reduced, like famished wolves, to prowl through the forsaken woods in quest of prey. Their instinctive love of their country attaches them to the soil which gave them birth, *f even after it has ceased to yield anything but misery and death. At length they are compelled to acquiesce, and to depart: they follow the traces of the elk, the buffalo, and the beaver, and are guided by these wild animals in the choice of their future country. Properly speaking, therefore, it is not the Europeans who drive away the native inhabitants of America; it is famine which compels them to recede; a happy distinction which had escaped the casuists of former times, and for which we are indebted to modern discovery!"
"It is impossible to conceive the extent of the sufferings which attend these forced emigrations. They are undertaken by a people already exhausted and reduced; and the countries to which the newcomers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes which receive them with jealous hostility. Hunger is in the rear; war awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides. In the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each individual endeavors to procure the means of supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the immensity of the desert like an outcast in civilized society. The social tie, which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved; they have lost their country, and their people soon desert them: their very families are obliterated; the names they bore in common are forgotten, their language perishes, and all traces of their origin disappear. Their nation has ceased to exist, except in the recollection of the antiquaries of America and a few of the learned of Europe."
"I should be sorry to have my reader suppose that I am coloring the picture too highly; I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery which I have been describing; and I was the witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray."
...
ReplyDelete"The ejectment of the Indians very often takes place at the present day, in a regular, and, as it were, a legal manner. When the European population begins to approach the limit of the desert inhabited by a savage tribe, the government of the United States usually dispatches envoys to them, who assemble the Indians in a large plain, and having first eaten and drunk with them, accost them in the following manner: "What have you to do in the land of your fathers? Before long, you must dig up their bones in order to live. In what respect is the country you inhabit better than another? Are there no woods, marshes, or prairies, except where you dwell? And can you live nowhere but under your own sun? Beyond those mountains which you see at the horizon, beyond the lake which bounds your territory on the west, there lie vast countries where beasts of chase are found in great abundance; sell your lands to us, and go to live happily in those solitudes." After holding this language, they spread before the eyes of the Indians firearms, woollen garments, kegs of brandy, glass necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, earrings, and looking-glasses. If, when they have beheld all these riches, they still hesitate, it is insinuated that they have not the means of refusing their required consent, and that the government itself will not long have the power of protecting them in their rights. What are they to do? Half convinced, and half compelled, they go to inhabit new deserts, where the importunate whites will not let them remain ten years in tranquillity. In this manner do the Americans obtain, at a very low price, whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of Europe could not purchase."
Footnote: "See, in the Legislative Documents of Congress (Doc. 117), the narrative of what takes place on these occasions. This curious passage is from the above-mentioned report, made to Congress by Messrs. Clarke and Cass in February, 1829. Mr. Cass is now the Secretary of War."
""The Indians," says the report, "reach the treaty-ground poor and almost naked. Large quantities of goods are taken there by the traders, and are seen and examined by the Indians. The women and children become importunate to have their wants supplied, and their influence is soon exerted to induce a sale."
According to de Tocqueville, never was an intentional genocide carried out in a more astonishingly civilized way than by the U.S. This element of civilization made the genocide more efficient and successful, not less so (which shouldn't surprise anyone). What de Tocqueville describes is a nearly perfectly civilized intentional method of genocide by means of various forms of indirect action including driving people to starvation and causing the victims to fight each other for scraps while the genocidal power watches from a short distance and carefully applies the required pressure and incentives to keep up the starving and the fighting until the desired proportion of a targeted group are dead, allows white private citizens to steal the land of anyone who manages to avoid the genocide for a while, and using state violence to enforce the genocide only when deemed absolutely necessary. The civilized element in this should be the greatest cause of horror, not a cause for admiration. At least if the genocide were less civilized it would be easier to alert people to what was happening and turn world popular opinion against it. Nearly the whole world admitted the Holocaust occurred shortly after World War II, but the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the U.S. was done so competently and cleverly that even though some especially intelligent people like de Tocqueville saw it for what it was at the time, it has taken much longer for large numbers of people outside North America to figure out that a genocide was what occurred. Now it has already happened and while a lot can be done, the genocide has long since accomplished the dramatic relative population, land and power shift which was its goal.
Alia, thanks for posting those passages. I suspect the response would be that what Tocqueville was describing societal competition which resulted in genocide or near-genocide by effect, but not necessarily by intention. The Europeans set up an advanced society that drove away and ruined the natives just as “progressive” humans in general have done for many wild animal species. Did humans intend to extinguish all the animal species we’ve killed just by extending our “civilized” borders and taking over their home territories? An apologist could say the same about competition between the European and the Native Americans’ ways of life. The one proved stronger or more dominant than the other.
DeleteThe question is whether the Europeans and colonists intended indirectly to end the native way of life or whether the former thought so little of the latter that they didn’t care what happened to them, so that the natives’ extinction would be the inevitable result of the American policies, through famine, cultural assimilation, and war between the natives. Of course the Christians deemed themselves superior, so they would have thought they were doing the natives a favour by terminating their hunter-gatherer culture.
Tocqueville quotes a federal document as saying, “the fundamental principle that the Indians had no right by virtue of their ancient possession either of will or sovereignty, has never been abandoned either expressly or by implication.” But I wonder whether there’s hard evidence the government intended to use these techniques to efficiently exterminate the natives. Clearly, the colonists didn’t respect the natives or credit them with having rights to the land. The colonists were going to take over the continent no matter what. They did so relatively peacefully, as Tocqueville says. Genocide would be so obvious a result of the expansionist nature of the colonist’s culture that it’s hard to see how the result wouldn’t have been intended or at least implicitly understood as inevitable. But it strikes me as comparable to the asymmetry between expansionist civilization in general and the less flexible animal ways of life.
Thank you for your response Benjamin, part of de Tocqueville's response to the objections you raise is contained in his comparison of U.S. expansion to colonization of the Americas by the French (elsewhere in the same book). I will share a few telling passages and then give my comments.
ReplyDelete"In Europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire of riches, and an excessive love of independence, as propensities very formidable to society. Yet these are the very elements which ensure a long and peaceful duration to the republics of America. Without these unquiet passions the population would collect in certain spots, and would soon be subject to wants like those of the Old World, which it is difficult to satisfy; for such is the present good fortune of the New World, that the vices of its inhabitants are scarcely less favorable to society than their virtues. These circumstances exercise a great influence on the estimation in which human actions are held in the two hemispheres. The Americans frequently term what we should call cupidity a laudable industry; and they blame as faint-heartedness what we consider to be the virtue of moderate desires."
"In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachments which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues. The French Canadians, who have faithfully preserved the traditions of their pristine manners, are already embarrassed for room upon their small territory; and this little community, which has so recently begun to exist, will shortly be a prey to the calamities incident to old nations. In Canada, the most enlightened, patriotic, and humane inhabitants make extraordinary efforts to render the people dissatisfied with those simple enjoyments which still content it. There, the seductions of wealth are vaunted with as much zeal as the charms of an honest but limited income in the Old World, and more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere. If we listen to their eulogies, we shall hear that nothing is more praiseworthy than to exchange the pure and homely pleasures which even the poor man tastes in his own country for the dull delights of prosperity under a foreign sky; to leave the patrimonial hearth and the turf beneath which his forefathers sleep; in short, to abandon the living and the dead in quest of fortune."
"At the present time America presents a field for human effort far more extensive than any sum of labor which can be applied to work it. In America too much knowledge cannot be diffused; for all knowledge, whilst it may serve him who possesses it, turns also to the advantage of those who are without it. New wants are not to be feared, since they can be satisfied without difficulty; the growth of human passions need not be dreaded, since all passions may find an easy and a legitimate object; nor can men be put in possession of too much freedom, since they are scarcely ever tempted to misuse their liberties."
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"M. de Senonville, the governor of Canada, wrote thus to Louis XIV in 1685: "It has long been believed that in order to civilize the savages we ought to draw them nearer to us. But there is every reason to suppose we have been mistaken. Those which have been brought into contact with us have not become French, and the French who have lived among them are changed into savages, affecting to dress and live like them." ("History of New France," by Charlevoix, vol. ii., p. 345.) The Englishman, on the contrary, continuing obstinately attached to the customs and the most insignificant habits of his forefathers, has remained in the midst of the American solitudes just what he was in the bosom of European cities; he would not allow of any communication with savages whom he despised, and avoided with care the union of his race with theirs. Thus while the French exercised no salutary influence over the Indians, the English have always remained alien from them."
ReplyDelete...
"I myself saw in Canada, where the intellectual difference between the two races [the French and English races] is less striking, that the English are the masters of commerce and manufacture in the Canadian country, that they spread on all sides, and confine the French within limits which scarcely suffice to contain them. In like manner, in Louisiana, almost all activity in commerce and manufacture centres in the hands of the Anglo-Americans."
"But the case of Texas is still more striking: the State of Texas is a part of Mexico, and lies upon the frontier between that country and the United States. In the course of the last few years the Anglo-Americans have penetrated into this province, which is still thinly peopled; they purchase land, they produce the commodities of the country, and supplant the original population. It may easily be foreseen that if Mexico takes no steps to check this change, the province of Texas will very shortly cease to belong to that government."
While de Tocqueville clearly does not recommend the French model of colonization of North America in the context of English/British and Anglo-American competition, he shows just as clearly that there was a very formidable and extremely civilized alternative model of expansionist civilization, the French model, which in the absence of the competition of the very singular model of English colonization would have been very successful in gradually colonizing North America.
While he never focuses upon the question of the relative advantages of the French model of colonization of North America compared with the Spanish model, in the last passage quoted he strongly suggests the French were in his view better able to hold their own against the English and Anglo-Americans than the Spanish (for example in their loss of Florida to the U.S. and of Louisiana to France) and later the Mexicans (for example in their loss of Texas). The French may have been forced to accept British and Anglo-American governments over them, but they were able to defend their land, French law, language, significant political power and their basic rights, and retained large cultural enclaves mostly under their own control. What this means is that the relatively peaceful, non-genocidal French, who often married indigenous women with the consent and blessing of their parents, were formidable enough that they likely could have defended themselves and colonized North America if it were not for the existence of the competing English model. The French model may have been somewhat less rapidly expansive than the English, but it was still highly civilized and still exists on a large scale in Canada and to a lesser extent in Louisiana.
What this shows is that the genocide was not an inevitable result of expansionist civilization itself, but instead a result of the specific culture and mores of the English and Anglo-Americans, their fanatical opposition to marrying indigenous people, and the deliberate and continuous will of their peoples and policy of their governments over a long period of time. Take the English and Anglo-Americans out of the picture and replace them with the French, and expansionist civilization would have spread across North America much more slowly and densely, without genocide, or at least without genocide on anything remotely comparable to the scale of what occurred. That argument, at least, seems implicit in what de Tocqueville says. This is a convincing argument as near as I can tell.
ReplyDeleteThe Cherokee and other tribes of the East which adopted agriculture, writing, newspapers and modern technology of their own choice while still effectively independent and unconquered show another model of civilization which could have had the time to fully emerge in a more slowly expanding French North America. The experience of the Guarani in Paraguay and their integration with the Spanish to form a modern state show yet another model which actually did occur elsewhere in the Americas. The genocide which the English and Anglo-Americans carried out was by no means an inevitable result of the expansion of civilization. Even with all of the specific peculiarities of their brands of civilization, had the English and Anglo-Americans made the simple changes of being fully open to intermarriage with the indigenous peoples of North America and been open to hiring them on an equal basis, they would have opened up a path to full integration with them, and at the same time would have rapidly accelerated the spread of civilized norms, provided the children of these marriages eventually came to practice agriculture and modern industry.
The English and Anglo-Americans were alone among the major colonizers of the Americas in not only generally refusing to consider intermarriage with indigenous peoples, but in consistently and zealously persecuting any couple who dared to try it. Given this background, it is very clear that the English and Anglo-American models of colonization were unusual in leaving no place for most indigenous people except to be exterminated or, perhaps, and only perhaps, converted into permanent hereditary second-class citizens incapable of safely attempting to own property or work many jobs, a condition which would be intolerable to submit to willingly for peoples who remembered total freedom and independence, who considered themselves sovereign, and who in any case generally looked upon the white lifestyle and society with disdain and viewed themselves as culturally superior.
It is in this context that “genocide would be so obvious a result of the expansionist nature of the [English/Anglo-American] colonist’s culture that it’s hard to see how the result wouldn’t have been intended or at least implicitly understood as inevitable.” As I’ve shown though, there was nothing actually inevitable about the genocide. There were many other successful models of colonization, and even given the unique characteristics of the English and Anglo-Americans, intermarriage and fair play was a perfectly possible alternative to genocide for them which they rejected. To say that genocide was inevitable under these circumstances is just to say that genocide was inevitable once the English and Anglo-Americans had adopted unusually zealous customs against intermarriage and against human equality in terms of protection under the law, in terms of property, in terms of work, in terms of expectation of physical safety within white settlements, and in terms of sovereignty, because they preferred to just wipe out the indigenous peoples.
When you say “Of course the Christians deemed themselves superior, so they would have thought they were doing the natives a favour by terminating their hunter-gatherer culture” This applies to de Tocqueville, but not to those active or complicit in the genocide. De Tocqueville very much thought that the natives would be done a favor if they were civilized, and given that civilization was their best chance at any kind of survival at all, it is hard to argue with him, though the indigenous peoples of North America certainly could have civilized while retaining certain traditions and norms which were uncivilized in character such as an intense emphasis on proving worth in hunting and war, as well as many others which were fully compatible with a high degree of civilization but not with European culture. De Tocqueville’s whole horror was that the indigenous people were not permitted by the English and Anglo-Americans to civilize and indeed in many cases were already Christian, but no matter how strongly they tried to civilize and turn to agriculture and settled life, the whites just stole their agricultural land, outcompeted their farming products through superior experience, used mob violence and terror, and menaced them with tyrannical laws until finally they were forced to flee and return to hunter-gathering, driven only towards poverty, uncivilization, flight, fighting with other tribes, cultural collapse and death.
ReplyDeleteGenocide by the English and Anglo-Americans was inevitable because the English and Anglo-Americans wanted genocide. The English and Anglo-Americans wanted genocide because it seemed inevitable, so there was no additional harm in participating or in enforcing what was already inevitable. There seems to be a certain circularity to these arguments, at least if I have correctly understood what you are saying.
Thanks for that comprehensive assessment. I see your point about the lack of intermarriage or cultural integration in the English model of colonization.
DeleteI suppose what was inevitable wasn’t genocide in the literal sense (the termination of indigenous genetic lineages), but cultural “genocide,” the end of the native ways of life. What was inevitable was a clash between the native hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence, and Old World civilization once the latter discovered the former in the Americas. The Neolithic replaces the Paleolithic, as it were.
As to whether the natives deserved to be civilized or should have been thankful for the American “Neolithic revolution,” the ecological damage done by civilization seems to leave the question open in the long run.
Hmm I see your point about cultural "genocide." Indeed, I view human life as sacred by extension of the potential for expressing autonomy and artistic, spiritual and intellectual creativity which always exists in every human being (no matter how disappointing many of them may be in the present, or how limited and Pyrrhic our eventual triumphs all turn out to be). It is for this reason, as well as from a sense of empathy and of common purpose, structure and potential with other beings with the higher autonomy of personhood, that I regard genocide with horror. You have made me realize this seems to mean that I should regard cultural "genocide" with almost the same horror as literal genocide. To destroy the independence and uniqueness of mind of a person or of a people and reduce them to a dull conformity to a larger or more powerful group is to destroy something very close to the heart of their personhood. That said, cultures are always evolving, and possess a material substrate which is far more binding and restrictive than that which restrains and molds the mind of an individual. Cultures endlessly are born, change, develop and die to suit the needs and opinions of people. People endlessly are born, change, develop and die too, but there is a far more irrational and permanent cultural and intellectual loss to personhood itself and to all people when a person is killed. Perhaps when a culture is silenced or destroyed rather than simply evolving or merging freely, this causes a far greater loss which while less than the deaths of people, is nonetheless a serious enough attack on their personhood to deserve to be compared by analogy through use of the term cultural genocide.
DeleteIt seems to me that this perspective will make sense to people who primarily values learning, the life of the mind and the life of the spirit, the human species and its development being a kind of library and public workshop of the mind and spirit which is in principle open to every searching person unless human beings or their memories and dreams are destroyed. I mean to say we are all the custodians of our library sections and workers in our workshops, temples and art studios, and that the books, tools and technics are within us. To kill a person is also to burn a library. In any case, thank you for making me see cultural "genocide" is more similar to literal genocide than I had seen before.
It does strike me that the massive effect of Eastern Hemisphere diseases and disruptive invasive species made the clash between indigenous hunter-gatherers and European civilization (or civilizations?) take place on a basis which had little to do with their respective strengths and weaknesses (it’s certainly true horses, guns and artillery, as well as the industrial revolution, among other European advantages, all sometimes also played decisive roles, but the advantages of the indigenous ways of life not to mention the defensive and initial population advantage had almost no opportunity to do so because of the extent of the ravages of disease, rapid ecological shifts, and the chaos they caused).
Likewise, considering that Neolithic civilization had already existed for thousands of years in Mesoamerica, South America, and also on a more limited (though still very large) scale in the U.S. Southwest Pueblo and Mississippi Valley Mississippian cultures and some other areas, it is curious that Neolithic civilization didn't penetrate far sooner and far more permanently and intensely than it did into the vast incredibly fertile regions of North America.
DeletePerhaps these regions were so vast and so fertile that intense concentration of people upon land was rarely necessary or beneficial except for religious reasons, and was thus often seen by those without such religious traditions as merely causing corruption of the earth through concentration of sewage, disease transmission and trash accumulation which served no practical material advantage and resulted in a less worthy, less enjoyable and/or less healthy form of life. Whether this was the view of many Pre-Columbian North American indigenous hunter-gatherers or not, it seems like a pretty good argument as near as I can tell. I think only religious or philosophical factors could have outweighed these considerations in vast, fertile regions in the absence of a military threat from a very large and expansionist civilized power.
It is worth considering that the vast Mississippian Neolithic civilization likely ended around 1600 in large part due to the introduction of Eastern Hemisphere diseases and invasive species. Many indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Eastern U.S. were not descendants of this civilization, but an immense number were. It is difficult to disentangle the indigenous ways of life at the time from the already all-encompassing and almost world-destroying shock wave of the Columbian Exchange even before Europeans ever laid eyes on most of the Americas, which also means many of the hunter-gatherers had not been hunter-gatherers for all that long. The Europeans were conquering a post-apocalyptic landscape.
I think you are right that the ecological damage of civilization seems to leave the question of whether hunter-gatherer ways of life or civilization are superior open in the long run. An especially interesting question is whether civilization can reform itself to become less destructive, especially now that human survival seems to depend on it. It could be argued this would also amount to a kind of vindication of the coherence of the civilized project. On the other hand, it could be argued that this would be a case of civilization going against or sublimating its own instincts to adopt values previously primarily held by hunter-gatherers, transitioning towards a new hybrid of value systems. I'm not sure what the correct interpretation is. Perhaps the answer depends partly on how a sustainable civilization can be achieved, if indeed it can be.
You make a number of interesting points. The culture clash certainly didn't happen on an even playing field, because of the diseases, but the overall human historical trajectory has obviously been from hunting-gathering to agriculture and civilization. So the clash was inevitable.
DeleteI don't know enough about the indigenous American civilizations. I imagine their spread would have been affected by their population growth and by competition for the wealth of natural resources.
The question of how a sustainable civilization can be achieved is certainly a big one. Not sure a hybrid is possible, but we're all equally in the dark on this one.
Thanks again for your detailed and thoughtful comments.
Thank you Benjamin,
ReplyDeleteI think you are right a clash between hunter-gathering and agriculture was inevitable. Still, the native way of life wasn't reducible to hunter-gathering or its cultural attributes, and agriculture existed on a large scale within North America, not to mention the more concentrated and technologically advanced agricultural populations farther south, so I think the end of the indigenous way of life and their politically independent development was not inevitable, and in some cases would have been very unlikely in the absence of disease and ecological disruption. If you would like to learn more about the indigenous American civilizations one book that I would recommend is Charles Mann's book 1491, as well as its sequel. These offer summaries and synthesis of recent research on the subject. Research continues to confirm the conclusions of these books and expand upon them.
Regarding a hybrid between civilization and hunter-gatherer values, one science fiction scenario on the hybrid side of the spectrum is that the internet, remote work, 3D printers, automated farming, raw materials extraction, manufacturing, distribution and services, fully automated and cheap synthetic meat and fish production, renewable energy and autonomous and remotely controlled electric vehicles, along with the ecological imperatives to consume far less physical resources, are pushing us towards a kind of high-tech post-civilization. I mean post-civilization in the sense of the feasibility of the total depopulation of cities and the practice of near-continual digital nomadism over vast distances by the majority, which renewable energy could eventually make sustainable or even reduce to insignificant cost and ecological impact. This wouldn’t be a return to the Paleolithic at all, but it would be a return to a greater focus on sustainability, an effort to live in “harmony” with natural processes which we fear and dare not provoke, living in small, tight-knit communities rather than cities, travelling around frequently over large distances often in order to commune for short periods with larger groups, and increasing reliance on contemporary technologies which, to draw from your work, have an animist quality to their interface, their structure and the ways we think and feel about them. Physical urban life might come to seem parochial, a pale imitation of the great virtual city, office and factory online, with the old urban zones converted into warehouses filled with constantly productive and self-repairing automated machines controlled from thousands of miles away, with only a few people required or wanted permanently on-site. It might turn out that few jobs would inherently exist in this economy, so many creative means of wealth redistribution would probably be needed to prop up education and consumerism in the developed world, while the developing world might have far more serious problems supporting itself.
You are right the question of how a sustainable civilization can be achieved is a very big one, and this science fiction scenario only shows how a hybrid between hunter-gatherer and civilized values might be possible. The thought-experiment leaves many big questions unaddressed about whether the "post-civilization" it describes would be capable of sustainabilty.
That is indeed an interesting hybrid scenario. It reminds me of Terence McKenna's idea of the Archaic Revival, although he couched the transition in psychedelic terms. Morris Berman's book, Wandering God, also comes to mind.
DeleteNormally, when I think of a post-scarcity economy, I think of the sci-fi take on posthumanism. But the way we're able to work more from our homes these days, the technological advances could indeed give us the freedom to survive on our own outside the big cities. Indeed, the Democrats in the US have a political reason to leave their urban zones, because of the Electoral College. If they moved to the rural areas in red states, the Republicans would be wiped out at the ballot box and would be forced to reform their party.
There was also a Star Trek episode (Voyager or Next Generation, I think), which featured an advanced, nomadic alien species whose members traveled alone in spaceships. Indeed, we're seeing hints of this in the tiny house and suped-up van movements. (Check them out on YouTube if you're not familiar with them).
I wrote something on post-scarcity economies that might interest you:
https://medium.com/@benjamincain8/socialist-fantasies-and-the-escape-from-natures-prison-fceb3fbf251a?source=friends_link&sk=8ad05046d14273ca5f2599d3c80b4dab