Originally posted by Tac:
So its.. umm.. more than a thousand years of Spanish civilization vs you meager.. how many is it? I'd say you did your best to catch up. Id say your civiliationwipeout/time ratio is about to par with the spaniards. Not bad.
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Tac, how wonderful of you to bring up the Indian tribes in North America! Of course you know they were incorrectly called Indians by that famous explorer <working for none other than the Spanish Crown> Christopher Columbus.
His discoveries led to a procession of Spanish Conquistadors <doesn't that mean "Conquerors" in Spanish?
> to the "New World".
...and so began the interaction of "Europeans" with the "Native Americans". How were they treated?
You've discussed the ending. After the US became a nation, the remnants of the "natives" were pushed further and further West over the next 100 years and their lands taken. Finally, they were left with the unwanted grounds and their numbers greatly diminished. Primarily by disease, not by combat. There have probably been far more "Indians" killed on Hollywood film than were ever killed by settler or Army bullets. Certainly not the proudest moment in a young nations history in any case.
But for a moment lets re-examine the real catastrophe that befell the "American Indian".
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/970818/18indi.htm How many people were here before Columbus?"One of the few certainties: The Indian populations of North and South America suffered a catastrophic collapse after 1492.
Even if the absolute total is forever unknowable, there are other numbers that tell a haunting tale. In the 1960s, a Berkeley geographer, Carl Sauer, cited evidence of a 1496 census that Columbus's brother Bartholomew ordered for tax purposes on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). The Spanish counted 1.1 million Indians. Since that sum covered only Hispaniola's Spanish-controlled half and excluded children, Sauer concluded that 3 million Indians once inhabited the island. But a generation after 1492, a Spanish resident reported Hispaniola's Indian population had shrunk below 11,000.
The island's collapse was only a preview.
By 1650, records suggest that only 6 million Indians remained in all of North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Subtract 6 million from even a conservative estimate of the 1492 population--like Denevan's consensus count of 54 million--and one dreadful conclusion is inescapable: The 150 years after Columbus's arrival brought a toll on human life in this hemisphere comparable to all of the world's losses in World War II.So, Tac, in the 150 years AFTER Spain "civilized" the "New World" a conservative estimate is that
89% of the "Native Americans" had been eliminated.
In that period, from 1492 until 1650, what major European nations were active in the "new world"?
Spain, obviously. Portugal, most certainly. However, the Portuguese posed a threat to the Spanish drive for New World wealth which even the Treaty of Tordesillas <1494> could not assuage. So the "simple solution" for the Spanish was to to eliminate the threat of Portuguese expansion by annexing Portugal. Although Spain mortgaged Venezuela to a German banking house for a brief period (1528-1547), she was then successful in keeping most interlopers out of her holdings from Mexico to Chile for the remainder of the sixteenth century.
The French really didn’t get rolling in North America until after 1650; particularly in what would be the later US. The same can essentially be said for the English, with their first Colony, Virginia, founded in 1606.
No, it is the Spanish who made the first and most devastating contact with the "Indians" of the "New World". By the most conservative estimates, they initiated and oversaw the decimation of perhaps 54 million people, with the result that by the time the English and French arrived to stay there were perhaps 6 million "natives" left in all of North
and South America.
How did they manage that? Why let’s check the story of that famous Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto around 1539!
http://www.interlog.com/~gilgames/collapse.htm "He set sail from Havana Harbour on Sunday, May 18th, 1539.
For the next 4 years, De Soto butchered his way up the Mississippi Valley. He took armoured trained-to-kill war-dogs, horses and even cannon. He traveled on well-used roads and paths and enslaved the locals, forcing them to act as guides and translators. De Soto was disappointed because the natives didn't have great collections of (useless) gold or European luxuries, but seemed overly concerned with real wealth, such as food, necessities and art.
He burnt and outright destroyed many of the great cultural centres in the American mid-west. The historical documents from the period are extensive and excellent. His chroniclers painted a portrait of a collection of wandering butchers and a savage mercenary army, merciless, greedy, remorseless, bent on pillage and plunder.
Modern European-colonist textbooks call him an "explorer", but he was really nothing of the kind. Little more than a pirate and in fact many times worse, De Soto's actions temporarily united nations of the region in an active hatred of the "Christians". However, over the course of several years he managed to thoroughly destabilize regional political relations and diplomatic systems. He died on the Mississippi at a town called Anilco. Only a few of his soldiers made their way back to Spanish-occupied Mexico, by fleeing downriver and attempting a desperate overland journey.
Hernando de Soto's barbarians laid waste an entire civilization.
Holocaust: The Great Collapse
The holocaust that began with De Soto's arrival didn't stop when he died on the shores of the Mississippi River. As the area was highly developed, people travelled, possibly fleeing the devastation, and brought European diseases with them. Some nations seem to have been utterly obliterated by plagues.
It's hard to imagine the horror of the scene: over half a continent, once busy roads and towns now empty and filled with bodies. Buildings falling into disrepair. Graves and bodies littering the landscape. Disease raging back and forth, periodically devastating entire societies.
Religious figures, leaders, farmers, merchants, craftspeople-- death was indiscriminate, and the social effects terrible. Harvests went uncollected.
The ensuing famine and lack of resources bred social conflict. Long-established trading systems fell apart. As the political order collapsed and devoured itself, internecine wars and raids added to the disaster. The civilizations of the American mid-west were torn apart from outside and within, in a cycle of death, disease, famine, poverty, war, political instability and economic catastrophe. This spiral of destruction left little in its wake.
Obliteration
There had been countless cities, towns and villages from Florida to Virginia and Illinois, built of wood and earth. From Florida to Mississippi and Texas, devastation consumed everything.
Qualla, Guasili, Toqua, Casqui, Quizquiz, Pacaha, Mabila, Cayas, Utiangue, Taliepacana, Mozulixa, Tula, Guachoya, Quigualtam, Anilco, Naugatex, Guasco, Aminoya and thousands of other centres became archaeological curiosities.
When the French ventured down the Mississippi Valley only sixty years later, they found a few tiny villages. All around them they saw the remains of some great culture they couldn't identify. The obliteration seemed complete. Vast, now wild cornfields and orchards stretched as far as the French adventurers could see. Forest was slowly reclaiming what had once been a fertile, accomplished civilization.
Soon, there was little left of these great nations but overgrown earthen mounds and ruins, rotting remains of cities, graves for archaeologists to find and a few struggling bands of survivors. Showing the resilience and power of life and the natural world, forest reclaimed the land almost immediately. When the Dutch, French and English arrived on the scene a hundred years later, they had no idea of the historical extent of the slowly recovering native civilizations."
By 1700 the white population far outnumbered that of the North American Indian. As any history book will show, it was the Spanish that were active here prior to that date.
After the US became a nation the Indians were indeed pushed even farther. But the irreversible damage had already been done by the Spanish.
The US has destroyed Japan? You are really reaching with that one Tac. They’ve been the masters of their own destiny. They made and are making their choices. Choices have consequences. Their culture has changed and continues to change. No one is forcing them to become more like the US. The road they follow is of their own choosing.
In your own words
"Japan, its become a US-Wannabe… And the Japanese seem to actually want that.". What are you going to do? Send some Columbian troops in and MAKE them be like old feudal Japan?
Make them be like
YOU want them to be. Go for it, dude! By any chance do you also have the blood of Spanish Conquistadors flowing in your veins?
Originally posted by Tac:
So its.. umm.. more than a thousand years of Spanish civilization vs you meager.. how many is it? I'd say you did your best to catch up. Id say your civiliationwipeout/time ratio is about to par with the spaniards. Not bad.
So tell me Tac. What civilizations has the US "wiped out" that can even begin to compare with the 48 MILLION "New World Indians" that Spain eradicated?
Go ahead and list the civilizations and populations that the US has eliminated/subjugated by force of arms.
Then on the other side of the balance ledger, list the populations and places that the US has helped (or tried to help) liberate by force of arms.
Look at the oppression in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador or Nicauragua that Ram refers to in the last 40 years or so. It wasn’t American troops doing the shooting there. We indeed may have supported a side that was guilty of human rights violations. Yet whenever the OTHER side took power human rights violations were just as prevalent if not more so. Nonetheless, it was brother against brother.
We’re not perfect by a long shot. Do any of you think the world would truly be a better place if the US had maintained a strict isolationist policy throughout the 20th Century?
Think it over, because you folks are driving us back to it.
I, for one, appreciate your efforts! (Image removed from quote.)
