this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
1506 points (95.8% liked)
Political Memes
5236 readers
2375 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Opens history book on Europe/Asia/Africa/South America, etc. insert literally any place in the world. Wow! I'm funny on Lemmy! So dumb, good people in every country in the world. And just about every country has done unspeakable things to get to where they are today. Most of the time it's not because the good people even want to be involved it's because the rich make it happen. Blame the rich...they are the problem in every country.
You're not wrong, every country has done fucked shit. I think the point of this meme is to bring Americans down to that realisation that applies to their country too, tho.
With an insulting title like this post has, I don't think that's the point at all.
DAE the US in unaware of history!? Because I think I know what 300 million people are!
I was talking about the meme that OP posted, not the title OP gave it. I am assuming OP did not make the meme.
Everybody knows. There's nothing new under the sun
Because Americans don't know? We get taught about this in school. If you want to find a country that buries its atrocities, try Japan
If your republicans get their way, kids won't be taught about it in school in future. :P
I can't imagine they don't know.
Not all countries did as horrible things as America, at least not on the same scale
Lol yes they did go read a book you pot stirrer.
Most countries haven't ethnically cleansed 99% of their original population
Um... you just haven't gone back far enough.
No, I have. Genetics have barely changed since the Neolithic apart from the US
Uhhh how about rest of the Americas for a start
They haven't changed much. Most people are still native with Spanish, Portuguese and African admixture
Brazil certainly has seen a massive change.
Argentina too
Another example would be Canada, but that's a bit on the nose.
19th century migrations were a thing.
What you posted doesn't reference any kind of genocide or ethnic cleansing, just people with a higher European percentage.
That's my point, Americans are the exceptions. Most societies mixed instead of wiping each other out
This is what I'm replying to. That part is obviously false. Since you meant specifically as a result of ethnic cleansing, it's a bit poorly worded imo.
What I meant was that a decent percentage of neolithic peoples' dna is still present everywhere but America
That's wholly different from what one would assume from the bolded part. But still, I've misunderstood your meaning. Sorry about that.
In all reality, the majority of Native Americans died from old world diseases brought over by Europeans prior to 1700, the idea of the modern American wouldn't exist for at least 100 years by the time Europeans had killed most of the Natives.
Cortez's arrival in Mexico killed ~20 million Natives in Mexico between 1520 and 1570. Prior to his arrival there were an estimated 22 million Natives in Mexico.
Contemporary estimates suggest that the USA population of Natives prior to the arrival of colonists was around 5-15 million. By 1800 that population had dropped to 600k.
So by the numbers it looks like Europeans killed ~90-99% of Natives Americans prior to 1800 and ~47-75% by 1600.
What the US did was deliberate and with the intent of eradicating natives, what others did was collateral damage
Also, where did you get the 20 millions number from? casualties were of 200k
Those are casualties from combat. My numbers were the resulting spread of disease
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas
Care to point to something specific? Also, you wanna explain that collateral damage part a bit better?
The US is responsible for the deliberate murder of a lot of Native Americans, but even if we put the biological warfare aside, Europeans deliberately killed magnitudes more.
Collateral damage is dying due to the unintentional spread of diseases.
Deliberate damage is sending the natives cloths that have been intentionally infected, then killing off their main source of food, then wiping out entire groups and then claim the natives are the savages when they fight back, while there were rewards for hunting natives like they were wild animals, and then confining the remaining few in bantustans or as the US called them "reserves" (know what wildlife reserves are?) that are put in areas chosen to deprive them from enough resources and where alcoholism was instigated by the government as a way to keep them weak. The people who made all of this possible are now regarded as national heroes.
And no, not even the English killed as much as the US.
I originally had a really long message refuting individual points, but I thought I'd take it back a step because at it's root we're arguing who caused the most genocide which really sucks.
I'm not sure where you're from, but based on your posts I'm gonna guess not the USA mainly because your argument really is missing a lot of important information.
Despite your opinions to the contrary most people in the USA know about the Native Americans, it's a massive portion of our basic education. You'll also have a hard time finding an American who thinks what was done to the Natives was ok. The people who caused the whole thing are not considered National Heroes, contrary to your statement. Most Americans think quite poorly of the likes of Custer and Jackson.
Your post in general seems to just be an anti-American post, while making large stereotypes and ignoring Europe's own involvement in the Americas and the rest of the world. Next time save yourself the time and just say what you really want to say, you hate the USA.
Americans don't consider the founding fathers and Lincoln to be heroes?
Also, feeling bad about something you're perpetuating is worthless. It's like killing someone but doing it with your eyes closed because you feel bad
See this is what I'm talking about when I said that your posts are missing information. The founding fathers are a huge group of people with a wide variety of background and involvement in various things. Some were slave owners, some were abolitionists, some were farmers, some ran mills, some literally were just popular people. Outside of a handful, most aren't really well remembered because their actions were important for a specific thing and as a collective (signing the Declaration of Independence and creating the US Constitution). Outside of this their cohesion is a bit of a mess.
Furthermore, the founding fathers of the Declaration of Independence and the founding fathers of the US Constitution had some overlap, but those groups were more than 10 years apart. I know a lot of Europeans blend things within a short period as being the same since the history of those regions is so long, but in the USA it can be extremely different. The founding fathers in 1776 and 1790 were fighting Native Americans, but a large portion of that was as part of the Revolutionary War. The Native tribes actually fought on both sides of the war and were hurt by the British and Americans alike (the Natives also had their share of shitty actions as well).
In the late 1700's and early 1800's there were some abuses which the founding fathers would have been involved in, but conflicts at this time were much more balanced. Some reservations were setup, but reservations at this time are different from your earlier usage, it was more like agreeing upon the boundaries of the natives land. The Native tribes treated for land individually while the USA treated as a group, so each group delineated their land separately from each other and then the US got everything in between.
The main atrocities were committed in the mid-late 1800's (~1830 - 1890) of which Lincoln was only a really small, but very impactful portion. More significant was the likes of Andrew Jackson who effectively dumped gas on the handling of the Natives and until Trump was widely considered the worst President by modern opinion. Jackson is also probably the cause for the change in usage of Reservations as they became purely about dislocating people from their land.
Earlier I said that short spans of time need to not be blended together, part of that is because the USA was rapidly expanding through Manifest Destiny. Lincoln wasn't a founding father, but his involvement was mostly focused around his short Presidency and the Civil War. Lincoln did have some involvement with Native Americans, but most of it was through the lens of the American Civil War. Lincoln handled the Dakota War of 1862 which took place in Minnesota. Minnesota had recently become a State, it had been a territory since 1849, but the cause for the Dakota War was bad treaties which Congress signed in 1851 (2 years after Lincoln had left congress and 10 years before he became president).
Lincoln swiftly moved to crush the Dakota War which had ~150 casualties to keep his focus on the Civil War. Lincoln did agree with Manifest Destiny and did allow settlers to continue moving west, but his tenure saw comparatively little abuse of Native Americans. During the Dakota War the Natives were eventually captured and given trial, Lincoln pardoned 264 of the 392 natives and the rest were hung. Here is a decent read about Lincoln's relationship to Native Americans (https://www.history.com/news/abraham-lincoln-native-americans).
As to your second comment
I never said anyone felt bad, I said it's shitty to debate who committed more genocide, you can call the destruction of 90% of the population collateral damage all you want, but it is what it is. You can say that England or Europe didn't do what the USA did (biological warfare aside), but you're factually wrong and need to read up on it a lot more.
If you're talking about the modern treatment of Native Americans it's really not the issue that it once was. Historically misrepresentation, discrimination, and reparations were the big issues for Native Americans. Now it's more to do with their low total population and pseudo self isolation. Things like environmental impacts, mistaken appropriation, lack of resources or economic growth on reservations are the bigger issues for Natives and are more specific to Native Americans which live on the reservations and isn't the case for every reservation.
I think that's my main thing, you really just don't know what you're talking about, but you want some outlet to say how much you hate the USA. Go read up, there are plenty of reasons to hate the USA, but your argument here is pretty poor.
Here's some recommended reading on shitty things Europeans did to the Native Americans in the USA
You're talking about thousands, I'm talking about millions
Which millions exactly? There were only ~600,000 Native Americans in what is now the USA in 1800, Europeans had killed all the others through various wars and disease.
If you actually look at the casualties from the 1800's Indian wars the grand total is <40,000. Some died of starvation or poor conditions, but the vast majority died from incidental exposure to small pox and measles just like when the Europeans exposed the natives when they arrived.
And they're still less than 1% of the population, with no traceable mixture with Europeans like in Latin America
What do you mean by that?
It's pretty clear
No not really
You're right. They go to other countries to ethnically cleanse those populations.
Like where? Not even Israel has such a low number of natives
Woah, I didn't know you were an expert on every single nation.
My apologies. Everyone, we're in the presence of greatness. Bow your heads.
Which country dropped 2 nuclear bombs again? I always forget.
Singling out the US from WW2 seems odd. It was the one with Nazis, you know? Also during that war Japan did some absolutely despicable shit, like Nanjing massacre, there were the Nazis which, yeah no need to explain that one, USSR had their own massacres and "forced relocations" of peoples, there was the fascist Italy which at least in Africa did awful shit, Croatia had Ustaše and their own holocaust, Lithuania same deal, don't remember off the bat what horrible shit Brits did but knowing Brits you know there's something there, Finland had horrific prison camps for Soviet prisoners...
Looking at WW2 and coming to the conclusion that the US specifically is bad is weird. There's so much fucked up shit done by almost everyone.
Also tbh I've never really understood what the big difference between using nukes and just bombing the absolute shit out of a population with conventional weapons is. Nowadays the difference is that you don't want to trigger a nuclear exchange, but that wasn't really a case then. One difference is that it's new and different weapon, but that's not very concrete. Radiation and lasting effects is more concrete, but also, unexploded shit manages to still kill people. You'll have horrific after effects from conventional weapons too.
This is something I've never understood but would be glad if someone explains. It's often just said as self-evident thing but I've never seen the argument spelled out. Might help me change my mind about it if someone does.
You have no intentions of changing your mind...
If you can't tell the difference in "just bombing" and what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki... well that says more about you than anything else.
It's sorta hard to learn about the argument or the difference when people outright refuse to spell it out.
Of course my opinion says things about me. But like I said, I don't see the big difference to conventional weapons. That's why I'm asking you to explain it to me ffs
What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't worse than Dresden, Tokyo, or several other bombings (especially Cambodia in the Vietnam war). They are notable in terms of being a nuke, but in terms of damage overall unremarkable.
This is my feeling too. With the number of killed and the destruction they caused they don't seem that different from conventional weapons.
I'm not sure what makes the nukes worse and this guy just outright refused to even explain it to me since they didn't feel likely they'd manage to convince me. Kinda infuriating, especially when I'm genuinely interested in understanding the argument.
A lot of focus is in those bombs and generally the complete destruction of conventional weapons is glossed over or even ignored. Especially when it was the allies targeting civilian infrastructure.