Someone should find those Europeans and punish them. Or at the very least make their descendants feel guilty forever.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519194 and marked it off-topic.
The implication to this hand-wringing that appears here and in literature is that "we" as a human race is somehow "better" or "reformed" now vs. then. That's absolutely false, and given the right situation, we always demonstrate that we're capable of any form of depravity that you can imagine (and many that you probably cannot imagine).
Compare this to the Nazis or various other genocides which were highly avoidable and huge faults of humanity.
I understand the ancestral affinity you may feel to the perpetrators, but we aren't bad people because our ancestors made terrible decisions.
True; we're bad people because we're still making terrible decisions today, but you can't run an empire without breaking a few countries.
I don't know. It hasn't been tried before.
Even optimistic Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek future it continues on and is a topic (the prime directive).
What do you think happened to the neanderthals?
Survival instincts are just inherently nasty but we as humans should rise above these tendencies since we have the cognitive ability to do so.
I mean for god sake look how we treat and what we do to the animals that we eat. A hundred years from now it might be seen as a serious moral slip on our part. We might all be very bad people.
Human nature is what it is. It has not changed in millennia, it's only sublimated by culture. Football is a substitute for war. Social media and Reality TV are a substitute for the 'gossip fence.' Gene Roddenberry had a transparently unrealistic model of humanity, and thank goodness. For many people it would boring beyond belief.
In the case of "Lord Jeff" he instead has a prestigious small college as well as a largish university named after him.