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Comment by asaegyn | Hacker News Reader

Always amuses me how the apocalypse of Inidgenous Americans never seems to make the cut...

It's sad but true. People even deny native genocide. I had a comment yesterday saying the natives didn't experience genocide but were simply "moved off their land".

But I guess I can understand it somewhat. It took me a long time to come to terms with it as well. The genocide of the natives didn't sink in until I saw a list of the native languages that were wiped out along with the natives. It was dozens and dozens of languages. Many times more languages than exists in the whole of europe.

>"moved off their land"

"Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. "

Bartolomé de las Casas - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Europe had many more dialects and languages than now... Some of extinction stories are genocidal as well. We have to assume a lot about what happened as Rome colonised southern europe, for example, but much of it probably rhymes what happened in the americas.

this is like people comparing the indigenous african slave trade to the triangle trade - completely facile.

>Rome colonised southern europe

colonization in the ancient world wasn't rapacious like it was in the new world. conquered peoples maintained much of their way of life and simply became vassal. in the roman case (towards the end) they even got roman citizenship.

Edit:I finally figured out hn downvotes - paper over a genocide nbd - use the word facile downvotes

Tell that to the Gauls!

>In the five centuries between Caesar's conquest and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Gaulish language and cultural identity underwent a syncretism with the Roman culture of the new governing class, and evolved into a hybrid Gallo-Roman culture that eventually permeated all levels of society

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Gaul

Can you point to symbiosis with native American culture that resembles that to any extent today in the US? All we have are racist football team mascots

I think the parent may be making a joke about the village from Asterix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix#Description

The people being conquered in Europe were also a lot less vulnerable in several key ways— my understanding is that they were largely overwhelmed by superior military tactics and infrastructure (roads and so on), but once conquered they were at a similar level in overall technology and well positioned to participate in the larger Roman economy.

North American native peoples faced new infectious diseases that they weren't at all prepared for, a huge technological disparity (guns), and a lot of predatory economics (trading away valuable furs for beads and trinkets).

> Europe had many more dialects and languages than now...

Yes I know. The difference is that with the natives, the language disappeared because the people got exterminated rather than through forced standardization/adoption of national languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotvingia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Prussian_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudovian_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbs

amuses?

I doubt the op meant in a pleasurable sense.

What's the saying? History is written by the victors? I don't think there will ever be a reconciliation in history for the elimination of native peoples across two continents.

In a thousand years it will just be described as ‘a migration’.

Obviously not in a pleasurable way.

It's disheartening / devastating / infuriating that the genocide of 120-40M people barely pierces the consciousness of the dominant culture when talking about apocalypses or genocides...

Winners don't talk about the people they murdered to win. Same thing about Australia, Canada and less so New Zealand.

It is also hilarious that the USSR is the only country apart from Japan to successfully industrialize and avoid a colonial genocide from a Western power.

If you could pick a place to live being a Russian in Moscow 1919 would give you a much better chance of surviving compared to being an Indian in Manhattan in 1624, Toronto in 1787 or Melbourne in 1835.

Russia was a Western power as far as Central Asia and the Caucasus were concerned

If having an empire is the definition of being Western than you need to include the Ottomans too. At which point the word means nothing.

Russians were genocided by their own government, not a foreign power (except for the many used as meatbags in WWII).

Please study the actual history of the USSR-- there were multiple genocides of different religions and ethnic groups. Most notable were the pogroms and the death of millions in the Ukraine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152387/st...

Interesting how all the groups who had genocide perpetrated against them somehow ended up with a double population than when they were conquered with, meanwhile Ireland still has a smaller population than they had in 1800.

> the USSR is the only country apart from Japan to successfully industrialize and avoid a colonial genocide from a Western power.

Thailand was never a colony either. Besides, USSR was not a country and formed after the colonial heydays.

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