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StarDoor on 26 November 2016
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Final-Fan said:
StarDoor said:

Acknowledge what? Your incredibely flawed argument? Disease killed the vast majority of the native population, not warfare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Depopulation_from_disease

The only other thing you could be objecting to is the land itself being stolen from natives, but that doesn't hold up either. The various native tribes in North America did not have a state in the modern sense, and thus could not have had any meaningful diplomacy with the European colonial powers; the difference in the level of political organization was too great. Given how sparsely populated it was, especially after the outbreaks of disease, the New World was terra nullius for all intents and purposes. The right of conquest was universally recognized for almost the entirety of human history up until 1945, so you're going to have to vilify a lot more people than just white Americans if you want to push irredentism.

1.  While the epidemics were incredibly devastating to native populations, it's very wrong to think that white settlers just moved into empty spaces.  They forced native populations aside.  Ever hear of the Trail of Tears? 

2.  Claiming that the native tribes were so different from European powers that diplomacy was just impractical ignores the existence of advanced societies like the Iroquois Confederacy. 

3.  Your "blame the diseases" argument also did not acknowledge the fact that, while Eurpoeans did not deliberately inflict the great majority of the epidemics, there was a non-trivial use of disease as biological warfare, as the Wikipedia article you cite mentions. 

4.  "Right of conquest" arguments break down where broken treaties are considered.  Unless you think dirty dealing and betrayal count as part of conquest. 

All you've done is counter my general arguments with highly specific exceptions.

1.) True, native populations were forced aside by whites. But how was this different than the tribes fighting among themselves? It's not like they were all innocent victims. Even the Iroquois Confederacy subjugated other tribes through warfare and forced adoption.

2.) My point about diplomacy is about sovereignty. Did any of the indigenous tribes have a state, in any meaningful sense? What power did they exert over their territory? You say the Iroquois were advanced, but they didn't even have a writing system for their language. How can diplomacy ever be fair if only one side can record the treaties?

3.) 90% of the natives were killed by accidental disease spread, but we should ignore that because less than 1% were killed by purposeful disease spread?

4.) Broken treaties are even more irrelevant, unless you think that white Americans are the only people to have ever broken treaties in human history. How much land do you think was taken because of broken treaties? How much land do you think the indigenous peoples "owned" in the first place? The entire continent? If you only count land that they lived on and used for agriculture, hunting, and gathering, it would just be around 3% of that.

Whites have never committed a unique crime. If they had the opportunity, every Old World population would have done the same thing to the indigenous Americans, if not worse. Unless you drop your anti-white bias, I won't argue this with you any further.