ms-demeanor: red-stick-progressive: aossidhboyee: red-stick-pr… SOURCE: ara-la]]>This is insane
holy fuck, this is A LOT
Also that figure is way too low, modern population estimates might be as much as twice that. There were between 25 and 40 million in central Mexico alone, almost as many people in the North Amazon, almost as many in the Andes, and almost as many in the American South. All saw 80 to 99 percent population loss in the period of 2 to 3 generations.
The Greater Mississippi River Basin had a population somewhere between 5 and 12 million, the Eastern Woodlands had about as many, about as many in the Central Amazon, and almost as many on the American West Coast and North West Coast respectively. All of which saw 85 to 99 percent population losses in 2 or three generations after the others.
Multiple factions if European interests killed all the natives they could and destroyed all the culture and history they could. They were not limited by gender, language, religion, culture, ethnic group, nationality, geography, or time period; just every single person they could.
That’s not even genocide, it’s apocalypse.
Why are you all omitting the well known fact that it was not purposeful genocide but simply new microbes introduced that no one knew about at that time.
Cuz that’s not true.
Tw genocide, tw violence
When Columbus realized the pigs they brought were getting the Islanders sick he arranged to loose as many as possible ahead of them primarily into the Benne region, I believe. Cortez loaded sickened corpses into Tenochtitlan’s aqueducts, Spain deliberately targeted the priests of Mexican society first because they knew it would severely undermine the public ability to treat disease. When the post Incan city states developed a treatment for malaria, the Spanish deliberately targeted the cities producing the quinine treatment and made it illegal to sell it to non-christians. The Spanish took all the sick and forced them at sword-point to go back to their homes instead of to the sick houses or the temples throughout the new world, and forced anyone who wasn’t sick to work in the mines or the coin factories melting and pressing their cultural treasures down into Spanish coins. The English were just as bad, they started the smallpox blankets. A lot of the loss was not deliberate infections like this but it was preventable at a million different crossroads and every European culture took the opportunity to weaponize the plagues when they could.
They knew what they were doing, just cuz they didn’t know what germs were doesn’t mean they have some accidental relationship with it. Alexander the great used biological warfare after all, so it’s not like you can pretend the concept was alien to them, they wrote about it.
Besides they did plenty of old fashioned killing too, there were Spanish conquistadors that estimated their own personal, individual killings might have numbered over the ten thousands. They were sure they’d killed more than ten million in “New Spain” alone. They crucified people they smashed babies on the rocks, they set fire to buildings they forced women and children into and cooked their meals over the burning corpses, they loosed war dogs on people. They sold children into sex slavery to be raped by disease riddled pedos back in Europe and if taking their virginity didn’t cure the sick creeps the native children would be killed or sometimes sent back.
The English were just as bad, shooting children in front of their mothers and forcing them to mop their blood with their hair. Turning human scalps into currency. Feeding babies to dogs in front of their mothers and fathers. Killing whole villages and erasing them from their maps so that historians would think God had made it empty just for the English.
The Americans after them burned crops and drove several species of bison to extinction just to starve the plains tribes. They pushed the blankets too. On top of the wars of extermination and scalp hunting and concentration and laws defining natives as non-persons so that we’d never be protected by the Constitution.
And even if you wanna live in some dreamy fairytale where God just made a whoopsie and then there were no natives left, nobody forced them to erase our history. The Spanish burned every document they found to erase the literacy and literary tradition of the Central and South Americans. There are essentially three Aztec documents left and some excavated pottery, and some archeological inscriptions and that’s it. The single most advanced culture in math and anatomical medicine erased probably forever. Same to the Inca, the most advanced fiber and alloy engineers and economists gone forever. Nobody made them do that. Nobody forced the American colonizers to steal political technology and act like they invented democracy or sovereignty. Nobody forced them to build their cities on top of native ones and erase them from history forever. Baltimore was built on Chesapeake, which translates roughly to “city at the top of the great water” in most Algonquin tongues. My favorite example is Cumberland in Western MD, they didn’t even reshape the roads or anything, they paved the steps and walking paths natives had used for hundreds of years and now it’s almost impossible to drive cuz the streets are too narrow or steep. The culture that built them didn’t have horses. Phoenix AZ, called Phoenix cuz the settlers literally found an old city and “brought it back to life.” Did they save any history or cultural artifacts? No. Most cities on the east coast are like this. Nobody forced them to erase that history.
Colonizers are not innocent just cuz the germs did a lot of the work of the apocalypse.
Yes, that is in fact the main love interest in a Disney movie talking about burning winter stores and pushing people into such misery that they leave their homes or surrender altogether by STARVING FAMILIES IN THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING WINTER.
He ends that section (which is called “How to Subject all the Savages in Virginia”) by lamenting that the English haven’t been able to control or subject or kill as many native populations as Spain has and talks about how it wounds his national pride that England hasn’t bent as many people to her will.
So get off my dick with this “iT wAs MiCrObEs” shit.
Microbes didn’t chop off children’s hands. Microbes didn’t write about throwing babies into waterfalls in front of their crying mothers. Mircobes didn’t enslave children as young as nine for sex. (All documented things that the Spanish did in South America)
The purposeful genocide of native populations was so bad and so known to be bad at the time that the transatlantic slave trade was started because Bartolome De Las Casas thought it would be better to enslave Africans than to drive the Taino to extinction.
And if you feel like maybe I’m full of shit or exaggerating please feel free to look up the writings of Christopher Columbus (Letter to Luis de Sant Angel), Bartolome De Las Casas (A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies), Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (The Relation), and John Smith (The General History of Virginia) because as it turns out we have the actual words of the people doing the colonizing explaining their motives and methods.
I can’t speak to the veracity of the earlier parts of this post but everything I’ve brought up here is directly from the writing of people colonizing the Americas.
Trying to fucking retcon what these people actually wrote about their intentional efforts to eradicate and enslave three fucking continents worth of people as “it was microbes” is fucking ghoulish, learn some goddamned history.
