this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
854 points (94.5% liked)
Memes
51592 readers
1266 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bloodthirsty british and european settlers, greedy for land, wiped out hundreds of native tribes, each with rich cultures, art, languages, and beliefs. And most of this happened less than 150 years ago.
Clearing an entire continent of peoples is unprecendented in history, and what's worse, is that it's still ongoing, and no one has had to account for this earth-shattering crime.
BREXIT MEANS BREXIT
I know who you are and I know you won't bother to read into this but for anyone else interested. Most of the native population was wiped out before the first English got here. Disease spreads and a bunch of Spaniards started spreading diseases in the 1500s.
Diseases did not conquer hundreds of tribes. The history of the new world is a one of campaigns of war and conquest against indigenous peoples. The fact that many are ignorant of this history is part of the whitewashing project. I linked some audiobooks below so you can learn this history.
If the nazis won, they would teach you about the shoah in exactly the same way western nations teach you about the colonization of the americas.
Disease played a major role in the European's ability to conquer those tribes. It's not an either/or situation. It is true that the "Americas" that the English started colonizing had already been devastated by the contagions brought by the Spanish. The English undoubtedly would have found it far more difficult and maybe even impossible to conquer those hundreds of tribes had they not first been so severely depopulated by pandemic. Acknowledging this does not absolve or even lessen the atrocities committed by the English.
/s. Unfortunately your rhetoric does not follow party line. Please censor yourself.
(I do appreciate that one of you is a historian and not a party liner)
So? The point is Europeans nearly wiped them out. Disease surely helped but they were making sure to finish the job.
That's supposed to make it better?
The upper estimates are around 90%. It's likely lower. But even an order of magnitude like that is not "wiped out". Millions of people still lived on the land
My brother if there had a hundred people in your town you lost 70 to 90% of your people and then there were only 25 to 11 of you left alive I'd say your group was obliterated. I do not argue that there were still millions of natives left alive, but there were roughly 60 to 100 million natives prior to the first explorers arriving.
Cool so you are saying millions of people aren't worth consideration. And I'm not your brother
I have never said this. It's nice to know that you have a vivid imagination. Maybe you can use that big imagination to tell Putin a nice story and he can start to care about the ukranians.
Very true, but Spaniards did not know about the lack of immunity from European diseases and never had that intention for erasure of Indigenous. The English, that colonized 2 centuries after the Spaniards, used European diseases as an additional tool for complete genocide on indigenous.
The Spanish 100% knew. What pipe are you smoking from friend? They would intentionally trade items from the people in their camp that had smallpox to the natives. That's how the initial outbreak on the coast started in 1518. They explicitly knew this would happen because they first exploited Cuba and the other New world Islands and found out there in the 1490s.
Germ theory was unknown then and those Spaniards lacked understanding of contagion, well I'm lying, the people then knew about contagion with blood and corpses but not through items like air or blankets. The disease spread, while catastrophic it was fully unintentional. The only accounts like the famed Bartolomé de las Casas described the diseases as "divine punishment" or "mysterious plague", never as a warfare tool.
However with the British, again more than 2 centuries later, there was knowledge and intent as per Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet discussing it "Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among the disaffected tribes?" "I will try to inoculate them with some blankets…" during the Siege of Fort Pitt (1763).
So Spanish are just as bad as the English then. That doesn't help your case.
Case? You seem confused, I said the natives were mostly gone before the English stepped foot in the new world. That's a historical fact read a book. I'm not saying anything else. I have no case.