I would argue that the Incas and the Mayas did quite a lot and, given a little more time or perhas technology being used to help them as opposed to ganking their shit, I think they both could have grown to be extraordinary civilizations, not that they weren't already. Maybe that's why the Spaniards wiped them out - it's why the U.S. did. Sure, we're foreign invaders trying to settle an area that is occupied. I have to believe the average European was terrified of the American Indian both because of their numbers as well as the fact that their sole occupation for the last few tousand years was to reach homeostasis with their environment. Talking teepees, I loved the Sioux, I've been into them since I was a kid, and I gotta admit Sun Dancing is some pretty serious shit. But make no mistake - these people weren't peaceful. The Apache were equally hard-core if not moreso (lived on cliffsides - you gotta' dig that). I would say if I feel bad for anyone, it would be the Nez Perce. What a fucked up deal that was. And Wounded Knee with the Sioux...that was pretty fucked up, too. Hippie, did Indians kill women and children? I find it difficult to believe that they would pull a "Wounded Knee," but when attacking a village, was killing exclusive? Ours obviously was not, which is my biggest beef with the whole deal. Indians attacked settlements just like settlers attacked camps; most instances the technology prevailed and for some reason tended to irradicate them as best it could. If I was going to equale an American to Hitler in this case though, it would have to be good old Andy Jackson and his Trail of Tears. Don't tell me that wasn't a genocidal scheme - it was scheduled for late spring but Jackson pushed it back to mid-winder so they'd freeze - the bastard even ignored a Supreme Court Order that told him he couldn't to it to begin with. "Let's see him enforce it" - you know the line.
However! While I will say that White People (mostly Spaniards, not Statemen) did enact some kind of mass genocide, though I'm not saying it was some organized scheme. I mean scheme as in lots of people doing the same kinds of stuff indipendantly for hundreds of years.
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the Mayans were so advanced in their knowledge that they scared and threatened the Church so much they were killed off not by the Spanish but by the Vatican...using the Spanish as their servant-tools of destruction.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
Maybe. But I think the money was a bigger motivator than salvation. I'm sure it stared out as "bring God to the savage" but it quickly turned to "bring gold to the Queen." At whatever cost. Including 10 million people. Well, I guess that's a grand total; it was probably only 6 or 7 million, a nice Hitlerian number. However, the idea that this can be equated as an event is ludacris. This took hundreads of years - the holocaust took ten or fifteen. Big fucking difference there. He also interned them and forced them to be slaves - something that the Spaniards did to the South American Indians but to my knowledge we never did to North American Indians. I could be wrong, we do do a lot of crazy shit sometimes, and my history book apparently reads like a novel. Oh, wait, this was my favorite line:
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And where do ya' think Hitler learned to erradicate his fear (the imperfect non-Arian races) from, from the American
systematic elimination of the American Indian right up through the 1920's<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
Apparently he was good enough at history to learn how to commit genocide (obviously something of wholly American origin in the last few centuries), but not smart enough to read about Napoleon's defeat in Russia a hundred years prior as not to send his armies there to suffer the exact same defeat. Cut and paste history...feels like what we're doing here...