Americans committed the worst genocide in world history

Originally posted by ThinkingHuman

Originally posted by Metallicus

 

Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't feel guilty.

You should be sorry. We are talking about millions of people killed, entire civilizations wiped out, by your ancestors and mine.

And you don't even ask yourself why?

Maybe you have never been on the "other side" of history.

Why? My Ancensters were involved in the trans atlantic slave treade.

Was it bad yeah

Do I feel guilty? Not in the slighest as I was not even born then so how could I be responisble for there actions

Originally posted by FidelityMusic


The Americans don't even scratch the surface, there's no comparison to what the Europeans did, none whatsoever.

edit on 2-8-2013 by FidelityMusic because: (no reason given)

Just beacuse american ancestors did it under another name does'nt make the USA of the late 1700's -late 1800's any less guilty.

The Crap in Americas history stinks just like the rest of the world. Man up accept it and move on and stop with the whole being moraly superior rubbish.

Originally posted by ThinkingHuman

Originally posted by sonnny1

 

Astounding how stupid the whole world is collectively. We are smart individually but like a Zombie collectively. Can anybody explain this?

What do you want?

What do I want? I want somebody to explain it.

I picked this example only because it is close to home.

I want to raise awareness that collectively we are Zombies. We Americans sometimes feels superior to, say, Afghanis with their warlords. It seems that we are not superior, except in our ability to start wars. We are just as Zombie.

edit on 2-8-2013 by ThinkingHuman because: (no reason given)

Explain it? Americans are humans and we have every human foible and sin and bad habits that everyone else has. The only explanation is that humans are a violent species that excel at killing one another. Nationality has nothing to do with it, other than a cheap and easy rallying cry when its time once again for humanity to destroy one another.

Just my .02

reply to post by ThinkingHuman


Let's not make it out to be as though the natives were rounded up and shot in the head every single one. A huge number of them died from illnesses and other less direct ways. Does that excuse anything? No way.. but it's 2013 now, the natives receive large sums of money monthly, and can get a college education for free.

I don't see how America is getting a pass? We don't ignore what happened to the natives, it's in every U.S. high school US History text book.

Would you consider the Germans as currently getting a pass for the holocaust? I mean should we be punishing everyone today by laying on guilt and blame for things that happened generations ago? We can acknowledge the atrocities, make a mends as best we can, and engrave it in history so it's not forgotten or repeated (wishful thinking)

It's also not like the natives never raided settler camps slaughtering women and children, there was some provocation on both sides. Many native tribes were not like people seem to think.. all about peace and love and sharing.. a lot of the native tribes were truly savage attacking each other constantly murdering and raping and enslaving each other long before the europeans came.

Originally posted by AlienScience
It seems like a lot of people in this thread are missing the point. They are having a knee jerk reaction of denying "guilt" about this. This topic has nothing to do with guilt or that people of today should feel guilty about the actions of others in the past.

The point of this topic is to recognize and finally admit that the founders of this country were not exactly great men. They weren't the demigods that some people try to make them out to be, they weren't noble, they weren't honorable, they didn't care about "freedom" in the true sense of the word, and they shouldn't be held up as idols that we should worship or to even respect their opinions. People need to really take a look at the founders and realize they were ruthless business men rather than selfless freedom fighters.

When I hear people make a claim like "Our founders would be appalled", all I can think of is "GOOD, must mean we are improving".

So, rather than guilt, the aim is self-loathing?

Okay, I'll still take a pass.

Originally posted by Drezden
reply to post by ThinkingHuman

 

the natives receive large sums of money monthly, and can get a college education for free.

Guilt payments

To answer your question OP, people (as a whole) are cruel and stupid.
White people just happen to be at the top of the pyramid of power, (since the middle ages) which makes them the cream of the crop of the cruel and stupid.
Here is an essay written about that fact READ
Enjoy.

As for what's to be done, I expect a whole lot more of the same, perhaps in reverse.
You can't however, blame America as a country or Americans as a people, it's pretty widespread throughout the countries following the Western Paradigm. And those who do not follow it, strive to.
So what are we working toward, if not more of the same?
I, for one, married a native person.

reply to post by ThinkingHuman


Commies did just as bad, also the 'native americans' weren't necessarily the first to the America's either...

Humans committed the worst genocide in world history.

Genocide will continue to dominate human history until we stop blaming each other.

I could add more but really, what will that achieve. As a species of great responsibility we have failed...

reply to post by Wrabbit2000

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
I'm not sure where your numbers come from. I'm headed to bed and too tired to bother getting the accurate numbers on Natives and who killed who between the French, British, Spanish (among others) and later, last but not least, the Americans themselves after independence. However, the estimates on the others is factually wrong by a wide margin.

Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Primary Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century

Stalin is good for 20 Million by himself. Mao is solid for 40 million with some estimates running as high as 60 million for just China during his rule and Cultural Revolution. Hitler is estimated close to 6 million in the camps alone.

Running between the 3 though, it's at least 66 million people murdered....since that figure isn't counting combat related deaths in the war (the 66 million).

Nothing very honorable about what Americans of the 19th and prior century did to the Natives. Nothing Honorable at all. Although comparisons just don't quite fit, as the Natives gave as much as they got, if not in sheer numbers. They fought like hell and they fought well for their right to live.

Mao, Stalin and Hitler murdered in a near assembly line fashion in some examples and systematically in all three cases. Just warm bodies to convert into cold ones.

You forgot God. I wouldn't mentioning that particular character if it weren't for the fact that hundreds of millions of people claim his word as historically accurate, which means that he is historically responsible for 20 million deaths. Puts him right up there alongside Stalin. And he is worshipped still today. So it could be suggested that genocide is not the question, but rather who does the genociding and why.

Those are the only reasons I'm mentioning it.

American generational guilt: the secular original sin. More death... yet equally delusional.

Obviously, I won't feel guilt or self-loathing for the actions of this country's forebears. I am aware that this country was founded on bloodshed, and I'm at least thankful for that injection of realism into a sense of patriotism that was never really there in me to begin with. Beyond that, I don't know what else I'm expected to do. Move back to... Germany, where my ancestors came from? Or how about France...?
Hahaha... no.

reply to post by voudon


Good point. This whole argument reeks of nationalism.

reply to post by ThinkingHuman


The difference is, America won. And we all know, victors write history.

reply to post by ProfessorChaos


No, not guilt or self-loathing.

The point is acknowledgment and the knowledge that the founding of this country wasn't the storybook fantasy that we are taught.

Once we acknowledge this, we can move forward without the ridiculous praise of the "founders" and trying to do everything with them in mind.

reply to post by AlienScience


So you want people to ignore the founding principals of a country that grew to be great and powerful in record time, because the people that wrote them had some flaws?

reply to post by ThinkingHuman


I totally understand and agree with you. However, as so many here have already (encapsulating their responses), I object to your labels.... Americans, Europeans, taking into account reincarnation, perhaps, who even knows who did that, exactly, especially considering what we know today about quantum entanglement: read: it won't be who you apply a label to, or even an easily discoverable entity(ties) for no one will step up to that blame, as horrible as it is.

They were natural souls, my take on it, and were destroyed to hide the truth of the natural world, before it was overtaken and anything "natural" converted into energy for what can now only be described as an "unnatural existence." Pity those who do not recognize this, for I believe some of those natural souls found their way back in some of us, to fight the battle for the unnatural world we live in today......

Without the recognition of all that, though, bringing this up in this fashion is to the detriment, IMHO, to EVERYONE.....looking for and casting blame, when the waters have been so muddied to this point, it is not determineable what happened, or who and what was where.

Still, I grieve, like you, for that entire culture of humanity lost, for these people, in their tribal culture, represented, perhaps, the best of what it is to be human. But underlining their slaughter, is your responsibility, in just HOW you attenuate that.....for if you do not consider all I mentioned above, then you become part and parcel of what it is that caused their slaughter.

Again, just my opinion.
Tetra50

Judgement is easy. Determination and consideration is extremely difficult. Judgement without those things, including empathy, is absolutely worthless to us all, and in fact, sujectifies and objectifies, the victims all over again, and makes new ones....every single day.

The closest the US Gov't came to doing something that remotely resembled anything that could be considered nearing the actions of "genocide" was the encouragement of killing the buffalo. But we were frequently at war with many of the Plains tribes at the time, and wasn't really different than attacking supply lines in modern warfare.

The growing encroachment of white civilization into lands that were occasionally occupied by the mostly nomadic Indians frequently led to battles--or to assimilation--or to mass movement of the Indians away. The final defeat of the Plains Indians and the Apaches did not occur till late 1870's and 1880's. The defeated Indians were moved to Reservations, not annihilated like was done in the true genocides against the white Russians, the Christian Armenians, the anti-communist Chinese, or the victims of Pol Pot.

The title of this thread is a very particular type of Disinformation. If a LIE is posted long enough, it seems to become TRUTH to the uneducated.

reply to post by MuzzleBreak


I've been encountering many of your responses lately, and find you are wiser beyond many of us here.
Thanks. I agree, for what that's worth.

Originally posted by AlienScience
reply to post by ProfessorChaos

 

No, not guilt or self-loathing.

The point is acknowledgment and the knowledge that the founding of this country wasn't the storybook fantasy that we are taught.

Once we acknowledge this, we can move forward without the ridiculous praise of the "founders" and trying to do everything with them in mind.

Ah, so your real issue is with calling the founders of the United States praiseworthy in any sense of the word.

So, assuming that 'we' acknowledge this history publicly, though to be honest it isn't exactly a hidden past, does that mean that all peoples whose ancestors have been the victims of genocide by the United States will move past the issue, or, as you say, 'move forward' as well, without continuously punishing those of us that had nothing to do with the actions of our forebears?

I highly doubt that.

Originally posted by TKDRL
reply to post by AlienScience

 

So you want people to ignore the founding principals of a country that grew to be great and powerful in record time, because the people that wrote them had some flaws?

edit on Fri, 02 Aug 2013 16:03:28 -0500 by TKDRL because: (no reason given)

No, I don't think I said I want them to ignore the principles. Just to acknowledge that the founders weren't the gods they think they were, so if modern times calls for some action/legislation that the founders didn't advocate 200+ years ago...that it is OK.

We should still push for and strive for Freedom...but we should acknowledge that the founders idea of Freedom isn't the version we should strive for.