Oh, Shoot (Connecticut)Follow

Sure, I guess. I don't think either case was a "deliberate and systematic extermination"

Well "either case" sort of lumps everyone who was living on the continent before Europeans arrived as sort of a homogenous mass of abstract cultures. Which wasn't the case. If Stalin had killed everyone who lived east of Moscow and repopulated with ethnic Russians, that would have been a similar act. Regardless, the US is built around power and it's consolidation, like most nation states. Not really that big of a deal aside from the lagging behind most of the rest of the first world by decades on progress on liberty and human rights issues.

Ok, let me say more guns on the streets, in our homes, in our walmarts and mcdonalds, in our cars, on our roadways in our parks and even on our mountain tops would result in more people being shot by guns (probably more sheep cows and grails being shot too).

Whether or not that is a bad thing is purely opinion.

Merry Soyal

Yeah, there's no way that us Americans could ever be as evil as Hitler.

It was both. Exterminate them physically and/or exterminate them as a people depending on the day. I have no idea why you'd argue it wasn't systematic given that there were decisions made, laws passed and government actions taken at every step towards the ultimate end goal of eliminating the Native American presence but whatever.

You're wrong.

Seriously; we're smart enough to know if you put people in camps it's better to brainwash, convert and assimilate. Killing people has a terrible long-term return from an investment standpoint. Besides, slave labor is where the money is anyway.

Per capita, I'd be willing to wager that the US Government was more effective than Hitler or Rwanda at getting rid of the undesirables. Granted no one bothered to try and stop us either.

Edited, Dec 19th 2012 2:50pm by Jophiel

Yup. That's exactly my point:



The law was passed in 1990, then modified in 1996 to address some constitutional issues. The Columbine shooting occurred in 1999. So after the law was passed. There were very very few mass shootings on school campuses in US history prior to the passage of this law. Gun violence? Yes. But there's a huge difference between an angry guy coming onto campus and shooting the guy who stole his girlfriend or a rival gang member, and a guy who decides to commit suicide by taking out as many random people on a school campus as possible until he's stopped.

But not extermination though. He was saying that while there were instances of attempts at extermination, they were not systematic.

You are correct that the goal of eliminating the Native American presence as a separate entity from the US presence was there and was systematic, but that's true of any intermixing of cultures pretty much throughout history. The methods vary from assimilation to extermination, from peaceful to violent, but the instances of any single culture surviving intact and unchanged after encountering another (especially if the other is significantly more powerful) are incredibly rare in human history. I point this out only to show that what happened in the US is not rare or even unusual, but is the norm. The only reason we single it out is because it's among the most recent examples occurring on that scale.

And while it's not a great example of US history, in the scope of wider human history, it is far from the worst example (and a lot better than even some more recent examples, as pointed out earlier). Not a whole lot of cultural assimilation occurred historically with flowers and kindness.



No, he's right. At no point was there an policy to actually kill every single Native American on US soil, or anything remotely close to that. That's what genocide is. There were relatively isolated attempts to wipe out individual tribes or sub tribes, but that's not even remotely the same thing. That's not to say that a bunch of really screwed up stuff was done to Native Americans, but it was not genocide.

Not at all. The public media explosion does contribute significantly to the problem, however. When the perpetrator is given celebrity status the way these guys are, it makes the idea more appealing to certain individuals. There's a whole side-debate going on regarding the extent to which public media response to these events contributes to the problem and whether this potential celebrity status might be a larger part of the problem.

Edited, Dec 19th 2012 4:43pm by BrownDuck

And they're 1HK!



panic hatchet is OP

And if the French hadn't helped us then the new Americans would have been genocided by the British, right?

(I like how firefox wanted me to capitalize American and British but was okay with French being lowercase.)