From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Sep 07 2002 - 15:35:35 MDT
On Sat, 7 Sep 2002, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Actually, it comes down to genocide and a long and disgraceful
> record of broken agreements made with Native Americans. The
> entire land-ownership thing is white man thinking and irrelevant
> to the real damage done.
Now Samantha, before you go off on your liberal white horse lets
be very clear that there is a difference between "active" genocide
and "passive" genocide. Much of the decline in population of the
American natives was passive rather than active. Europeans came
to America, they brought their diseases against which there was
little natural immunity, and a great deal of death resulted.
Koch's postulate on germ theory were not developed until 1890!
See: http://www.qmw.ac.uk/~rhbm001/bactsick/howknow.html
That is long after most of the damage to native Americans by Europeans
had been inflicted. Yes there were battles and wars but there
were also cooperative mutually beneficial relationships.
Most of the damage done to the native Americans by the Europeans
was done by their simple presence on the continent -- and they
could not have known that would be the case before they came.
Its "passive" genocide and I have a hard time holding people
accountable for that.
Now, as de Soto has shown for civilizations to flourish you have
to have a way to "own" your resources and allocate them productively.
That must have been as true for the native Americans as it was
for the Europeans (though the systems may have been different).
I really doubt that all native Americans lived in peace with
each other with respect to resource allocation problems.
One way or another they must have had a way of resolving
"ownership" disputes (whether they were women, game or land).
The European system either had a better resource allocation
mechanism (better technology?) or a better legal system to
deal with allocating those resources productively for it to
be successful (with respect to that used by the native
Americans).
I am not sorry or apologetic for the vector as it has
developed. A "naturalistic" vector without advanced
technology *will not* survive the next impact of a
large comet or asteroid. It is therefore a dead-end
vector that is unextropic and one which few tears should
be shed over.
Robert
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