HelloAgain;1647265 wrote:Columbus' crew and the Mayflower were greeted peacefully and even assisted in survival by Native Americans. You could also throw the "lost" colony of Roanoke in there since it's pretty evident they were unable to survive and had to be taken in by Natives. Yet from the onset the Europeans had little such cooperation in mind(from Columbus' own journal)
"They…brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
These thoughts are also parroted by many other European travelers, "hey, they seem to think we come in peace, how can we fuck them over before they catch on?"
It's one thing to win a war. But the European decimation of the Native Americans was far more covert than that, not to mention what was essentially biological warfare of the time. They would have had virtually no chance at conquering anyone without these tactics. Some figures estimate plague wiped out 90% of the population.
This was of course all justified by religious reasons and manifest destiny. And spared not women or children. No different than any other current terrorist group.
I got fires up about that story when I read it in the opening pages of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States".
The problem with it is it uses a story and extrapolates from that a movement that took place over hundreds of years. We're there peaceful Indians in places? Sure just like there were peaceful Euros. But if you were to attempt to walk through North America on your own in 1492, odds are you would have been enslaved and/or killed before you reached the other side. Point is that however ruthless the Euros may have been, the Indians were equally violent and sometimes more so. They wanted a land they had emigrated to, the Euros wanted a land they emigrated to - and the Euros won.
