Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/badmemes/comments/1pu3n6v/loooll/?sort=controversial
Context: The post in question
HIGHLIGHTS
They weren’t refugees. They were originally looking for a new trade route to India and China, because the Ottomans were charging (in spains mind) exorbitant fees/tarrifs for trade routes. Once they discovered what is the Caribbean, they decided to give up on the search for the east passage, and instead decided to conquer the peoples living there. They arrived as explorers, but later came as conquerers. They brutalized the population, so much so that Spain recalled Columbus and his brother and replaced them. Then, Spain came to the great Inca empire, and brutalized their population, killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Many of the Spanish also believed (or claimed they did) that Jesus Christ wanted them to do these atrocities. Many Spanish soldiers wrote about what happened, and how evil their actions were. That there was no way any one of them were getting into heaven. That the governors of the subjugated Incan people were creating hell on earth. History is important. Learn it before making such a stupid statement.
Sorry but the human sacrifice must stop.
Yes, thank god European contact wiped out over 90 million indigenous people and put a stop to those nasty killings in the name of religion…
I ain't crying over dead nazis in dresden and I ain't crying over dead cannibals in mexico
And that excuses wiping out an entire race? Quite a nazi argument you're making there yourself.
"wiping out" You are aware what mexicans are right?
Are YOU aware??? They’re the descendants of the Spanish conquerors r*pe victims. The ones anyway that survived slaughter, disease and enslavement long enough to become rape victims
Yeah at least Columbus and the Britains brought them tons of technology and advancements, unlike modern day asylum seekers
Like smallpox?
Lmao stay angry abt it
stay angry about... history? it's the truth. don't be mad your white ass can't accept it for what it is. do you bury your head in the sand when a majority of school shooters are white too?
Homicide statistics
If this is true, why don't we see Native Americans anymore?
Small pox mainly.
Was it accidental?
Was rarely accidental. The early colonists would regularly give smallpox infested blankets to their native neighbors during cold winters. Yes, they knew it would make them sick, even if they didn’t don’t understand germ theory. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/229.html
Rarely accidental? There has been exactly one recorded incidence of this happening I've seen mentioned, and native populations from anchorage to patagonia were all heavily affected that they were nearly entirely wiped out by the diseases. If it had been an intentional thing, we would have seen at least some more mentions of it, and not one time 270 years after Columbus arrived, when the diseases had already done most of their work.
are you against diversity? it would be super racist of native americans if they kept all that land to themselves and didn’t share with other races
It would be really racist if Christopher Columbus captured and enslaved indigenous people and shipped them back to Spain. It would also be really racist if he would mutilate and rape those people’s when enslaved because they weren’t working hard enough. Oh wait… that did happen, and he wrote about it himself.
Isn't that what the native Americans were already doing too? With the scalping, cannibalism and inter tribal warfare?? What do you people think happened to the women after a successful battle/raid by native Americans??
That’s not the same no. Sure conflict existed, but Colombus introduced foreign conquest, racialized slavery and terror as a state policy. If that was all normal, then why did Spain have him arrested?
But they already had internal conquest, terror, and id say slavery too. Raiding and scalping are certainly acts of terror. No doubt if the native Americans could, they'd have externalized their conquest too. They were just too busy doing it to each other. Spain would have arrested his ass because they could. It's not like they could arrest all the natives🤷🏻♂️
War between tribes were historically low casualty and honor based. Slavery was never done in the form of hard labor as Colombus did, and never such poor conditions as him and his men did. For tribes “slaves” we’re usually just used for ransom, or we’re incorporated into the new tribe, and given full freedoms. So no it’s not the same. Not to mention you compare one man’s actions to all tribes where many were entirely peaceful.
Actually no, Columbus wasn't a refugee seeking a "better life"
His actions were so heinous that not only did the woman that hired him try to kill him for it, but also at least on of his crew spent the rest of his life attempting to atone for his involvement by joining a mission of charitable works towards the native American peoples.
It’s not like the natives didn’t commit similarly heinous acts though. Both sides were in the wrong here.
This is the statement made by someone who clearly doesn't know the full extent of history.
Apache tribe scalpings, enslavement after the Narváez Shipwreck, and plenty of other actions taken by native Americans were heinous. Did Anglo-Americans at the time use underhanded war tactics? Yes, but so did pretty much every civilization at that time. If the Natives had been more technologically advanced, then the same narrative would be spun backwards.
And therefore the actions of Columbus and his crew are more justified? That's what this argument seems to imply, especially with your "both sides" argument. How does inter-tribal warfare and conflict relate to Columbus's intent of colonizing and enslaving unless you think "oh well they do bad things too, so it's ok to do it to them"?
The point is that there is no justified or unjustified, just humans doing what human have always done. The natives did it to each other, the Europeans did it to each other and to them, and in an alternative universe where the natives were more advanced they’d do it to the Europeans
How is that point relevant to anything though? So what? It sounds like you people are responding to an argument that hasn't been made yet.
The point is that you’re clamoring for justification when justification doesn’t exist. The world and how it works is amoral
This is always brought up to justify bullshit lmao
Lmfao really? Are you really excusing genocide rn? In what context is it appropriate to mention it in your view?
Where would I be excusing genocide? I’d like to know because apparently you know
Apparently it's not ok to bring up in this context for you. So I ask again which context is it ok to bring up?
Is it ok? Let’s look at context and surroundings of the prompting event. This was brought up only when genocide was used as a way to scrutinize a deplorable historical atrocity. As far as I can tell there was no conceivable point to this whataboutism. Hmm. Why do you think that is?
I think this is you reaching for the stars over something no one said. Lol
not at all
Racist
how bruh? based on her facial structure i give her a 5, not based on race. i dont consider race when i say someone is attractive or not.
There is only one race and many cultures. Women do have all the same culture and the absolute worst place to experience women is the US!
Found the inc*l
What's with all these troll accounts with expensive_(noun)(numbers) as a username? This is like the third person this week with that username settup.
Columbus wasn't fleeing shit. If you're talking about the settlers, that's another thing, but Columbus was just motivated by a new way to get to India so he could make a ton of money
we are referring to the colonists who sought religious freedom and inhabited these lands. Columbus was just an explorer.
The first English settlers in Roanoke Island and Jamestown were here for monetary reasons, not for religious freedom.
Shush, you're dismantling their narrative and that is very rude. It will be harder for them to pretend the US was founded on freedom rather than the pursuit of spices and gold, well, probably not actually they'll just ignore you... but it could have!
Obviously the settlers were a monolith and decades can be reduced to a single time and place.
The americas were settled to get at some sweet spices and gold man, thats just reality. The puritans didn't found shit, they came to an already inhabited place and joined in. The pursuit of wealth has always been at the root of american colonization
Never in our history was this a thing and it will never be a thing. Cruelty is normal in the animal world and in the end, we are nothing more than animals
I mean just because cruelty exist doesn't necessarily mean everyone should go out of one's way to be cruel to people who don't have it coming but I definitely understand being prepared for cryelty
My point, it's never going to be any different. We are shitty beings. We always will be as a collective.
Thanks Malthus, real good stuff and definitely not just BS propaganda to excuse bad behavior.
This isn’t a refutation. It’s simply wishful thinking. Historically inneryard is correct. You’re speculating it’s possible. Your entire argument is unsubstantiated belief.
Idk where you got your history information but everything Inneryard said is unsubstantiated. Literally just parroting Malthusian propaganda. I wonder who benefits from that propaganda (the last sentence is sarcasm, I don’t wonder, I know)
It’s been proven time and time again that people are shitty to one another. I can name 10 places today where that’s true. At a certain point it’s not coincidence.
Think deeper. I could do the same with the opposite. Many anthropologists already have. People are the product of the environment and conditioning they exist in. That’s it. People bred and raised in hostile environments are hostile. This means to make better people, we must make a better environment. (23 more comments of these two arguing)
“Slavery isn’t a genocide unless you believes what happened to the African slaves in the United States was also a genocide. Which it wasn’t.”
You know what's funny?
During the Nuremberg trials America pushed for the definition of "crimes against humanity" to only include acts committed during war time. Because they feared otherwise the treatment of PoC in America would be considered a crime against humanity.
So much of the American idea that genocide against black Americans and First Nations isn't actually genocide is based on this idea "well technically, what we did doesn't meet this exact definition (that we defined specifically to not apply here)..."
Yes, and Hitler was explicitly influenced by American Jim Crow and the colonial British empire.
To further your point on the Nuremberg trials and international definition of ‘genocide’ I believe the exact wording was to do with “acts committed during a war of aggression” to protect US policies like internment or the use of nuclear weapons as defensive acts and therefore not prosecutable.
It ought to be.
Yes, indigenous civilizations did wage wars and some engaged in practices like human sacrifice. Those parts of history should be acknowledged and civilizations should not be whitewashed as "noble savages."
However, it's unfortunate how often people nowadays use the "indigenous civilizations did some unsavory things" observation as a springboard to claim that the victims of atrocities (the large majority of whom were civilians) totally deserved to be killed, displaced, or enslaved and have their civilizations destroyed.
It's like saying that American citizens today deserve to have atrocities committed against them because the U.S. government has done bad things.
People on reddit (and people in general) have a really hard time with the idea that both sides of a conflict can be guilty of bad things. Human sacrifice was bad AND genocide was bad and unjustified.
Its not that. Its not that at all.
Its that people on reddit have a hard time recognizing that the most destructive thing to ever happen to the majority of the world is European colonialism and the subsequent imperialism by the western world.
Nothing has even come close to the destruction of cultures and civilizations as European colonialism. The only two places on the planet that 'escaped' it are Ethiopia and Japan, and one of those is simply because they were awful imperialists themselves.
And the (mostly white) people on reddit are really uncomfortable with this fact so they justify it by calling out the few crappy things other cultures did/have done.
!!! 100%
The human sacrifice was basically ritualistic capital punishment. I always think its funny people get outraged that the Aztec turned something gruesome into something holy, while Europeans literally watched hangings for fun at the exact same time in history.
Fucking Augustus even ritually sacrificed his 300 of his enemies to Ceaser's Temple in Rome. It's stupid to pretend that Western civilization was above this stuff when the literal founders of Western civilization were doing them.
I mean, one could argue that witch burnings in Germany are a form of human sacrifice.
Did Europeans hang a lot of children though if we are going to compare? Were they tortured first before the execution, with special interest in getting them to cry as much as possible?
Gotta finish up the analogy.
Literally yes. Criminals and people who were seen as heretics would absolutely be executed, and children could be included in that- in fact, when criminals with children were executed, their children used to just be taken into slavery, and any slave child like that would be at really high risk of just being viewed as having a criminal predisposition. Any accusation of criminality towards a slave is a surefire shortcut to torture, and execution isn't far beyond that.
Unfortunately, executioners weren't just executioners in medieval Europe. They were commonly torturers by trade, utilizing it as both a form of interrogation (to torture criminals like bandits to extract information about their criminal enterprises, for instance) and/or as a facet of execution itself, famously in methods like drawing and quartering. It was routine to torture people before killing them.
So like... Yeah, a lot of children would have absolutely been tortured before being executed, just by virtue slaves and people associated with criminals being easily viewed as subhuman.
They did hang lots of children, especially for theft.
It's called the Shoah and it happened 400 years later
I mean yes, despite its lack of efficacy torture was used routinely in European criminal justice systems up into the mid 1800s (and, you could probably argue, was continued in an unofficial capacity well into the 20th century at least). The last child hanged in the UK was in 1889, with the last person sentenced to hang while under the age of 18 being executed in 1960. During the 1500s and up into the 1800s, again, child execution was incredibly prevalent throughout Europe, with a lot of these children being tortured beforehand. If you're gonna be a racist at least learn about your own fucking history, isn't that like the point of your whole schtick?
So they didnt torture children with the express intention of making them cry as much as possible to make their bloody sacrifice to the gods better then is what you you are saying. Cool, that's all i wanted to confirm. I know kids died from the state lol.
The kids are getting tortured and made to cry either way man, intent is a weird line to draw
I'm starting to think you might not know what the Aztecs did.
It’s funny how we keep cycling through the same arguments again and again throughout history.
You could go back to the imperial period of New Spain and find Catholic priests making the exact sort of arguments we find in this post
People on Reddit genuinely believe everyone who lives in a red state deserves to suffer and die lol. If you point out that blue cities and poor people who can’t afford to move are apart of those red states they ignore you.
Never seen that said except for maybe the odd edgy teenager. Liberals just want healthcare, they don’t have any reason to want red states to suffer any more than they already do. But we have a president who publicly posted a video of a man at his rally saying “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” without any serious objection, so….
Go to any news article on here about a red state business doing poorly or shutting down, just a slew of “everyone in that state voted for Trump so they should all go broke and die cause that’s what they ALL wanted!”. And if you point out the obvious that not everyone in a red state is a republican you basically get people saying they deserve to suffer too cause they haven’t moved or that them hurting is a necessary sacrifice.
yes there are a lot of intense people who will often say trump voters deserve the misfortune they experience, but there’s no need to exaggerate the wish for them to die on top of it. Practically every popular liberal sub has highly strict rules against that anyway, so you’d have to go looking in the margins to find that kind of unmoderated talk.
You can’t even openly insult someone in the largest politics sub without being actioned. They are very harsh about that in a way I personally think is a little insane, but it does mean that there’s nothing like you’re saying.
leapordsatemyface is a sub already. Trump voters suffering from Trump policy is a common topic, but no one’s in there pointlessly hoping for death. Except for Trump himself. That’s very common.
If you want a modern example but from a different country, look at Ukraine-Russia war.
Many, if not most, people on mainstream internet want Russia to be nuked and every last Russian to be killed. And every time Russian civilians die in some kind of bombing, scores of people come laughing and saying that they deserve it.
It's the same kind of thinking.
I think it's more fair to say that this was a done deal in Europe and those in the Americas were not simply noble pacifists with some moral stand over others. It was not targeted inhumanity which was exclusive to the relationships between these two groups.
The religious wars, which took place some years around new world colonisation are not recognised as a genocide. The enslavement of peoples under Rome, Babylon and such are not seen as inhumane war crimes. The harrying of the north is barely known of while William the Conquerer is recognised as an icon. The Arab conquests which eradicated and displaced native populations are simply ignored.
So many historical acts to the same merit, where their perpetrators are simply viewed as aspects of their time, and yet we must take a black and white moral icon and inhumane psychopath view through a modern lens of American colonialism which must be atoned for by all of a certain ethnicity. It's is utterly unreasonable, and it's not a view which is, ironically, going to stand the test of time because it is not foundationally sensible. I mean for gods sake, people attribute victimhood of Columbus to those half a continent away.
Can we have some educated nuance where that recognition of how native populations and colonial populations acted outside their isolated interactions when whittled down to the barebones simplistic level.
All those things are terrible. Colonialism of the americas, Africa, China. India etc. are still unique in scale and form and specially bad in its lasting effects, what with an enormous territory existing to be exploited and benefitting some far away land and them happening during the age of globalization.
Out of those examples rome is the closest to it, and if the roman empire was still a single continuous government with remnants of the conquered cultures being oppressed today or having to live some extremely unequal existence, they also would have to "atone" for it.
If the Ottoman empire or the Abbasids or the Ummayad were still around they'd also have to "atone" but it'd still be different to conquer neighbors and assimilate over time from going to some far off space you have zero stake, claim or connection to, and set up a colony for the benefit of the metropolis.
There's a lot that can be said here, but the most racist part is probably conflating two continents worth of separate nations with different people morals and practices into one overarching group. Like, you have to be one super smooth brained racist to claim the poor bastards on the various islands that Columbus enslaved are somehow responsible for what the Aztecs are doing.
Even then, the stuff Columbus got up to broke Spain's own laws regarding slaves to the point it actually shocked them and caused a stir.
I saw this post earlier and someone said that some these comments defending Columbus and the genocide of Indigenous Americans sound like they’re arguing “if Jewish people were the majority in Germany and faced similar conditions, they would also have done Holocaust on Germans, and thus the Holocaust is totally fine.”
There are some incredibly stupid comments in that thread. Permanent marker sniffing levels of dumb.
America in 2025 is run by a child rapist and a Nazi that a third of the country supports, but a genocide of us would still be wrong.
Even people in his time hated Columbus.
Yes! He’s one of the most unambiguously terrible people in history, because even “you have to judge them based on the morality of the time” can’t save him. Even his contemporaries were horrified by what he did.
Yeah, Bartolomé de las Casas had actually met Columbus as a child and ended up writing “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” an absolutely damning account of the Spanish treatment of the natives in 1542 from someone who had spent decades there. I don’t know how anyone could defend Columbus after its publication.
The Spanish Inquistion thought he was too much.
I have to assume that if you’re defending Christopher Columbus you are a colossal piece of shit.
imagine being such a piece of shit in late 1400's/early 1500's that the Spanish crown, who instituted the Inquisition, were so appalled at Columbus's behavior in the Americas (which he thought was Japan) they had him arrested because of it
Now imagine defensing that piece of shit 500 years later
The first Europeans to make contact with Japan were the Portuguese in 1543, by accident. Though, Europeans might have known of it's existence... Now I'm curious.
Marco Polo had heard of Japan from the Chinese and mentioned it in his writings about two centuries before Europeans actually visited Japan.
In this house he's a hero. End of story.
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
Looks like not many Sopranos fans here...
Sharp as a cue ball this one
I mean, it fits, Tony Soprano was a piece of shit.
We're not in your house, dumbass.
It was a Sopranos reference but a poorly timed one
It’s been researched that it’s difficult for dumb people to change their opinion when new information comes to light.I've been soprano'd
You never had the making of a varsity athlete.
Well in the future I'll ask that you extend to me the same courtesy that you would a crack addict.
This kind of sentiment seems to have arisen so fast and aggressively I have to believe it's a psyop. The other day there was a thread about a 13 year old who was scalped during Western Expansion, and from the comments you would have thought white folks were just pleasantly strolling through the prairie and were viciously attacked for no reason by savages. The kind of propaganda you would expect in 1825, not 2025.
It has gone along with the sentiment that history doesn't matter, and even if it did nobody(read: white people) never did anything bad to anybody ever.
Because it becomes a culture war battleground by proxy as people like in this thread seem unable to admit that yes, ritualized sacrifice of thousands is really bad and it was a good thing Spain put a stop to it even if it doesn't justify the wanton and needless cruelty of Columbus and the Spanish Empire.
Instead people try to white wash it and pretend they were noble savages.
If you kill all the potential victims along with all the perpetrators and destroy their society and culture, you haven’t “put a stop” to mass murder. In fact, you’ve made the mass murder a lot worse.
The Soviet Union did some heinous things during the thirties, but the correct amount of props the Nazi’s should get for “putting a stop to it” is absolutely none.
Except the Spanish didn't kill all the potential victims. And yeah, while you are right that the Soviets did some heinous things they should still have props for putting a stop to the nazis.
But yeah, the question was why the sentiment has risen so fast, and this is the answer. When people like you are capable of having zero nuance it gets polarized fast.
Uh-huh, and was that what I wrote? Or did I perhaps write about the amount of props the Nazi’s are owed?
It’s not “nuance” to both sides the genocides that the Spanish Empire committed. It’s just imperialist apologia.
Edit: Replying and then blocking me to make sure I can’t reply; sure sign of a master debater.
Your analogy sucked so I fixed it. If you had wrote better stuff to start with I wouldn't have had to do that. ;)
The whole argument of “which side was good and which side was evil in America” was already figured out by r/historymemes months ago
For anyone interested, the is a great writeup on colonial/native interactions in Ask historians.
I was going to mention, and was looking up numbers to verify, that many colonists in North America defected to live with the natives because the colonial leaders were incompetent and cruel.
Eh. A lot of the cases of people doing that usually end up being children taken at a young age. It isnt much of a surprise that people raised in a culture for years usually don't want to be yanked away and put into an alien culture, even if they originally came from it.
Contrary to popular belief, the same didnt happen with adults too often, and when it did, it was usually Native-American-to-Euro-American, not really the other way around
Euro-Americans, particularly Euro-Americans on the frontier, adopted parts of Native-American culture and society, but they didnt usually give up Euro-American culture and society the same way Native Americans adopted Euro-American culture.
Hell, just pointing out that Native Americans acculturized to Euro-American culture and society, contrary to what pop-culture/history likes to say, is likely to be unpopular. But it happened; by the late 1600s in New England alone, there were thousands of Native Americans that were adopting European culture wholesale, from religion to language to material culture.
Are indigenous human sacrifice really that different from Christians killing people for practicing witchcraft or being a jew? I don't think so.
And, is inter tribal warfare really that different from inter kingdom warfare?
Its interesting how whenever its a "two-sides" argument is "what the natives did in their land vs what the colonizers did" and never "vs what the colonizers also did in their land"
It's a quick narrative to paint the natives as uneducated savages (same as the "technological improvements they brought") that had to be put in check by a superior civilization.
Yepp. Like straight up, Europeans has multiple different types of commonplace cannibalism, ritually eating the body of God, to actually eating people's organs or drinking blood because of superstitious believe in the power of flesh. People used to rush the stage of executions to catch blood mixed with mud because they thought it had healing powers, or commodifying Egyptian mummies as little different than jerky.
Oh, absolutely. One is done by white people, which is justified and God's will, and the other is done by non-white people, who are gross and icky
Fun fact... Human sacrifice is biblical! People just choose to ignore or reinterpret that part!
That's ok for modern times but let's not rewrite history.
That's different from condoning it, all three abrahamic religions condemn human sacrifice
Does the purpose truly matter? It’s still brutal murder. Protestants and Catholics murdering each other en masse was the norm for a long time. Church criticism could easily earn a death sentence, as could preaching anything contrary to the sanctioned christianity.
OK but that's literally not the same thing as standardized human sacrifice bronze age societies practiced
Like yeah it does fucking matter because they're both two different things, ritualistic murder is different from murder over religio-political violence. Anyways my main point is that no Abrahamic religion condones ritualistic human sacrifice
I think the larger point people were trying to express is that religious sacrifice isn’t somehow inherently more barbaric than European societies commonly conducting public executions of, for a typical example, hanging, drawing, and quartering. Which included burning the victim’s entrails in front of them prior to death (standard for that method).
The intended purpose is less of an issue compared to the actual killings.
Fair, yeah I agree that both societies were barbaric in their own ways.
The old testament absolutely condones human and animal sacrifice. Wdym...
Roman human sacrifices during triumphal parades is a good comparison
How different is it from Augustus sacrificing 300 of his political enemies to Julius Ceasar's Temple? This shit is literally foundational to western civilization too.
They are different in principle.
Anti-heretical killings have a hypothetical end; no more heretics.
The aim is to get rid of heresy, and killings are not "needed" afterwards.
A "successful" Christian tyranny would have a lot of executions during the rise of power, but after dominating and "cleansing" the country, the executions would stop.
Aztec religious human sacrifice was endless, and the more people killed the better.
There was no realistic/semi-realistic end to it, people would have to be killed forever.
A "successful" Aztec tyranny would sacrifice hundreds of thousands people more than they were able in reality.
The only sacrifices that would be diminished in number, would be "anti-drought" sacrifices made from children, as if you aren't suffering from water shortage, you don't have to sacrifice that many of them, but the "thank-you" and "sun-fuel" sacrifices would only increase with the size/power of Aztec society.
So one brings finite death and suffering, the other brings infinite death and suffering.
Both are bad, of course; but you may look at the difference as between:
1. A country that has death penalty for having long hair.
2. And a country that randomly kills people all the time.
The 1. executions will stop when people stop wearing long hair.
But the 2. sacrifices won't ever stop.
This is so ignorant. Killing heretics would never stop because banning something with death penalty doesn't stop it from being done.
Not to mention the definition of a "heretic" isn't set in stone and can be changed, so they can easily change it to include anything.
The overwhelming majority of Slavic religion was lost due to oppression they faced after their countries adopted Christianity.
The destruction of the old religion (now heresy), was so effective, that not only are there virtually no pagans in Slavic countries, but even if you tried to become a pagan, there's almost nothing you can do, as the knowledge about actual pagan practices/gods/rituals/beliefs was almost completely lost/eradicated.
The few remaining traditions are mostly guesswork, and have little to do with actual old faith.
And even those tiny religions which claim to be old-pagans, arose only in the last 100-150 years.
So they also know nothing of old paganism, and are only guessing and inventing 90% of the things they believe were part of Slavic paganism.
That is true, but that's a slippery slope.
With that logic, all law and prisons should be abolished, because sooner or later the government will start making random stuff illegal for shit and giggles.
And whereas, things can be said about stupid/outdated laws and systemic racism, etc.
Every country in the world isn't rapidly becoming a new North Korea.
You don't need the "original"/"true" traditions to be heretic, if people want to worship non-christian gods (trinity), they will make up their own traditions. Allow me to give you an example by going back to America, the Pachamama may longer be given human sacrifices but people still believe, celebrate and worship her in the Quechua region.
What even? The point was that a heretic can be interpreted to be anything because there was no LAW that defined it, meanwhile legal terms have a definition. In Columbus time they could make up reasons a certain tradition or a political opositor was a heretic, and it happened.
The sacrifices in scenario 1 never stop either because their society keeps changing the definition of heretic to fit the description of the current marginalized group at the moment.
Once they're gone and everybody realizes that their problems aren't fixed, they proceed to find another scapegoat and repeat the process.
So there's functionally no difference between the two, because that theoretical end to the killing will never happen.
….yea there’s never a time when it would be stopped for lack of offenders with just the merest glance at history for proof. You familiar with how Protestants and Catholics warred against each other for centuries? There was never a time when one wiped out the other. I know you’re speaking hypothetically, but there was never a rational belief that heresy would eventually end if enough people died.
Christianity in Europe and Britain held government power, and could execute people for simply opposing their teachings. There was never a lack of people or reason.
Have you seen American history?
European did the Native American genocide, and then a lot of years of religious and racial discrimination against them, and that successfully stopped them from doing human sacrifices and many other things.
If they wanted they could've easily kill every single one Native American there was.
Now imagine reversed history, with the same power difference, where Aztecs have proper ships, metal, and gunpowder; while Europeans beat each other with stone/obsidian clubs and don't even have wheels outside of toys. (and throw in a plague or two)
With such a huge difference of power, Natives invading Europe/Asia could eradicate other religions/races entirely, or drop them to less than 5% minority.
And for a different part of history, Germans "lowered" the Jewish population of certain countries by 90-99%.
(and there's also my other comment here, where I mention the huge historical effectiveness of oppression of the original Slavic religions)
Those things can be done, and after you do this then you don't have the population to oppress.
So anti-religion and anti-racial genocides, do have a hypothetical end, or at least a huge drop in oppressed population (because the rest is dead)
Whereas, Aztec type of human sacrifices is race/religion -irrelevant, and as such there's no "end goal" to achieve by doing more of it now, and then slow-down/stop later.
So the larger and more powerful the Aztec society would become, the more sacrifices would be made, and that would never stop.
Now, a reminder for any readers with poor reading comprehension. I am not saying that genocides are good. I am only pointing out important long-term differences between genocides/oppression, and Aztec human sacrifice.
Ok, so this one really pisses me off. By the time the Spanish made it to Meso America, indigenous people had functioning pluming, in a time where the Spaniards back home shit in the street and wondered why they kept getting sick. Technology and advancements my fucking ass!
Buddy, I don't know what being covered in plumes has to do with where europeans shitted
lol this guy doesn't know how to use the three bird feathers
I hate the way people speak out of both sides of their mouth about this. I have seen people say “the stronger society conquered them” and “it was self defense against heretical savages!” In the same conversation.
Like they want to aura farm about being epic chad conquerors but also need everyone to know that they are completely wholesome and blameless (“enemy is both weak and strong”)
Yes. I heard that all the time at my old workplace. People who boasted about how strong and tough they were at the same time saying how much of a victim they were as well.
I bet you they absolutely do. Seriously why are there so many nazi comments in that thread. What the hell is thst sub.
Europeans used to watch public executions for fun. They used to EAT THE REMAINS OF MUMMIES cause they thought it had magical medical powers. They colonized half the fucking world but no...my ancestors deserved to be systemically wiped out and raped because they had cultures they didn't understand and didnt want to understand.
The indigenous people attacked them as a reaction. And they fucking deserved it idfc. im tired of people having these online culture wars about the "ethics" of genocide of indigenous people. its exhausting. im tired of it and idgaf anymore and the more people argue in defense of the genocide the more I am convinced the colonizers deserved the violence in return.
The reason they bring up NA’s having warring tribes is a way to dehumanize them and make CC’s actions look better. It’s the same exact thing that racists do to Black people and the same exact thing slave owners did to slaves.
“Yeah, Europeans (they just mean white) had war, but we didn’t scalp people or ritualistic sacrifice them; that’s barbaric!” White people did it too but you know, in a much more civilized way and they didn’t live in huts and play with dirt and sticks; that’s how they think.
Anytime anybody tries this, just look at them and tell them white people used to eat slaves, burn women at stakes (esp Black women, which you don’t hear about at all), feed Black slave babies to gators, and take their young children to public lynchings (lynching picnics).
That should either shut them up or make them triggered.
Crazy how right wingers are completely incapable of thinking that were other things than Aztec caricatures in South America
If anyone wants an example of a fascinating region that disputes the Malthusian lover over there, read about Transylvania during the Reformation.
Religion was just not really a factor for violence there, to the point its strangely tolerant for the period following the doofus Malthus.
Turns out normal people don't like butchering their neighbours. Odd!
Via:
Kamen, Henry 'The Rise of Tolerance' (1967)
Walzer, Micheal 'On Toleration (1999)
Balázs, Mihály 'Tolerant country - misunderstood laws, interpreting sixteenth century Transylvanian legislation concerning religion' The Hungarian Historical Review (2013)
Wien, Ulrich A. (ed.) 'Crossing Borders - Impact of Reformation in Transylvania since the 1520s. Diversity of faith and religious freedom in the Ottoman zone of influence.' (2022)
Daddy did not order this word salad. Daddy wants meat.
Snapshots:
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Look my boy CC did some bad things but I get a day off of work, so I think it balances out.
This is basically the viewpintof half of Australia on the 26th of january lmao
Man this entire subreddit seems miserable.
that's a pretty good one, trying to put Nazis in line with anyone is an underhanded move, but not a lot of people are going to defend gratuitous painful human sacrifice or cannibalism, even if it's religions-based or a cultural heritage
“Thanks Malthus”
Tempting flair
Reminder there’s a difference between Hitler and Columbus.
That guy wouldn’t cry if his mom fell off a tower holding his childhood dog.
Holy hell. This sub is just porn. 🥀
Bro just cause the Aztecs used swastikas does not make them Nazis smh