Dessalines"They're the same picture"
Some audiobook torrents on the US settler colonial project:
ieatpwnsI’m gonna check this out
BananaPealYou forgot the pre-1700s picture where all of the US is red.
Bloodthirsty british and european settlers, greedy for land, wiped out hundreds of native tribes, each with rich cultures, art, languages, and beliefs. And most of this happened less than 150 years ago.
Clearing an entire continent of peoples is unprecendented in history, and what’s worse, is that it’s still ongoing, and no one has had to account for this earth-shattering crime.
ForesterI know who you are and I know you won’t bother to read into this but for anyone else interested. Most of the native population was wiped out before the first English got here. Disease spreads and a bunch of Spaniards started spreading diseases in the 1400s.
HiddenLayer555That’s supposed to make it better?
Very true, but Spaniards did not know about the lack of immunity from European diseases and never had that intention for erasure of Indigenous. The English, that colonized 2 centuries after the Spaniards, used European diseases as an additional tool for complete genocide on indigenous.
The Spanish 100% knew. What pipe are you smoking from friend? They would intentionally trade items from the people in their camp that had smallpox to the natives. That’s how the initial outbreak on the coast started in 1518.
So Spanish are just as bad as the English then. That doesn’t help your case.
Case? You seem confused, I said the natives were mostly gone before the English stepped foot in the new world. That’s a historical fact read a book. I’m not saying anything else. I have no case.
Germ theory was unknown then and those Spaniards lacked understanding of contagion, well I’m lying, the people then knew about contagion with blood and corpses but not through items like air or blankets. The disease spread, while catastrophic it was fully unintentional. The only accounts like the famed Bartolomé de las Casas described the diseases as “divine punishment” or “mysterious plague”, never as a warfare tool.
However with the British, again more than 2 centuries later, there was knowledge and intent as per Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet discussing it “Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among the disaffected tribes?” “I will try to inoculate them with some blankets…” during the Siege of Fort Pitt (1763).
Diseases did not conquer hundreds of tribes. The history of the new world is a one of campaigns of war and conquest against indigenous peoples. The fact that many are ignorant of this history is part of the whitewashing project. I linked some audiobooks below so you can learn this history.
If the nazis won, they would teach you about the shoah in exactly the same way western nations teach you about the colonization of the americas.
Diseases did not conquer hundreds of tribes.
Disease played a major role in the European’s ability to conquer those tribes. It’s not an either/or situation. It is true that the “Americas” that the English started colonizing had already been devastated by the contagions brought by the Spanish. The English undoubtedly would have found it far more difficult and maybe even impossible to conquer those hundreds of tribes had they not first been so severely depopulated by pandemic. Acknowledging this does not absolve or even lessen the atrocities committed by the English.
/s. Unfortunately your rhetoric does not follow party line. Please censor yourself.
(I do appreciate that one of you is a historian and not a party liner)
(I do appreciate that one of you is a historian and not a party liner)
The upper estimates are around 90%. It’s likely lower. But even an order of magnitude like that is not “wiped out”. Millions of people still lived on the land
My brother if there had a hundred people in your town you lost 70 to 90% of your people and then there were only 25 to 11 of you left alive I’d say your group was obliterated. I do not argue that there were still millions of natives left alive, but there were roughly 60 to 100 million natives prior to the first explorers arriving.
Cool so you are saying millions of people aren’t worth consideration. And I’m not your brother
I have never said this. It’s nice to know that you have a vivid imagination, however.
redchertHolocaust deniers also claim that most victims died due to diseases. The destruction and enslavement of natives did in fact cause their high mortality due to diseases.
So? The point is Europeans nearly wiped them out. Disease surely helped but they were making sure to finish the job.
british and european
BREXIT MEANS BREXIT
Tankie detected, opinion rejected!
At first I thought I agree with the post and now I’m second-guessing what OP is trying to convey. This is an amazingly ambiguous picture when posted without further commentary.
LuciI think this is another america bad post. Like we don’t know that already.
Posting this to /memes is what confuses me the most
And the OP Dessalines is none other than the creator and lead developer of the Lemmy software (Yes! The creator of Lemmy itself!). He is also the lead moderator of the lemmy.ml instance. He is a well known tankie and genocide denier in the Fediverse.
How is this relevant in an objectively verifiable point though?
You’re not sure if you oppose the genocide of indigenous peoples or not?
I’m sure some people are perfectly okay with the bottom part and would consider it a great justification for the top part. That’s what I meant.
Ah, my bad.
Huh. I hope we can get to mutual understanding. I’m not trying to corner you. I’m just curious. What did you think at first the image showed and how did the comment about tankies lead you to second-guess?
Right, I was too vague too. See my other comment please.
SigntistI mean, they're trying to say that the terrible colonialism practiced by the European-based American people against the native Americans if happening again in Israel. We're well past the ability to stop the atrocities committed by America in the past, but we're able to stop Israel today. The same idea applies to the terrible treatment of non-while populations in America today by ICE and other agencies, while we're on the topic of preventable atrocities.
“I thought I agreed with the sentiment of recognizing an ongoing genocide as compared to a previous genocide, but now that I see it’s a filthy commie posting it, I’m not sure anymore, they must have bad intentions!”
Careful, you might get a rule 2 ban for that!
How is this a meme?
It’s not really, but what a meme is has kind of transcended to “any image on the internet”.
Memes have to be pictures?
"Birds aren't real" is a meme in my book.
Fair enough. I mostly just meant to highlight that it’s kinda used for anything on the internet lately.
I remember reading the selfish gene maybe a decade ago… iirc a meme is really just any idea, that like a gene, can replicate and spread, and has a “fitness” to its environment that means it either spreads easier, or dies out. It applies to any idea / mental construct, from art, music, even to sayings, philosophies or moods.
MicrowWell it's low effort and loses a lot of nuance in the way it draws its maps, so there is that
What is this supposed to mean? Are you insinuating that the genocide of palestinians or native americans is trivial?
The past can’t be changed but we need to be aware of the atrocities of the past. But now it can be prevented and something can be done to stop it but world powers are sitting on their asses to fill their pockets. We should be learning from history not repeating it.
The ambiguity of the meme format makes it seem like rage engagement bait
But now it can be prevented and something can be done to stop it but world powers are sitting on their asses to fill their pockets. We should be learning from history not repeating it.
If you don’t see how both of these western settler colonial projects are linked, then I’m sure you haven’t learned from history. The fact that many westerners are equally ignorant is why we’re repeating it in 2025.
Samsuma“Ah but you see, a long time has passed by! There’s generations [of settler-colonialists] that have already lived through these times, and the people of today have nothing to do with their past!”
Motherfucker, landback means the LAND which is rightfully the Indigenous’ is taken BACK, and it means you GO BACK too, no one should give a fuck about which gen. you’re currently a part of.
They’re going to say the exact same shit for Palestine if it’s allowed to be festered long enough by settler-colonialists, as if it already hasn’t been festered.
I call this the finders keepers rule of colonialism. The western supremacists think that as long as you
- Kill a large enough percentage of the native population, and
- Wait long enough
Then the finders keepers rule kicks in, and you get to keep anything you stole. They even will yell “no ethnostates!!” at indegenous peoples they evicted and stole land from.
The main point is that its not for anyone but indigenous peoples to determine what they want to do with their land.
I agree that colonizers have harmed indigenous people, but find the argument anyone has a birth right claim to property proposterous. As Proudhon proclaimed, “Property is theft!”. I expect any revolution toward anarchy to remove property from the owning class.
I am less knowledgable than you about “land back”. How does “land back” differ from other ethno nationalist movements like “blood and soil”?
Also it’s very much actively going on and the current generation is totally involved.
Belly_Beanis [he/him]There are people still alive who grew up in residential schools. There are even people alive who knew survivors of the Trail of Tears. The genocide of Native Americans really wasn’t that long ago and (like you said) still ongoing.
Obama forced an oil pipeline through indigenous land in what? 2014?
and it means you GO BACK too
That doesn’t really make sense if you’re not first-gen; there is nowhere to go “back” to, if you were born there. What place does someone belong in more than the place they were born? Do you think that some far-away land with a different culture, that hates immigrants, would accept someone in just because of blood relation?
Land back means the ownership of the land is returned; it does not mean the expulsion of non-indigenous people. Maybe you should get off your armchair and go to a protest.
Land back means the ownership of the land is returned; it does not mean the expulsion of non-indigenous people
Not up to you or me, that’s up to the indigenous tribes themselves to decide.
That doesn’t really make sense if you’re not first-gen; there is nowhere to go “back” to, if you were born there.
Less than half an hour later, the finders keepers rule I talked about elsewhere in this thread gets invoked.
Maybe you should get off your armchair and go to a protest.
Extremely redditor behavior
Less than half an hour later, the finders keepers rule I talked about elsewhere in this thread gets invoked.
it’s almost like the most thought-terminating cliches abaolutely HAVE to be said and mentioned at the slightest available opportunity 🤣
Maybe you should get off your armchair and go to a protest
(I admit I probably violated rule 1; my apologies to @Samsuma for that.)
What I mean by this is that people who are actually involved in these issues out on the street talk very differently than people do on lemmy. Or reddit for that matter. I go to some Indigenous issues protests in British Columbia now and then, usually it’s street blockades; “land back” is a very common rallying call. I’ve chatted with many protesters; what they mean by this is “the landlords should be indigenous” essentially. And also that much more territory should be transferred back to the reserves. Some people even put the goal at replacing the government entirely. But nobody is talking about ethnic cleansing.
By finders keepers, what I thought you meant was “it was done in the past, by different people, so it’s not a problem that can be solved anymore.” That’s different from “we have to completely erase all people descended from settlers/colonists.”
Nakoichi [they/them]Hi there I am one of those people with over 20 years of direct action work on this topic and some of my best friends are Lakota, if they wanted me to leave with the rest of my settler kin I would honor that and keep fighting for revolution elsewhere God knows if I got sent back to Ireland or Wales I would have plenty work to do. You should think very hard about why you are so defensive about this.
That said chances are if you actually put in the work and shut the fuck up about impracticality or whatever else excuse you use, you’d probably be allowed to stay. Hell my friends family invited me to a wedding out at Pine Ridge but sadly I could not afford the travel expenses to attend because my last trip out there to help them with the sun dance cost me a couple grand.
I didn’t give impracticality as an excuse. I just don’t agree with ethnic cleansing. Everyone has a right to live where they were born. Furthermore, it just doesn’t track with the indigenous people I actually know in real life. I can’t imagine any of them wanting to expel most of their friends.
do something more meaningful
I help with language revitalization on occasion, there are places coders like myself can help there. I’ll admit it’s not exactly a full-time job, but it has its value. But in general I don’t want to bother people who live on reserves. Regardless, I reject the notion that you need to actually be helping in order to have an opinion.
I reject the notion that you need to actually be helping in order to have an opinion.
Damn almost took you seriously for a second.
imo if people are talking about kicking you out of the place you were born, you are warranted an opinion.
Not in this case you really arent