This is a sad quote, and I'm sure you've all read it before.
In two momentous early encounters, Native Americans greeted Europeans with kindness and generosity. Here is how Christopher Columbus described the Arawak, tribal people living in the Bahamas when he landed there in 1492: "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."
*****
A similar pattern unfolded in New England in the early 17th century. After the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower, they almost starved to death. Members of a local tribe, the Wampanoag, helped the newcomers, showing them how to plant corn and other local foods. In the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest with a three-day feast with the Wampanoag. The event my classmates and I reenacted in grade school really happened!
But soon after the white settlers wiped out the Wampanoag.
The Scientists American
John Morgan - Thanksgiving guilt trip: How warlike were Native Americans before Europeans showed up?
15 comments:
"On the whole the native Americans were a peaceful people.”
Yes, until the white man came with such brutality that the natives were forced to fight back in order to survive. The natives started fighting the whites, plus each other, tribe against tribe. It was all about survival amid escalating violence.
For example, whites started the practice of taking scalps. The natives copied it.
Until the whites came, when one native tribe fought another tribe, the members “counted coup,” which meant that the winning tribe was the one that scored the most physical touches on the bodies of the competing tribe.
White savagery changed this to outright killing.
One exception to this was the Aztecs, who took slaves from neighboring tribes and sacrificed them to the Aztec gods.
Hernan Cortez could not have defeated the Aztecs in 1521 without the help of several different tribes who sought freedom from the Aztecs.
While the Spaniards invaded Central and South America, the French invaded the American northeast, especially what today is Canada. Eventually “New France” extended down to Louisiana. The British occupied the Atlantic Seaboard down to Florida, which was occupied by the Spaniards.
“After the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower, they almost starved to death.”
Half did die. 102 Puritan Separatist Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower and settled on what is now Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts. During the very first winter, 45 of them died. Finally with native help they learned how to survive, and then they began to exterminate the natives.
Some lies never end. The ancient Romans enslaved and exterminated people in order to bring them “civilization.” The French and Spaniards enslaved and exterminated people in order to bring them “Christianity.” The Western Empire enslaves and exterminates people in order to bring them “democracy.”
Utter nonsense. There was a lot of pre-contact war. Just read up a bit on the Iroquois confederacy. Read up on the earlier French contacts, in which, for instance, Champlain allied himself with the Hurons in their already long-standing war with the Iroquois.
We must always acknowledge the brutally of western colonization, but pre-European North American was a violent place.
I meant "brutality". Here is something to consider:
North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence
By Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza
The University of Arizona Press
Despite evidence of warfare and violent conflict in pre-Columbian North America, scholars argue that the scale and scope of Native American violence is exagerated. They contend that scholarly misrepresentation has denigrated indigenous peoples when in fact they lived together in peace and harmony. In rebutting that contention, this groundbreaking book presents clear evidence--from multiple academic disciplines--that indigenous populations engaged in warfare and ritual violence long before European contact. In ten well-documented and thoroughly researched chapters, fourteen leading scholars dispassionately describe sources and consequences of Amerindian warfare and violence, including ritual violence. Originally presented at an American Anthropological Association symposium, their findings construct a convincing case that bloodshed and killing have been woven into the fabric of indigenous life in North America for many centuries.
The editors argue that a failure to acknowledge the roles of warfare and violence in the lives of indigenous North Americans is itself a vestige of colonial repression--depriving native warriors of their history of armed resistance. These essays document specific acts of Native American violence across the North American continent. Including contributions from anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and ethnographers, they argue not only that violence existed but also that it was an important and frequently celebrated component of Amerindian life.
Marian all of these guys are extremely biased anti-war and have had no scientific training so you will get no objectivity out of them on this subject believe me....
Columbus was after gold and silver via ANY means....
Matt Franko admits to being "to the right of fascism" and furthermore, with no prompting, admits to being someone who would willingly "push the button" and exterminate hundreds of millions of people, unaware that doing so would result in self-suicide and a global holocaust. That's his "scientific training", albeit one suffused with nuggets of irrelevancies from the Bible. His "scientific training" includes dismissing evolution as nonsense (despite it being the most tested scientific theory in history and never found wanting) and a total incomprehension of stochastic theory. Matt pontificates about "objectivity", but then he's using his own warped definition. There is a very simple way to decide these things: let's look at the facts. But our self-proclaimed "to the right of fascism" stormtrooper refuses to accept any facts that don't correspond to his extremely strange cloud-cuckoo-land version of reality.
All this is embarrassing enough, but Matt goes further. He claims that all equations have exact solutions. Can he give us these exact solutions? No, of course not. If he could, he'd be feted as the greatest mathematician in history. The approximation techniques mathematicians have developed to "solve" these more difficult equations are, to Matt's mind, nonsense. Clearly Matt has never taken a course harder than elementary calculus. If he had, he'd know all this. He's know that even a system with three idealised particles (the famous three-body problem) can't be solved let alone an n-body problem. How does he think models are made of gases, quantum fluids, stars, galaxies, galactic superclusters, biological systems etc? He has no idea because, like someone who can't get past freshman mathematics for engineers, he's still playing around with inclined planes, pulleys, two-body systems and Ohm's law. I have considerably more scientific training than, Matt, and almost certainly more than anyone here, even the brilliant Brian Romanchuk (an absolutely superb mind who is ALWAYS worth listening to), who went from applied mathematics to engineering. That's why I can categorically say that Matt hasn't got the foggiest what he's talking about. It's total gibberish from beginning to end.
Matt seems to think that his ability to read a bank balance sheet and calculate some stuff about capacitors makes him a genius in all fields. By his own admission, he is a fascist who dreams of initiating by his own hand genocide. He condemns people for being anti-war because he gets off on war. For Matt, the deluded scientific and mathematics genius who can't get past the two-body problem, there can never be enough shedding of innocent blood and chaos. If 'Murica does it, it's good. End of story. It's a conveniently simple morality for a conveniently simple-minded genocidal fascistic maniac.
Warfare has been a normal occurrence throughout all mankind’s recorded history... grow up...
“I have considerably more scientific training than, Matt”
I would contest that... or perhaps would advise you to go get your munnie back...
John:
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-evidence-could-totally-break-our-understanding-of-quantum-mechanics
Uh oh!!!!!
Get your munnie back!!!!!
“Franko condemns people for being anti-war because he gets off on war.”
Yes, because he has never had to experience war himself. He’s a bed-wetting little punk that lives in his mommy’s basement, spewing excrement in a desperate bid for attention.
Art major!
Art major!
Get yer munnie back!
Get a job, Franko. And try washing your own diapers instead of expecting Mommy to do it for you.
Columbus was after gold and silver via ANY means.... Franko
So much for Austrian Economics being a promoter of peace when history reveals otherwise.
As much as I hate to agree with Franko on *anything*, truth is we humans are violent little monkeys and that goes for Native Americans, too.
Matt: "I would contest that... or perhaps would advise you to go get your munnie back..."
Contest what? You have a bachelor's degree in engineering. I have considerably more than that, although to my mind that isn't a measure of anything. One of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century was a qualified engineer before taking up physics. But it is *YOU* who makes qualifications a measure, not me. By your standard, I am far more qualified than you.
A true measure, however, is what is said/written, not some letters on a piece of paper, and what you say/write is total gibberish. I wouldn't bring it up - everyone has a right to their own scientific bees in their bonnets - if it were not for your droning on about "scientific training" and "Arts majors". Even then, I still may not have brought up your shocking mathematical and scientific ineptitude. But I can't help myself when I read your bloodthirsty tirades, your demands for genocide, your pride in a movement that is "to the right of fascism", whatever the fuck that may be (Nazism perhaps?), your dismissal of anything that shows the GOP and Washington for what they are. It seems I'm the only one on this blog who takes great exception to all this "fascist" pride and your admiration and championing of genocide for no good reason other than it's been done in the past. It's vile, it's stupid, it's mentally sick beyond belief, and because everyone ignores it you come back with more of it, more whacko than the last genocidal insanity, until a so-called "snowflake" replies and calls you out, at which you point you clam up just as all whacko rightwing snowflakes do.
Matt, the so-called information in the link is basically old news. It just regurgitates what has been known for some time, albeit with some new experimental evidence from Steinberg's lab in Toronto. The piece is also packed with mistakes and clearly written by someone who doesn't understand the field. Anyone who has studied, as I have done, the foundations of quantum mechanics to any high level knows all this, and could have explained it much better than the gibbering idiot who wrote the piece, which for some reason has got you all gaga. Quantum mechanics in its current form cannot possibly survive. Even Steven Weinberg, a grand pooh-pooher in the past, now accepts that something is wrong. Something like what Steinberg (an extremely clever bugger who does some of the best work in the field) and others have been saying will eventually overturn standard quantum mechanics.
But this is all irrelevant. It's not a problem. It's called science, and science keeps moving, keeps progressing. We learn more, and we develop new techniques. Your reply that I should demand my money back is like demanding my money back because Newton's laws of motion don't explain the very small or the very fast, or a patient asking for his insurance/tax money back because the cancer operation failed. It does highlight in stark fashion yet again your inability to understand science and how it operates: I should ask for my money back because there are some foundational issues with the most accurate theory yet devised by the human mind? Take some courses in quantum mechanics and learn something. MIT has two excellent courses available on Youtube. Once you've done those, you can then take some courses on quantum optics, quantum field theory and quantum information theory. Then I'll give you a reading list of about fifty postgraduate-level books to read on the mathematical and physical foundations of quantum mechanics. Only then can we have a discussion on roughly equal terms. But I suspect you'll start ranting about exterminating certain particles for being leftwing or supporting fascist superparticles or some other psychopathic drivel.
John:One of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century was a qualified engineer before taking up physics.
Yes, back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I happened to sit in front of him at a lecture. But what a chatterbox he was! ;-)
Calgagus, oh you lucky bastard! I would have done anything to have merely seen the man. What a time it was when so many giants lived among us (Dirac, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Wheeler, Chandrasekhar, Feynman etc. Einstein doesn't count because his genius is almost impossible to come to terms with; he shares a podium with Maxwell and the super freakish Newton).
I knew someone who knew Dirac well. He said talking to him was "fucking impossible". This was the only time I heard this gentlemanly nonagenarian professor with scientific awards up the wazoo to utter an obscenity. Bohr apparently was not that different either and he had the added complication of having such a faint voice that no one could ever make out a damn thing he said. For Dirac, almost all situations required nothing more than one word answers! Can you imagine having a meaningful conversation with someone that unusual? All of which reminds me, I must read Graham Farmelo's suitably titled biography "The Strangest Man". Nevertheless, Dirac was an absolutely extraordinary mind. Although I wouldn't personally recommend it to anyone but the more hardy types, his book on quantum mechanics is nothing less than one of the great classics of twentieth century science. Of Dirac's many contributions, he is not appreciated enough for his brilliant insights into what is now known as the "anthropic principle". It's a quirky subject and one that attracts some silliness, but Dirac's thinking is majestic. Less well known, unlike Einstein and Schrodinger who were very vocal, was the fact that he showed quite a lot of scepticism towards the framework of quantum mechanics that he helped create: he thought something better would be developed. We're still waiting, but then science is hard.
It's funny how things work out. Einstein was so obviously right and Bohr so obviously wrong. But far too many people just don't understand the argument and go away with some silly notion that Einstein's opposition was to God playing dice (some of Einstein's best work was in statistical physics, for pity's sake!). All anyone has to do is read what Einstein wrote to understand why he was so self-evidently right. If you're interested, the best person to read, funnily enough, is Tim Maudlin, an extraordinarily brilliant philosopher of science. His book "Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity" is beyond anything as trivial as a masterpiece. It could have been cowritten by Einstein and Bell, yet another extraordinary genius who may not have been altogether human!
.. so many giants lived among us: .. Wheeler - that's who was giving the lecture - NY Academy of Sciences, late 70s - he said we are honored by Professor Dirac's presence and asked him to stand up. Don't think he said anything when he did, but bowed slightly. A very dignified, august presence.
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