"Are you saying the natives are solely responsible for their own genocide, and that capitalist greed does not have anything with the great crime?"
That's two separate issues.
If it happens to you, it's your fault. This is the reality of evolution, regardless of whether it's nice, fair, or beneficial to you or anyone else. Existential threats don't care. They exist only to take you out of the gene pool if you can't keep your place in it.
The plagues killed 98% of Native Americans ~between 1500 and 1600 because they didn't have any grasp of modern medicine, no vaccines, and obviously only inadequate means of preventing plagues from spreading. Additionally, those plagues had absolutely nothing to do with capitalism, greed, feudal states, or conquest.
The subsequent vulnerability of Native Americans that resulted from that extinction level event has indeed enabled a litany of crimes against humanity and predation - exactly what the many Native cultures afflicted each the others with in pre-Columbian times - committed by savage bloodthirsty POSs, but they remain responsible for their incapacity to defend themselves.
By hook or crook Native Americans have today been restored to an appreciable portion of their pre-Columbian numbers, which means the survivors have learned from the mistakes made by their forebears. However, they still engage in utterly brutal intertribal competition, only now those competitions don't involve tomahawks and scalps, but lawyers and casinos.
The two questions aren't related, even if both disastrous results stem from the same incompetence.
This is simply not true.
Scalping, just as ‘lawyers and casinos’ were all the invention of a colonizers. You are actually justifying the genocide over native people using fake news of their murderers. The might is not an excuse for crime. I must say, I didn’t expect that from you, @valued-customer.
I don't excuse any crimes, but neither do I sugarcoat Native Americans. Again, I was raised on an island in Alaska, and speak from my personal experience as well as research.
Speaking of research, my assertion that 98% of the tens of millions of Native Americans died of plagues between 1500 and 1600 isn't my invention. I've read accounts of 17th Century explorers that found sparse populations where earlier expeditions found numerous thriving communities of tens of thousands. Information on these events is sparse. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of N. America range from ~15M to ~150M, and you might as well just lump S. America in there too, because there's no records to cite and most of what stone age peoples use and build decays organically in just a few years without a trace.
Colonists didn't kill the mound builders, nor most of the Natives in N. America, because they never got there until decades later, after the Natives were damn near extinct from plagues.
If this is the claim you refute, please direct me to credible sources.
Certainly lawyers and casinos, maybe even scalping (although I doubt the practice was introduced given the import and value of trophies to many Native American cultures), were introduced. However, Native communities today are experiencing massive improvements in their financial situations as a result of their territorial holdings being considered sovereign nations, where casinos can be lawful.
In the area where I live two casinos ~30 minutes apart fund separate tribes, and do so substantially. Wherever big money is involved skulduggery is too. Wherever gambling is involved syndicated criminal institutions (mostly actual banks today) are deeply involved, and lawyers multiply like fleas.
It isn't pretty. People get shot. Hundreds of $M's are at stake. But it's important to note that Native American tribes are literally just as separate culturally from one another as European or African nations. In many cases these peoples have been at war with each other for thousands of years. Wrangling in court over ten foot easements is IMHO preferable to murdering each other and taking their women and children as slaves, which was absolutely the SOP during pre-Columbian times in North America.
I probably knew Tlingits in my youth that today own Aleut slaves. These aren't TV Indians, particularly the Tlingits who never were conquered by either the Russians or Americans that moved in on their territory. In fact the Tlingits probably drove the Russians to sell Alaska. The cannon on the Russian ships were devastating to the Tlingit, and other native tribes like the Aleut and Tsimshian, villages. So chiefs and acclaimed warriors would slather up in seal grease, grab a big, heavy rock, and swim out to the Russian ships at night and bash holes in their hulls. Can't shoot cannons underwater, and the Tlingits were never, ever gonna give up.
Neither do I deny horrifying war crimes and crimes against humanity followed the decimation of the plagues during the 16th and 17th Centuries, committed by conquistadors and pilgrims alike. But it's important to admit such atrocities were SOP globally at the time, including London, Paris, Kiev, and Moscow, as everywhere else, and also undertaken by Native American peoples themselves, both against colonists and their generational enemies in their homelands. I recently read that ~80k people were murdered for being witches in Europe at this same time. Crucifixion and burning at the stake long predate colonial presence in the Americas. It's not like there were Geneva Conventions.
If you disagree, please provide credible evidence, as I do want to know what the actual facts are. Whether what I read in books, saw with my own eyes, or heard with my own ears the histories of the Natives where I grew up, is wrong, I want to be set straight if it was.
Treating those people as someone who deserved what they’ve got, is mildly put indecent. It is not the matter of liking or disliking someone (or ‘sugarcoating’ as you say), it is the matter who attacked and wiped whom. Anything else is a shameful attempt of equalization of victims and murderers.
It isn’t your, alright, but this period correspond with the colonization of European conquerors. Not one of the lethal diseases was not known before they came. It is well documented:
The fact even Wikipedia does not deny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas, and leaves many links to the atrocities made by colonizers. It was the greatest genocide in the history of mankind, and it cannot be justified by saying it has happened everywhere else:
In essence, you are saying: “Well, yes, American indigenous people were wiped out, but British did the same thing with Aborigines in Australia”. How does that sound? Not a justification at all?
What would you do if someone comes to steal your land kill your people? You wouldn’t defend yourself? Wouldn’t you reciprocate the crimes of conquerors?
When you can respond to what I did say, and not what you think I meant in your head, you'll make sense. You twisted everything I did say to fit your agenda. You can just have that conversation with yourself. You don't need to interject a pretense you're responding to anything I said.
What I did say was that the victims of genocide have not protected themselves, and they have no one to blame for that but themselves. This is more relevant than ever today, and I recommend everyone be as secure as possible against war, famine, and plague, because I think they're getting started in the West.
Fail to plan, plan to fail.
I actually can’t construct anything worse than you can with your explanation. That’s why I was mainly asking you to explain.
That's utterly silly. Who do you think is responsible to protect people from catastrophes if they aren't? You? Me? Rampaging hordes have been a hazard since humanity learned to sharpen sticks. Anyone unprepared for them asks for what they get, and that's the fact of evolution.
This isn't a comment on rampaging hordes' responsibility for their actions. It doesn't address them at all. In the context they are comparable to volcanoes and earthquakes, just another disaster that human societies face from time to time, and which they are either competent to survive or perish therefrom. If you want to discuss the responsibility of rampaging hordes for their rampages, that's a different matter that we should not confuse with the matter at hand: the personal responsibility of people for their personal survival.