In point of fact, the Europeans who discovered America brought advanced civilization to a savage, vicious, animalistic New World. The Natives who inhabited the Americas were brutal thugs waging constant wars and engaging in widespread scalping. Their economies were primitive with little incentive for technological innovation. A three-course meal consisted of maize, tree bark, and human flesh.
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When the white man came to this country, Indians were running things.
There were no taxes.
Excuse me while I LOL...
My God, this idiot thinks that the Native Americans were stupid cannibalistic savages. Oh this is just surreal. I suppose then, that he has never heard of all the civilizations of the New World, such as the Maya, Aztecs, Anasazi, or even the Mound Builders? If you include South America, then you also get the Incas, who were probably the least "primitive" among them... good God this is stupid.
"The Natives who inhabited the Americas were brutal thugs waging constant wars and engaging in widespread scalping."
With a bit less scalping, how does that distinguish Native Americans from the Europeans who conquered, enslaved and slaughtered them?
J J Sadia is wrong, wrong, and wrong.
In truth we were on the brink of our own bronze age, some 4000 years behind the arabs.
We developed civilization independantly... while Europe had to learn about it from the arabs
Now our plastic culture hates and destroys everything, including itself. The native Indians survived for twelve thousand years, our industrial civilisation has lasted about a century and a half.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a culture based on finite resources cannot last forever.
Because, as we all know, Europe had always been a peaceful culture with no history of violence whatsoever. Except those few thousand times when they had to invade a neighbouring kingdom, and that was for perfectly legitimate reasons, such as which of two siblings would be ruler or when the king didn't like someone's face.
As for every assertion about the state of things in the New World, [citation really really needed].
@D Laurier
The natives of the New World weren't exactly without sin either. The Aztec Empire was built on conquest, and there is a very real possibility that it was driven by their religious need to obtain human sacrifices. Prior to being subjugated by the British Empire, the people of the Northwest Territories often had bloody wars with one another (though, considering the state they live in nowadays, they might have been better off in their state of constant warfare). And the Anasazi built an entire city state that wound up depleting the surrounding resources, which were already scarce, leading to its own collapse.
The problem with Mr Sabia's argument is that the Europeans were little better. They too had human sacrifice (witch burnings and the like). They too had a history of conquest and bloody warface. They too overexploited their resources to the point of collapse (read up on the history of the European bison). The only difference is that the Europeans had a head start on technology, and so could do it with better weapons.
Heh. While that may be true in a few rare instances, except the tree bark thing which is fucking retarded, Europeans sure as HELL did not improve things at first. Can you comprehend a 90% death rate plague in today's terms? That's the stuff post-apocalyptic horror movies are made of.
The Europeans weren't exactly hot shit either. They went to war, holy and otherwise, with each other for reasons that were fucking retarded with a regularity you could set your watch to, and when they got here they wasted their damn time looking for gold and when winter came they did, surprise surprise, they resorted to CANNIBALISM.
And the only goddamn reason the Europeans had reached a higher societal tier faster than the Americans did was because they got lucky with native animals and resources. "Guns, Germs and Steel" is something that needs to be beaten into your brain FEMA-deathcamp style.
@D Laurier:
now, i know they weren't part of the diet, but there is tree bark that is edible. hell, humans are the goats of the primate family: we eat everything! (see: pica disorder)
[/smartass]
The whole article is FSTDT-worthy. Sabia goes into right-out denialism. He honestly thinks that throughout all of European history, Europeans were just as respectful of civil rights and peaceful as they are now. Please, read the whole thing, because I can't do it justice with this summary.
The only non-emergency cannibalism I'm aware of among the natives are the Mohawk (I don't know the actual name; "Mohawk" is Algonquin for "man-eater", and suffice to say the Algonquin had no use for the Haudenosaunee member groups), who partook of slain enemy warriors' flesh to adsorb their strength (i.e. essentially ritualistic, not for the taste), and Aztec priests, for a similar reason, to adsorb the strength of the war sacrifices. (And I'm not certain of the latter, truth be told.)
I know someone tried to claim that archaeological evidence showed the Anasazi were cannibals, but I'm only aware of one single place where they found that evidence. What makes them think the Anasazi couldn't have just had the bad luck to for a time have their own version of Jeffrey Dahmer?
A place far larger than Europe, but they think it had LESS cultural variation? It makes no sense...
Yeah, because Europeans were never vicious or warred amongst themselves, or ever had piss poor diets. Oh, wait.
@D Laurier
Also, the Romans developed a pretty damn good public sanitation system before their empire collapsed.
The worst thing this fellow would have had to eat in pre-Columbian America was bee grub soup, which a Native American friend of mine assures me is sweet and nutritious. Other than that... Let's see... Tomatoes, potatoes, corn in its many manifestations, squash, most kinds of beans, chocolate, vanilla, strawberries big enough to be worth your while, turkey...and I don't doubt I'm missing stuff. Yeah, I'd like to see him spending his life without any of it.
The Inca didn't have a concept of theft until the Spanish came. Roll that around in your brain. Taking things that didn't belong to you didn't happen, because they hadn't thought to do it. Isn't that wild?
Also, you need to die. Not in a fire, because fire keeps us warm and cooks our food, and feeding you to a fire would insult something that does so much for mankind.
No, you need to die in a pirahna-storm. Raining carnivorous fish. That's how you need to die.
I find it hard to reconcile this "portrayal" of the Native American tribes to those of William Penn or Ben Franklin, woh adapted the principles of inter-tribal government to the Constitution of the United States.
Maybe because "Joseph Sabia" is an utterly moronic imbecile, who wouldn't know history if it bit him on the backside.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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