Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.
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This is an anarchist comm. You don't have to be an anarchist to post, but you should at least understand what anarchism actually is. We're not here to educate you.
Imagine being able to successfully convince yourself that the existence of defences, and conflict, between neighbouring indigenous nations, is equivalent, to the point of nullifying, sailing around the globe genociding and enslaving its population as you go, for profit.
White supremacy is a hell of a drug.
There’s no way humans didn’t have human problems. This seems like an extension of the “good ol’ days” that views the past with rose tinted glasses. There absolutely would have been theft, murder, laziness, have-nots…whatever. People are people.
Ninja edit: found this.
Banishment, execution, murder, and theft among other things were absolutely a thing.
I would go so far as to say this is some classic “noble savage” bullshit that only serves to dehumanize people.
Yeah, in a big way. The European colonists committing genocide on the Native Americans does not have to have the Native Americans as inhuman angels to be a massive atrocity and grievous wrong, and trying to take the position that the Native American societies were is nothing more than a xenophilic form of cultural conservatism and chauvinism.
Native American peoples were people, like any other, with human problems common to any society, unlike what this quote implies. They do not have a 'magic' history for outsiders to aspire to become 'as good as', they do not have the secrets to the elimination of the dastardly social ills of 'civilization'. They're people. They're people who deserved better than the atrocious treatment that they got, but the 'Noble Savage' stereotype is no more humanizing or acceptable than the 'Ecological Indian' stereotype.
It kind of goes both ways. Just because "people are people" doesn't mean any comparison of the savagery of two cultures is suddenly invalid. Native Americans had war, rape, disease etc. but then they got colonized by one of the most brutal, violent cultures in the world at the time.
If I lived with a spouse and kids in the suburbs and a murderer came in and killed my family. It would be pretty silly for my friend to say "stop trying to paint your old life as perfect. You and your wife were people. You fought often and you were hiding a gambling addiction. I swear this "noble domestic bliss" stuff is really not helping your cause."
but then they got colonized by one of the most brutal, violent cultures in the world at the time.
The past is filled with cultures which commit genocide, mass mutilations, torture, systemic rape, etc. The Europeans are only notable because they had unusual success, because that success came at the same time as philosophical development which began to make that treatment towards other Europeans taboo, and because that success eventually was leveraged into a system of strict hereditary privilege we're still dealing with today.
The Europeans were not more torture-happy than the Natchez, not more murderous than the Aztecs, not more mutilatory than the Sioux.
What the Europeans were was hypocrites. At a time when humanist notions of basic dignity and universal brotherhood were being preached by scholars and theologians, European soldiers were murdering and enslaving Mesoamerican peoples en masse. In an era when tolerance was quickly becoming the watchword of the day, European priests burned ancient texts in the Americas for the suspicion of pagan notions. In an era when 'all men are created equal', American colonists denied not only the right of the Native American tribes to be equal polities, but even denied them the ability to be equal citizens.
It's less jarring when a culture which believes that incorrect ritualism will doom the universe murders people for religious reasons, or when a culture admits that it finds the murder of women and children to be an honorable deed to slay civilians, or that a chauvinistic culture extols itself above all inferiors; compared to one that preaches one value and acts according to another entirely. Not even in a selfish manner, but in a manner suggesting a total reversal of their claimed principles.
When American colonists murdered American tribes from the youngest to the oldest, saying 'nits make lice', that was not some exceptional deed that had never happened before in the history of the world; a scant few generations ago Europeans were doing just that to one another; American tribes had done the same to each other since times immemorial; same with every other suitably wide collection of cultures on the planet. The difference was that we were supposedly 'civilized' enough to recognize the basic dignity of one color of our fellow man, but none of the others.
THAT is what makes European colonialism repulsive beyond the 'normal' passage of history, the butchering of Saxons by Franks, or of Pawnee by Sioux, or of Chinese by Mongols. We claimed to know better - we demonstrated an understanding of the values that should have prevented such action - we demonstrated the ability to restrain ourselves in dealings with fierce (European) foes - and yet we proceeded to indulge in the worst impulses of man that we claimed we had left behind anyway. We were not ignorant, we were not running on fundamentally different values that made murder somehow okay like Bronze Age fanatics - we made a deliberate choice to exclude subsections of our fellow man from the 'enlightened' values we were redefining our civilizations by.
They were not medieval peasants who knew no higher word than their lord's. They were not Aztec warriors brought up in a culture of human sacrifice and flower wars. They were men who were raised reading the works of the humanist enlightenment, whose norms should have excluded many of the actions they took - but when they saw a human being of a different color than them, they turned every last goddamn one of those norms on its head like they were the Hebrews bashing in the skulls of gentile infants in the Bronze Age.
I really appreciate this perspective (it's something I hadn’t considered before) Standing up for equal rights doesn’t mean we need to glorify or unconditionally defend a group, no matter who they are. For example, opposing police racism doesn’t require me to justify the actions of every Black criminal or attribute every single crime solely to systemic factors. (Though, of course, they often play a significant role.)
People are people. We all have the best and worst human traits somewhere inside of us, and we deserve human rights not despite of that, but because of that.
Were there not many different tribes? It stands to reason that there could well have been a range of different lifestyles too. Including that described above.
My point being that other recorded experiences with native americans do not invalidate this rosy reminiscence.
It is in no way a workable solution to the modern maladies of this fractious over-crowded planet but it does help to have a range of idealised utopias to draw from in our discussions of how to proceed.
Ok. An unsourced meme is not historical fact. It’s disturbing that it’s even taken as valid with no corroborating information, you arguing as if it were true, and using opinion to manufacture “proof” such a “different tribes” and “lifestyles”. There’s plenty of made up bullshit floating around on the internet in pic/text format, why is this one granted any more believability? Do you have a legitimate source indicating any such “utopias” or do you just want to keep making things up?
Good thing we've sacrificed that relative utopia to solve all those problems, eh?
Not even remotely close to a utopia, especially when compared to modern day, but I'm sure that doesn't matter to you.
The number of people that want to quote native Americans and talk about how native Americans were screwed over by the white man and how terrible it is all the things that have been done to them divided by the people in that group who are willing to give up their property and their lives and move back to their ancestral homes is the same as any number divided by 0.
And I'm saying this as a Lakota man.
You don't want to actually do anything about the problem with native americans.
You just want to feel Superior to other people.
But don't get off of your high horse because I'm sure the fall will kill you.
Kinda weird that everyone had a horse. Considering there where no horses in the Americas before colonialism.
There were. They just happened to have died out. So, ancient native Americans, potentially horse-knowledgeable, and then they died out 10000 or so years ago.
Which is an even weirder and more fun fact, an addendum fact.
There were no horses in America, there were evolutionary ancestors of horses that would not be able to fulfill any horse role.
Just like zebras are not horses and wolves not dogs. They would obviously not be owned by Native Americans nor would the Native Americans have a remarkable body of knowledge about them (like they developed with actual horses).
Horses were bred to be big and strong enough in Central Asia.
We also learned about horses in America from the book of Mormon. They were also around approximately 2 - 3,000 years ago before all the good light skinned believers died out. Along with their horses...
Weird less fun non fact addendum to the weird fun addendum fact.
Wooaaahh?? TIL
As the other comment pointed out, horses used to be found in the America's, but had since gone extinct before Europeans reintroduced them.
Horse-like ancestors, not horses. And they were 10,000 years ago.
In the same way that man wasn't drastically different evolution wise from that period to now (science says we got a little shorter, but thats about it genetically) , horses were not some wild precursor species here. They were just horses. Potentially stockier, but still horses
"As early as the year 1000, for example, Huron, Neutral, Petun and Iroquois villages were increasingly fortified by a timber palisade that could be nearly 10 metres in height, sometimes villages built a second or even third ring to protect them against attacks by enemy nations."
I was going to say. First Nations did not have some amazing peaceful utopia. They killed each other for resources too.
Almost as if they were human, doing human things
Damn humans. They ruined humanity!
This feels very "noble savage."
You think so?
I read it as a native american highlighting good points of an already functioning model of civilisation before white men brought them, figuratively and literally, all the misery and disease of their own
It was a knee-jerk reaction. I looked up the quote, and it was made by John Fire Lame Deer. The reason it sounds "noble savage" to me is because, as you say, it's highlighting only the good points of his peoples' history. They fought and killed one another just like all people have. On the other hand, it's not his responsibility to describe every good and bad thing in said history and there's no doubt they had a way of life that was working that the colonialists destroyed. I guess one very cold comfort is that the colonialists have continued their destructive way of life to the point that they will be destroyed as well.
This perpetuates an inaccurate stereotype, and separately, it makes no sense. Downvoted.
A man's worth was measured by how good he was at killing the other tribe's men. So there's that.
Native Americans weren't/aren't some monolithic people. Back then they no doubt had a lot of different ideas on measuring a man's worth.
lmao this is pure bullshit, like boomer on facebook, HRC lib bullshit