this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
745 points (98.2% liked)
memes
9615 readers
2690 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thanks, can you provide a source for that? Was that true for indiginous people in the Spanish colonies in the Americas in the 16th and 17th century already? Cause these people were not better off. Spain's colonial rule was as brutal and genocidal as any other. The common whitewashing myth goes that the indigenous population of South America 'was reduced' to large parts in this era due to not being immunologicaly prepared to the 'flu'. Well, they were not 'immunologically' prepared to the metal swords and armour and the bullets of the conquistadores. Many of those who survived were killed by working themselves to death in the forced labour system in notorious Spanish silver mines (see e.g. Potosí). Let's be careful not to portray Spanish colonialism as being something 'civilized'* by the omission of this, but maybe that wasn't your intention.
*Well maybe it was civilized, depending on your view on civilization.
I recommend reading this section of the "Spanish colonization of the Americas" Wikipedia article, which has plenty of sources. Obviously they weren't saints, but, at the time, they were "the dawn of human rights" (cited in the article) and took Christian values very seriously, which is also why they converted all the population forcefully. There's no denying that, but, as a silver lining, education and religion were almost one and the same, and they did build many universities, schools, etc.
When I visited the United States, they always tried to paint it as "they were all equally bad" when it came to colonizers in the museums I went to. However, I feel like that is because the "situation" with natives was way worse in North America than it was in South America.