Stefan’s tip-toeing around the Native American origins is appropriate as it is a subject of much debate.
The best part about this presentation is the genetic aspect. Libertarians do not understand culture, so we can give Stefan a pass for that. He even passes up an opportunity to understand tribalism and trumpets the State instead. Culturally speaking, it is my contention that Americans are so much more freedom minded than Europeans, because of the contact with Native populations over hundreds of years. This makes sense in that, unlike striving pioneers of myth, American settlers were mostly white slaves or slave masters with no history of hunting, for instance. As far as Native women mating with whites, it was often in terms of prostitution attested by journals kept all along the frontier.
Concerning disease, Indian blankets traded east infected whites with small pox in Philadelphia in 1870! Infection generally travelled through trade, from coastal contact with European sailors kidnapping sex slaves and trading equipment for sex and then spread inland along the river systems.
Let’s not forget that Native Americans served as slave catchers to keep white slaves on 17th and 18th century plantations by returning them.
One mistake in determining population is the fact that what is now the Southern U.S. was densely populated by agrarian societies who kept slaves—including Europeans—engaged in human sacrifice, etc. I go for the 2 million persons in North America—that is north of Mexico, which held more people that the entirety of the Current U.S. and Canada.
What Stefan cannot get, as a materialist, is the cultural loss, the number of tribes and languages destroyed. The rate of population loss demonstrates that the Indians were winning most of the frontier conflicts and were slowly ground down.
The presentation of King’s Phillip’s war is grossly inaccurate and only tells one side of the story. The account of Increase Mather, one of the victims of what Stefan describes as a one-sided Indian attack on New England in 1675, is much more even-handed. Historically speaking, this presentation is as one-sided and inaccurate as the Leftist claims it is intend to rebut, but is what you get when you go reactionary. The empty land theory is over simplified to the pint of being useless. Only the coastline and forested hunting preserves were really empty in spots. The idea that disease marched ahead on bats wings and rat backs, with Europeans peacefully walking along behind and finding corpses, is patently false. The broad points though, are correct. There was no genocide as we conceive of it as the planned and executed elimination of a people. This only happened on a tribal level, with Indians having already a tradition of tribal eradication which was extended to some European settlements of that tribal scale.
What I love about this presentation is that it proves that Native cultures have died at the same time that the culturally stripped remnant population has expanded!
As far as Native displacement and the wonderful freedom of colonial life, if you really want to read about the truth, check out America in Chains at the link below.
America in Chains
>Culturally speaking, it is my contention that Americans are so much more freedom minded than Europeans, because of the contact with Native populations over hundreds of years.
This is the conclusion come to by William James Sidis, the man with the highest recorded IQ in history. He said that American love for freedom and democracy came from influence by the Northeastern Indians, wrote a book about it. The manuscript is available here: mortenbrask.com/wp-content/uploads/The-tribes-and-the-states-SIDIS.pdf
Sidis himself was quite a character. He was probably born too late or too early. His parents were Ashkenazi Jews from Russia. His dad was a revolutionary, got his MD in Russia, went to jail, got exiled to the US and did his PhD at Harvard, I think maybe the first Jew to do so. They were great friends of William James and that circle, for whom Sidis Jr. was named. Anyway, by the time Jr. was full grown (he graduated Harvard at a very young age in 1914,) the New England post-Unitarianism his parents had been inspired by had jumped the shark, and the full blown socialism which it had developed into was too vile for him to stay in for long; he ended up a sort of urban hermit working menial jobs, if that sounds familiar. If he'd been born 20 years later, he would have gotten pulled into the Manhattan Project or the American cryptographic establishment. You can see from his work that he never found the community and ideals that would live up to his G-d given abilities, and perhaps ended up having to invent them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis
James, the greatest loss to my personal beliefs, was the woodcraft and respect the Natives had for the earth. Cahokia could be one example of a culture that went to far and destroyed itself? Mayans too. I have no guilt, personally, or historically, if I were to find myself back in the 1800s I imagine I would fall right in to the European mindset, I do believe that some people are born with the heart of a hunter, I have one grandson who takes to it like I did as a young child, the loss of culture, language, philosophy, the amazing woodcraft skills they had, has always made me sad. Thanks James Ishmael.
"...The idea that disease marched ahead on bats wings and rat backs, with Europeans peacefully walking along behind and finding corpses, is patently false..."
I think you're sorta wrong about this. Your right that it wasn't bats but disease was carried by the Indians themselves. If 95% of all Indians had not been killed from disease and mentally paralyzed by the catastrophe then they would have driven the Whites into the sea.
Between the time the first explorers came and the later settlement type Europeans most of the Indians had died off and they had reverted to more of a hunter gather type existence. When the the new settlers came they brought a new round of mutated diseases that started the disease deaths all over again.
Same thing happened in the Amazon. This guy,
3.bp.blogspot.com/_kWMXxXiuOmM/S8svHrUjq1I/AAAAAAAAALw/7FeChx84its/s1600/francisco+de+orellana.jpg
Tough guy for sure.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana
First White guy to go down the Amazon. A complete mad man like the rest of the Spanish conquistadors.
When Orellana went down the Amazon he wrote about the huge cities of millions of people. No one went back until a few hundred years later. There was NOTHING there. Jungle. A few thousand people. They thought he lied but now we’ve found out he didn’t. Researchers studying the jungle found huge areas with laid out patterns kilometers long. They also found a type of built soil called Terra preta ( if you’re interested in gardening, soil or growing stuff this Terra preta is completely fascinating stuff). We now know these people all died from disease and the jungle just grew over everything.
The same thing happened in North America. The land was almost empty. As farmers would move in periodically the Indians would get upset about it and massacre them in the most gruesome of ways. The Whites would oblige them by giving them the same. The only Indian tribe that really tried to live with the Whites was the Cherokee but by the time they started to try this strategy I believe it was too late for it. The Whites hated the Indians and wanted them gone. If there had been less attacks and a more organized response by the Indians earlier in American history I don’t believe that it would have turned out as bad as it did for them. Any one who believes the Indians were loving, back to nature, peaceniks knows nothing about Indians. They were brave and tough, to the point of stupidity, fierce fighters not to be taken lightly.
I always found this notion of "Native American Genocide" to be quite preposterous, as obviously "The White Man" did a dismal job of it, if "he" intended to do it all. For example the native American tribes in my state are quite prosperous today thanks to casino gambling. The smallest tribe with about 1400 members is among the wealthiest. That tribe makes about 360 million dollars in pure profit annually from its major casino. This is after has contributed about 64 million dollars to the state treasury in accordance with the covenent agreement with the state. To put this in perspective the Green Bay Packers organization (a public corporation) recently announced it made 409 million dollars this past season. Nobody but the Indian tribes are allowed to run a casino in the state. Historicaly both the church people and the progressives in the state opposed gambling, regarding it as a social evil that ruined lives and broke up families. Regardless, our community at large is now willing to accept the cost of few destroyed lives in exchange for the huge revenues casino gambling provides the government, as well as for the fact that it has made the tribes self-sufficient and no longer wards of the state. Would anyone at all hand over such a lucerative enterprise (and the poltical influence that invariably comes with such wealth) to a group of people they wished to exterminate? Certainly not. So the tribes in my region have successfully transitioned from being Neolithic hunters and gatherers and subsistence farmers just a century or so ago to finding a place for themselves in our modern technological society.