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News & ArtsWednesday, May 23, 2012
History Settlers in History, Settlers Today, Settlers from Space
Posted by Charles Mudede on Wed, May 23, 2012 at 8:24 AM
While watching this video, I recalled this passage in Jared Diamond's book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal:
To begin with, we do not discuss the Indian tragedy much - not nearly as much as the genocide of the Second World War in Europe, for instance. Our great national tragedy is instead viewed as the Civil War. Insofar as we stop to think about white versus Indian conflict, we consider it as belonging to the distant past, and we describe it in military language, such as the Pequod War,Jared Diamond's point is this: In the colonizing moments of Australia, Tasmania, and America, the indigenous people were mostly killed not by the army but by civilians, settlers.Great Swamp Fight, Battle of Wounded Knee, Conquest of the West, and so on. Indians, in our view, were warlike and violent even towards other Indian tribes, masters of ambush and treachery. They were famous for their barbarity, notably for the distinctively Indian practices of torturing captives and scalping enemies. They were few in number and lived as nomadic hunters, especially bison hunters. The Indian population of the US as of 1492 is traditionally estimated at one million. This figure is so trivial, compared to the present US population of 250 million, that the inevitability of whites occupying this virtually empty continent becomes immediately apparent. Many Indians died from smallpox and other diseases. The aforementioned attitudes guided the Indian policy of the most admired US presidents and leaders from George Washington onwards (see quotations at the end of this chapter). These rationalizations rest on a transformation of historical facts. Military language implies declared warfare waged by adult male combatants. Actually, common white tactics were sneak attacks (often by civilians) on villages or encampments to kill Indians of any age and either sex.
When I read this piece of news...
Astronomer Jill Tarter, the inspiration for heroine Ellie Arroway in the novel and movie "Contact," is retiring after spending 35 years scanning the heavens for signals from intelligent aliens....I recalled the passage in The Third Chimpanzee and that video in The Guardian and thought: Why are we looking for intelligent aliens? What in the world (or in world history) makes us think that such an encounter will be peaceful? The last thing we need are settlers from space.Tarter is stepping down as the director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the organization's officials announced today (May 22).
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"Why are we looking for intelligent aliens? . . . The last thing we need are settlers from space."
It wouldn't necessarily be the extra-terrestrials who did the colonizing.
It wouldn't necessarily be the extra-terrestrials who did the colonizing.
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I wouldn't worry about it. The chances of intelligent aliens (1) existing at all and (2) having the ability to travel to our planet are vanishingly small (even if they're massively overstated by SETI scientists and alien conspiracists alike). Read up on the Fermi Paradox on Wikipedia for all the reasons that multiple intelligent civilizations existing in the galaxy at the same time is so unlikely. Then consider that, according to what we know now, it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light (and extremely difficult to even get close to it), so even if there are other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, they would most likely never be able to reach us anyway.
Aliens are a fascinating subject. Unfortunately or fortunately humans will almost certainly never encounter any.
Aliens are a fascinating subject. Unfortunately or fortunately humans will almost certainly never encounter any.
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IDF handed out assault rifles to hundreds of settlers back in September, they assumed that widespread violence would erupt when the PA went to the UN to declare statehood. Violence never erupted, but the settlers kept their guns and are now using them against Arabs in the West Bank.
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Good Morning Charles,
Hmm? Interesting passage from Diamond. I've read his "Guns, Germs & Steel". I might check this book, "The Third Chimpanzee" out.
I've noticed that "settlers' movements" if you will (that includes the British colonization in Australia & New Zealand, the Dutch in South Africa, the Spanish & Portugese in South America, the French in Algeria and elsewhere, the Europeans in the American West and yes, the Israelis in the Palestinian Territories among others) have one thing in common. That is a "messianic vision" or "manifest destiny" to the land they are vanquishing. "God told them to" or "It is writ in the Bible" to go forth.
My point is religion is injected into the debate of settlement histories. People are really driven by religious "destiny" scenarios. Yes, this may sound far-fetched and it in no way excuses the atrocities perpetrated by the conquerors on the conquered. But, it highlights the determination that these settlers have/had. Many of them suffered themselves. And indeed, their own govenments promoted settlement for the expansion of their empires/civilizations. It is unfortunate that such a mentality exists today as it is surely is a barrier to permanent peace in parts of the world.
BTW, did you know this year (last month?) is the 150th anniversary of the Homestead Act in the USA? It was an act that aided and abetted European Settlement in the American West by having claimants agree to acquire land freely west of the Mississippi (160 acres?) and work it for 5 years when title was granted. It ended in 1976 except for parts of Alaska. The Act had an INCREDIBLE impact for better or for worse on US history.
Hmm? Interesting passage from Diamond. I've read his "Guns, Germs & Steel". I might check this book, "The Third Chimpanzee" out.
I've noticed that "settlers' movements" if you will (that includes the British colonization in Australia & New Zealand, the Dutch in South Africa, the Spanish & Portugese in South America, the French in Algeria and elsewhere, the Europeans in the American West and yes, the Israelis in the Palestinian Territories among others) have one thing in common. That is a "messianic vision" or "manifest destiny" to the land they are vanquishing. "God told them to" or "It is writ in the Bible" to go forth.
My point is religion is injected into the debate of settlement histories. People are really driven by religious "destiny" scenarios. Yes, this may sound far-fetched and it in no way excuses the atrocities perpetrated by the conquerors on the conquered. But, it highlights the determination that these settlers have/had. Many of them suffered themselves. And indeed, their own govenments promoted settlement for the expansion of their empires/civilizations. It is unfortunate that such a mentality exists today as it is surely is a barrier to permanent peace in parts of the world.
BTW, did you know this year (last month?) is the 150th anniversary of the Homestead Act in the USA? It was an act that aided and abetted European Settlement in the American West by having claimants agree to acquire land freely west of the Mississippi (160 acres?) and work it for 5 years when title was granted. It ended in 1976 except for parts of Alaska. The Act had an INCREDIBLE impact for better or for worse on US history.
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2, You're assuming that ETs would use the forms and formats of travel that we humans have figured out, ignoring the possibility that they have discovered other realities about our Universe that still escape us. Recall that we have no idea what approximately 90% of the mass of the Universe actually is. What else is there to discover? Quite a lot, I'm sure.
To Charles' question, yeah, maybe space settlers would come in aggression, but consider how unifying for the human race that would be. Issues of "race" and class and ethnicity would vanish as we found a brand new "other" to define --and defend-- ourselves against.
To Charles' question, yeah, maybe space settlers would come in aggression, but consider how unifying for the human race that would be. Issues of "race" and class and ethnicity would vanish as we found a brand new "other" to define --and defend-- ourselves against.
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Holy shit, those Palestinians have some serious brass balls...hurling rocks(?) at dudes with assault rifles.
But I guess when you are resisting the illegal seizure of your land by a militant and aggressive state, there is little else you can do.
But I guess when you are resisting the illegal seizure of your land by a militant and aggressive state, there is little else you can do.
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Charles, have you ever read Octavia Butler's "Lilith's Brood"?
It has one of the most original and richly developed ideas of why aliens would come to Earth; I won't spoil it, but basically it's, uh, just business...
Some of Ms. Butler's novels aren't as amazing as Lilith, but I think she was a wonderful writer.
It has one of the most original and richly developed ideas of why aliens would come to Earth; I won't spoil it, but basically it's, uh, just business...
Some of Ms. Butler's novels aren't as amazing as Lilith, but I think she was a wonderful writer.
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Tasmania IS Australia; you know that, right?
At one point Tasmania was cleared of aboriginals by an advancing line of men with guns, spread in a line across the entire island, shooting all they encountered. There are certainly traces of mixed indigenous blood in some white Tasmanians, but they were shockingly successful; the last full aboriginal Tasmanian died in 1876 (though this is disputed) and her skeleton displayed in a museum.
If Diamond really says there were only a million Indians in North America, he's woefully behind the times. The numbers of people in the Americas before contact is a hotly debated topic, but some estimates (Henry Dobyns says 90-112 million, for both North and South America) but the number is certainly much, much higher than one million. Disease had ALREADY wiped out massive numbers before settlement even occurred in North America; the expeditions of Cabeza de Vaca and Hernan De Soto caused millions to die of smallpox who never even saw a white man. One of the magic features of disease is that it can spread faster and further than the people who carry it.
When the first American settlers arrived a hundred years later, the spread of what was to become the USA was already hugely depopulated; perhaps a million THEN, but not in 1491. Estimating the pre-contact population is largely a matter of estimating the death rates; some say 95%, some say less. Dobyn's numbers, which are not accepted everywhere, are based on much detailed research in Indian villages in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico. There's a good discussion of this in Charles C. Mann's "1491"
None of this has fuck-all to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of course. Or space aliens (which don't exist).
At one point Tasmania was cleared of aboriginals by an advancing line of men with guns, spread in a line across the entire island, shooting all they encountered. There are certainly traces of mixed indigenous blood in some white Tasmanians, but they were shockingly successful; the last full aboriginal Tasmanian died in 1876 (though this is disputed) and her skeleton displayed in a museum.
If Diamond really says there were only a million Indians in North America, he's woefully behind the times. The numbers of people in the Americas before contact is a hotly debated topic, but some estimates (Henry Dobyns says 90-112 million, for both North and South America) but the number is certainly much, much higher than one million. Disease had ALREADY wiped out massive numbers before settlement even occurred in North America; the expeditions of Cabeza de Vaca and Hernan De Soto caused millions to die of smallpox who never even saw a white man. One of the magic features of disease is that it can spread faster and further than the people who carry it.
When the first American settlers arrived a hundred years later, the spread of what was to become the USA was already hugely depopulated; perhaps a million THEN, but not in 1491. Estimating the pre-contact population is largely a matter of estimating the death rates; some say 95%, some say less. Dobyn's numbers, which are not accepted everywhere, are based on much detailed research in Indian villages in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico. There's a good discussion of this in Charles C. Mann's "1491"
None of this has fuck-all to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of course. Or space aliens (which don't exist).
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@6 I've heard incidents like the one documented in the video, compared to ritualistic human sacrifice. The Palestinians who throw rocks at armed Israelis are willing to be shot, and the Israelis are willing to shoot them.
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Why would aliens want our deep gravity well? It's not like we have any resources that are not much more abundant and easy to get in space.
Hell, we don't even colonize anymore, we just go in, take the resources for at best a token payment, and move on.
I wouldn't be surprised if first contact consisted of a bunch of unmanned mining ships dropping in and strip mining the asteroid belt and Oort cloud then moving on paying us no regard.
Hell, we don't even colonize anymore, we just go in, take the resources for at best a token payment, and move on.
I wouldn't be surprised if first contact consisted of a bunch of unmanned mining ships dropping in and strip mining the asteroid belt and Oort cloud then moving on paying us no regard.
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You look for extra-terrestrial intelligence because science implies that it exists and we are not alone in the universe. The discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence would have a profound impact on our society even if we never made contact. This type of discovery (like a discovery of life on Mars or a gas giant moon) would help rid the world of all of the superstitious religious bullshit. It might even start an age of reason.
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I hate to break it to you, but we're not in a prime real estate location here.
About all we're good for is a galactic bypass ...
About all we're good for is a galactic bypass ...
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@9 - Cabeza De Vaca; now there is a tale.
It's worth trying to find Samuel Hearne's 'A Journey from Prince of Wales’ Fort in Hudson’s Bay, to the Northern Ocean..' for a similar tale of first contact in the North. It is available free online. It is a fairly sympathetic portrait of the Athabaskans.
Wasn't Diamond's point that the 1 million figure is one of the lies we tell ourselves to justify the genocide?
It's worth trying to find Samuel Hearne's 'A Journey from Prince of Wales’ Fort in Hudson’s Bay, to the Northern Ocean..' for a similar tale of first contact in the North. It is available free online. It is a fairly sympathetic portrait of the Athabaskans.
Wasn't Diamond's point that the 1 million figure is one of the lies we tell ourselves to justify the genocide?
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The chance that aliens could be within spitting distance is so remote. But we are definitely nice and fat if they want to breed us for food. That would be hilarious. We would be getting just what we deserve.
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There's also the theory that an alien civilization advanced enough to travel faster than light has gotten to the point where they'd very likely be peaceful and uninterested in conquest. If they were hostile, they would've destroyed themselves in their technological adolescence (much as we still could).
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@15, fair enough.
@16, maybe so; I haven't read it. But in a way it didn't really matter to the early British colonists, or later American settlers, how many people were here in 1491; it only mattered how many were here in 1620, or 1790, or 1850, or 1910. They did, in fact, encounter a radically depopulated continent. The damage had already been done; that's one of the weird things about this country -- areas that just a few years earlier had been full of people and settlements were eerily empty when the next group came through. And many of the dead probably never came within a hundred miles of a Spaniard; the disease was carried to them by their own people, or travelers from other groups. Some news! "You're all going to die shortly, for I have infected you".
Incredibly, there were probably more people living in the Valley of Mexico when Cortes arrived than in Spain. You wouldn't guess it from most histories, though.
The tragedy of the US Indians is that when the whites did get here, many of them were essentially in refugee status, which deeply colored the perception of their "savage nature" (for instance, the Plains Indians). They had previously developed a civilization in many ways superior to that of western Europe -- more advanced farming, better houses, better health, cleaner water access, significantly longer life expectancy. The American landscape was largely a managed one; for instance, the Indians routinely burned the forests, or their understories, for agriculture and livestock maintenance. Their disappearance also gave rise to the notion of "the environment" being a "pristine wilderness" untouched by man, which was mostly untrue; this idea has repurcussions even today.
@16, maybe so; I haven't read it. But in a way it didn't really matter to the early British colonists, or later American settlers, how many people were here in 1491; it only mattered how many were here in 1620, or 1790, or 1850, or 1910. They did, in fact, encounter a radically depopulated continent. The damage had already been done; that's one of the weird things about this country -- areas that just a few years earlier had been full of people and settlements were eerily empty when the next group came through. And many of the dead probably never came within a hundred miles of a Spaniard; the disease was carried to them by their own people, or travelers from other groups. Some news! "You're all going to die shortly, for I have infected you".
Incredibly, there were probably more people living in the Valley of Mexico when Cortes arrived than in Spain. You wouldn't guess it from most histories, though.
The tragedy of the US Indians is that when the whites did get here, many of them were essentially in refugee status, which deeply colored the perception of their "savage nature" (for instance, the Plains Indians). They had previously developed a civilization in many ways superior to that of western Europe -- more advanced farming, better houses, better health, cleaner water access, significantly longer life expectancy. The American landscape was largely a managed one; for instance, the Indians routinely burned the forests, or their understories, for agriculture and livestock maintenance. Their disappearance also gave rise to the notion of "the environment" being a "pristine wilderness" untouched by man, which was mostly untrue; this idea has repurcussions even today.
20
It's been a few years since I read Alex Krieger's We Came Naked and Barefoot (http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/kriw…), about Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's narration of a years-long journey that makes a barefoot marathoner look like a toddler holding onto the coffee table for his first few steps, but I highly recommend it.
Cabeza de Vaca showed an unusual-for-the-time recognition of the common humanity of the people he encountered while struggling along from the west coast of what is now Florida to Spanish outposts in northern Mexico. Though he was in survival mode, he seems not to have swallowed whole the conquest imperatives of church and empire, instead imbibing cultures and languages, and often interacting in deeply empathetic ways as he progressed.
He was unable to tolerate a humdrum sinecure after his return to Spain, and subsequently traveled to South America so he could pull off his boots and resume his exploration of the world.
Cabeza de Vaca showed an unusual-for-the-time recognition of the common humanity of the people he encountered while struggling along from the west coast of what is now Florida to Spanish outposts in northern Mexico. Though he was in survival mode, he seems not to have swallowed whole the conquest imperatives of church and empire, instead imbibing cultures and languages, and often interacting in deeply empathetic ways as he progressed.
He was unable to tolerate a humdrum sinecure after his return to Spain, and subsequently traveled to South America so he could pull off his boots and resume his exploration of the world.
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@19 In the late middle ages lots of places were better than Europe in terms of public health, life expectancy, etc. Historians theorize that the new world was conquered by Europeans instead of Asians, largely because 15th century China was a rather nice place to live, which meant that few people were willing to risk their lives on some hair brained expedition to places unknown. On the other hand, constant warfare honed the fledgling nation states of Europe into finely tuned fighting machines and created a population of displaced persons with nothing to lose. Whatever else they may have been Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortes were bad mother fuckers. It is hard to imagine such manly men being created by a more tranquil society.
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@21 Good points though the Americas did produce a quantity of its own bad mother fuckers. Once they had horses the Comanche successfully drove the Spanish from the Southwest before U.S civilians with their Colts finally were able to dismantle them (re-iterating Charle's original point).
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Because a species capable of inter-stellar travel must, by implication, have access to technology that makes Earth's available resources redundant. This is the problem with almost every film about an alien invasion: what do we have on Earth that the aliens could want?
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folks in the americas were violent; the large populations in what is now mexico for instant conquered their neighbors and had endless wars. in what is now the continent USA, various tribes and groups moved around aggressed, enslaved each other and fought for eons, basically, then some whites came and joined in the fray. except lots of times certain native groups joined certain whites against other whites plus other natives, and sometimes the natives rose up together to try to laughter the whites. the whites also showed differing approaches. the diseasses that killed did so largely without this being intentional. the whites acted no differently at all than the natives did ....they just had guns, horses, more and bigger ships, and this thing called europe to keepo sending more of them. had the natives had guns ships horses and a continent to send more people they would have genocided the whites. it's pretty hard to say one prior group in history is morally superior to any other one when basically any group that could kill rape tak land of and destory any other group pretty much did so. yes, this includes the vikings, the english, the french, etc., but also it includes the algonquins, the penobsctos the apaches, etc., also yes the spaniards who retook spain while enslaving moors, the moors who raided spain and took christians as slaves and the spaniards who then took parts of morroco and shortly thereafter took largish parts of the americas displacing the ruling aztecs who'd taken large parts of it for themselves enslaving and sacrificing tens of thousands of the less fortunates ones who "lost." to romanticize one group over another one is both silly, and ignorant, and is done to feed the emotion laden stories that make our identity today (" I am a a BoBo putamayo loving pro third worlder living in fremont, seattle, so I will decry the white's genocide against natives while enjoying the fruits of it; if I say guilty things about it this demonstrates I am morally superior, much like the gift giving potlaches of yore demonstrated a native was morally superior and a bigger man."
at bottom it's all ego, and no, we're not different from one tribe to another whether welsh, irish, english, viking norman portuguese or algonquin or aztec or olmec or anasazi.
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at bottom it's all ego, and no, we're not different from one tribe to another whether welsh, irish, english, viking norman portuguese or algonquin or aztec or olmec or anasazi.
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@15: Hawaii is an oceanic island associated with America only by politics. Tasmania is a continental island sharing, well, pretty much everything with mainland Australia.
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Random Tasmania trivia: Steve Solomon, founder of Territorial Seeds and author of the essential NW gardening text 'Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades' now calls Tasmania home.
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