"Nazi Fan Boy" Scenarios

[Joachim]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Yes a society without a state or law, in which any angry man can murder anyone he likes with the active assistance of others is morally inferior.

a) Please tell me an example of one Indian nations/societies whatever that qualifies for your statement above.

Please prove that the majority of the Indian nations/societies whatever qualify for your statement above.

Joachim

[JasonC]

Cultural relativism, the reigning philosophy, wants to teach that the mere opinion that there are moral differences between cultures is the cause of all oppression. It refuses to confront the massive fact that entirely unjust societies exist and flourish. Worse, it was in fact founded by men who knew - precisely - that removing the place to stand above particular cultures that universal morality provides, would excuse exactly the least moral societies. That it would make morals irrelevant and victory the only issue.

If all morality is only inside of a culture as its internal rules, and cultures are made and changed by brute force outside of cultures themselves, then all that is necessary to excuse anything is to win, and establish such culture as one likes. That is the founding thought of cultural relativism in its German philosophy form.

It was a founding idea of the hard right in Germany. They ceased to believe in traditional religion, which they considered a lie, but they noticed that said lie had been effectively believed and a culture built around it for millenia. Why can't we do that with our own lies, was the basic thought. If we win, morals be damned, we will legislate what shall count as morals.

When this philosophy was exported to the modern west following WW II, it was given a slight operational twist, mostly for rhetorical purposes. From excusing everything, it would condemn everything, thus making it servicable as a weapon for leftist revolutionaries intent of smashing "the establishment", whatever is was, said, or did. Moral standards themselves were oppression. The thing wrong with those dang Nazis is they claimed they were right.

As a fact, no they didn't. They claimed it didn't matter and they could do what they pleased. But the cultural relativists of the left didn't care about historical accuracy, just about political differentiation. Condemning no cultures could be the ad slogan, not condemning Maoist revolutionaries but condemning anyone fighting them could be the actual operative content. Which would be easy to square with the "condemn no cultures" line, by simply making an exception for those nasty moralists who kept doing so.

Thus, only the belief in morality can be condemned. Disbelief in morality is the height of moral purity. That this inevitably winds up whitewashing criminals is obvious. It was designed to, and the new spin makes no appreciable difference. Every culture energetically evil enough to frankly embrace cruelty will be excused because condemning it is judgmental. And only civilization will be assailed, as the redoubt of those dastardly believers in morality, who are clearly the same as Nazis.

Why did this appeal to some otherwise decent people? The non-judgementalism tapped into a piece of traditional moralism, the golden rule. All the actual moral content of such sentiments comes from that source, not from the cultural relativism. Self criticism becomes a reflex. But it can't deal with exterior cultures that actually need dealing with. Implicitly, it denies they can exist, romanticise all exterior cultures as non-blameworthy.

Which is easy if they are dead things of the past, but doesn't work anymore when they come and kill you.

[JasonC]

Joachim - no problem. Read "Trail of tears". You will find the wars in Florida before the displacement were all occasioned by local hotheads who personally decided they would go on the warpath, defying their chiefs and their past treaties with the settlers. If you read any detailed history of the cause of any indian war, you will find the same. The young braves simply do what they please, and what they please, like as not, is a raid.

[JasonC]

Joachim - oh yes, you do. You have repeatedly argued that the only reason the Nazis are condemned in they lost, the hypocrisy of victors. Which is nonsense start to finish and you know it is.

[JasonC]

Joachim on relative and absolute guilt - the objective evil of the Nazis fully justified brutal war against them to destroy so evil a state. Do the alleged injustices of the US justify present murderers waging war against the US? I presume no. So what exactly is the equivalence, again?

There isn't any.

[ April 13, 2006, 03:04 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[JasonC]

Joachim cares only about who won or lost, and who is an imaginary victim. I care only about the morals of those involved. He cannot see how a state can justifiably fight, win, and defeat an unjust one. He claims he understands the problem presented by the Nazis, but with that understanding of things he clearly does not. No understanding of the Nazis that can't tell the difference between waging brutal war against them and winning that war, and their own actions, understands them in the slightest.

Surely the bad thing about the Nazis isn't that they won, since they didn't. So winning is not damnable. Those who defeated them deserved to defeat them and they deserved to be defeated. Their culture was not equal to others, but fundamentally tainted and wrong, and it needed to be utterly destroyed. Ergo, there are cultures that need to be utterly destroyed. No amount of destruction suffered by one of them makes them some pathetic victim able to beg off with "we should have been left alone to murder those we enjoyed murdering".

There is no getting around it, I am afraid. No one can condemn the Nazis without recognizing trans-cultural moral principles capable of condemning an entire society. And as soon as you do, you will find those principles could be incompatible with tolerating some other societies, too. (Like Stalin, for one). And now you are in the thick of it. Because the societies that are morally justified in fighting against those so condemned, are morally justified in fighting, and in winning, and in destroying some other societies, which simply do not deserve to exist.

You can debate *whether* society A or B falls into that category, but not whether the category exists and is populated. If you try, you will find yourself willy-nilly excusing Nazis. Nazism and cultural relativism are joined at the hip, for a reason. The same thinkers laid the foundations of both.

[Joachim]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Joachim - oh yes, you do. You have repeatedly argued that the only reason the Nazis are condemned in they lost, the hypocrisy of victors. Which is nonsense start to finish and you know it is.

Please cite the relevant sentence and the context.

[Joachim]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Joachim on relative and absolute guilt - the objective evil of the Nazis fully justified brutal war against them to destroy so evil a state. Do the alleged injustices of the US justify present murderers waging war against the US? I presume no. So what exactly is the equivalence, again?

There isn't any.

Do the alleged injustices of some terrorists justify a cruise missile on a village somewhere in Asia?

If you hit only terrorists and no innocents standing by that know nothing about world politics - IMHO yes.

If you hit terrorists and innocents - tough decision.

If you did a crappy job, hit only innocents and did not care about that when you sent the missile on the mere rumor of a terrorist being there you are a terrorist yourself. No difference. Both sides believe there morale is superior to the other side and justifies their deeds.

[Sirocco]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Sirocco - yes burning captives alive for amusement is morally inferior. Yes cutting of the tops of the heads of civilians wherever you can find them and wearing their anatomy as ornament is morally inferior. Yes a society without a state or law, in which any angry man can murder anyone he likes with the active assistance of others is morally inferior.

You can pull examples of barbarism from whatever culture you choose. And you can choose to amplify them out of proportion. And were barbaric things not done to the Native Indians? Were the actions taken against them based on law?

[JasonC]

Sergei - they aren't killed off and they aren't behind barbed wire. I realize non-Americans might have difficulty actually grokking this given the decades of agitprop spewed forth on the subject, but actually they are still here, intermarried with the rest of us, working away and driving pickups and shopping at WalMart.

Along the way, lots became farmers or tradespeople, many intermarried, and when they "settled down" that way they got along fine. Not with perfect justice, any more than Jews or Italians, but fine.

Some kept up older modes of life for a while in the great reserves of the west, after being pushed into them violently when they raided their neighbors otherwise. But their young drifted out of them to the cities in search of work and a better life. Some remained on relief at various times, and some still do, but a tiny minority of their actual descedents.

There was no extermination. There was no slavery (of course there was for others, in the south, until almost a million Americans died to change that - but not for the natives). There is instead a fully assimilated few percent of the population with an approximately normal average condition of life etc.

You have to realize just how completely the whole thing is made up. You can find a handful of wars in which a few hundred civilians were killed - typically on each side. The population was simply swamped by the numbers of newcomers. It was a tenth the size of the sparse early population, which then grew 10 fold by the mid 1800s. Men walked past and around them. If they started trouble, it was heartily reciprocated and they lost as a result, and soon enough gave it up. That made for inevitable marginalization, it did not make for genocide, which is a figment of fevered imaginations of those for whom any stick is good enough to beat a hated power.

[Joachim]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Joachim - no problem. Read "Trail of tears". You will find the wars in Florida before the displacement were all occasioned by local hotheads who personally decided they would go on the warpath, defying their chiefs and their past treaties with the settlers. If you read any detailed history of the cause of any indian war, you will find the same. The young braves simply do what they please, and what they please, like as not, is a raid.

From wikipedia: "The Trail of Tears resulted from the enforcement of the Treaty of New Echota, an agreement signed under the provisions of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which exchanged Native American land in the East for lands west of the Mississippi River, but was never accepted by the elected tribal leadership Chief John Ross, or majority of the Cherokee people. "

From amazon.com:

"Editorial Reviews From Library Journal:

One of the many ironies of U.S. government policy toward Indians in the early 1800s is that it persisted in removing to the West those who had most successfully adapted to European values. As whites encroached on Cherokee land, many Native leaders responded by educating their children, learning English, and developing plantations. Such a leader was Ridge, who had fought with Andrew Jackson against the British. As he and other Cherokee leaders grappled with the issue of moving, the land-hungry Georgia legislatiors, with the aid of Jackson, succeeded in ousting the Cherokee from their land, forcing them to make the arduous journey West on the infamous "Trail of Tears." Popular history for public libraries. Mary B. Davis, Museum of American Indian Lib., New York

Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. "

Seems more like somebody was looking for excuses to relocate the Cherokee.

Are gold diggers waging war on the Indians in the Black Hills a reason for the Indians going to war? This is what I read about those times. And it were American authors. If I look at those wars, there might have been Indian young braves wanting to raid - stealing horses was a sport for them. But there where definitely reasons for the settlers wanting the war, too. And of course looking for excuses. It is easier to call the cavalry when you blame the Indians for starting the war. There were wars started by Indians - but not 99%. 50% sounds more reasonable. And the whole thing started with an invasions across the sea.

[JasonC]

Joachim - sure, you said

What would you say if the Nazis won? Would you support them? What would be your best come back? Doing as the winners do?

c) Vae victis. But you can't really win if you act that way - except if you exterminate or oppress the losers. Removing any history written from their point of view helps, too.

Much easier now as they didn't win.

this would be a nice statement a Nazi could use if the Nazis had won

[JasonC]

Trail of tear is the name a a famous history book on the subject, which covers that episode and much of the pre-history of it, including all the settler-native relations in Florida. Read the whole book, not a wikipedia entry on the term, and you will learn the underlying causes. Of course there were ambitious troublemakers on the settler side too. There were also entirely peaceful people trying to intersettle, and found in the morning with the tops of their heads missing, which is why it was thought removing Indians from the area might actually make anything more available than with them there. It is not like they were taking up a lot of space when they minded their own business. Nobody would have needed to move them to get the land, just clearing it would have been quite sufficient.

As for those who cross the sea, they did not "invade" - some did in Mexico, to the considerable support and applause of those oppressed there, later somewhat rued to be sure. In North America, they settled along the coast, fished and farms, traded for beaver pelts collected by the natives. And were occasionally wiped out by the natives in wars.

Somewhere in the back of Joachim's mind there is an unstated maxim that men of one race have a right to the exclusive possession of portions of the earths surface, living free of the pollution of the physical presence of other races. But he doesn't want to come out and say so, since it is transparently a Nazi platform plank.

The early settlers in North America, on the other hand, had no such notions. And for reasons he cannot fathom, thought a man who clears an acre of primeval forest nobody is using, might gain some ownership of it thereby through his labor, without any offense to anyone else on earth. Many of the natives felt the same, except for the ownership through labor part, foreign to them because they did not so labor. But largely a matter of indifference, since people were so scarce and land so abundant, who could possibly care? Besides, the forests were lousy with beaver - you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting one - and these silly people would give you shirts that didn't stink and knives made of actual metal for a few lousy beaver pelts - etc etc.

Some invasion. Just like Barbarossa, right? There were 4 US-Einsatzgruppen operating behind the advancing Puritan Panzer Corps, exterminating every native they could find and dumping them in mass graves. But it has all been whitewashed by Donald Rumsfeld.

[Joachim]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Joachim - oh yes, you do. You have repeatedly argued that the only reason the Nazis are condemned in they lost, the hypocrisy of victors. Which is nonsense start to finish and you know it is.

Originally posted by Joachim:

Please cite the relevant sentence and the context.

Originally posted by JasonC:

Joachim - sure, you said

What would you say if the Nazis won? Would you support them? What would be your best come back? Doing as the winners do?

c) Vae victis. But you can't really win if you act that way - except if you exterminate or oppress the losers. Removing any history written from their point of view helps, too.

Much easier now as they didn't win.

this would be a nice statement a Nazi could use if the Nazis had won

Oh - it's just that. That's why I asked for the sentence and the context. Please get sober and read the context again. It is on page 3. My statement is that zmoney uses phrases the Nazis could use to defend themselves and now you try to turn them against me. Nice try.

And I joke about your "Nazis p*** off" statement. It is easy to be brave from a distance.

[ April 13, 2006, 04:06 PM: Message edited by: Joachim ]

[zmoney]

Originally posted by Joachim:

And the whole thing started with an invasions across the sea.

I was hoping some one was going to bring this up. You see the Indians did the same thing. The Indians “invaded” the North American continent as well. They used the Bering Strait to come to North American from Asia. So really the whole invasion thing is a bad point for you to bring up. Peoples move, whether it is the Indians from Asia or whites from Europe.

[JasonC]

I am sober. You are obsessed with the argument from victory and brought it up 4 times. The Nazis lost, the natives lost. So what is the argument from victory supposed to be about? Americans of course, who were just like Nazis to the natives, and only got away with it because they won. Of course, the Americans also did the same sort of thing to the Nazis, didn't they? Did they exterminate the Germans? Nope, still there. Did they exterminate the natives? Nope, still here. Beat both, exterminated neither. Somewhere Joachim is reaching for the argument that the Nazis deserved it but the natives didn't, but he hasn't found it yet. That the citizens of Germany are better off with the Nazi regime destroy, I trust he understands only too well. Why he can't even entertain the parallel proposition about the natives is a mystery. Perhaps because the Germans were mostly left a pure race in charge of their country, while the much less numerous natives were assimilated into a democracy a hundred times their size. And horror of horrors, people of a different race are actually allowed to live right next to them! Shudder.

[Wodin]

Originally posted by Rob Ross:

[Furthermore, to those who say 'more died under Stalin', if you used your brains for one moment, you might consider how many would have died under Hitler if he had not been stopped.

[/QB]

Oh boy what a sorry thing to say. So its all right to play as the Russians because Stalin might not have killed as many people within the political timeframe of the Nazi party?

1. Your most likely wrong. 2. What difference does that make for gods sake?

You either stand your ground on morals and not play any games set in the East Front and then have the right to speak out against people who do OR you admit both regimes commited mass murder put that to one side and play the game for what it is....a game.

[JasonC]

Personally, on the subject of the Russians, I condemn both regimes as ruthless murderers and then regard the put upon Russian common people, who suffered the most from both, as the true heros of the war in the east. Thankfully they eventually got rid of the regime. Too bad it took so long.

[JasonC]

Day's headline on the popular sport of pretending the US is Nazi Germany -

Kendall-Smith told the military hearing that he refused to serve in Basra, Iraq, last July because he did not want to be complicit with an "act of aggression" contrary to international law.

He said: "I have evidence that the Americans were on a par with Nazi Germany with its actions in the Persian Gulf. I have documents in my possession which support my assertions.

"This is on the basis that on-going acts of aggression in Iraq and systematically applied war crimes provide a moral equivalent between the US and Nazi Germany."

Sentencing Kendall-Smith, Judge Advocate Bayliss told him: "You have, in this court's view, sought to make a martyr of yourself. You have shown a degree of arrogance that is amazing."

Maybe he should have brought up the Indians...

[JasonC]

Isn't anyone going to give the answers to my physics quiz?

For that matter, does anyone here actually play CM? I mean, other than me.

Anyone looked at Uranus, Ponyri, or 1SS First Day packs yet? Another thread, no doubt.

[Joachim]

Originally posted by zmoney:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Joachim:

And the whole thing started with an invasions across the sea.

I was hoping some one was going to bring this up. You see the Indians did the same thing. The Indians “invaded” the North American continent as well. They used the Bering Strait to come to North American from Asia. So really the whole invasion thing is a bad point for you to bring up. Peoples move, whether it is the Indians from Asia or whites from Europe. </font>

[Xenophile]

Is it not a little hard to believe that the various cultures of pre-Columbian America incited all their European...visitors? to conquer them all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, all over both those continents? It surely couldn't be that Europeans behaved in North America as they did in South America and Australia and Africa where the native populations were similarly weakened by alien disease and outmatched in war-making? Or could we see the visitors as somehow in competition with the native population and engendering violent resistance from them?

Permanent settlement is not a precondition for use of land. Forest is productive in a different way to pasture or cropland, perhaps less productive but still necessary to those who have that way of life. Does the mere fact of increased material productivity justify morally the displacement of the forest people by farmers? It helps to explain why it happens, but does it justify it, morally?

Contemporary European culture has determined that capital punishment is barbaric - would the continuation of the practise in the US justify it's invasion from Europe? Is it only the military strength of the US which prevents this? Or have Europeans perhaps reached a level of civilisation (through their recent and direct experience of modern war) which understands that the cost of war is almost always outweighed by it's benefits? Or that cultural change is almost always better for the people of any culture to be adopted than imposed?

I don't believe that the US is fascist - it's as democratic state as any I think (but flawed too). I do think it is hegemonistic (rather than outrightly imperialistic) and aggressive and that is why it is mistrusted, despite the undoubted good it has performed, particularly in WWII in helping defeat fascism in Europe.

It is hard to reconcile the moral presentation of the US as the last best hope for mankind with the state which pursues it's own self-interest so purposefully. This is not to say that the US is any worse than almost all other states which have attained a position of material or military dominance thoughout history. In some respects it may be somewhat better than most; but in others it seems depressingly similar.

[ April 13, 2006, 05:28 PM: Message edited by: Xenophile ]

[Xenophile]

(Self-confessed pragmatist, but with both moral absolutist and cultural relativist tendencies and failed hippy who perversely likes WWII Eastern Front wargames which attempt to model the historical reality but prefers playing scenarios which are designed to give both sides a chance within that limitation. Definitely not a Nazi. But prepared to play their forces in a game.)

[Joachim]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Did they exterminate the Germans? Nope, still there. Did they exterminate the natives? Nope, still here.

Agree on the Germans, disagree about Indian nations. Many of them are gone. They are not all the same. And it's not that genocide starts when you get them all.

Beat both, exterminated neither. Somewhere Joachim is reaching for the argument that the Nazis deserved it but the natives didn't, but he hasn't found it yet.

Nope. No need to find out if the Natives deserved it. It's pretty clear to me they did not.

That the citizens of Germany are better off with the Nazi regime destroy, I trust he understands only too well.

Yes, definitely no interest in guard duty in Siberia.

Why he can't even entertain the parallel proposition about the natives is a mystery.

Perhaps because the Germans were mostly left a pure race in charge of their country, while the much less numerous natives were assimilated into a democracy a hundred times their size. And horror of horrors, people of a different race are actually allowed to live right next to them! Shudder.

or

Jason, you know nothing about here...pure race? Bwahahahaha. "Different race actually allowed to live right next to them?" ROFL. Ever been to Berlin? Frankfurt? Ruhr area? Some projections state that Germans will become a minority in Germany in 2060. And the assumptions of those calculations are just "nothing changes".

The natives were assimilated after being decimated, herded in prison camps until the democracy around them was large enough - so the minority would not be a danger. Using some Indians to guard other Indians was a nice tactic, too. Asylum seekers over here have better housing than available in reservations

Read the following from wikipedia again: "The Trail of Tears resulted from the enforcement of the Treaty of New Echota, an agreement signed under the provisions of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which exchanged Native American land in the East for lands west of the Mississippi River, but was never accepted by the elected tribal leadership Chief John Ross, or majority of the Cherokee people."... "The Treaty of New Echota was signed by a small faction of prominent Cherokees, Major Ridge, Elias Boudinot (Buck Watie), and Stan Watie, and their followers willingly left Georgia for Oklahoma Prior to the forced removal. The signing of the Treaty entailed accepting payment from the government for their land in Georgia and relocating to Oklahoma."

a) the Cherokee democratically elected leaders (what? this "inferior society" could vote? these "lawless natives" had laws and rules???)

the US first decides on an "Indian Removal Act". Then they give money to a small part of the Indians and sign a treaty with them regarding land. Democratic authorization of the signature? Well... Those making profits wanted the deal. And the President supporting them was elected... and that President had a large army. Surround all Indians. Take weapons away from those opposing the deal. Leave Indians alone. Don't care about that signature. Just ensure there is no court available to check it. Please tell me which society was superior here and why.

Scratch on the surface and you see it ain't black and white.

PS: Don't blame it on me if you can't find irony in some of the questions above.

[ April 13, 2006, 05:41 PM: Message edited by: Joachim ]

[JasonC]

Joachim, here is your problem.

Nations/Races/Peoples/Religions are abstractions.

Individual human beings exist.

I am not the US condemning a race. I am an individual human being condemning the culture and way of life of natives before they assimilated, and of Nazis.

I never said any race was inferior, I said a culture was, in the case of natives in the US, and a regime was, in the case of Nazi Germany. The people are still here, their descedents are still here, their culture has changed and the old one destroyed.

The same is true of Germans. Their ways of acting under the Nazis were objectively morally inferior, and every human being - not a nation, every individual human being regardless of group affiliations - has not only the right, but the positive duty, to condemn and fight against any such way of behaving.

Anyone who simply accepts whatever his culture tells him is right, as right, is an immoral human being.

Anyone who accepts on any authority, actions like those of the Nazis, is an immoral human being. Whether he performs them or excuses them.

And immoral human beings are inferior to moral ones. Moral behavior is choiceworthy, morals are a principle of preference and rejection. Morals cannot govern men's conduct if they do not accept some behaviors and reject others. And instead trying to reject morality or condemnation, does not make all equal. It simply excuses the concrete injustices of Nazis et al.

Anyone who takes from the episode of the Nazis, the lesson that no way of life can be though superior to any other, lest one become Nazi-like, has fixated on a false diagnosis of the problem with the Nazis, one that is easily seen to be false as soon as you try to apply it to those who fought and killed to destroy the Nazi regime. They did not tolerate Nazis. They did not treat the Nazi culture as equal to all others. They treated it as a moral evil and a disease to be smashed and eradicated.

"But smashing and eradicating was the problem with Nazis". No. What they smashed, which was objectively innocent, what they eradicated, which was completely just, was the problem. Not because all claims of superiority are insupportable, but because *theirs* were. They made irrelevant claims about morally indifferent matters - race foremost among them, a moral *nullity*.

Should the rest of the world have tolerated the Nazis and just let them kill whoever they wanted to kill, not judging them? Of course not, the proposition is incoherent on its face.

That is just to establish the principle, yes some cultures are deservedly condemned, and not only condemned but fought. It is a moral duty to do so, not merely permitted.

Next to the empirical misunderstanding about US history, which is systematically distorted by the moral equivalence and relativism lense of European political history it is being compared to. I realize it is practically impossible for a ideologically trained modern European to grasp it, but really, Americans did not run concentration camps or exterminate anybody. Purely empirical point, it is just utter guff.

Americans - both natives and settlers - approached the matter with an expectation *not* of European race-nationalism, that all exclusive groups shall live hermetically sealed from one another in vertical isolation chambers, occasionally at war with each other but morally obligated to instead shun each others very sight to avoid such war. Instead, they had the expectation that human beings can simply and naturally live beside each other living differently. Land abundance and perennial diversity make that difference, perhaps.

It is a fine ideal but not always practiced. In practice, it works by little agglomerations and by mutually helpful interchange among them. It did and does work that way for the most part, and did for vast stretches of American history that revisionists have tried to paint as unremitting genocidal war. There are entire eastern tribes of natives that assimilated in place, occasionally taking part in the settler's own wars, but no more politically active in that respect than any other portion of the population.

For a long time, the settlers and plains indians had a different livable mode of living. The settlers farmed, using a tenth to a hundredth the land per person as the indians used, hunting. In the expansion across the midwest, that division was natural enough. There was conflict, particularly around the seven years war and revolutionary war and war of 1812 as European power and settlers hired different native allies. There was ongoing border fighting occasionally. But mostly, farmers wanted rich soil and indians wanted rangeland, and as a matter of pure geography and demographics, they did not directly conflict.

When ranchers pushed into the northwest territories, and especially when railroads opened up the interior (previously only really accessible along rivers, plus a new network of canals largely restricted to the northeast), that changed considerably. Now cattlemen wanted actual rangeland. Conflict became endemic, and escalated into sustained guerilla warfare several times. The US cavalry was largely created in this period - which was quite recent, second half of the 1800s, thus 350 years after original settlement - and that is when the reservation system expanded.

Most stuff before then had been accomplished by treaty, though with quite uneven compliance. Now those treaties came generally at the end of a period of open warfare, and were onesidedly settler dictated, as the winners. The source of the heightened conflict was the new economic reality that settlers wanted land for stock raising that the indians had hunted on, and the indians did not acknowledge settler property systems over land or livestock. They took want they wanted and were excoriated as cattle thieves, restricted, chaffed at those restrictions, raided, escalated etc.

The government's solution to this, such as it was, was that indians could live side by side with settlers only if they stopped living as hunters. If they wanted to keep living as hunters, they would have to do so someplace there weren't ranchers - or the ranchers would simply shoot them for taking cattle and start a new war. So the government assigned them new lands ahead of the ranchers. At first as far east as Oklahoma and the Dakotas, soon out in Montana, Colorado, and then the southwest (Arizona etc).

At every stage, some natives were assimilating, not migrating. Those migrating ahead of the settler wave were the holdouts, the diehards, those who were least attracted by settled life. The fought 3-4 wars against particular stages of the push west. They were not exterminated.

Those who stayed - and they were free to - adopted settled life. Those who went, instead, did so to get away from law, first of all. In the process, power within the native communities passed to war chiefs, younger generals rather than elders. They fought each other as well as settlers and cavalry.

They were given large reservations, and peace and protection conditional on staying on them. The reservations were restrictions on settlers more than anything else, places they could not go, or could not expect anyone to help them if they were robbed there. Usually the natives stayed on them, settled somewhat, and their young trickled out to the wider society and assimilated. Occasionally they left en mass to go to war, raiding settlers violently. The cavalry then retaliated, and forced them back onto their allotted land.

When the last of those gave up fighting, they were all free to live on their reservations as they had been doing, or to leave them and assimilate. They were not "barbed wire", as Sergei tellingly suggested in passing. Any individual indian was free to go farm corn in Illinois or become a gambler or what have you. The culture had morale problems and some endemic poverty, of course.

Now, where is this real history are the mass graves of the machinegunned? It is just nonsense. What is happening is a racist nationalism of European origin is being exported to an alien context where it makes no sense, and people are then assuming it is just like Bosnia, or the holocaust, or Armenia, or the Bulgaria horrors, or whatever. It is simply nonsense - such egregrious mistreatment was not visited upon anyone in the US experience, with the exception of the black slaves of the south before abolition. (Even in that case, far and away the worst in North America, exploitation not extermination was sought).

Everyone involved was much more willing to live side by side without stepping on each other's toes, and eventually to live in much the same way. Not as nations, or races, or peoples, but as individuals. That is one reason there are about 10 times as many Americans today with tiny portions of native ancestry as those half native or more.

Now, should the Sioux nation be an independent country inside the continental US, conducting its own foreign policy like the Czech republic or something? No, it was never even about that. If Sioux went on the warpath at the drop of a hat, then they had problems with the US cavalry and could not afford to keep it up. If they didn't, they no more deserved or needed their own country than the Amish. Land they needed and had. Livelihoods they needed and could pick from their own or any occupation in the wider culture.

But an independent ability to make war on others was dear to them, but no actual good to them or anybody else, and they and the rest of us are all well rid of it.

Perhaps in European conditions, a racial nation thinks they will be exterminated if they can't fight for their own independence or make their own alliances with great powers or something. But that is utterly irrelevant in the US context. Nothing remotely like it was at stake. Anybody not desiring to scalp his neighbors or take their cattle could and did live as he pleased.