Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
The idea of "the noble savage" came from the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Yet ANOTHER half-baked idea we can blame on the French!
Rousseau was actually Swiss. He was born in Geneva.
Snicker...
O, NE ZOT! This is just too much, before lunch and everything!
Yup.
Although we generally discount the efficiency of "primitive" weapons.
The huge death toll in Rwanda was achieved almost entirely with sticks and knives.
The Romans, at Cannae, lost 50,000 killed out of 80,000 men in a few hours. That is a much higher death rate than any of our bloody Civil War battles. Such losses were not uncommon in ancient warfare.
The Taiping Rebellion of the middle 19th century against the Manchus was fought mostly with relatively primitive weapons. It is estimated that 50M people died.
Primitive weapons are ineffective when pitted against modern weapons. They can be highly efficient at slaughter when pitted against other primitive weapons or the unarmed. All you need is soldiers willing to keep killing.
And somebody to sharpen your blade every few hours.
Really? Well, this is the first I have heard of it.
Perhapsyou should sue the Iroquois for reparations? ;)
But we're supposed to believe that they were bucolic, pastoral people with an advanced civilization utterly destroyed by the evil Spaniards, who then tortured them into Catholicism even as they plundered their palaces.
History in the last 30 years has been the study of revisionist claptrap, not fact.
Liberals are such effing idiots.
For any Freeper's interested, there was a quite prescient volume written on this subject qquite some time ago: "A History of Warfare", By John Keegan.
I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the methods and motivations of ancient warfare. Without the political correctness.
It has the added bonus of turning Clauswitz on his head.
Just a suggesstion.
Wombat101
You really can't talk about these civilizations as a group. The Maya and Aztecs had some contact and continuity, but they were as different as Chinese and Arabs in many ways.
The Incas were so isolated they weren't even aware of the civilizations of Mesoamerica to their north. They were also generally not as bloodthirsty, although they also practiced human sacrifice, if on a much smaller scale.
Historians today are generally agreed that the collapse of these civilizations was caused by the merging of the Old and New World disease ecosystems. The Spanish had the luck of walking into societies that were disintegrating anyway.
It is estimated that 90 to 95% of the population of the Americas died by 1600 as a result of Eurasian and African diseases.
How about a word for "mass extinction of large mammals"? The invading (across the Bering) prehistorics, aka "natives", exterminated about 80 percent of the species of large mammals on America's left coast. After the animal meat supply understandably dwindled human canabalism became the protein source of choice.
bump
Steyn had better watch it because amongst the "respectable" conservatives there still is this superstition that the Left is moral.
BTTT!
The origin of the State is twined with that of death-cults.
It could be argued that the State as we know it is the mere reification of blood-lust.
I almost fell out of my chair when I read that. Leave it to Steyn...
But you make a good point. Overt violence and suppression of the natives by European explorers wasn't really the major cause of death among those peoples. They were exposed to diseases for which they had acquired no natural immunities, and they were decimated by the resultant plagues.
In the case of the Aztecs, their culture had stagnated anyway to a large extent. They re-energized their warrior culture by arranging mock raids on nearby tribes to "capture" their young men and sacrifice them.
And people thought Roman decadence was bloody ...
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