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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27933 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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As hydro said, the Amerindians were originally kept as separate as possible from the white American population. Amerindians weren't given unconditional birthright citizenship until 1924, and the reservations are still considered sovereign territory for their respective Indian nations. Later developments would take Indian policy in a more assimilationist direction, but that was mainly from a Christianizing perspective and not broadly miscegenatory.

The Australians went around massacring Aboriginals in an ad-hoc bottom-up way because it was easy but there was never any actual policy to get rid of them, the closest they got is 'the arc of history bends towards us, no big deal if they wither away but we won't actually make it happen, we'll do weird things like them away from their parents and raise them as our own'.

While there was no official policy of extermination, there was a considerable amount of more active efforts to expedite the withering process.

From Mark Twain's "Following The Equator":

Here is an instance. A squatter, whose station was surrounded by Blacks, whom he suspected to be hostile and from whom he feared an attack, parleyed with them from his house-door. He told them it was Christmas-time-a time at which all men, black or white, feasted; that there were flour, sugar-plums, good things in plenty in the store, and that he would make for them such a pudding as they never dreamed of-a great pudding of which all might eat and be filled. The Blacks listened and were lost. The pudding was made and distributed. Next morning there was howling in the camp, for it had been sweetened with sugar and arsenic!

The white man's spirit was right, but his method was wrong. His spirit was the spirit which the civilized white has always exhibited toward the savage, but the use of poison was a departure from custom. True, it was merely a technical departure, not a real one; still, it was a departure, and therefore a mistake, in my opinion. It was better, kinder, swifter, and much more humane than a number of the methods which have been sanctified by custom, but that does not justify its employment. That is, it does not wholly justify it.

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