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Ah, Las Casas, the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, abuses of the encomienda system, and it turns out it actually wasn't smallpox. The greatest hits. I don't consider the Wikipedia page probative at all (the ESL involved is amusing but also suspicious: "However, descendants of the Taíno continue to live and their disappearance from records was part of a fictional story created by the Spanish Empire with the intention of erasing them from history.") The Black Legend runs deep, even if it's passed from Anglo-Dutch propagandists to anti-colonial academics.
I think it's entirely possible that, between diseases, resource exploitation, and the Malthusian conditions of the New World, the Spanish wiped out entire populations of natives, including many cultures smaller than the Taino. But "genocide" is the intentional destruction of a people based on their identity. If aliens landed their starship and crushed Switzerland, that would not be the Swiss Genocide.
I'll make two further points: first, I would hold up Las Casas as evidence that this sort of thing was not sanctioned by European culture of the time. The Church and Crown consistently attempted to reign in the frontier warlords and planters. Secondly, I have no basis to claim this and have looked up zero evidence, but I would bet that if we were to look at genetic evidence from Taino graves and at modern Dominicans, we would find a nontrivial fraction of Taino genes in the Dominican Republic (Haiti, obviously, is a monoethnic state founded on actual genocide, but the DR is a more representative sample).
Yeah, I am pretty sure if those were Spaniards it would go differently. But, OTOH, see England/Ireland, I think the Irish are still pretty salty about those times...
I think it's not a useful distinction. If somebody murders a lot of people and wipes whole cultures, it doesn't matter much, morally speaking, whether you thought "fuck you in particular, this culture, I hate you specifically because your language irritates me and your dances are ugly!" or you just thought "it'd probably more useful for me if this two-legged cattle just died, and I don't even care how they call themselves". This argument sounds like a pointless rule-lawyering, where you substitute naming question for substance question, and try to argue that because exact labelling and classification may be questioned, the substance - massive dying of people caused by somebody's actions - is not not as reprehensible, because some definition of some word does not cover this particular case with enough precision. I find such kinds of argument utterly useless.
No True European Culture, amirite?
Yes, it's not "true Christianity". But somehow things still happened... Just as slavery - according to many, many Christian authorities - weren't part of true Christianity, and yet, it happened too. As I said, people are very flexible in their religious beliefs when they want to be.
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