Why, after reading this and some other posts earlier in this thread about the conquest of America, do I get the image of white superiority and racist tendencies?
Probably because those were somewhere in the background of the era. However, that wasn't the driving force behind the colonialism in North and South America. The
pattern here, set originally by the Spanish in the 16th Century, was one of conquest rather than exploitation.
Contrast what occurred in the Americas with the exploitative pattern of colonialism by first the Portuguese but mostly by the Dutch in your own nation's history. Indonesia was a prime example of commercial exploitation (vice conquest) by white Europeans. Occasionally brutal (as in the Dutch suppression of the Banten Peasant's Revolt led by Haji Abdel Karim, believed by some Indonesians to be the Mahdi, who proclaimed a
perang sabil against whites in 1888), the form of colonialism practiced by the Dutch was geared toward commerce rather than control. As such, it was comparatively benign (if I can be pardoned for using that term in reference to occupation of a nation by a foreign power).
Native Americans, OTOH, after the Spanish had obliterated the Inca of Peru and the N'huatl-speaking civilizations around the Valley of Mexico (not to mention the Arawak and other tribes of the Caribbean), were unlucky enough to have nothing worth exploiting (from a European standpoint), except the land they stood on. The pattern was not one of commerce - it was conquest. Due to superior technology, superior organization, and superior military capability honed in the innumerable bloody wars of the European continent, any Native American group - an unorganized patchwork of independent tribal nations - that had the temerity to resist was ruthlessly eliminated. However, it wasn't racism, any more than removing an obstacle from a roadway is racism. There wasn't even much of the paternalistic "help the benighted heathens" that characterized much of British colonialism elsewhere (like India and East Africa). Like buzzsaw mentioned (although he's apparently proud of the fact rather than appalled), it was a case of "You've got it. We want it. And we're strong enough to take it. Get out of the way or die." Mostly, the Native Americans died. Not something to be particularly proud of. OTOH, since I'm not a Christian, I don't accept that the sins of the ancestors devolve on the descendents. So I don't see the need to apologize for something that occurred 200-400 years ago. The history of Man is full of similar examples. We're an aggressive, territorial species. It's the nature of the beast.
I suppose that's enough digression for this thread. Apologies to the thread originator, but I thought it necessary to provide a counter to the "European racism" idea.
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