Comments on: War: What is it Good For?

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Fri, 09 May 2014 00:25:48 +0000

Typical Roman exaggeration or "historical showmanship" if you will. The best modern estimates are still in the hundreds of thousands, mind you, but not a million and certainly not millions dead.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Thu, 08 May 2014 23:17:44 +0000

Scipio, is the “Caesar killed a million Gauls, enslaved a million more” proven false? I’ve believed it for years. Round number, sure.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Thu, 08 May 2014 21:16:47 +0000

We don’t have to wonder, really; we know how the French interacted with the various aboriginal tribes of North America, because they had extensive colonies at the same time as the British. That said, their economic motive was extraction of natural resources more than colonization, and they were dealing with different tribes.

By: Zhai2Nan2

Zhai2Nan2 — Thu, 08 May 2014 20:58:27 +0000

There were at least three white-related sources of Native American deaths: (1) formal wars, (2) epidemics, (3) low-intensity war atrocities without orders from government.

There were, furthermore, many other sources of death that cannot be blamed on whites. (E.g. the self-destructive internecine warfare of local tribes, etc.)

I will post about the demographic decline of the American aborigines after I get done posting about the Boer War.

Broadly, I will claim that the English did a bad job of diplomacy with the American Indian; the French would probably have done a better job.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Thu, 08 May 2014 19:15:15 +0000

Neither were millions of Gauls killed in the romanization of the Gallic tribes, for that matter.

By: Toddy Cat

Toddy Cat — Thu, 08 May 2014 17:19:19 +0000

“United States could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans”

What the Hell is this idiot talking about? The United States was not built by killing “millions” of Indians, or anything like it. Total casualties on both sides in all the Indian Wars from colonial times up until 1890 were abut 30,000 on each side, and could have been lower. Lots of Indians died from epidemics brought by whites, but there was nothing that could have been done about this — the second contact was made between Europeans and Indians, the diseases started to spread, and it wouldn’t have mattered if Custer and the Seventh Cavalry had all been pacifist hippies waving flowers. Even then, most of the dead were in South and Central America. BS like this does not make me want to read this guy’s book.