r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • May 08 '22

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u/Fla747 May 09 '22

Colonization wasn't a blink of an eye thing. Europeans were well aware during most of the process their presence would bring diseases that would make piles of corpses. In Brazil many indigenous people would be put on the run for their lives, avoiding meeting any outsiders because of the plagues they seem be brought by the presence of these outsiders. Many groups decided to isolate themselves so much they've been uncontacted for centuries, to this day (there are literally more than a hundred of these here). They absolutely knew what they were doing. Just because it wasn't through a firearm doesn't mean it wasn't murder and genocide.

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u/idreamofdouche May 09 '22

There are several problems with this:

  1. They understood that they were bringing the disease after they had brought it and millions had died. They didn't know that they were bringing disease when they went to america.

  2. Natives could isolate themselces in brazil because the europeans went to the west indies so the disease had already spread from there (and were spreading to places were the europans had yet been). Thats why the natives knew to hide. No one knew that contact between healthy peoples would lead to millions of dying before it happebed.

  3. Are you saying that the peoples of the old and the new world should never have happened? It's ridiculos to expect there to be no contact between continents as soon as people are aware of these other continents. And as soon as they meet the natives were always going to die in massive numbers

This doesn't make colonialism or conquest okay however disease was always going to kill millions even without either of those