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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Biggest genocide by what metrics? Certainly not by percent, the genocides in the Caribbean take the grim prize there, and even the highest estimates of pre 1492 population of us and canada combined are lower than the number of soviet civilians alone that the nazis killed and not all of those people died and most of those who died did so from disease before the genocide even begun so it cant be by raw numbers. so im curious by what metric u evaluate it to be the biggest genocide? maybe by land area held while doing the genocide? but im pretty sure even then the tsar's russia would win.
There were around 130 million indigenous Americans at the time of arrival according to the most recent estimates I’ve seen. It wasn’t only the Americans who committed genocide certainly, but in terms of scale, the genocide of the indigenous was definitively the most expansive in known history.
yes 130 million in the americas not in what is now the usa the most populated areas where in central america and the Andes. even high estimates for what is now the usa and canada are at around 8 million the highest dont go above 13 million which is around the number of soviet civilians the nazis killed and much lower that the total number of civilians the nazis killed. and going even further most of those people died from diseases. by the time the usa became a country there were only 700k indegenous people in what is now the the contiguous us i think its fair to say the usa is responsible for the genocides that happened even before that but point is in terms of raw numbers there is no comparison.
u say in terms of scale it was the most expansive but what scales are those.
The scale of over 120 million people dying… can you name another genocide in which more than 90% of the population was exterminated and in which over 100 million people died? A genocide doesn’t have to be committed by a single group. The Americans continuing (and expanding) the genocide started before them by the Spanish, British, French, etc, doesn’t make each of those separate genocides. It was one long historical process that lead to the depopulation of an entire continent.
while u can make a case that what the european powers did in what is now the united states was continued by the usa its insane to say that it is the same event as what other or the same european powers did elsewhere some of these genocides are separated by centuries they were carried by different people often from different countries using different tactics for different reasons to completely different people who were not in contact with eachother and they often did this without even known what other colonizers were doing, the idea that what the european powers were doing was somehow cohesive is ridiculous.
i think ur scale of time is way out of whack for this, for example the peoples of the caribbean had already been complety erased for decades before jamestown had been stablished let alone the colonies let alone an american national identity.
And also the original meme about the united states not the entirety of the americas it was about what the united states did which israel and nazi germany copied.