Smogon Forums

the extent of colonial violence is pretty ridiculous to me. „The crime of genocide is unique because of its element of dolus specialis (special intent) which requires that the crime be committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such [...]" is a more recent definition made by the UN Genocide convention

you can read up the whole case which was about Jean Kambanda in 1997 here https://web.archive.org/web/20120121030812/http://www.unictr.org/Portals/0/Case/English/Kambanda/decisions/kambanda.pdf

apart from that the last 20 years have shown enormous progress in genocide studies. If you have interest in the topic feel free to read up on the works or theories of leading genocide historians like Jürgen Zimmerer, Boris Barth, Helen Fein or Jacques Sémelin. Those are very recent. I also want to add that I even pointed out that there are historians who do see colonial mass-violence as genocide

so good job on the highlighting I guess

In anthropology and historical cultural studies, the European instinct to see the New World (i.e the Americas and the Caribbean) as virgin land for the taking by God's chosen ones is a well documented rhetoric. It is what created this myth of Columbus "discovering" America when he didn't really "discover" anything. It was land which already belonged to native communities which had populated it for millions of years.

It is this instinct that engendered many policies, aimed at (unconsciously or otherwise) a systemic massacre of the native population. I would spend time curating and citing more contemporary postcolonial research on this, but the Cong thread has left me exhausted and frankly a little furious so at this point I couldn't care less.

"I also want to add that I even pointed out that there are historians who do see colonial mass-violence as genocide"

you didn't. don't lie. I wouldn't have been half as livid if you did. I have your post right in front of me. You do however spend a lot of time cherrypicking the credibility of the claims, and drawing a big fat distinction between "exploitation" and "genocidic tendency".

I don't know if your example (picked from African politics) is concordant to the discussion of Columbus' crimes and I'm not well-versed enough in international law to evaluate your claim. My specific problem with your post was while it paid all the attention and care to referring to specific legal precedent regarding the definition of genocide but showed little regard for context.

There is exhaustive criticism regarding genocide being classed as an exclusively post-colonial phenomenon which makes it very easy for instance to make an international criminal out of an African strongman but not so easy to denounce European massacring of native populations around the world in the colonial age.

Was Columbus an active protector of Native Americans? No. Did he wish to eliminate them? We can't know, not at least to modern legal standards of proof. Did genocide directly result from his decrees and his family’s commercial aims? Yes. Undeniably yes. Any post by you which doesn't explicitly acknowledge such basic nuance is automatically evasive and as such deserves to be called out.

There might be a language barrier here of course but I did say that there are historians who use the term genocide before the 20th century. So there's that. If you think that calling the actions and the actions that resulted from columbus as mass murder and a degenerated result of exploitation (which I did) is not enough I don't quite know what would make you happy.