[patrickve]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door CUFI

Lees, hallucinant:

, during a long journey into the interior in 1833, he came face to face with the alternative policy towards indigenous peoples defending their lands against expropriation. General Manuel de Rosas, a cattle rancher who served as governor of Buenos Aires, and later dictator of Argentina (and who, later again, retired to Swaythling in Hampshire), was engaged on what Darwin recognized at the time as a mission ‘to exterminate the Indians’. Some 112 women and children and men were ‘nearly all taken or killed, very few escaped’. (Darwin notes in the margin: ‘Only one Christian was wounded.’) ‘The soldiers pursue and sabre every man. Like wild animals however they fight to the last instant.’ The reason was to be made plain. ‘This is a dark picture; but how much more shocking is the unquestionable fact that that all the women who appear above twenty years old are massacred in cold blood. I ventured to hint, that this appeared rather inhuman. He answered me, “What can be done, they breed so.”’12

It is the sadly familiar language of genocide. To the perpetrators, Darwin noticed, the killing was reasonable and even moral in the larger scheme of things. ‘Everyone here is fully convinced that this is the justest war, because it is against Barbarians.’ His protest echoed all the others: ‘Who would believe that in this age in a Christian, civilized country that such atrocities were committed?’ In fact, those who could believe it included himself, and for the reasons of historical progress self-evident to the winners of the war for the land. The theodicy of civilization would set the pattern for Darwin in all his writings: it celebrated a new world of productivity and profit that decreed the sacrifice of barbarians who stood in its way. The shooters were the shock troops of the new relations being established.

If this warfare is successful, that is if all the Indians are butchered, a grand extent of country will be available for the production of cattle, and the valleys?…?will be most productive of corn. The country will be in the hands of white Gaucho savages instead of copper-coloured Indians. The former being a little superior in civilisation, as they are inferior in every moral virtue

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full...13220500106170

Dat is toch exact juist ? Maar let goed op, dat is geen VERSCHONING, dat is een BESCHRIJVING van een proces dat sinds oudher aan de gang is. Ter informatie, denk jij echt dat de Spaanse conquistadores zich aan Darwin inspireerden ?