I agree with you that genocide makes sense if you are (or think you are) in an existential, zero sum situation, and are killing the "bad" guys (from your point of view).
It really doesn't horrify me, strangely enough. I recently started working on a history of Bacon's Rebellion, so have been reading about murders and atrocities being committed by Aboriginal Americans against settlers and settlers against Aboriginal Americans, and from their point of view they both were in an existential struggle, in the sense that they could not cohabit the same vicinity unless they adopted the other's means of production, hunting/gathering with slash-and-burn agriculture vs. English style intensive farming.
I have yet to read any account that any of the parties to the respective genocides had any remorse or even reflected on the harm they were causing.
But in the beginning, when the English settlers first came to Jamestown, and depended on the Aboriginal Americans for food, it would have been stupid for the English to kill them, shooting themselves in the foot because they'd starve to death.
And, from the point of view of the British royals and their governors later on, killing off the natives would be shooting themselves in the foot vis-a-vis the very lucrative fur trade, which they controlled, so why not tolerate the deaths of a few lower class settlers? Which is why Bacon rebelled.
No, I don't have a problem with seeing other points of view, when they make sense.
BTW, if Americans started killing Native Americans at this late date, I'd think it was insane. |
