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May 11th, 2009 - 01:05 pm
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Heh. That Star Trek essay I posted about actually covered some of that - the science fiction/frontier mythology thing is... interesting.
I actually explained things a little badly in my last comment. (We're outside my medicated hours, I'm afraid.) The idea is that the explorers who came around the same time Columbus himself did, like, say, Francisco Pizarro and other conquistadors, visited huuuuuge civilisations etc, and *they* left diseases behind that killed everybody over the course of the 16th century; when 17th-century settlement started taking place (and, you know, started killing everybody) they were actually dealing with only a tiny remnant of the initial civilisation.
His argument is sort of that "real" natives were much more "civilised" than the ones found later - because, you know, they lived in large, dirty cities just like real people Europeans. (Which implies that the way of living they had was of course vastly inferior.) But it's seriously unsupportable. |
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