Memories of the 28th Century

Nasty though humans often are, they aren’t very efficient when it comes to getting rid of enemies or others who are in the way. I don’t recall what brought it to mind, perhaps Amherst and the Indians again, but I started trying to think of examples of ethnic cleansing or genocide that did anything positive for anyone. Typically, ethnic cleansings have resulted in some, or most, of one people being chucked out of one area, while the people who did the chucking gained the eternal hatred of those who were chucked out.

The only times when this was not the pattern were when the people to be cleansed were killed to the last man, and the post WW II movements of ethnic Germans from other countries into Germany proper. As best I can tell the people in the countries the Germans were taken from were happy to see them go, because the local Germans had collaborated with the Nazis, and the Germans were happy, because there would be plenty of reprisals if they hadn’t left. Something like fourteen million Germans were transported, and it was ethnic cleansing that we never hear of anymore.

I did some searching around online to see if there were any really effective ethnic cleansings, but other than the well-known actions of Nazi Germany against Gypsies, Jews, Poles, and others there was the elimination of the majority of the people on some islands in the South Pacific by Maoris, the sending of the Cherokees to Oklahoma, the actions in Turkey against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other minorities. While those actions and other ethnic cleansings did eliminate some people and move other from one area to another they mostly just made the survivors hate the nasties even more, but that was when the ethnic cleansing was intentional.

One of the most successful examples of ethnic cleansing was the elimination of the Dorset Culture by the Eskimos or Inuit. There isn’t a huge amount of information about the Dorset culture online (or anywhere), but they seem to have been the dominant North Polar Region culture for a considerable time. They probably were the inspiration for the Trolls. The Eskimos had a more warlike tradition and seem to have eliminated the Dorset culture in most places within a couple hundred years. There was a small remnant population on some islands in Hudson’s Bay until the early twentieth century.

There have been some accidental ethnic cleansings that were very effective and left little hatred behind. One that I am thinking of was the removal of the Indians from Western Massachusetts. That was a result of an outbreak of smallpox in Springfield that spread through the region among both the English settlers and the Indians, but the Indians did not have any natural immunity, so it killed them at a very high rate. By the mid 1700’s there were a few hundred Pocumtucks left from a population that had been in the tens of thousands. I have met a few people descended from the remaining Pocumtucks, and they were completely assimilated Americans, but it has been hundreds of years. If the reduction in the population of the Pocumtucks had been deliberate, then it would have amounted to one of the most effective examples of ethnic cleansing.

I believe that there have been examples of ethnic cleansing where the people who left were happy too, but I can’t remember who those people were. But a related sort of event is when the local physical conditions change and force some people to leave, because the crops die, or whatever. Shortly before Genghis Khan started his conquests such an event happened and forced his tribe to shove out some other tribes. All together many millions of people were affected by the migration that was forced by climate change. I don’t think that anyone has pinned the blame for that climate change. It wasn’t climate change or plant disease that made havoc of the Irish in the 1840’s; al the potato blight is commonly blamed; the real cause was the changes in the Poor Laws that were passed in the 1830’s that caused the real damage. The English still caused it one way or another.

I would suggest that those who are interested in ethnic cleansing take looks at the linked pages. There is more involved in ethnic cleansing than meets the eye, and that it usually comes around to bite the perpetrator on the arse may be what people should remember, but over the long run no one remembers. Even the animosity of Armenian for Turk is not as strong as it was a few decades ago. And the Irish have largely forgotten what the English did to their country just a few hundred years ago during the Cromwellian period. But a sure way to make a people that you have tried to wipe out continue to hate you is to continue to be nasty to them; the Russians have been finding out about this in Chechnya for the last few decades, and Circassians have been moving back to their homelands. After a sufficiently long time no one remembers enough to make any difference, and even deadly enemies become not just friends but a single people. A good example of that took place in Scandinavia.

Way back when (no one knows exactly when) the Germanic branch of the satem speaking branch of the Proto-Indo-Europeans went off by themselves. They rather quickly migrated from what is now Ukraine to Scandinavia, where they met the tall, blond Frost Giants (the Germanic people were of average height and brown haired). All we know of the meeting and subsequent events is in ancients songs and stories, but the eventual result was that the two peoples intermarried and multiplied greatly. Eventually, the Germanic people took to moving to areas outside Scandinavia, spreading the Frost Giant genes as they went. Thus showing how one’s deadly enemy may become one’s descendent.

I suppose the point of this is that it’s a good idea to be nice to one’s enemies, unless one is willing to wait quite a long time before they become reconciled. If you don’t want to be nice to your enemies, then there are two alternatives: kill them or send them to a very distant place and leave them there.







http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_cleansings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history#Haiti

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/SA...IRISH/Poor.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_Culture