What if China found Mexico first?

Originally posted by pinguin I don't get you guys. What do I say it wrong? What political agendas?, or just I miss the point? Why to get irritated? If you are just playing, I leave and come later.   Pinguin

No. No. 

1.  red_clay was saying we've gone way off topic.  He was too polite to say that it was really me.  I plead guilty anyway...

2.  The "political agenda accusation" was directed at Voyager by me.  I said so explicitly. No one's pointing that at you.    BTW, Voyager himself accused Flyingzone of a political agenda.

Originally posted by Voyager That attitude of your only makes me suspect that you have a political motivation for that. Also, don't play the victim in order to get from the others more sympathy.

3.  Lastly, in my previous post--yes I was playing, but being serious too:  I was explicitly acknowledging that you're probably correct about your assertions on the survival of Native American genes amongst whites.  However, this doesn't not change the fact that MASSIVE genocide did take place.  We're merely arguing over the extent of it.

Originally posted by Byzantine Emperor  Did anyone see the discussion TranHungDao and I had on page 7?  It was on topic and quite interesting.

Yes, though I was much responsible for going off-topic , I was on-topic quite a bit too. 

Pinquin was essentially always on-topic.  Our discussion on the extent of the genocide against Native Americans and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is central to the theme of brutality during the conquest of the Americas by the Europeans.

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Byzantine Emperor,
 
You know, I think I spoke too soon in saying the Chinese might be less brutal than the Europeans to the people of the New World.  If you look at the colonial and WWII Japanese or even the Japanese of the Imjin War (late 1500's), they were quite brutal.  Indeed, downright bestial in WWII.  The culture is rooted in Chinese culture (Confucianism), just as its traditional technology was.

If we compare the WWII Japanese to the Nazi's, they're about equal.

1.  They both ran diabolical camps for human experimentation with chemical, biological agents and whatnot.  So they are about equal in this respect.

2.  The Nazi's had the concentration camps for Jews, homosexuals, dissidents, eastern Europeans.  The Japanese killed millions in in Manchuria; many other countries literally lost millions due to Japanese brutality due to indiscriminate warfare, outright genocide, famine, diseases due to famine, etc.

3.  Both used rape as a weapon of war.  However, in China, Japanese soliders were known to force sons to rape their mothers and fathers to rape their daughters.  Pretty sick stuff.

4.  (a)  Generally speaking, Japanese soldiers were more medieval than their German counterparts.  They treated their POW's like animals at the slaughter, routinely decapitating them with Samurai swords--this included their Brit and American POW's.  There was an incident where two officers held a contest for who could decapitate the most Chinese men; they lined them up and started choping.  The winner had about 150 decapitations if I recall.  It is not hard to find pics of Japanese WWII attrocities. 

The funny thing is that Brit and American soldiers generally found the Korean conscripts in the Imperial Japanese army to be the most brutal.  They hated the Koreans even more.  This was because of the culture of brutality that existed in the Japanese military training prior to WWII.  Veterans now talk of being kicked and punched several times a day by their trainers, i.e. the Japanese military leadership was intentionally created killing machines.  Koreans were treated even worse than Japanese conscripts, hence they became more violent.

(b) Cannibalism was not uncommon due to the fact that the US demolished Japanese supply lines.   It was bad enough so that an official order was issued which said that any Japanese soldier eating a fellow Japanese soldier would be sentenced to death.  Apparently, it was okay to eat European and American POW's, or the local defeated populations.

This was quite different from how the Japanese treated their POW's in WWI.  Quite a number of German POW's of the Japanese enjoyed their time in Japan and decided to remain there after they were freed.  Thus training, i.e. context, can bring out animalistic behavior.

Of course, Japanese imperialism was a combination of trying too hard to copy the European colonialists and their own then native medieval ways.

The whole point here is that it is definitely within Chinese culture, or rather it's derivatives in Japan and Korea, for things to go monsterously out of control.  The Mongols, who were not sinitic by culture, were perhaps the most brutal regime of all time.

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Two more things about the Chinese and that what if scenario:

1.  We can't underestimate that age-old theme of young men going off to war in distant lands:   Things go crazy, real fast!  Such Chinese colonies would be half a world away from the motherland.  The Portugese in Brazil were the poster children for this type of insanity.

2.  What was Chinese technology relative to the Aztecs back in the early 1400's?  Could they have even defeated the Aztecs on their own turf to begin with?  Remember, the Aztecs were fatally fatalistic due to their belief the landing of Hernan Cortes was the return of Quetzalcoatl.  The legend said the conquerors would be white.  Moreover, the conquistadors allied themselves with disgruntled factions of the Aztec empire, otherwise, I'm pretty sure Cortes could not have beaten them.

3.  The Taiping rebellion was the biggest war on the planet until WWI, or even WWII.  I can't recall the actual numbers but it was staggering in its scale and violence.  (But then again, it was a civil war which was in turn ultimately the result of European meddling/colonialism.)

Originally posted by TranHungDao ... Pinquin was essentially always on-topic.  Our discussion on the extent of the genocide against Native Americans and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is central to the theme of brutality during the conquest of the Americas by the Europeans. ...

Edited by pinguin - 13-Jun-2007 at 16:30