Ayytaly wrote:As someone of First Nations descent, I have to say something: This is less on the religion and more on European colonialism in general. This is the result of narcissistic racists subjugating an entire people based on looks and tradition. Regardless of what religion they followed (if at all), they would deliberately change its context and claim divine right to commit their atrocities.
Most of them never opened the Bible; they merely stood on them just to look down on us.
It's been over 500 years, and my people's blood is still fresh on their hands.
War is war. None of this is abnormal or unique to Europeans. It is thanks to Europeans that modern morality regards these things as unjust on the basis of being anti-human rather than merely "an injustice because it was done to our group, but fine against others".
Colonialism is simply war done more effectively and over larger distances (And, indeed, longer time frames and largely institutionalized, covert, and automated to some extent.).
There is no meaningful difference between the children found in these mass graves and the children kidnapped by ottomans to be raised as jannisaries, or the children killed in a general military advance to seize a tributary state.
The institutions of integration and assimilation imposed on first nations have casualties as surely as any other campaign of assimilation, conquest, and integration of a nation into an economic system. It's important to acknowledge this and to acknowledge these schools as a form of warfare against a populace, causing casualties in order to capture mental territory and acquire resources, wealth, and a subject population. But it is not uniquely atrocious. It is simply the business of war as it has always been, manifested with new social technologies.
You can regard war as bad and inhumane, but to specifically add arbitrary reasons to condemn colonialism specifically smacks of hypocrisy and endangering the very consensus that now protects the vulnerable. That these things are bad because they are anti-human, not because "It's different when it's done to us!". Rather like the germans in WW1 whining about how using shotguns to kill people was bad and evil but using rifles was still bad, but fundamentally different somehow and of a different character, more gentlemanly, less evil, less bad.
It isn't different. You're just complaining about new technologies of warfare, like most people who lose wars do.
The bodies in this grave are war casualties. I don't deny it. children often die in war. Acknowledging that and acknowledging that the assimilation campaigns were a form of warfare is where I stand on the issue. But I don't consider it a uniquely european sin. It also means acknowledging that peace requires dismantling the automated systems of warfare that these social technologies represent. But it doesn't mean pretending this is anything new, or uniquely european, because it isn't. It's the oldest profession.
