Jared Diamond Quotes
We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company, 1997, p. 321.
First Published American Indian Author
First Published American Indian Author. His last public speech. He was referring to a horrible massacre of Christian Indians and the polarizing effect that such conflicts had. Whosoever publicly castigated a massacre of whites or Indians would be met by accusations of condoning the massacres of the other side and ignoring the inevitable and natural seeking of retaliation for future protection and revenge.
John Mason led a force of 90 Pilgrims and 70 Mohegan Allies quietly surrounded the Pequot village at Mystic. Then they fired their guns into the village and charged the Pequot houses, setting them on fire and killing all those who tried to escape. Over 400 Pequot were killed. The Mohegan allies were so shocked at the carnage that they shouted, “Stop! Stop! It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.” Prior to the massacre of Mystic Village, there had been many battles and villages destroyed, but this marked the first time that entire populations of men, women and children were exterminated in the English Colonization. After Mystic village both whites and Indians participated in terrible massacres inflicted on each other. This was not the first massacre in America as the Spanish in the South and West commonly used the tactic.
Clark’s men had English Colonel Hamilton under siege by making him think there were many more Americans in Clarks army than the real 180 or so. He tried to get Hamilton to surrender by threatening if they had to take the fort they would treat Hamilton and the British as murderers—Hamilton had paid hostile Indians for American scalps. At that point a party of Clark’s men arrived with 4 or 5 Indian prisoners who had been captured raiding
civilian farms. After the Indians were executed, Hamilton agreed to surrender.
Genocide generally means the intentional destruction and elimination of a people. In the case of Columbus and the Spanish Conquistadors, they thought little of the lives of the indigenous people of the New World, but they wanted them for slaves to extract the gold and silver. They wiped out several peoples, mostly as a result of the communicable diseases (mainly smallpox) they brought from Europe for which the South Americans had little or no immunity. Also the size of the invasion forces (the Spanish) was relatively small. The size in land and number of people who they invaded was huge. The Spanish were the worst of the European empires from the point of view of the native colonized people. And Columbus was the trigger. So Chavez has a point in castigating Columbus and the Spanish but, typically, and like many politicians, his oratory lacked the precision of total accuracy.
Jared Mason Diamond is an American geographer, historian, anthropologist, ornithologist, and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005), The World Until Yesterday (2012), and Upheaval (2019). Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA.
