Embarrassing Chapters in US History, Part 2

Gifted Americans

Countries With the Biggest Boobies

The USA has plenty of good things going for it. And in many of my quizzes I have pointed toward those things (in a way that others often misconstrue as me heaping praise on the country).

There are thousands of quizzes on this site. Each one focuses on something different. Do you find it overkill that there is a whole quiz devoted to American fast food chains that doesn't say anything about all the unhealthy foods from other countries around the world and never mentions the thousands of great American restaurants that aren't about fast food? Do you feel the two quizzes I made on oldest cities don't cover enough young cities? Or maybe it's unfair in my countries with the biggest boobs quiz I don't also include countries with average sized boobs? There is no quiz on this site that is about everything. I find your criticisms absurd. lighten up.

Peer back a few thousand years and it was generally well accepted that if your tribe, city, or country went to war against another tribe and won, there was a not-insignificant chance that genocide against the males and sexual enslavement of the females in the losing tribe would follow.... I'm sure if you did a poll of Americans or other Westerners today the approval rates for such a thing would be extremely low. And by extremely low I mean very close to 0%.

If that's not the point you were making then I just find it odd you would bring it up in this context. If one person says "the Holocaust was bad," and a 2nd person says "well what about when the followers of Moses slaughtered the Canaanites? Wasn't that also bad?" ... that's whataboutism. It just comes across as cynical and missing the point, and perhaps trying to excuse something horrible (the Holocaust) by pointing at something else that was also bad. And saying one thing is bad doesn't mean that all other things not mentioned are not bad. So if that is being implied, then that's attacking a strawman.

And at any rate, what was done to North American indigenous people as a whole by European colonists and their descendants is way worse than anything that they did to one another (possibly excepting the indigenous people of Mexico who practiced industrial-scale human sacrifice). So... one is mentioned more often than the other because it was actually a lot worse. Or maybe because the descendants of the people who perpetrated the latter atrocities are either dead now, not around in very large numbers, or they just don't have much power.

and in that case... the reason why there aren't more atrocities committed by Native Americans on this and the other quizzes in the series is primarily three-fold:

1. We know very much less about them. Tribes indigenous to North America did not have writing. Their cultures, at the time of first contact with Europeans, were technically still "pre-historic." We have very little reliable information about what they were doing before European colonization, and after that point, they were slowly but surely integrated into the modern nation-states that came to exist on the land.

2. I'll admit this is in a way oddly racist, Euro-centric, and chauvinistic... but typically the concept of "US history" includes the history of the United States as well as the history of the European settlers and colonists whose descendants would go on to found the United States, and the indigenous peoples they interacted with or assimilated.

3. Still, whatever atrocities the indigenous people of North America got up to, they were generally not as bad and significantly smaller in scale than some of the worst things listed on this quiz. Plus... Americans generally know almost nothing about them... so... less cause for embarrassment. (once again, exception made for the Aztecs, who were pretty awful, but they lived in Mexico)