*Sigh* One Last Time...
Here is what Jared Diamond says, in his Guns, Germs, and Steel, about the consequences of the enormous Eurasian (and even more enormous western European) edge in power--in guns, germs, and steel--that had developed by 1500:
Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: The history of interaction among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries.... [M]uch of Africa is still struggling with its legacies from colonialism. In other regions... civil unrest or guerrilla warfare pits still-numerous indigenous populations against governments dominated by descendants of invading conquerers. Many other indigenous populations... so reduced in numbers by genocide and disease that they are now greatly outnumbered by the descendants of invaders... they are nevertheless increasingly asserting their rights...
Here is what Fred Errington and Deborah Gewertz say about Diamond:
Savage Minds: [Diamond offers] a history of morally neutral conquest through the use of techniques and technologies of physical domination... a model that justifies as well as universalizes expansionism: one used to explain what happened to "everybody for the last 13,000 years" (1997: 9).... Indeed, given Diamond's view of history, the conquest that he (rather mechanistically) entitles "Collision at Cajamarca" (1997: 67), was inevitable.... De Las Casas, citing eye-witnesses and writing only two decades after the event, conveys the massacre as remarkably cruel and entirely unjustified. From his contemporary Spanish perspective, Pizarro was, even by the standards of the time, a "great villain."... We do not think that Diamond, given his history of grand inevitability, would be much interested in such alternative voices as de Las Casas's.... Certainly, the voices of those like Yali would scarcely register: their concerns and sense of injustice would not be heard, their claims to moral worth would not be recognized....
Errington and Gewertz are, of course, simply lunatic.
"Genocide" is not a "morally neutral" term. To say that indigenous peoples "so reduced in numbers by genocide and disease that they are now greatly outnumbered by the descendants of invaders" are now nevertheless "asserting their rights" is not to ignore the "concerns and sense of injustice" of indigenous peoples.
It is hard to know why Errington and Gewertz make the claims that they do. Are they so ignorant of the meaning of words in their own culture that they think the word "genocide" is "morally neutral"? Are they making a cynical bet that the group they are really addressing is made up of people who will never take the time read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and thus that they can simply make stuff up?
To claim that Jared Diamond sees genocide as "morally neutral conquest through the use of techniques and technologies of physical domination" is very false and ugly.
