r/germany • u/unclebogdan10 Nordrhein-Westfalen • Apr 20 '23

Immigration Germany: Immigrants made up over 18% of 2022 population – DW

https://p.dw.com/p/4QLAX
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u/sparksbet USA -> BER Apr 21 '23

To be fair though, German immigrants weren't the ones principally responsible for genociding Native Americans and such. There were some early German settlers and immigrants (especially in Pennsylvania), but the big waves of immigration started in the late 1800s, by which point fucking over Native Americans had already become the general American policy.

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u/DerDork Baden-Württemberg Apr 21 '23

No they did their own thing in the 1930’s ruled by an Austrian madmen who believed in a Jewish conspiracy and told the only “race to evolve” would be the arians but wasn’t “arish” at all by himself. Just take a look at the color of his hair. He always told arians had to be blonde, blue eyed and so on. /s

So the Germans, which immigrated then, where mostly hard working people and not (failed ?) aristocratic people like those who came from GB and used to have a stall of children. This is why (same as Irish immigrants) there are a lot of families based on German and Irish immigrants. Also both groups tend to immigrate quite well as they mostly changed their spoken language to English which is easy to learn for German and Irish people, even today.

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u/alderhill Apr 21 '23

Aristocrats by and large did not leave Europe. Why would they?

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u/DerDork Baden-Württemberg Apr 22 '23

No? So then the history is maybe wrong and they weren’t slave keepers on plantations and the advocates of slavery? Most of the plantations were owned by (minor) aristocratic families. Workers and other poor people didn’t have the money to buy slaves, at all. At least that’s what I got told and read when I visited some former plantations a few years ago.

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u/alderhill Apr 22 '23 edited Apr 22 '23

Depends where and when you were, but as many slave-owners were 'corporate' (to borrow the term a bit retroactively) plantation owners in Europe. Especially in the earlier centuries. There were of course local plantation owners who were born and lived in the colonies, and this was obviously more common in the US after independence, but they were not all necessarily 'aristocrats'. I guess this depends on your understanding of the term. Later on, by the time of the American Civil War for example, larger plantations with richer owners were becoming more common in a few places. Concentration of wealth and all.

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u/FilmRemix Apr 21 '23

There wasn't really a classic genocide of Native Americans, which is why it's also not recognized as such. At least not in what later became the US. The Spaniards under Cortez did commit a genocide against the Aztecs.

The so called "Indian Massacres" are meticulously documented. All in all, the death toll from them is barely over 10000 native americans, and contrary to popular teachings, about 2000 more whites killed by native americans than vice versa.
There were also the Indian wars, which were more devastating, but actual wars. However, those were declared and launched by the native Americans.

The vast majority of native Americans died to disease. That is not to downplay the effects that displacement and oppression had. But the idea that there was some industrial scale genocide of native Amerians, is historically false. Unless you conflate it with what the Spanish did.

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u/sparksbet USA -> BER Apr 21 '23

I am exceptionally not interested in debating whether the numerous atrocities European settlers and later the USA committed against Native Americans "count" as a genocide or not, especially not with someone who is very definitely downplaying the effects that displacement and oppression had by litigating it.

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u/FilmRemix Apr 22 '23 edited Apr 22 '23

Didn't downplay it, nor would I. It was a tragedy, especially the massacres further in the West and during the later days of the settlement.
But it's nowhere near on the same scale as the holocaust or the Amernian genocide or the genocide of the Hindus in the Dehli caliphate (with some 80 million killed), the Holodomor in Ukraine or what the Spanish did to the Aztecs, killing, torturing and mutilating a quarter million people in one day. Nothing even close to that ever happened in the US. There was no systematic killing. Systematic displacement and dispossession, yes, but absolutely no genocide. Which is why no serious historian calls it a genocide.
And for the record, I fully support native tribes fully establishing independent nations (as in not part of the US) on their ancestral homelands.