Yup, a huge fallacy used to push an agenda of "how it really was!"

Yes - the world was peaceful until the big bad West came into play. Very bad people!

Lol. The reality is as you lay above. Constantly clashes for resources and land, just as the lives of wild animals are in the present.

Even just watching the birds eating from a limitless supply of seeds this morning, they were fighting and establishing an order.

Note that pretty much all of the North American megafauna were wiped out within a few thousand years of the arrival of the proto-Native Americans.

The only exceptions were species that were total badasses (bears, pumas), extremely prolific (deer), or a combination of badass and prolific (wolves, bison).

Also note that the pre-Contact Aztecs weren't exactly nice people. I believe it was Neal Stephenson who observed that one measure of how much the Aztecs sucked was that when the Spanish Inquisition took over, things actually became more humane.

You may be right, but s/prolific/tasty/ mostly works as well.

Species can survive humans if (1) the humans can't wipe them out (badass, prolific) or (2) humans don't want to wipe them out (tasty/useful, invisible, cute).

> The default state of humanity is tribal warfare, not some beautiful Eden-esque utopia. "Colonialism" wasn't the cause, this is just humanity.

Colonialism isn't the cause, but colonialism, powered by weapons and transportation technology and the concept of manifest destiny, massively increased the scope and scale of human exploitation of other humans.

This is an animated map of who owned what parts of Europe over the past 1000 years. Do you consider 'colonialism' to be different to any other form of human expansion done since time began?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI

> This is an animated map of who owned what parts of Europe over the past 1000 years.

Who said colonialism didn't happen in Europe? Scotland and Ireland were arguably where the English prototyped their methods of subjugating countries.

> Do you consider 'colonialism' to be different to any other form of human expansion done since time began?

Yes. Colonialism as a systematic state supported effort to subjugate other nations and overtake their resources is very different than migration, for example.

Sorry, you can’t compare warring factions in an already war torn and exploited country to the normal behavior of humanity.

Who taught the first human tribe engaging in warfare the idea? Who taught chimps? Who taught all the other species that fight over resources?

Talking about the normal behaviour of humanity is like talking about the normal outcome of addition. It depends entirely on the inputs.

Can you give us an example of a country that wasn't war torn and exploited at some point in its history?

If you go back far enough, you get this:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/new-study-o...

Hahaha. Who stepped in to do what? I don't think you've thought this answer through mate. Anothet time mate.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.

If you know more than another commenter, that's great, but in that case share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. Responding to bad information with good information improves this place; just putting others down makes it worse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...