Under no meaningful comparison can you claim that native civilizations were less brutal than the Spanish (and to a lesser extent, Portuguese and later French and British) extraction operations. "Look! The Inquisition! Three thousand people, that's it!" Columbus's second voyage kidnapped 500 Taino from Hispaniola alone and 300 of them died on the way back to Europe. By 1542, las Casas--a Spaniard--estimated that the Spanish had killed between twelve and fifteen million natives, and while that number is probably not well-sourced by las Casas, modern research suggests that that number, if it is inaccurate, is likely to be so on the low end when you tally up the whole thing.
"Look! Three thousand! The Aztecs! But the Aztecs!" The Mexica? Yeah, they sucked a whole lot. It's not a huge surprise that the Tlaxcaltecs and others thought the Spanish were a good bet, because the Mexica were downright vile. So yanno, let's scratch the whole thing off, call that one fair-is-fair (it's not but okay). Now how about the other millions to tens of millions killed by the Spanish alone and forced into slavery?
Because these genocide-softpedaling assertions are hiding the ball.
Here's las Casas himself. Read it, if you have the stomach.
“They [the Spanish] forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders, shouting, ‘Wriggle, you little perisher.’
What was that about the implied nobility of destroying a culture that has a problem with child sacrifice? Shit, this wasn't even to anything in particular. And the Taino, to the best of my knowledge, didn't practice any form of human sacrifice at all. What's your high-minded lesswrong-dot-com excuse for that genocide?
Funny that you cite las Casas as a historical document, when it is well known that his writings were exaggerations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_Account_of_the_Destruc...
Even if I steelman this attempt at an argument to its fullest, "exaggerated" doesn't mean "didn't happen"--if you go actually read the article that Wikipedia page cites, von Vacano does not claim that it's false--and we have other contemporary accounts of the Spanish acts of genocide on Hispaniola alone.
Somewhere in the mid hundreds-of-thousands to a million Taino, depending on which ends of the estimate make sense to you, lived on Hispaniola when the Spanish showed up.
By 1650, they were gone.
I wonder what happened? Maybe it was ghosts.
See: https://books.google.com/books?id=dvjNyZTFrS4C
> Okay. You'll note that the only citation to that claim is a political science professor in a political science journal
You can also check out John Elliott. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1970/11/05/spanish-holocaus...
The figures can be discussed, but all this means then is that we're in agreement and "Now we're just haggling about the price"
Genocide (or at least the destruction of the native culture) may be a morally consistent position for those who believe in utilitarianism: if you don't like the idea of child sacrifice, it may be better to destroy a culture that favors child sacrifice.
The morally consistency of similar problems has been explored by Yudkowsky on "baby eating aliens": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...