All this talk about "civilized" people and barbarians has really gotten me thinking lately about just who the real civilized people were. Depending on who's perspective you look at, the answer is different. The European view point sees the indigenous as barbarians because of their different culture. Natives don't wish to modernize and change everything they have always known, and their reluctance to change causes Europeans to see them as unintelligent, and thus barbaric. From the point of view of the indigenous, the elites of society are trying to force their ideas upon them. The indigenous never do anything that today could be considered barbaric and morally wrong, but the elites of the nation still punish them cruelly.
So my question is, from today's standards, who is really the "civilized" people during that time?
Personally, I have always believed the Europeans and the Latin American elites to act more barbaric then any indigenous groups. More often then not the European ideas somehow end up hurting the indigenous and their way of life, while the indigenous never do anything to deserve their punishment and cruelty.
This is also a question I have been thinking about. Who is civilized and who is barbaric? It is kind of funny, but not really funny, to think about how the Europeans automatically inherited the ability to rule over the indigenous just because they are from Europe, I guess. The ironic thing is that they call the natives barbarians along with "savages" as Sarmiento describes them, but you have a point. The elite Europeans are the ones acting as savages. What determines whether a group of people is barbaric or civilized? I feel like the word barbaric kind of has two meanings being: 1) cruel or brutal and 2) inferior or unsophisticated and primitive. So I guess if we look at the two groups, the Europeans and their ideas like you said, probably are considered to be barbaric as in cruel and brutal. While at the time, the indigenous were kind of automatically "considered" to be primitive, unsophisticated and inferior to the Spanish which apparently makes it right for them to punish them and treat them in a cruel manner? Oh history. It befuddles me.
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