The steamroller effect

The "steamroller effect" is what happens when an advanced culture meets a primitive culture, it steamrollers it away. Of course, the use of the terms "primitive" and "advanced" are politically incorrect, but I don't care about that, I call it as I sees it. In the current PC way of looking at it, all versions of history are simply different "narratives," or versions of the same events seen from different biased perspectives. But, I am sure that both sides would agree that the British steamrollered the natives of many countries, Australia, South Africa, North America, India, New Zealand and so on. Recently I described how the British had completely wiped out the native Aborigines of Tasmania by the 1870's. The effect of being steamrollered also destroys the native languages, replacing them with English.

Although some will consider this process of colonization and imperialism immoral, looked at from today's viewpoint, nevertheless it is an inevitable process. While the natives in America and Australasia were going about their business, far away the tsunami of progress was gathering to wipe them and their languages out. It started in the British Isles when the Celtic languages were replaced after the conquests by the English. Welsh barely survives in north west Wales, Scottish is spoken only in the Highlands (remember the Highland clearances), and Irish after massive suppression survives only in pockets around Ireland. This was in effect the clash of civlizations; in the cases of the other British tribes, they were conquered and dominated by the English and forced into the periphery. In a similar way the Jews in Britain were an internal colony, separate in speech and culture, until they were steamrollered into assimilation. Although all the internally colonized people managed to keep some degree of separation to a greater or lesser extent, the Jews are rapidly vanishing as a separate culture in Britain.

Think of the many cultures that have been steamrollered from existence; Slavonia was once a great power that controlled vast lands in Eastern Europe, but they were overcome and assimilated by other tribes, and their language Slavonian is now extinct. There were tens of thousands of American Indians (or native Americans) when the British arrived in the 1700s and established New England. Many tribes were wiped out, for example the Algonquin Federation, and later ironically the British tried to stop American expansion Westwards by declaring the territories beyond the 13 colonies as Indian territory, but as we know they were defeated and the Western expansion of the United States was inexorable. The Indians in California were mostly wiped out by the 1890s.

There is a continuing controversy as to whether or not the US, Australia and New Zealand owe land and/or financial compensation to their native peoples, or whether that should all be consigned to the past as unfortunate but inevitable. I think we must admit that we are all better off given that millions of people have been able to live and prosper in the US and Australia. But, should that be the end of the matter?