I wish we could put this thread in Great Debates, but I’ve got to admit that it’s likely either to wind up in the Pit anyway, or to wind up with some replies and some entire voices choked off. So maybe it’s better here.
I had a longish post written in reply to What Exit?, and just before I hit post I saw the link to this thread. So I’ll put it here instead.
Maybe?
I am also not an expert. But I don’t think it works to try to assign numbers; not only because that’s only bound to lead to arguments both about what the number should be and about exactly how many people got killed in any given case, but because I think it obscures the overall problem. And the overall problem is people being so certain that there’s only One Right Way to be human that they’re going to try to enforce it by any means they deem necessary; whether that’s killing everyone who disagrees with them and/or torturing them into submission and/or forcibly removing them from any land they can live on and then teaching that they’re despicable for being poor and/or stealing their children and indoctrinating those children by means up to and including torture and death.
I also don’t think it’s either possible or wise to try to draw precise lines between the specific acts that lead to the total destruction of some cultures in what’s now called the Americas, to the considerably more than decimation of others, and to the serious damage done and often still being done to the remainder. Chop every incident apart into fine enough bits, and many of them will be tiny. But the total impact was and is huge. And again the overall attitude behind it was the same.
And suppose there’s a group left somewhere with 17 or 23 people left alive who know the language and traditions; and somebody decides that there should be no chance for that language and traditions to be passed on, so they kill those 17 or 23 people. They would have intentionally killed a culture. (True even if they only killed a few of the group in the process of terrifying and beating the others into never again speaking that language or teaching those traditions.) Shouldn’t there be a word for it? Maybe that culture was dying anyway. But maybe before it died it could have taught the rest of us something important. And I suspect that at least some cultures started, somewhere in what’s now the distant past, with 17 or 23 people or one really determined character with charisma; so we can’t be sure what the dividing line is to viability, either.