"But this thread is not about the Catholic Church, you started this thread about the evil America. Which is exactly why I pointed out the situation with Russian indigenous people to show the hypocrisy of your stance".
You know, with this phrase you put me in a rather embarrassing situation: yesterday you accused me of "... calling names". I tried to explain to you that under no circumstances I go down to this, and I tried to "smooth" this moment.
However, it should acknowledged the fact that in YOUR OWN comments on my “Open Letter to the President”, for which I am grateful to you, you do not look like an "innocent lamb", allowing yourself sharp attacks on my personality. Based on my many years of experience working in internet-forums in different countries and participating in social and political discussions, I came to conclusion that usually this is a strong indicator of the absence of serious counterarguments and the prevalence of emotional over rational…
Concerning the indigenous peoples of Russia.... Basically, I already wrote that in this thread, I insist on discussing the Content of the Letter, not Russia. But as Russia's theme pops up again and again (and I just cannot understand why, I even started to slip in suspicion that I, a full-fledged American citizen, am discriminated because of my origin), I will answer your thesis.
Colonization is always or almost always accompanied by violence, as is the re-division of the world. And in the case of the tsarist Russia’s advance to the East, to Siberia, as well as in the case of the landing and advancement of European settlers to the West of America (which the British Crown later tried to prevent repeatedly, foreseeing and wishing to prevent the genocide of Native Americans), we have a classic redistribution of land the deficit of which was catastrophic in the overpopulated Europe.
Russian “Native Americans” were lucky much more than their counterparts in the New World, because they lived and continue to live in the North, whose lands did not represent economic interest to Russian colonizers, and no one has encroached on their land. The "colonization" of territories, now called the "Russian North", passed quite gently and humanely. For a long time the only sign of the presence of the economically more advanced Russian empire over there were only the trading stations. And skipping the degree of economic justice - the norms of exchanging furs for gunpowder, rifled firearms, tobacco, cereals, it is possible to state with a sufficient responsibility that this colonization took place in very limited quantities, and the exchange was voluntary. The Russian northern furs were highly quoted in the world fur markets, and this exchange suited both sides: the agricultural population of Russia for the most part has never encroached on the land of the Russian “Native Americans”, since there were no people willing to live in the harsh conditions of the North, except the Indians, and neither wheat nor wheat corn, or potatoes, as it is well-known, grow in the snow…
If we take the indigenous population of Eastern and Western Siberia, the situation here looked somewhat different - several military expeditions of the Russian Empire did in fact take place, the redistribution of land, it was accompanied by force of arms to overcome the military resistance of the local population. These campaigns were short-lived thanks to military-technical superiority of Russia's troops. After the crushing defeats the armies of the local population peace was established (of course, under the pressure of troops stationed on new lands!) and the relatively innumerous population of these territories was quickly enrolled into the economic life of the country . A distinctive feature of the Russian colonization of Western and Eastern Siberia was that the local population was not exterminated, as in the New World, but enrolled in the economic activity of the Russian Empire. And neither the "ethnic cleansing" nor the genocide of the local population, as it was in the history of America, took place during the Russian Empire’s colonization of Siberia.
There was no mass shooting of deer or other wild animals that formed the basis of nutrition of the indigenous population of Western and Eastern Siberia, there was no artificially induced famine, as a result of which hunger, cold, diseases, and soldering with vodka, as happened in America where 120 million people, among whom, as journalists like to write, "there were children, women and old people"...
The direct confirmation of this thesis is that today the Russian state has a heterogeneous population, a federation of more than a hundred nations and nationalities, representing the indigenous peoples, the vast majority of which have their own national republics, their own constitutions, their parliaments and governments ... But the Russki people - until 1917 - the state-forming people of the Russian Empire - that are deprived of any rights…
Anticipating your possible reference to the war of Bolsheviks’ Russia in Central Asia, I would like to make a remark that it was a civil war, and the advancement of Bolsheviks’ Russia to Central Asia, although it was much more bloody, than Russia’s expansion to Siberia, had a different goal: again, was not the seizure of territories and extermination of the indigenous population, as it was in America but the geopolitical accession of territories to Russia, the struggle for cheap access to strategic raw material such a cotton, as well as the expansion of the industrial Russia’s goods’ consumption market. And the struggle here was of a frankly class nature, since the land redistribution that took place here was not between the invading hordes of landless Europeans and the local population, but between innumerous local latifundists and the rest of the peasant landless poor. Again, there was neither the genocide of the local population nor the occupation of land by the invaders ...
But this was already the 20th century, and a completely different story . and for strategic raw materials - cotton. And the struggle here was of a frankly class nature, since the land redistribution that took place here was not between the invading hordes of Europeans and the local population, but between large latifundists and the rest of the peasant landless poor. Again, there was no forcible seizure of land, extermination of the local population and appropriation of its land...
But this was already in the 20-th century, and a completely a different story ...