ABSTRACT
Mann’s main thesis is that murderous ethnic cleansing, which in extreme forms can become genocidal, is predominantly a modern phenomenon. It is the ‘dark side of democracy’, when the rule of the people and the ethnicity of the people are ‘confused’. In that process, all the archaic humans who inhabited the Old World were gradually extinguished, everywhere displaced and replaced, victims of what was probably our species’ superior skills in subsisting, reproducing, and fighting. Incidentally, there is no need to shift the blame for murderous mass killing from our civilization to our species, a popular holdover from the 1960s. Although from time to time Mann likes to chide ‘our civilization’ and ‘Europeans’, by association, as if they meant democracy, Spanish America was not democratic, of course. This native civilization is believed to have succumbed to European diseases that spread from Mexico even before its contact with the Europeans, let alone with white settlers.
