[soyyo]

Well the aztecs did the same before the europeans:

"Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs eradicated many Mayan works and sought to depict themselves as the true rulers through a fake history and newly written texts"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

I dont mean this to be taken as a justification or something, but there is this tendency of picking historical eventsand judge them by todays standards, and is particularly egregious when it is only applied to just one side portraying others as innocent victims when they were actually doing the same thing.

[kristopolous]

I think the final group in the line deserves disproportionate blame for destroying the remaining collection.

No matter how I think about it, it seems like a more egregious act.

Pre-Colombian literature on philosophy, nature and governance would be quite a find. Hopefully there's many places yet to be searched.

To be speculative, if I was trying to hide books while being invaded, I'd bury them in a box in an old cemetery in a dry climate.

[infoseek12]

A cemetery would be a bad place for them as cemeteries tend to attract looters.

[sophacles]

If alice murders bob, then charlie murders alice, 2 murders have been committed, indepdendent of one of the victims also being a perpatrator. Its still perfectly reasonable to be upset about the murder rate, and it's ok to be upset that alice was murdered.

[hugetim]

But is it reasonable to consider charlie worse than alice?

[mmustapic]

If you feel closer to Charlie, yes

[enhancer]

Also I'm getting tired of people using Europeans as a whole all the time when it's one particular country. How are Bulgarians, Greeks, Estonians or Swedes to blame for anything there. It's amazing. No one is blaming Japanese, Vietnamese or Malaysians for the Mongol invasions in Europe. It's beyond ridiculous.

[AlecSchueler]

They said "European colonizers." That doesn't signify every European nation, but only those with colonialist histories.

[huytersd]

No one is blaming Eastern Europeans. Everyone knows they were not capable of carrying out colonization. They were the slaves used in the Arab world for a lot of antiquity.

[jeltz]

Italians and Spaniards were sold as slaves in North Africa and were still perfectly able to colonize.

[huytersd]

Those were overwhelmingly women.

[ffgjgf1]

The middle ages, not sure there were many East European slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia. Also plenty of them were “imported” into the Byzantine empire and Italy. After the Vikings Venice and Genoa mostly controlled the slave trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea and also the Balkans (Venice had a massive slave market).