Originally Posted by
BlackPeter
I don't think this is the point.
Clearly - Maoris are (as a race) neither better nor worse than the Europeans, neither more nor less cruel than the Europeans ... they are just as human (with all the good, the bad and the ugly) as we all are (if we ignore for a couple of minutes the bots on some of the conspiracy threads ... :).
And of course - they have been at the time Europeans arrived here in an earlier stage of their development (which is reflected in their level of "being civilised" like their from of "government", their norms and their technology at that time), not different te e.g. a bunch of Europeans would have been who started rowing 5000 years ago and ended up in a small group on some remote island without any contact to the rest of the world.
Our big technological advantage came not from being better or more intelligent in any way, shape or form, but from living on a continent with lots of other people. That's the thing - if you live together on a huge continent (Eurasia) with (over the centuries) tens and hundreds of millions of other people, than you need only one in say ten million with one good idea and everybody can (and does) copy it (like using a wheel for transport, using iron for tools, developing black powder for propelling bullets, developing better crops to feed your people, furthering medicine).
If you live however together with just some tens of thousand of people without communication to the rest of the world on a remote island, than the odds are not good that all the one in ten million geniuses you need to develop modern technology are part of your group - nothing to copy, and you stay behind.
Was it good for this group of people to be "colonized" by the people who happened to have the opportunity to copy good ideas form others due to growing up on the large continent? Well, it certainly helped them to further their technological development. Whether it did help them to further their well being is a different question ... and as discussed earlier, the answer to that is clearly very personal and subjective.
Quite amusing however when members of the occupiers try to tell the people who got occupied and cheated that clearly colonisation was good for them. Maybe, we should leave it to the Maoris to make this judgement call?