East of the Sun -- book

Talk about deja vue all over again! I'm reading East of the Sun by Benson Bobrick, an account of the Russian conquest of Siberia. It's like reading a mirror image of the European conquest of America. The same attitude prevailed:
"Like other European powers then expanding overseas, the Russians were 'convinced of their right to dispossess inferior and barbaric foes, to establish the true faith, and to reap the economic benefits of dominion.' For the Russians--as for the Spanish, English, or Portuguese--progress was conveniently understood as a rise from 'savagery' to 'civilization,' and it demanded the conquest of the wilderness, in keeping with the divine injunction to 'Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish and subdue the earth.'"
They accomplished this with the same means Europeans used in the Americas:
"...in June 1651 they began to fight their way down the Amur. Khabarov ravaged numerous settlments without mercy, and in this barbarous manner conquered both banks of the river as far as the Sungari. Below this tributary, the region was 'completely devastated within a week's time' as the Russians looted and burned and cut down the natives 'like trees.' In one instance they seized hundreds of women and children, 'with God's help,' recalled Khubarov, 'we burned them, we knocked them on the head...and counting big and little, we killed six hundred sixty one.' His rampage continued into the land of the Goldi, where he again left a trail of blood."
This, of course, is only one example of the carnage the Russians inflicted on the aboriginal population of Siberia:
"So the culture of the Siberian peoples was not negligible, and of more than strictly anthropological note. But the Russian conquest threatened to sweep it all away, and pulverize it almost to nothing with musket and cannon shot."
Sound familiar? It should. The same thing happened as Europeans spread into the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The record is clear. There is no doubt what happened. It was so common and so widespread that at least one writer has suggested that Europeans must have suffered from a collective Wiitiko cannibalistic psychosis. He meant cannibalistic in the sense that it destroyed lives through various means, not that they literally consumed the flesh of their victims. Unhappily there are still examples of it going on in various parts of the globe at this very moment. The human species is a strange one, virtually unique in its capacity for self-destruction. You might think that after all these years of experience we might try to do something about it. Fat chance. If you even suggest Peace instead of War you are looked upon as peculiar, to say the least (think Dennis Kucinich). First Iraq, then Iran, and then the world! We are mighty! Mighty like a bunch of mental midgets.

LKBIQ:
"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
Heinrich Heine