Posted by:
Phazer
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)
Date: October 10, 2014 02:51PM
Phazer Wrote:
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> Good ol Howard Zinn. I think the conservative
> rebuttal to him was in this last summer's 2014
> movie "America"
>
Snippet of Chapter 6: America --- really long I apologize. Good info.
...let’s move to Columbus and the charge of genocide. The historical Columbus was a Christian explorer. Howard Zinn makes it sound like Columbus came looking for nothing but gold, but Columbus was equally driven by a spirit of exploration and adventure. When we read Columbus’s diaries we see that his motives were complex: he wanted to get rich by discovering new trade routes, but he also wanted to find the Garden of Eden, which he believed was an actual undiscovered place. Of course Columbus didn’t come looking for America; he didn’t know that the American continent existed. Since the Muslims controlled the trade routes of the Arabian Sea, he was looking for a new way to the Far East. Specifically he was looking for India, and that’s why he called the native peoples “Indians.” It is easy to laugh at Columbus’s naïveté, except that he wasn’t entirely wrong. Anthropological research has established that the native people of the Americas did originally come from Asia. Most likely they came across the Bering Strait before the continents drifted apart.
We know that, as a consequence of contact with Columbus and the Europeans who came after him, the native population in the Americas plummeted. By some estimates, more than 80 percent of the Indians perished. This is the basis for the charge of genocide. But there was no genocide. Millions of Indians died as a result of diseases they contracted from their exposure to the white man: smallpox, measles, cholera, and typhus. There is one isolated allegation of Sir Jeffrey Amherst (whose name graces Amherst College ) approving a strategy to vanquish a hostile Indian tribe by giving the Indians smallpox-infected blankets. Even here, however, it’s not clear the scheme was actually carried out. As historian William McNeill documents in Plagues and Peoples, the white man generally transmitted his diseases to the Indians without knowing it, and the Indians died in large numbers because they had not developed immunities to those diseases. This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it is not genocide , because genocide implies an intention to wipe out a people. McNeill points out that Europeans themselves had contracted lethal diseases, including the pneumonic and the bubonic plagues, from Mongol invaders from the Asian steppes. The Europeans didn’t have immunities, and during the “Black Death” of the fourteenth century one-third of the population of Europe was wiped out. 3 But no one calls these plagues genocide, because they weren’t.
It’s true that Columbus developed strong prejudices about the native peoples he first encountered— he was prejudiced in favor of them. He praised the intelligence, generosity, and lack of guile among the Tainos, contrasting these qualities with Spanish vices. Subsequent explorers such as Pedro Alvares Cabral, Amerigo Vespucci (from whom we get the name “America”), and Walter Raleigh registered similar positive impressions. So where did Europeans get the idea that Indians were “savages”? Actually, they got it from their experience with the Indians. While the Indians Columbus met on his first voyage were hospitable and friendly, on subsequent voyages Columbus was horrified to discover that a number of sailors he had left behind had been killed and possibly eaten by the cannibalistic Arawaks. (Christopher Columbus, The Journals of Christopher Columbus (New York: Bonanza Books, 1989), pp. 33, 58, 116; Wilcomb Washburn, “The First European Contacts with the American Indians,” Instituto de Investigacao Cientifica Tropical, Lisbon, 1988, pp. 439– 43.)
When Bernal Diaz arrived in Mexico with the swashbuckling army of Hernán Cortés, he and his fellow Spaniards saw things they had never seen before. Indeed they witnessed one of the most gruesome spectacles ever seen, something akin to what American soldiers saw after World War II when they entered the Nazi concentration camps . As Diaz describes the Aztecs, in an account generally corroborated by modern scholars, “They strike open the wretched Indian’s chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets.” Huge numbers of Indians—typically captives in war— were sacrificed, sometimes hundreds in a single day. Yet in a comic attempt to diminish the cruelty of the Aztecs, Howard Zinn remarks that their mass murder “did not erase a certain innocence” and he accuses Cortés of nefarious conduct “turning Aztec against Aztec.” (Bernal Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain (New York: Penguin, 1963), p. 229; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperPerennial , 2003), p. 11.)
If the Aztecs of Mexico seemed especially bloodthirsty, they were rivaled by the Incas of South America who also erected sacrificial mounds on which they performed elaborate rites of human sacrifice, so that their altars were drenched with blood, bones were strewn everywhere, and priests collapsed from
exhaustion from stabbing their victims.
Even while Europeans were startled and appalled at such blood-thirstiness , there was a countercurrent of admiration for what Europeans saw as the Indians’ better qualities. Starting with Columbus and continuing through the next few centuries, native Indians were regarded as “noble savages.” They were admired for their dignity, stoicism, and bravery. In reality, the native Indians probably had these qualities in the same proportion as human beings elsewhere on the planet. The idealization of them as “noble savages” seems to be a projection of European fantasies about primitive innocence onto the natives. We too— and especially modern progressives—have the same fantasies. Unlike us, however, the Spanish were forced to confront the reality of Aztec and Inca behavior. Today we have an appreciation for the achievements of Aztec and Inca culture, such as its social organization and temple architecture; but we cannot fault the Spanish for being “distracted” by the mass murder they witnessed . Not all the European hostility to the Indians was the result of irrational prejudice.
While the Spanish conquistadores were surprised to see humans sacrificed in droves, they were not shocked to witness slavery, the subjugation of women, or brutal treatment of war captives— these were familiar enough practices from their own culture. Moreover, in conquering the Indians, and establishing alien rule over them, the Spanish were doing to the Indians nothing more than the Indians had done to each other. So from the point of view of the native Indian people, one empire, that of Spain, replaced another, that of the Aztecs. Did life for the native Indian get worse? It’s very hard to say. The ordinary Indian might now have a higher risk of disease, but he certainly had a lower risk of finding himself under the lurid glare of the obsidian knife.
What, then, distinguished the Spanish from the Indians? The Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa offers an arresting answer. The conquistadores who came to the Americas, he concedes, were “semi-literate, implacable and greedy.” They were clearly believers in the conquest ethic— land is yours if you can take it. Yet these semi-literate greedy swordsmen, without knowing it, also brought with them something new to the Americas. They brought with them the ideas of Western civilization, from Athenian rationalism to Judeo-Christian ideas of human brotherhood to more modern conceptions of self-government, human rights, and property rights. Some of these ideas were nascent and newly developing even in the West. Nevertheless, they were there, and without intending to do so, the conquistadores brought them to the Americas.
To appreciate what Vargas Llosa is saying, consider an astonishing series of events that took place in Spain in the early sixteenth century. At the urging of a group of Spanish clergy, the king of Spain called a halt to Spanish expansion in the Americas, pending the resolution of the question of whether American Indians had souls and could be justly enslaved. This seems odd, and even appalling, to us today, but we should not miss its significance. Historian Lewis Hanke writes that never before or since has a powerful emperor “ordered his conquests to cease until it was decided if they were just.” The king’s actions were in response to petitions by a group of Spanish priests, led by Bartolomé de las Casas. Las Casas defended the Indians in a famous debate held at Valladolid in Spain. On the other side was an Aristotelian scholar, Juan Sepulveda, who relied on Aristotle’s concept of the “natural slave” to argue that Indians were inferior and therefore could be subjugated. Las Casas countered that Indians were human beings with the same dignity and spiritual nature as the Spanish. Today Las Casas is portrayed as a heroic eccentric, but his basic position prevailed at Valladolid. It was endorsed by the pope, who declared in his bull Sublimus Deus, “Indians . . . are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possessions of their property . . . nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen it shall be null and of no effect.” 7 Papal bulls and even royal edicts were largely ignored thousands of miles away— there were no effective mechanisms of enforcement. The conquest ethic prevailed. Even so, over time the principles of Valladolid and Sublimus Deus provided the moral foundation for the enfranchisement of Indians. Indians could themselves appeal to Western ideas of equality, dignity, and property rights in order to resist subjugation, enforce treaties, and get some of their land back.
It is against this backdrop that we should consider the question of whether the white man stole the Americas from the Indians. Let’s begin by appreciating the ambiguity of the term “theft” in this context. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his autobiography tells the story of how as a slave he stole food from his master. Douglass impishly points out that in extracting meat from the tub, he wasn’t really stealing. That’s because as a slave he wasn’t considered a human being; he was considered his master’s property. But the master’s provisions were also the master’s property. So Douglass says that far from stealing from his master he was merely “taking his meat out of one tub and putting it in another.” 8 The point of this anecdote is that concepts of “theft” only make sense when there is a built-in infrastructure of ownership, property rights, and morality. “Theft” requires that someone legitimately own something, so that it is possible for someone else to illegitimately take it. If I steal your corn, and it turns out it wasn’t your corn— you stole it from someone else—then I have indeed committed theft, but not against you, only against the person who actually owns the corn.
Theft, with respect to the Indians, is rendered problematic because the Indians themselves had no concept of property rights. The Indians held that no one actually owns land— land is the common property of all. Who then gets to use the land? Naturally it is the one who is occupying it. This picture was further complicated by the fact that there were two types of Indian tribes, the sedentary agricultural tribes and the nomadic hunting tribes. The sedentary tribes cultivated the land and seemingly by occupation they were its rightful owners. The hunting tribes, since they moved around, occupied no particular place. Over time, however, the hunting tribes used their martial skills to defeat and displace the sedentary tribes. They then became the new sedentary tribes, and their claim to the land was also based on occupancy. Of course there were constant clashes among tribes— no one wanted to be ejected from their land. Everyone understood, however, that there was no real basis for complaint since it wasn’t “their” land in the first place. When everyone is a renter, use is solely according to possession. This is the conquest ethic in its purest form.
The white men who settled America didn’t come as foreign invaders; they came as settlers. Unlike the Spanish, who ruled Mexico from afar, the English families who arrived in America left everything behind and staked their lives on the new world. In other words, they came as immigrants. We can say, of course, that immigration doesn’t confer any privileges, and just because you come here to settle doesn’t mean you have a right to the land that is here, but then that logic would also apply to the Indians. Let’s recall that the Indians who were here also once came as immigrants. In the beginning there was no one here, and then the Indians came from Asia or someplace else and themselves “discovered” the new world.
Does this mean that the Indians “owned” America because they got here first? To see this question in its clear light, consider the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Abel was a shepherd while Cain was a farmer. Abel moved around with flocks, while Cain cultivated the earth. Now imagine that each day while Abel tended livestock, Cain built fences and said “This is mine and this also is mine” until Cain has enclosed all the existing land, while Abel continues as a shepherd. Does this mean that the descendants of Cain— owing to their original occupation of the earth— own the whole world? In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau suggested that the first man to build a fence around something and say “this is mine” was the original con artist. Rousseau raises the question of how one can claim to own something in perpetuity simply by occupying and claiming it. To understand the legitimacy of property rights, we have to see the justice in Rousseau’s comment. If ownership of the globe is not first-come, first -served, then how does an individual— or a tribe, or a nation— get to declare that it owns land and that everyone else who tries to occupy or use it is a usurper?
It would be nice to turn to an American Indian source for a doctrine of the origin of property rights, but no such source exists. The white man who displaced the Indians also brought with him that doctrine— not to mention courts of law to enforce it— which ultimately enabled the Indian to challenge the white man’s occupation on the basis of the white man’s own doctrine. What, then, was that doctrine ? In the ancient and medieval world, just as in the Americas, there was no clear notion of property rights. People owned property, but the idea that they had a right to it would have been regarded as absurd. The ancient view of property was summed up in Cicero’s analogy: Owning a piece of land or property is like occupying a seat in a public theater. It’s your seat, but only while you are sitting in it. You don’t own it, and even its possession comes with certain duties and obligations. The ancients also assumed that the amount of land, like the number of seats in a theater, is generally fixed, so it’s not right to take up more space than you need.
\..........fast forward some pages...
Today we think of Indians as tragic figures, woebegone on the reservation. But that’s not how Andrew Jackson— Indian fighter and later president—saw them. Jackson knew the Indians were canny, organized, and strong. In short order they had the same guns and equipment as the white man. The Indians knew the territory, they knew how to fight, and at first they resisted the settlers on even terms. We should not regard the Indians as passive weaklings . Many of them had the spirit of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who famously cried, “Let the white race perish . . . . Back where they came, on a trail of blood, they must be driven! . . . Burn their dwellings —destroy their stock— slay their wives and children that their very breed may perish. War now! War for ever!” (Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 271.)
This was not mere rhetoric— Indian massacres were a serious threat that settlers had to contend with. Some of this violence was unprovoked. Indians weren’t retaliating for injuries done them; they were engaging in simple banditry and theft. As late as the 1840s, a traveler heading north from Mexico commented on the regularity of Comanche raids over the previous months. “Upward of ten thousand heads of horses and mules have already been carried off, scarcely has a hacienda or rancho on the frontier been unvisited, and everywhere the people have been killed or captured.” 14 It was only over time, with the advance of Western technology, that the raiding threat subsided and the military advantage shifted decisively in favor of the settlers.
So the settlers fought the Indians, and made deals with them, and signed treaties with them, and sometimes broke those treaties, and eventually the settlers got the land they wanted. The Indians were forced to retreat and settle for reparations and reservations. For many decades now, the U.S. government has tried to make restitution to Indians for broken promises and repudiated agreements. Unfortunately, the result has been to make large numbers of Indians dependent on the federal government. Many Indians today live on reservations without working, subsisting off the federal dole. I drove across the Pine Ridge reservation with Charmaine White Face. We saw the dilapidated trailers the Indians lived in. In every village, there were stray dogs barking loudly. I saw in the Indians, especially the young men, the same look of hopelessness that I used to see among slum-dwellers in Mumbai. “This is a terrible place to live,” White Face told me. I asked her if she trusted the federal government. She snorted. “Never! Look what they have done to our people. They promise to protect you, and then they destroy you.” I mentioned Obamacare. Her only response was, “Get ready.”
So when Indian leaders like White Face say that their people are being shafted, I know what she means. The Indians have gotten a bad deal. I’m not saying it is a good deal . At the same time , we should be clear about what the alternatives are. It makes no sense to say, “Give us back Manhattan.” We cannot give you back Manhattan because Manhattan was never yours. You sold a piece of land that was virtually worthless and on it others have built a great and glorious city. It is unjust to demand back what was never yours in the first place. Then you say, “Give us back the Black Hills.” You point out that there is uranium and other minerals in those hills, and now that land is worth a fortune. Once again, no Indian tribe knew how to mine uranium and no Indian tribe knew what to do with uranium if they had it. Other Americans have added value to the Black Hills by figuring out how to tap its resources, and now the Indians want the land back so they can take advantage of what others have figured out how to do. The Indians were cheated when the treaty was broken and they deserve a fair restitution. If the courts simply return the Black Hills, however , they will be giving back far more than was ever taken. The same is true of the rest of America. The land now is not the same as the land then, and demanding a return of land which others have developed and whose value others have increased is not justice; it is stealing.
The best option available to the Indians, it seems, is to assimilate to the new civilization that the Europeans brought to America, and to take advantage of the wealth-creation opportunities that have so enriched the lives of wave upon wave of immigrants. This assimilation option has been available to the native Indians in a way that, for nearly two centuries, it was not available to blacks. Yet this is precisely the option that the native Indians rejected from the outset. Today, many Indians have assimilated, and some tribes have taken advantage of gaming rights and made huge fortunes through operating casinos. Still others live forlorn on the reservation, psychologically removed from the America that is
around them. These are people who seem to prefer the joy of victimhood— and the exertions of claiming reparations of one sort or another— to the joy of entrepreneurial striving. They are doing this in the name of their ancestors , who were brave and resourceful people, and yet I sometimes wonder what their brave and resourceful ancestors would think if they could see the current state of the native Americans.
It seems easy for an armchair progressive activist to deplore Columbus’s legacy. I see the sadness in the eyes of a Charmaine White Face, and I am tempted to agree. Then I ask myself: What would have happened if Europeans never came to America? Would the Indians have developed their own modern civilization? Would they have adopted Western ways? Or would they have continued living as before, and what would that look like? I suppose it would look like the lifestyle of aboriginal tribes that we see today in Australia or Papua, New Guinea. Essentially they would be living characters out of National Geographic. No Western clothes, no Western medicine, no Western technology. If I wanted to be blunt about it, I’d throw in rotting teeth, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy. Imagine people still living in tepees and chasing animals for their meals.
I know, it sounds wonderful as an idea— perhaps even as a short vacation. But try living like that; it would be almost as strange as trying to jump around all day like a frog. The native Indians know that, which is why none of them live like that. They could— the reservations are huge, and the Indians could create a simulacrum of their original lifestyle if they wanted to. But they don’t. In refusing to do so, they are voting for their current life over their ancestral life. The choice is not without its regrets. They have endured great hardships over the years, and they will never stop mourning the legacy of Columbus. Even so, they have no interest in going back to the National Geographic life. They would rather live in modern America and enjoy the fruits of the civilization that Columbus and his successors brought to the continent.
D'Souza, Dinesh (2014-06-02). America: Imagine a World without Her. Regnery Publishing.