Posted on 10/26/2010 5:30:22 AM PDT by SMARTY
Was anyone else able to catch the PBS program last night about the history of Indian wars in the American and Midwest? I missed a lot of it, but saw enough to make some observations.
The art direction was spectacular!! However, the program was grinding the same old ax. America is awful and has no right to exist. Period.
I mean, it was a perfect laundry list of all the evils of civilization!
Of course, Native Americans were entirely blameless and the unqualified textbook image of the noble savage... far above the crude brutality of white settlers and the military.
Make no mistake… I feel that there is almost NO population in this hemisphere which got a worse deal than Native Americans.
That said… how about a little academic rigor and empirical scrutiny?
When white people came to this hemisphere, they were appalled at the extent and severity of the vicious, nearly wanton, savagery which natives practiced on their enemies. I mean, APALLED!!! And THAT is saying something coming as it does from a people settling here after the ravages of nearly perpetual religious and political butchery which had taken place (was taking place) in Europe!!
And, it may be my imagination, but it seems that the producers (etc.) scoured the universe to find an exact double for “O”, to portray Tecumseh…blue lips and all! Please!!!???
And some tribes were worse off than others. Some were pretty organized. Others were bark-eating beggars. Just as it is racist and simplistic to view the Europeans as monolithic, the same goes for the Indian tribes. The Flatheads were a lot different than the Cherokee, who were different than the Apache, who were different than the Cheyenne, etc.
I agree with all your thoughts on this thread. SMARTY gets it! It’s impossible to study human history and not reach the conclusions you have reached. It puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?
Liberals will always make it out that whites in North America took immediate, constant and gratuitously unfair advantage of Native Americans.
That happened… but NOT immediately, invariably or permanently as Liberals like to claim!
Also, to the extent that Native Americans became involved with the ‘politics’ of the colonials and the crown, they exacerbated the situation.
But, I don’t honestly know how they could have avoided it. Native Americans wanted trade (weapons, especially) with whites and compromised themselves from that point on.
I have found that if you take money and blood out of the narrative, history will make even LESS sense...and history is pretty confusing, anyway!
I’m with you. It’s sometimes hard to understand WHY people are motivated the way they are, but it’s easy and important to understand that it is SO.
The great Khan would pile up the skulls of his conquered enemies so that people could see them from a mile away. In an age without mass media... what better way to send the message that ‘you will die, if you do not submit’? This is pure and unalloyed terror and PR worth its weight in gold!
Much of this behavior has been bred out of humanity or criminalized by mutual consent, but if you force individuals into a desperate corner or engage backward peoples on the ground ...they will revert to type. Count on it!!
It went from ancient times all the way up to modern times, and the effect was to see the entire panorama of savagry, bloodletting, greed, conquest, all in one great timeline. It really struck me. What a messed up breed we are!
Humanity has survived in spite of itself...NOT because we are superior.
The butchery which has been committed is beyond belief. Staggering... much abated these days, but still evident and dormant just under the most urbane and ‘civilized’ veneer.
Personally, I believe the Christian (New Testament) conception of Mercy, has been the single most significant bar to senseless and wanton killing ... for which there existed NO moral censure in the ancient world.
If left to ‘other’ beliefs… we’d still be robbing, killing and worse with perfect impunity
That's not entirely true. The Iroquois were very well organized with a functioning government. The "Iroquois Influence Thesis" has been pretty well dismissed as an influence on our Founding Fathers but the fact that such a thesis could even be considered shows that there were common elements in both models of governance.
That's not to say they weren't brutal; "killed by Indians" is too common a cause of death in my family tree. Some tribes were organized and quite efficient at warfare. Disease, poor alliance choices, and military technology were greater contributors to their downfall.
You’re correct. I eluded to that point later on in the thread. You can’t treat the Indians monolithically. Some were more organized than others. The Sioux and Cheyenne were the ones who couldn’t control their younger warriors, and thus were drawn into conflicts that their elders had tried to avoid.
The way I see it, the greedy power-mongers of the world smartened up. They’re like crime families. They figured out it’s best to avoid a war whenever possible. I think nowadays they fight their battles behind the scenes, and instead of body counts, it’s credits in bank accounts that measures success. I think they’re just more business-like now.
The last, decent PBS special I watched (then owned) was REVOLUTION’ wherein the characters were explaining to the camera on segments why they rebelled against the British.
I even saw Philip Seymour Hoffman in the documentary as a young conscript in the Colonial Army. Truly the best documentary about the American Revolution.
Sounds not so different from current-day environmentalists.
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