Field Encounters with American Progressives
Your humble servant, the author, is waddling out of his domestic lair en route to his habitual foraging place, when he is suddenly joined by his next-door neighbor, California-native paleontologist T.H., recently returned from a dig in Argentina.
TH: [after preliminary civilities] They're so racist in Argentina. There's a statue in the center of town of a conquistador that massacred the area's indigenous people. And they're proud of it!
Author: Well, that seems to be a healthy attitude. Healthier than you've got here in America.
TH: [pregnant silence]
TH: [decides to change topic, but it's already too late] What have you been up to while I was away?
Author: No, seriously. Do you think history is a bed of roses? What do you think your indigenous people were up to? Native Americans here in the US slaughtered most European settlers, women and children, in 1622 with no provocation whatsoever. And that was only the beginning of endless killings: Vicious brutal murders with tortures and dismemberment. Why do you think the settlers ended up hating them?
TH: [in shock, incredulous] They were on their land.
Author: The native Americans of Virginia were semi-nomadic and had no notions of private property or unconditional rights. Their world of inter-tribal relations was one in which might made right. Besides, at the time of the Great Massacre the English only occupied a tiny strip of land on the York river, in the context of a peace treaty with the Indians. They hadn't even started the big tobacco plantations. It was an unprovoked attack, like countless others for 200 years.
TH: It was their continent!
Author: Would you say today's Europeans in Europe have a right to massacre Muslim immigrants?
TH: With what white people have done...they don't have a right to anything.
Author: I think if you look at it comparatively, you'll find that Western civilization isn't anywhere near the bottom of the pile.
TH: "I think Western civilization would be a good idea."
Author: Western civilization was the only civilization in history to abolish slavery.
TH: [Stumped, troubled by this] Uh, uh... That's not true! HAITI abolished it first. You don't know shit!
Author: Robespierre abolished it first. Haiti was a slave revolt that succeeded. They put "Slavery is abolished" in their Constitution, and then re-established it. They still practice it to this day! It's called Restavek. Illegal immigrants from Haiti practice it here!
TH: Yeah, yeah [no longer listening] Your white supremacist bullshit again.
Author: What did they do to you in that fucking public school you went to!?
TH: [walks away]
It is ideological nonsense to think of "Native Americans" as a homogeneous victim group genocided by evil whites. There was in fact a disparate collection of tribes, which had little in common with each other, in constantly shifting alliances with one another as well as with the Europeans. The latter were just one more player (but a very successful one!) in a complex world that extended across the whole continent. The Sioux loved the French and were constantly asking them for more missionaries. The Iroquois regarded the English as their traditional tribal allies. All were enthusiastic slave-holders, with the lot of the slave considerably more wretched than anything ever seen in Alabama plantations. The changes that inevitably followed the opening up of the North American continent to the world allowed some tribes to get revenge on their old enemies, other ones to switch from agriculture to war-raiding, and so on. Harshness and brutality are the necessary features of life that wants to preserve itself at the edge of civilization, and it is this fact that prompted the United States government, much later, to remove Indians from its domains.
TH: [after preliminary civilities] They're so racist in Argentina. There's a statue in the center of town of a conquistador that massacred the area's indigenous people. And they're proud of it!
Author: Well, that seems to be a healthy attitude. Healthier than you've got here in America.
TH: [pregnant silence]
TH: [decides to change topic, but it's already too late] What have you been up to while I was away?
Author: No, seriously. Do you think history is a bed of roses? What do you think your indigenous people were up to? Native Americans here in the US slaughtered most European settlers, women and children, in 1622 with no provocation whatsoever. And that was only the beginning of endless killings: Vicious brutal murders with tortures and dismemberment. Why do you think the settlers ended up hating them?
TH: [in shock, incredulous] They were on their land.
Author: The native Americans of Virginia were semi-nomadic and had no notions of private property or unconditional rights. Their world of inter-tribal relations was one in which might made right. Besides, at the time of the Great Massacre the English only occupied a tiny strip of land on the York river, in the context of a peace treaty with the Indians. They hadn't even started the big tobacco plantations. It was an unprovoked attack, like countless others for 200 years.
TH: It was their continent!
Author: Would you say today's Europeans in Europe have a right to massacre Muslim immigrants?
TH: With what white people have done...they don't have a right to anything.
Author: I think if you look at it comparatively, you'll find that Western civilization isn't anywhere near the bottom of the pile.
TH: "I think Western civilization would be a good idea."
Author: Western civilization was the only civilization in history to abolish slavery.
TH: [Stumped, troubled by this] Uh, uh... That's not true! HAITI abolished it first. You don't know shit!
Author: Robespierre abolished it first. Haiti was a slave revolt that succeeded. They put "Slavery is abolished" in their Constitution, and then re-established it. They still practice it to this day! It's called Restavek. Illegal immigrants from Haiti practice it here!
TH: Yeah, yeah [no longer listening] Your white supremacist bullshit again.
Author: What did they do to you in that fucking public school you went to!?
TH: [walks away]
It is ideological nonsense to think of "Native Americans" as a homogeneous victim group genocided by evil whites. There was in fact a disparate collection of tribes, which had little in common with each other, in constantly shifting alliances with one another as well as with the Europeans. The latter were just one more player (but a very successful one!) in a complex world that extended across the whole continent. The Sioux loved the French and were constantly asking them for more missionaries. The Iroquois regarded the English as their traditional tribal allies. All were enthusiastic slave-holders, with the lot of the slave considerably more wretched than anything ever seen in Alabama plantations. The changes that inevitably followed the opening up of the North American continent to the world allowed some tribes to get revenge on their old enemies, other ones to switch from agriculture to war-raiding, and so on. Harshness and brutality are the necessary features of life that wants to preserve itself at the edge of civilization, and it is this fact that prompted the United States government, much later, to remove Indians from its domains.
The West abolished slavery first, and all non-Western cultures abolished it only under pressure from the West