Fri, 10/02/2009 - 9:31pm — koshembos
Ken Bern's America's National Parks just finished a week long run. The parks are either beautiful or important, The parks were established on Indian land and the Indians living there for millennia were evicted, discarded like old shoes. The parks were not discovered by us; the Indians knew about them and respected them.
Aren't we beautiful and moral people? We can tell evryone how to behave.
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What's your point?
Are you somehow suggesting we should have bulldozed and paved over the national parks, just because we took them without asking?
Nothing is true; everything is permitted.
Agreed
White people took the whole continent away from the Indians. What makes the parks notably worse than all the rest?
Well, it's a part of all the rest.
And we didn't just take "the whole continent away from the Indians", we did evict them, and then we destroyed them, a clear, undeniable, and very lengthy program of deliberate ethnic cleansing. Take any one of your founding Fathers and the same story applies. Indeed, the French in early Canada did much better with the natives, even with the natives who brutalized them.
New Defense
Since we have stolen everything why bother us with measly parks? I'll stick to Ossetia and Georgia not to offend your sensitivities.
KoshemBos
>And we didn't just take "the
>And we didn't just take "the whole continent away from the Indians", we did evict them, and then we destroyed them, a clear, undeniable, and very lengthy program of deliberate ethnic cleansing.
Back then it was called conquest, and the idea was pretty universal. Europeans (thanks to guns, germs*, and steel) were simply better at it. If the Aztecs or the Incas had had the biological and technological advantages of Europe, we'd be talking about the horrible crimes of Native Americans in France. Or perhaps not, since such an Aztec Empire might never have developed the Enlightenment concepts that allow us to judge the past in those terms.
>Take any one of your founding Fathers and the same story applies.
Any? No, a few harbored fantasies of working out a way to share the continent-a fantasy because all attempts to limit westward expansion were doomed from below, from ordinary people pushing west despite any attempts to limit them.
>Indeed, the French in early Canada did much better with the natives, even with the natives who brutalized them.
A tactical decision made because of the very limited numbers of Frenchmen who came to the New France, not because of French cultural superiority.
The real crime of the US was not in its conquest of the West (that was inevitable) but its treatment of the natives after the conquest. It is the history of American treatment of the tribes AFTER the Indian Wars were concluded that is the real shame.
*The most damage by far was done by Europeans just by showing up: most Native Americans died of European diseases in the first few decades after Columbus, and given the lack of knowledge at the time those deaths couldn't have been avoided even if the European intentions had been as pure as snow (which, of course, they weren't). It was the effects of disease that allowed Europe to conquer the Americas in the first place.
Tdraicer