Posted on 10/08/2007 10:56:50 AM PDT by Graybeard58
Well, Australia, the North America under discussion, and sub-Saharan Africa were all three places where the "Evil Europeans" visited their evil-doings.......Also three places where there existed very, pardon the expression, not very forward progressing residents......as in the three R's? for example....Yeh, I know....I'm just another old white bigot for that observation
Note: Lief Erikson day is before Columbus day. The Norse - due to lack of technology were required to fight a running retreat until they reboarded their ships.
In this thread: Armcharl anthropologists.
I’m LOL’ing.
I have read every reply and found them, for the most part, to be interesting. I'd also be interested in your opinion on the article.
I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.
The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919)
...knowledge of Indians, & humanity are seldom found in the same individual.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, February 22, 1877
Years ago, I was accused of loading an Indian up with beans lubricated with nitro-glycerine & sending him in an ox wagon over a stumpy road.
This was impossible, on its face, for no one would risk oxen in that way.
But it shows how far malice will deflect an aborigine from the equator of truth.
- Letter to Charles H. Clark, March 6, 1880
MARK TWAIN
Note: I am part Choctaw!
Well, the editorial is right and wrong. They’re right by saying there was no genocide against Native Americans by Columbus, or, for that matter, most settlers from the Old World. The editorial is wrong about the Stone Age existence of Native people, however. The book “1491” and many other well-researched publications outline precontact Native people living in organized villages with agriculture, manipulating the environment, and in some places gathering together in empires (as bloodthirsty as any on Earth). If the writer read “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” he or she would realize that the fatal accident of Native people was lack of domesticated animals in the New World, which meant a lack of diseases transmitted from those animals to the humans tending them. Diamond makes the argument that most of the highly infectious diseases of the Old World, such as measles, influenza, and smallpox, started in the animals domesticated by Old World people. When those diseases reached the New World, the Natives had no immunity, and their death rate was grotesquely high. (The “1491” author says perhaps up to 95 percent of the New World’s population died off.)
Having said all that - an accident of history isn’t genocide.
Smearing Columbus is no accident, either. For more on that, look up “The Frankfurt School” and “Antonio Gramsci.”
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