Posted on 10/08/2003 8:20:26 AM PDT by presidio9
The author is a realist. Your view of the author as a racist is an indication that you have bought into the erroneous "Noble Savage" myth.
The author does everything he says the Indians should not in this article. They should not be proud of their ancestors but he is, they should not vilify Columbus yet he vilifies Indians, they should not have a racist view yet he clearly does. The man is a hypocrite.-Between the Lines
The author is a realist. Your view of the author as a racist is an indication that you have bought into the erroneous "Noble Savage" myth-presidio9
Author advocates a rationalist choice: choose Western civilization because it is superior.
I detest the multiculturalist notion that all cultures are equal: it is a tenet of a moribund philosophy.
However, the author seems to jump the shark just a bit by rejecting "heritage". I detest rationalists, too.
Da*n! Hero worship keeps getting harder.
The author is just dishing out the same hate, lies and disrespect that the Indians are. This article is nothing more than tit for tat.
Your view of the author as a racist is an indication that you have bought into the erroneous "Noble Savage" myth.
LOL. My views of the author are based solely on this article and have nothing to do with the issue of good Indian/bad Indian or good European/bad European. Someone (like this author) who extols the superiority of one race over that of another, is in fact the exact definition of a racist. Look it up.
You presume that because I disagree with the author’s tactics that I must be in agreement with the multiculturists. You are wrong. I believe that we should celebrate Columbus for his outstanding accomplishments. I also believe that the Indians are being hypocritical when they say that Columbus accomplished no great thing, yet blame all of their problems on what he did. You cannot blame the evils of an entire civilization on a man who did nothing great.
We should not stoop to the tactics of half-truths, racism, and vilification as the mulitculturists/Indians and author of this article has. I would rather loose an argument on its merits, than to win it by slander or deception.
Agreed, but since the author is arguing from the premise of cultural superiorirty, rather than racial superiority, you are still way off base. The author is not so much attacking pre-Columbian American culture as he is pointing out the truth.
Fair enough.
Someone (like this author) who extols the superiority of one race over that of another, is in fact the exact definition of a racist. Look it up.
The author did not extol the superiority of one race over that of another. He extolled the superiority of a civilization.
Clue #1: Western Civilization = White Race.
The author is not so much attacking pre-Columbian American culture as he is pointing out the truth.
The truth or half-truths? There were no written languages in the same sense that ancient Egypt had no written language. Little agriculture? American Indians domesticated corn, squash, pumpkins, potatoes (both white and sweet), tomatoes, beans, a wide variety of peppers, blue grapes, peanuts, strawberries, cocoa, vanilla, maple syrup, avocados, pineapples, cassava, tobacco, cotton, watermelons, as well as a variety of gourds. Today, 60 percent of U.S. crop production comes from crops originally domesticated by Indians. Scant permanent settlement? When Cortez arrived at Tenochtitlán was home to over 200,000 people and one of the largest cities in the world. Only Rome and Constantinople were larger. While there were hundreds of small Aztec cities, three were larger than 100,000. I do not see how the author is simply pointing out the truth.
Incorrect. Western Civilization is dependent on and built upon Eastern and Mediterranian societies inhabited by a lot of brown skinned people. The fact that at that moment in history white people had built up the most cultural capital is a reflection of chance partnerships of history, not genitics. Tomas Sowell discusses this concept in depth in his fine book "Conquests and Cultures."
Native Americans left Asia 10,000 years ago and dispersed widely in relation to Europeans. As you pointed out, when Europeans arrived in America American culture was at the times roughly 2000 years behind European culture. And that's ignoring the fact that they had no large beasts of burden and had not yet invented the wheel.
And just what races make up this Western Civilization he extolled? In case you are not familiar with it, "Western Civilization" is the PC word for the oppressive white imperialistic race. It is also a term white supremacists use when they don’t want to seem racist, along with “Western Christian Culture”. Western Civilization also means nothing else but the white race to Africans, Asians and people from the Middle East.
"Western Culture" equals the white race to everyone in the world, except for maybe a few conservative whites.
"Western Culture" equals the white race to everyone in the world, except for maybe a few conservative whites.
No more how widespread, such an equation is itself racist. I would hope you would excuse the author from having to dignify it with a qualification.
It must be possible to make the distinction. Sorry, PC does not own a monopoly on the language.
No doubt.
I would hope you would excuse the author from having to dignify it with a qualification.
I am far from the first person to call Dr. Michael Berliner a racist and he has never answered the accusation before, so I guess he has excused himself.
Sorry, PC does not own a monopoly on the language.
And neither do racists. But they both use the same language we do meaning differant things than us. But if you listen real closely you can hear the differance.
Columbus was not a genocidal monster. He was not Mother Theresa either. He was an adventurer of the late 15th Century with all the cultural and moral failings of his era if such an era can be judged with 21st Century moral hindsight.
The "genocide" topic is one of those topics that has become so mired in revisionist propaganda that is now Politically Correct Gospel. Columbus has become the poster child of those who despise to the cominng of the Europeans to the Americas.
Politically Correct Gospel now proclaims that:
1. Spain commited genocide.
2. It is Columbus' fault that the genocide occured because he discovered the America's for the Europeans.
The fact and the propaganda often get quite mixed up as in the article you quoted in Post 5:
Bartolomeo de las Casas, a young priest who assisted Columbus in the conquest of Cuba, writes in his book “History of the Indies” (reprinted by Harper & Row, 1971) that "from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines.
It is true that Las Casas participated in the Spanish conquest of Cuba in 1513. However, Columbus was dead and buried by 1506. Thus Colombus gets credit for conquests he never made and for many events that occurred after he was dead.
According to the genocide P.C. Gospel, Spain in 1492 should have the 21st Century enlightment to known that conquest of a new land is sooooooo Politically Incorrect. After all, there were other people already living there. The fact that, in 1492, conquest of "barbarian" lands had been the natural order of things since the dawn of history is irrrelevant. Spain should have known better.
Of course, these individuals are the same ones who glorify the Aztecs who had no qualms about conquering neighboring Mesoamerican tribes and cutting out the beating hearts of their captives. The also never mention the very Politically Incorrect and cannibalistic Carib Indians that were conquering their way up the Caribbean archipelago and eating the peacenik Arawaks.
According to the genocide P.C. Gospel, Columbus should have known better than to take Indian slaves back to Spain.
However, this was at a time when Venetian and Genoese traders had a rather active Black Sea slave trade in white Slavic "barbarians". To Spain's credit, The "Catholic Monarchs", Ferdinand and Isabella, disapproved and ordered the Indian slaves returned to the Americas.
Eventually, Spanish colonists in the New World set up a system of encomiendas where they played the role of fuedal lords and the Indians played the role of feudal serfs. (Not unlike the roles the Cuban Communist Party and the Cuban people now play.) Las Casas himself received an encomienda in Hispaniola in 1502.
By 1511, however, Las Casas was influenced by other Spanish clergy that complained about the treatment of Indians by the colonists and, after the conquest of Cuba brought more abuses, he became an advocate of Indian rights.
Las Casa returned to Spain to plead his case before the Spanish Crown and was succesful in being appointed part of a royal commission to investigate the treatment of the Indians. Las Casa became a political activist for Indian rights and part of his campaign was the writing of his books detailing atrocities against the Indians.
Las Casas' books made quite an impression on the Spanish Crown which passed laws abolishing Indian slavery.
Some claimed that Las Casa accounts were totally accurate. Some claimed that he greatly exagerated in order to achieve his political aims. It is now generally agreed that 3 million dead is a gross exageration as there were not 3 million Indians in all of the Caribbean.
This being the time of religious wars, Las Casas' books were used by Protestant nations such as Holland and England as an example of how horribly cruel Spain was......"The Black Legend" as anti-Spanish propaganda was called.
What the anti-Spanish propaganda failed note, however, was that atrocities by some Spaniards were denounced by other Spaniards, debated in Spain by Spaniards and reforms were instituted by the Spanish Crown on moral grounds.
In the English and Dutch colonies of North America, the Indians had no such advocates. "The only good Injun is a dead Injun" was the motto until the late 1800's but it is Spain that was branded as commiting "Genocide".
It is true that the Indian natives dissappeared from the Carbbean islands. You will see white Cubans, black Cubans, mulatto Cubans and even Chinese Cubans but you will find no Indian Cubans. This, however, is mostly due to the effects of introduced diseases in small island populations.
"White man's diseases" are often cited as part of the "genocide" charge. It is rather absurd, however, to blame such tragedies on a 16th Century nation that knew nothing about the transmission of infectious disease and that suffered in turn. The Black Plauge was an Asian import to Europe and syphilis was an American import to Europe. Millions of Europeans died from such diseases during the Age of Exploration but only non-European deaths are labelled as "genocide".
To those who now, with 21st Century 20/20 hindsight accused Spain of "genocide", I would ask them to compare the racial populations of the American East Coast with the population of Mexico and Central America.
Look at them. What race do you see?
In the American East Coast you will see whites and blacks and immigrants from all nations but the number of Native American Indians is miniscule.
In Mexico, except for a small white minority estimated at about 11%, you will see either a full-blooded Mesoamerican Indian or a Mestizo of mixed white and Indian blood.
In spite of this, it is Spain that now bears the stain of so-called "Genocide".
It is interesting to speculate how America had turned out if Europeans had never learned to sail. Would the Aztecs still be cutting out their neighbor's hearts? Would the Caribs be eating anybody right now? Would the Japanese have discovered America in 1910 and left not a single Mexican Amerindian alive by 1939?
Once you apply 21st Century moral hindsight to an era half a millenium ago and use the term "genocide" rather loosely, there is hardly a society in history that would pass the moral test.
Great analysis.
We do not have state or federal holidays which celebrate one race over the others.
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