j*******7
发帖数: 6300 | 1 Reject the Lie of White "Genocide" Against Native Americans
Michael Medved
Few opinions I've expressed on air have produced a more indignant, outraged
reaction than my repeated insistence that the word "genocide" in no way fits
as a description of the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists
or, later, American settlers.
I've never denied that the 400 year history of American contact with the
Indians includes many examples of white cruelty and viciousness --- just as
the Native Americans frequently (indeed, regularly) dealt with the European
newcomers with monstrous brutality and, indeed, savagery. In fact, reading
the history of the relationship between British settlers and Native
Americans its obvious that the blood-thirsty excesses of one group provoked
blood thirsty excesses from the other, in a cycle that listed with scant
interruption for several hundred years.
But none of the warfare (including an Indian attack in 1675 that succeeded
in butchering a full one-fourth of the white population of Connecticut, and
claimed additional thousands of casualties throughout New England) on either
side amounted to genocide. Colonial and, later, the American government,
never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the
official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers
and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality
.
Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with
massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases
that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the
New World.
UCLA professor Jared Diamond, author of the universally acclaimed bestseller
"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," writes:
"Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from
tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an
estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The
most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the
Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late
1600's, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the
Mississippi River (page 78)....
"The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been
exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic
resistance. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus rank top among the
killers." (page 212).
"As for the most advanced native societies of North America, those of the U.
S. Southeast and the Mississippi River system, their destruction was
accomplished largely by germs alone, introduced by early European explorers
and advancing ahead of them" (page 374)
Obviously, the decimation of native population by European germs represents
an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime. Stories of
deliberate infection by passing along "small-pox blankets" are based
exclusively on two letters from British soldiers in 1763, at the end of the
bitter and bloody French and Indian War. By that time, Indian populations (
including those in the area) had already been terribly impacted by smallpox,
and there's no evidence of a particularly devastating outbreak as a result
of British policy.
For the most part, Indians were infected by devastating diseases even before
they made direct contact with Europeans: other Indians who had already been
exposed to the germs, carried them with them to virtually every corner of
North America and many British explorers and settlers found empty, abandoned
villages (as did the Pilgrims) and greatly reduced populations when they
first arrived.
Sympathy for Native Americans and admiration for their cultures in no way
requires a belief in European or American genocide. As Jared Diamond's book
(and countless others) makes clear, the mass migration of Europeans to the
New World and the rapid displacement and replacement of Native populations
is hardly a unique interchange in human history. On six continents, such
shifting populations – with countless cruel invasions and occupations and
social destructions and replacements - have been the rule rather than the
exception.
The notion that unique viciousness to Native Americans represents our "
original sin" fails to put European contact with these struggling Stone Age
societies in any context whatever, and only serves the purposes of those who
want to foster inappropriate guilt, uncertainty and shame in young
Americans.
A nation ashamed of its past will fear its future.
One of the most urgent needs in culture and education for the United States
of America is discarding the stupid, groundless and anti-American lies that
characterize contemporary political correctness.
The right place to begin is to confront, resist and reject the all-too-
common line that our rightly admired forebears involved themselves in
genocide.
The early colonists and settlers can hardly qualify as perfect but
describing them in Hitlerian, mass-murdering terms represents an act of
brain-dead defamation.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelmedved/2007/09/19/reject_ | k****s
发帖数: 1209 | 2 文字游戏。genocide就是genocide。 |
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