In which brave and courageous, godlike heroes clash with savage, murderous barbarians<\/a>. \u00a0Of course Salon, being slightly to the Left of center, simply takes the old stereotypes and flips the nameplates around.<\/p>\nFirst, note the Myth of myths in the article: The idea that kids in America today would not be aware of the hardships and atrocities visited upon the Native American population when it is overwhelmingly focused on in our schools, on the news, on PBS, on educational TV, in popular culture and in almost every publication out there. \u00a0That is like imagining a kid growing up in the 1950s who never heard\u00a0of Communism. \u00a0But again, the Myth of Myths \u2013 fear it. \u00a0It\u2019s always a sign of movements with ulterior motives.<\/p>\n
As I\u2019ve said before, my appreciation and celebration of American heritage along with\u00a0American Indian heritage is courtesy of my wife. \u00a0She is proudly part Indian, and part descended from Jenny Wiley, a woman whose family was slaughtered by Indians before she herself was enslaved. \u00a0Eventually Jenny escaped and was able to convey her tale, which was later corroborated. \u00a0Thus my wife\u00a0is dutifully proud of her American Indian heritage, but also her European American heritage. \u00a0And likewise, she tends not to idolize either tradition or ancestry. \u00a0Which is a good thing, and would be nice if we could get back to a time when we actually understood the history better than today. \u00a0Something that, apparently, outlets like Salon would rather lose an arm than see happen.<\/p>\n
The fact is, there were no Native Americans when the first Europeans arrived in the New World. \u00a0They weren\u2019t even there when the Vikings came. \u00a0There existed a vaguely similar culture across the lands in a way similar to Europe, with radically different people with different customs and cultures joined together only by a few common traits. \u00a0Most who lived along the East coast by the 15th Century were themselves immigrants or invaders. \u00a0It\u2019s not as if the first migrants crossed the Bering Straight and shot straight for the East Coast, set up shop, and remained in place for the next 10,000 years. \u00a0Those who were there as Columbus, and later other European explorers and settlers, came to the shores either had conquered or displaced others, or were descended from their ancestors who did the same.<\/p>\n
And as those strange looking explorers from an unknown land came to settle in this new world, the local inhabitants reacted in a variety of ways. \u00a0Some lashed out with immediate violence, others sought friendship. \u00a0More common was the tendency for the inhabitants to seek some form of truce with these new immigrants in the hopes of solidifying help against other, hostile Indian tribes.<\/p>\n
Though the disease that cost most of the Indian lives is pretty much settled history, the exact extent and cause is still open for debate. \u00a0Particularity tricky is the possibility that explorers from Asia, specifically\u00a0China, may have come to the New World via the Pacific Ocean. \u00a0Knowing that a great many diseases common in Europe were also known in Asia, the question then remains if we will see such a devastation of native populations in the West, and if not, why weren\u2019t those native populations in the West devastated the way they were in the East? \u00a0So while much is known, more is assumed, and there is also much that we don\u2019t know yet \u2013 if we\u2019ll ever know.<\/p>\n
Of course while all of this was happening in the good old soon-to-be-American lands, in Europe, Ottoman forces were preparing to make their second big attempt to conquer Europe by way of Vienna and subsequently smash into that coveted European continent. \u00a0It had already tried once, only to be stopped at the Battle of Lepanto. \u00a0It would be stopped again outside the gates of Vienna. \u00a0But while those immigrants were traveling to the new world for divers reasons, most in Europe had no way of knowing how long Europe would last. \u00a0It wasn\u2019t the first time Europe faced invasion in its history. \u00a0The Mongols, the Vikings, the Magyars, and by\u00a0different ways and from different places, the Muslims. \u00a0The Christian Visigothic kingdom of Spain had been conquered ages past, and only recently had been retaken. \u00a0Sicily was a cosmopolitan mix of Christian and Islamic influences due to Muslim attempts to strike at Europe\u2019s \u2018soft underbelly\u2019 mixing with Normans from the north. \u00a0And while invaders\u00a0had been stopped in most cases, or assimilated in a few others, most Europeans had no way of knowing how the Ottoman menace\u00a0would eventually turn out. \u00a0The Islamic world had, after all, successfully conquered Byzantium, signalling the death knell of Christendom and subjecting much of southeastern Europe to centuries of second class citizenship at best.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t anything new of course. \u00a0Though I\u2019m shocked at how few Americans know this part of history (being far more versed in America\u2019s subsequent treatment of American Indians and slave trade). \u00a0I\u2019m stunned at how few Americans know of the Islamic world\u2019s vibrant and extensive African slave trade. \u00a0And of course, if we want to be snarky and say Thanksgiving is all about Europeans conquering the Native Americans, perhaps we should remember the reason the age of exploration happened in the first place was because the Islamic world had destroyed the Byzantine world, sacked and conquered Constantinople (modern Istanbul), and threatened\u00a0Europe\u2019s trade links to Asia. \u00a0Perhaps we should emphasize\u00a01453 as the beginning of the American Indian\u2019s woes.<\/p>\n
And it wasn\u2019t just Europe and the Islamic world and the various wars over\u00a0land and territory going on in the pre-Columbian Americas. \u00a0In India, one of many invading forces, in this case the\u00a0Mughal Empire, was brutally subjecting the Indian subcontinent to its will. \u00a0Other kingdoms would rise and conquer that region, often using similar brutal tactics, until eventually the British would come in and set India under its domination. \u00a0While Spain and Portugal were busy in South America, the First Burmese Wars had happened, as the Qing Dynasty was preparing to topple the Ming and use whatever tactics to solidify control in China. \u00a0In Africa, various empires continue to vie for control, attacking neighbors and enslaving losers. \u00a0By Plymouth colony\u2019s founding, the Songhai Kingdom, one of Africa\u2019s greatest and most aggressively expansive empires, had crumbled after a brief, but meteoric, rise to power.<\/p>\n
The point being\u00a0that progressives, through Multi-Cultural education with a sprinkling of Political Correctness, have established a historical narrative where the world is casually seen as a pretty happy place with awesome cultures and wonderful people in beautiful civilizations pretty much making love, having occasional squabbles, and singing\u00a0John Lennon songs. \u00a0Suddenly BAM! \u00a0In come those brutal, murderous, racist, imperialist European Christians, butchering and slaughtering their way through the hapless hordes of peace loving flower children throughout the world. \u00a0All was happy and peace and equality and LGBT rights and equality for women, until the dark ages of the Christian West from which modern liberalism is hellbent on delivering the world.<\/p>\n
The fact is, the Europeans of that age were aggressive and violent, using the ideals and technological breakthroughs that began apace during the Reconnaissance in order to finally break away from a defensive posture and take their colonial designs\u00a0into other parts of the world. \u00a0The main goal was to gain a foothold against other European powers, using lands gained as economic and political leverage. \u00a0The world they invaded and conquered was every bit as violent and aggressive as they were, the Europeans merely had bigger guns. \u00a0In some cases, centuries of plague and sickness had rendered Europeans immune to illnesses that other people had never encountered, but suddenly were forced to encounter all at once. But slavery, war, conquest? \u00a0These were as common \u00a0to the world of the pilgrims at Plymouth as dirt and sky. \u00a0In fact, what is really shocking \u2013 and seldom at all focused on any more, though it was emphasized when I was a kiddo \u2013 was that in this world of violence, conquest, slavery and extermination, the Plymouth colony actually forged a peace treaty with the Wampanoag that lasted almost 50 years. \u00a0Not a bad record for those days. \u00a0Or any days for that matter. \u00a0Ah, what could have been. \u00a0I wonder why that isn\u2019t the focus of so many Native Americans and Progressives nowadays.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, this was, like all periods in history, a complex and vast story with many elements worth studying. \u00a0A team of experts dedicated to only studying the 1620s could spend a hundred years and still come away with questions unanswered. \u00a0That\u2019s the way history is. \u00a0Usually we have a dozen or so pieces of a thousand piece puzzle and we do our best to figure out the picture. \u00a0Which is why history is more of an art than a science, no matter what Marx believed. \u00a0And it\u2019s that artistic side that allows so much room for agendas, biases, prejudices, politics, ideologies, axes to grind, and any one of a thousand other factors to influence how we read that handful of puzzle pieces.<\/p>\n
So hopefully we had a happy Thanksgiving, celebrated a rare occasion in history where two radically different people came together, and actually formed a temporary bond. \u00a0Sure, we can invoke collective guilt and blame the Pilgrims for what later people with the same skin color\u00a0and religion did, but I thought the idea of collective guilt went out in the mid-20th century. \u00a0Because collective guilt is no longer vogue, I\u2019ll go with focusing on what could have been, celebrating that moment of friendship and alliance, and remembering the courage and kindness that this holiday should inspire \u2013 if we are\u00a0as smart as we love to imagine. \u00a0Assuming, of course, that courage and kindness are the traits we\u2019re hoping to inspire in a new generation in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In which brave and courageous, godlike heroes clash with savage, murderous barbarians. \u00a0Of course Salon, being slightly to the Left of center, simply takes the old stereotypes and flips the nameplates around. First, note the Myth of myths in the article: The idea that kids in America today would not be aware of the hardships […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2805,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,70,62,45],"tags":[80],"class_list":["post-7495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-our-big-politically-correct-bother","category-uneducating-postmoderns","category-why-learn-from-history-when-we-can-repeat-it-instead","tag-history"],"yoast_head":"\n
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