Serenity509 wrote:Malcolm wrote:Serenity509 wrote:As an American Buddhist, I am thankful for the blessings we often take for granted, despite our country's imperfections. Even when adjusted for differences in currency value between countries, the bottom five percent of Americans have a higher standard of living than 68% of the world's people, and the median household income is higher than 93% of the world's people.
Yes, at the expense of 400 years of systematic ethnic cleansing and genocide of an indigenous population.
Let's begin by asking whether the white man was guilty of genocide against the native Indians. As a matter of fact, he was not. As William McNeill documents in Plagues and Peoples, great numbers of Indians did perish as a result of their contact with whites, but, for the most part, they died by contracting diseases-smallpox, measles, malaria, tuberculosis-for which they had not developed immunities. This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it is not genocide, which implies an intention to wipe out an entire population. McNeill points out that, a few centuries earlier, Europeans themselves contracted lethal diseases, including the bubonic plague, from Mongol invaders from the Asian steppes. The Europeans didn't have immunities, and the plague decimated one-third of the population of Europe, and yet, despite the magnitude of deaths and suffering, no one calls this genocide.
http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... ut-america
- In the beginning, Anglo settlers organized irregular units to brutally attack and destroy unarmed Indigenous women, children, and old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks. During nearly two centuries of British colonization, generations of settlers, mostly farmers, gained experience as “Indian fighters” outside any organized military institution. Anglo-French conflict may appear to have been the dominant factor of European colonization in North America during the eighteenth century, but while large regular armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the Indigenous communities. Much of the fighting during the fifteen-year settlers’ war for independence, especially in the Ohio Valley region and western New York, was directed against Indigenous resisters who realized it was not in their interest to have a close enemy of settlers with an independent government, as opposed to a remote one in Great Britain. Nor did the fledgling US military in the 1790s carry out operations typical of the state-centered wars occurring in Europe at the time. Even following the founding of the professional US Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method of the US conquest of the Ohio Valley and Mississippi Valley regions. Since that time, Grenier notes, irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces.
The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of the extreme violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to seek the utter annihilation of the Indigenous population. “In cases where a rough balance of power existed,” Grenier observes, “and the Indians even appeared dominant— as was the situation in virtually every frontier war until the first decade of the 19th century—[ settler] Americans were quick to turn to extravagant violence.”
Many historians who acknowledge the exceptional one-sided colonial violence attribute it to racism. Grenier argues that rather than racism leading to violence, the reverse occurred: the out-of-control momentum of extreme violence of unlimited warfare fueled race hatred. “Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American could later generations of ‘Indian haters,’ men like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.” By then, the Indigenous peoples’ villages, farmlands, towns, and entire nations formed the only barrier to the settlers’ total freedom to acquire land and wealth. Settler colonialists again chose their own means of conquest. Such fighters are often viewed as courageous heroes, but killing the unarmed women, children, and old people and burning homes and fields involved neither courage nor sacrifice.
So it was from the planting of the first British colonies in North America. Among the initial leaders of those ventures were military men— mercenaries— who brought with them their previous war experiences in Britain’s imperialist, anti-Muslim Crusades. Those who put together and led the first colonial armies, such as John Smith in Virginia, Myles Standish at Plymouth, John Mason in Connecticut, and John Underhill in Massachusetts, had fought in the bitter, brutal, and bloody religious wars ongoing in Europe at the time of the first settlements. They had long practiced burning towns and fields and killing the unarmed and vulnerable. “Tragically for the Indian peoples of the Eastern Seaboard,” Grenier observes, “the mercenaries unleashed a similar way of war in early Virginia and New England.”
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014-09-16). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) (pp. 58-60). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
- There is one feature in the expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries which should never be lost sight of, especially by those who denounce such expansion on moral grounds. On the whole, the movement has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place.
—Theodore Roosevelt, “The Expansion of the White Races,” 1909
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream … the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
—Black Elk, 1930, on the massacre at Wounded Knee
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014-09-16). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) (p. 162). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
You said:
As an American Buddhist, I am thankful for the blessings we often take for granted, despite our country's imperfections. Even when adjusted for differences in currency value between countries, the bottom five percent of Americans have a higher standard of living than 68% of the world's people, and the median household income is higher than 93% of the world's people.
The word "blessing" is very apt here. Why? The verb "to bless" comes from:
- Old English bletsian, bledsian, Northumbrian bloedsian "to consecrate, make holy, give thanks," from Proto-Germanic *blodison "hallow with blood, mark with blood," from *blotham "blood" (see blood (n.)). Originally a blood sprinkling on pagan altars.
So, yes, our "blessings" comes from the blood our ancestors spilt on the altar of European incursions into the the new world.
It would be wrong to say that whites never killed natives. But again, we must judge American history by the same standards we'd judge any other country's history. For example, wasn't India, the country in which Buddhism was born, established by Aryan invaders who displaced the native peoples? Does that make India or Buddhism all bad?
Yes, for in fact Europeans frequently killed natives, more often than not. As for India, we do not have an accurate historical record of the movements of Indo-aryans into India, all we have is myth and guesswork. But Europeans were so callous in their disregard to the First Peoples here, they willing wrote down accounts of murder and pillage without a second thought.
- Documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; the post– Civil War era of the so-called Indian wars in the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period, all of which are discussed in the following chapters. Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children … during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” As Patrick Wolfe has noted, the peculiarity of settler colonialism is that the goal is elimination of Indigenous populations in order to make land available to settlers. That project is not limited to government policy, but rather involves all kinds of agencies, voluntary militias, and the settlers themselves acting on their own.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014-09-16). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) (pp. 9-10). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
Our blessings also come from the fact that as Americans, our colonial policies are so successful that indeed "the bottom five percent of Americans have a higher standard of living than 68% of the world's people" as you note. America is thus far the most successful experiment in European colonialism ever tried. It is important that we remember how we arose as a country, and not smother it in Hallmark sentiment.
I am not saying we need to feel some kind of white guilt about it all. I certainly don't. I am saying that we need to remember and never forget where our "blessings" come from and how they were gained.