Why Trump’s America is like the real America (link fixed)
Why Trump’s America is like the real America
I grew up believing in a host of commonly taught myths about my country. I’m embarrassed by how long it takes to get over these myths, but I also see that many people never do.
A good way to shatter these illusions with good historical facts is to read An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz. Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
All societies are bound together by myths. They provide the stability upon which daily life can go on without painful disruption.
Meanwhile serious historians dig beneath these superficial fairy tales to look at the core beliefs the society uses to function at a systems level. In our culture, this hierarchical gap is a natural outcome of the reductionist philosophy that dominates Western thought.
The context for the arrival of the Europeans who settled North and South America was a broader racist arrogance that made the whole planet a place for the Europeans to lust after. An inherent racism in their cultures made it easy to create the “discovery” myth and the following myths about “savages” that allowed the conquest of so much of the world’s indigenous people. It was closely coupled with slavery which had its own parallel mythology about Native peoples.
So I learned that this was our place and that the savages had to be civilized. The case for slavery had a different character but it also required the dehumanization of people different from the European colonialists.
In the case of the Native People there was the issue of their occupancy of the land and the need to terminate that. Genocide was the answer and it was massive. Along with the removal of those people from the land was another more subtle issue and that was the land itself. Its commodification and its role as a storehouse for raw materials for commerce were also part of the overall mythology.
It all comes out in the open with Trump. No need for excuses or apology, only the exercise of raw power to carry out the process. Nothing else is new about what Trump is doing. The curtain has been removed and the naked exploitation to satisfy greed remains.
Comments
This may be the hidden benefit of Trump
What happened at Standing Rock is overt that no one (except CNN, MSNBC, Fox) can overlook it. For decades we, the people, have been smoothly been maneuvered as not to know where we are going. Just like a ride in Disney's It's A Small World. A happy diversion, ending up in the same place as when you got on. Now the pleasant soothing of the Small World song has been obliterated by the roars of powershovels and trucks and boring equipment. As a new American genocide is occurring we watch infotainment about who is dating whom and how much breast display can be managed without showing the forbidden nipple. This time the genocide isn't just coming for the "Indians". It's coming for all of us. Draw a number from 1 to 10; if you pick correctly, you may be allowed to survive--and perhaps some of your progeny.
Manifest Destiny
The real SparkyGump has passed. It was an honor being your human.
There has been 40,000 years of humans
over running, pushing out, mating with, killing or conquering OTHERS. Homo erectus might have been the only pure one and he/she was an animal killer. America was nothing special, get the fuck over it. We are Homo Sapien Horrendus.
The link to the Indigenous Peoples' History
book wasn't working a moment ago. The ISBN is 9780807000403. Just put a hold on it at the library -- I'm about the 49th person in line for it. Many thanks, Don.
@Creosote. link fixed
link fixed
An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.
Confirmed!
Thank you DM
The link doesn't work.....
I would like to read it.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
@dkmich link fixed
link fixed
An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.
People are still believing incurrent day myths
the White Helmets have been exposed here by either Big Al or gjonsit but the rest of Americans are believing the hype.
The person who has spent the last FIVE years filming them, Khaled Khatib can't get a passport because of Trump and people are upset.
Keep reading!
I have often thought the same - and I am a historian, who has been reading modern history for 25+ years. The myths are pervasive. We do not recognize them any more than fish do the water around them, because they form the medium of our thinking, speaking, and acting in the world. But as you have learned, we can overcome our parochial blindness, by expanding our horizons in time (reading history) and in space (reading alternative perspectives), so to speak.
By all means read Dunbar-Ortiz. Also worthwhile, in somewhat the same spirit, is Eduardo Galeano's classic Open Veins of Latin America. Those works are valuable for the same kind of reason as Howard Zinn's People's History of the US - they all make manifest the real crime and inhumanity hidden behind our self-serving mythologies of the past, by re-telling the story from the POV of the victims. But understanding why these things happened requires, I think, getting beyond the 'good guy vs bad guy' model that these accounts tend to embrace.
Not that there aren't plenty of bad guys! There are - the question is why are there so many, and why do we suffer them - and enable them? FWIW, I don't think "inherent racism" provides a very enlightening answer here - any more than "inherent evil". Racism is not inherent in European (or any other) culture (if it is 'cultural' then by definition it is not 'inherent'). Race is a cultural construction, as the saying goes, and had to be invented in order to justify the crimes committed in its name. There has been a ton of really good work on that subject since the 1970s, most of it (in the American context) going back in one way or another to the question of slavery: which came first, racism or New World chattel slavery? Eric Williams' seminal work (first published 1949, I think), Capitalism and Slavery, set the standard. Williams' argument was then the radical Marxist outlier; today it is the consensus: capitalism -> slavery -> racism. Williams is still readable, if the subject interests you. Or, for a real brain twister, with an Irish angle, Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race goes along way to clarifying the relation between race and class/capital/property, from 16th century Ireland to 19th century America.
On the creation of Native Americans as a 'race', Alden Vaughan's work - especially his essay "From White Man to Redskin" - showed how English settlers in N America first viewed Native Americans as "savages" only by accident, not by nature - like untutored children. Since the natives were capable and intelligent, the English/Americans expected them to assimilate readily and rapidly to the 'obviously' superior European/American culture of settled cultivation and property rights, etc. When they did not do so, a convenient explanation was found (i.e. invented): the Indians must be an inferior 'race' of men, inherently incapable of civilization. So by the end of the 19th century even such a humanist as Walt Whitman could say in 1888, without battling an eye, "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, [of] history..."
Thank you
Invaluable citations. Zinn, Open Veins of Latin America, Capitalism and Slavery. Kierkegaard's (1840s) comments on the costly velvet garments of Denmark's christian ministers also come to mind.