His short answer was rather pathetic. But yours is an oversimplification. And both strategies worked for NA's and both failed. With the vast % of both failing.
This thread has totally degenerated and moved away from the original thought which, by the way, is totally correct. Attempting to blame the people alive today for having taken the land is equally as stupid as blaming every living German for the Holocaust or blaming all living Caucasians for the slavery of the Blacks over a hundred years ago. No one alive today (with the exception of a VERY few Germans) had anything to do with those events. But, knowing how stupid some people can be, I've no doubt there will be some in the 23rd century who will be blaming living Americans (and others) for the 21st century invasion of the Middle East. :shrug:
How stupid is it to blame your ancestors for something, and hold that up as an excuse for not addressing the obvious disparities that the 'something' caused to an entire race of people? How intelligent is it to blame the pioneers and plantation owners, for the repression of Africans who were kidnapped and imprisoned, forced to work as slaves, and so on? How stupid is it to believe that since it happened 'ages ago' there's nothing to be done now? The problems of the past stay in the past? How dumb is that?
And given the amount of apologists for those ancestors - it was inevitable, guns, germs steel, theory, uh, so it was ok or they had to make way for a superior civilization (ie. one that destroys others) - one could, instead of blaming the NAs who are bitter and use the construction in the thread title, blame the apologists for still not getting it.
For not getting how proud they should all be about conquering some place, and disenfranchising the natives, you mean?
I think by we most people are referring to "the Americans". It is true that Americans forced Native Americans off of their land. It's wrong to place blame on the current Americans living today for what happened becaue it obviously wasn't their fault. But it's a how do you say an "editorial We" (correct me if I'm wrong because I don't know. Language is not my strong point). Like when people say we when referring to a group that they are a part of, but may or may not actually mean themselves personally. Like if I said we resisdents of California voted against parental permission for abortions of minors... I am a resident of California, but I didn't vote on that proposition (as I was still a minor myself at the time).
Actually, it's VERY stupid to do so when things happened so long ago. Just how long do you suppose the guilt should continue? And what should we - the ones that had NOTHING to do with the original crimes - be required to pay to correct for the wrongs done by others, eh? If your own father stole money in a bank roberry 50 years ago, just how much responsibility do you as his child bear for that (even though you shared in the benefits of that money)??????
The same would of course be true for pride. But americans often take pride in things like the Boston Tea Party or the Revolutionary war and the texts written by 'their forefathers'. They take pride in the Pilgrims and revel in myths of this country that begin back when the incredibly unjust treatment of the NAs was just beginning. Somehow this country myth gets tucked into the personal self myth. If you are going to identify with the pride of people you are not, then shame must also be a part of the identification, given what these early Americans did.
How invalid is an argument that compares a social crime like theft by a single individual, to theft by an entire social group? The first is 'wrong' because society says theft is wrong; the second is 'right' because society says it has 'every right' to steal collectively. How long ago is "very long ago"? The effects have disappeared from view over the horizon of history? We can now blame the natives for their own problems, since they don't want to 'assimilate'? They would rather sit around and get drunk, beat each other up and end up in jail? What's wrong with these people, for god's sake? Surely, as you suggest, it's just a question of how much money we should give them. We can all feel less guilty at least, or having handed over some money, we then have more justification for blaming the disenfranchised natives for their own sorry plight. It's not like they don't have a culture anymore, it's not as if we tried to destroy it or anything; what's their problem? What's wrong with that idea? Money always fixes everything. /sarcasm
All of that is nothing more than just an attempt at distraction and trying to confuse the issue. I see no point in such false pride OR shame. I'll also let you in on a little secret: I'm a card-carrying certified member of the Cherokee Nation and along with a few dozen others of us that I know, take no pride in our "heritage" as Amerinds or our other distant "heritage" as Welsh, Brits, Scotts, Spaniards or whatever. All of that is SO far back as to be meaningless today.
REally? I see this all over the place. People identifying with the acts of 'their' forefathers. And it can be seen in the frenzy of Francophobia, as I mentioned above, where people were screaming about how the French would be speaking German if it wasn't for us. And while I am sure there were a few WW2 vets in the bunch, most of those people had nothing to do with liberating France. Apart from being anecdotal evidence this is beside the point. Many Americans do take precisely the kind of pride I mentioned in my other post. This self/country myth pride could use some counterbalancing. What you and your friends do and don't do is simply what you and your friends do and don't do.
Oh, really? And I see you have carefully ignored and refused to reply to the question I asked you about your father having robbed a bank... Do you bear any responsibility for that or not????
Actually you asked the other guy. It's a bad analogy. Better if my father embezzled money from a group of families in a town. If I was living in a house built on land my father bought with their families' money and in a house built with their families' money, I can see where they might eye it as their property. Going back to the identification. I was taught in social studies that manifest destiny was correct. It was our country and a good thing we took possession of it - we being Europeans and members of the Judao-Christian tradition. The teacher's use of the plural pronoun was constant... 'We spread into the new territories..." There was one teacher I had in the 7th grade who used an alternative textbook that made the issue more complex.
There are all kinds of things that are being taught. What you wind up accepting is up to you. However, you'll always have a GREAT deal of difficulty trying to get most people - including me - to accept any degree of responsibility for something done 100 or 200 or a thousand years ago by individuals who are long dead. And once you start back down that idiotic path, there's no logical stopping point. You might as well say we are ALL (today) responsible for everything bad that's happened in the past million years. It makes just that much sense.
The latest round of lawsuits over land and resource grabbing from Red tribes by Whites of various agency is still in the courts, and references crimes committed in the late 1900s - within the current generation. The earlier ones form a continuous chain of criminal behavior reaching back from 2006 (Abramoff) to the late 1600s, without skipping a single decade in that span of time. It's not ancient history - a lot of this stuff is still within its statute of limitations, a lot of it is on legal paper in perfectly valid and enforceable treaties etc. The racial oppression of blacks by whites was overt, even statutory, within the personal memories of people as young as Obama. It remains present and influential today, and yes the people responsible for it and the people benefiting from it are reasonably liable for doing something about it.
But their for fathers sure did. That is like saying that if your great grandfather owned a property in the 1800's and then passed that property down to his next of kin and they passed it down to theirs, then that property would have always remained in the family wouldn't it? Same holds true for the Native Americans, for they were the ones who were here when the Europeans came over and stole their lands away from them with lies, alcohol and beads telling them they had treaties that allowed whites to live on their lands but could never own it. Still today not one of those treaties has ever been upheld when the Native Americans went to court to validate them, why is that?
I haven't made that case. I do think that as long as people think of themselves as that 'we' that shaped the nation then they need to think of themselves as part of that 'we' that did other things that they should not be proud of. This kind of mythmaking is very common and I think a more realistic look at that 'we' would have some excellent effects on how other countries view us and how groups within the US view current events and this mythmaking. I am not saying that a card carrying Cherokee such as yourself should have the right to occupy some white guy's aparment in Bryson, North Carolina. I do think that this one-sided we-ness is damaging and needs to meet its other side in statement like 'we stole....' etc. Repeated use of the second person plural pronouns about all the citizens of a nation leads to idiocies like 'they hate our freedom' and and a bunch of other idiocies based on a false sense of unity, rose colored glasses and lies.
