Native Americans were not killed en masse, and Americans did nothing to institute slavery. And he’s serious, folks.
Contemporary followers of Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill view the entire American experience as a disgrace, even a crime. They stress the nation’s guilt in committing “genocide” against Native Americans, enslaving millions of Africans, stealing Mexican land, despoiling the pristine environment, oppressing working people everywhere, and blocking progressive change with an imperialist foreign policy.
Fools. Who needs “history” and “facts” when we have this pretty flag?
Of course, the idea of conscious “genocide” again Native Americans is absurd – despite Cindy Sheehan’s claims of “virtual extinction of our native population” there are more self-identified Indians alive today than a hundred—or even two hundred – years ago.
Was it an unconscious genocide, then? And there are still quite a few Jews and Armenians alive today, too — was genocide not committed against them simply because their killers weren’t fully successful? Apparently if some members of a group survive and in a few centuries its population grows, genocide never happened.
Moreover, the assimilation and massive intermarriage with white people (even Bill Clinton claimed to be “part Cherokee”) erased far more self-identified Indians than the relatively rare (but undeniably loathsome) massacres by whites.
Blame interracial marriage, not mass murder (er, excuse me, rare murder). And since when does interracial marriage “erase” someone’s heritage?
Also, wouldn’t interracial marriage make more people self-identify as Indians — like Bill Clinton, for example?
Concerning slavery, Americans never invented it or instituted it – we inherited it, and with such great discomfort that anti-slavery activists were far better represented among the founding fathers (Franklin, Adams, Hamilton) than those who made an active case for slavery. David Brion Davis, the Yale professor who’s written magisterially about the history of the peculiar institution, makes clear the positive role of the American Revolution and its ideals in giving life (after many millennia of slavery) to the abolitionist movement around the world that ultimately put an end to this savage oppression. The United States, in other words, played a unique, prominent role in ending the institution, but played no role in establishing it.
We inherited it from who, exactly? The Native Americans, who had a thriving slave trade in which they kidnapped people from Africa and brought them back to the United States?
As for playing a unique, prominent role in ending the institution of slavery, has Michael forgotten that we fought an pretty big war because a good part of the country was very attached to the idea of slavery continuing?
In other words, the best response to America bashing radicals involves celebration, not castigation – an emphasis on joy, gratitude and pride rather than guilt and despair. Among other things, it’s simply more fun to be a patriotic American than a doom-embracing, “anti-imperialist” internationalist. There’s not better occasion than the anniversary of our independence to emphasize our uniqueness and, yes exceptionalism – to light a few firecrackers, eat some cherry pie, and join our neighbors in rejoicing in the Glorious Fourth.
In other words, why worry our pretty little heads about silly things like slavery and genocide and human rights when we can be eating pie?
Congratulations to Townhall.com for bringing on this winning writer.