Tag: slavery

America, Land of Innocents

W.J. Astore

I’m sure glad atrocity never happened here

It’s depressingly true that no nations or peoples are immune from committing atrocities. History is filled with them. Atrocities, that is.

Did Hamas commit atrocities, most notably on 10/7? Yes. Has Israel committed atrocities in Gaza since those terror attacks? Yes.

Any sane human is outraged by atrocious behavior. What is particularly galling about Israel’s atrocities is that the U.S. government is enabling them while claiming Israel and the U.S. are the good guys—and that, however many innocents die due to U.S. and Israeli bombs, bullets, and missiles, it’s all the fault of Hamas.

Even serial killers sometimes know they are monsters. We fancy ourselves as innocents.

Why? Because America is a “good” country. Good thing we never promoted slavery and participated in massacres of Native Americans.  Or the mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II.  Or widespread misogyny. (Remember that women weren’t even allowed to vote in presidential elections until 1920.). Good thing we’ve always embraced Jews, never discriminating against them or turning desperate Jews away during the Holocaust.

Americans should know from our own history that “good” people can do horrific things because as a country we’ve done them ourselves.

Most Americans see Israel as an ally, a modern democracy akin to the U.S. That doesn’t mean Israel is immune from atrocious behavior; again, our own history shows that America is well capable of slaughtering millions in the name of “manifest destiny.” Back in the day, most Americans agreed we had our own “human animals,” our own savages, and that “the only good Indian is a dead one.” So, in the name of destiny, even of God, we killed the brave.

My dog-eared copy

The other day, as a distraction from current events, I started reading again from Schopenhauer’s essays and aphorisms. As a European living when slavery was very much alive in antebellum America, Schopenhauer had this to say about the “pitilessness” and “cruelty” in “slave-owning states of the North American Union”:

No one can read [accounts of slavery in antebellum America] without horror, and few will not be reduced to tears: for whatever the reader of it may have heard or imagined or dreamed of the unhappy condition of the slaves, indeed of human harshness and cruelty in general, will fade into insignificance when he reads how these devils in human form, these bigoted, church-going, Sabbath-keeping scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them, treat their innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into their devilish clutches. This book [on slavery in the USA] rouses one’s human feelings to such a degree of indignation that one could preach a crusade for the subjugation and punishment of the slave-owning states of North America. They are a blot on mankind.

Schopenhauer was pulling no punches, and rightly so. Yet there are still those in America who make the argument that slavery wasn’t all bad, that some slaves learned useful skills. Though I don’t hear such apologists volunteering to be slaves themselves.

If a curriculum in Florida can still put a happy face on the deep iniquity of slavery, which the U.S. eliminated (at least by law) in 1865, are we at all surprised that many can put a happy face on whatever Israel is doing in Gaza?

Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? Been there, done that. But that’s OK: “they” were savages. “We” the chosen ones had no choice. Or did we?

Hope You’re Enjoying Indigenous Peoples’ Day Weekend

Columbus Day Parade, a traditional celebration of Italian heritage
Columbus Day Parade, a celebration of Italian heritage

W.J. Astore

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  And he discovered a new world.  New to him, of course, and his fellow Europeans, not to the indigenous peoples already living there.  Yes, Columbus gets too much credit for that “discovery.”  Yes, he and his fellow Europeans were incredibly ambitious, often vicious, and not overly interested in the fate of indigenous people.  The three Gs of overseas exploration usually applied — God, Glory, and Gold, often with greed for gold and other valuables taking first priority over spreading the Gospel or winning a reputation (titles and other personal honors).

But are we truly showing sensitivity to Native Americans by changing the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, as the Seattle city council did earlier this week?

For many years, I taught world history.  The key event that touched off the modern world was the Columbian Exchange, the reconnection of the Old and New Worlds and the transfer/diffusion of peoples, animals and plants, products, ideas, and so on between those two worlds.  Of course, this transfer greatly favored Europeans and utterly devastated indigenous people, especially since Europeans brought all of their “old world” diseases with them, such as smallpox, which ripped through Native American populations that lacked immunity to those diseases.  As indigenous people experienced mass death, mainly due to these diseases, Europeans sought another labor source they could exploit for their plantations and mines and farms in the New World, tapping into a preexisting trade in African peoples.  The rapid expansion in exportation of African slaves (more than 12 million being shipped to the New World between Columbus’s voyage and the end of the slave trade in the 19th century) is another ghastly and haunting feature of the Columbian Exchange.

Columbus’s voyage changed the world, usually for the worse for the indigenous peoples of America as well as the peoples of Africa.  But are we truly showing cultural sensitivity and enlightenment by renaming Columbus Day in honor of indigenous people?  By rectifying a name, are we really doing anything to rectify a wrong?

Long ago in the United States, Columbus Day ceased being connected in any solid way to Columbus.  It morphed into a celebration by Italian-Americans of their heritage while much of the rest of America went shopping (at least that’s what we’re told to do by incessant ads and by the media).  Dismissing the celebratory traditions of Italian-Americans in the name of cultural sensitivity for indigenous peoples seems more than a little contradictory.

Want to show sensitivity to indigenous peoples?  Give them back their land.  Treat them with dignity and respect — you know, like they’re human beings just like you and me.

Vigorously patting yourself on the back for your sensitivity in inaugurating an “indigenous peoples’ day” — well, it just seems like another flabby exercise in cheap grace that requires no real sacrifice — and no real penance as well.