Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas

["David B. Kronenfeld" kfeld@xxxxxxxx]

Hey guys ! Enough is enough. No culture or group of cultures or supposed
race, or region has any monopoly on good or evil. We in the US have done
some really bad things to people who were here before us, and they have
done some of the same to each other and to us. They do seem to have been a
bit less racist about it than have most of us--in the sense of not seeing
it as red unity vs. white unity, but rather as one or another political
group dealing with its friends and enemies, whatever they looked like. We
all have to find ways of being humane to each other--and generically
ascribing bad stuff to some other group doesn't move us in the right direction.

                David

At 05:56 PM 9/4/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> I agree that "savage brutality" is probably rhetorical overkill, and the
> point that the indigenous peoples did not wage war for ideological reasons
> is a very interesting idea I had never considered. And, too, the horrors
> of the Inquisition in the name of Christ must certainly set some kind of
> record in the history of humanity for hypocrisy. I can't think of anything
> I know of to parallel (sp?) it with the Native Americans.
>
>
> Nonetheless, taking great delight in the suffering of prisoners -
> indigenous or white - being tortured to death was a staple of
> entertainment for many Native American tribes, and their willingness to
> turn on each other for pay from the whites - the Hurons definitely come to
> mind, and I remember Kit Carson, who specialized in helping the U.S.
> Cavalry exterminate whole tribes by first guiding the soldiers to their
> hidden crops so they would starve and then guiding them to their hiding
> places so the soldiers could kill them in their weakened state - certainly
> does them no honor, and reinforces the idea that most tribes were as
> murderous toward the members of other tribes as the Nazis were to the
> Jews, Gypsies and Poles.
>
>
> I think that one or another of the Native American tribes, sooner or
> later, left to their own devices, would have developed sufficient
> technology to become a version of the Nazis. Then the horrors that already
> occurred in America at a relatively low rate would have been multiplied
> just as many-fold as ever happened in the concentration camps of the Nazis.
>
>
> I remember learning that one of the tribes, I forget which one, which was
> a notably peaceful tribe, nonetheless only applied the concept "human" to
> people of their own tribe.
>
>
> So, I think it's really a matter of quantity, not quality. The Nazis were
> really efficient, but essentially there was no difference.
>
>
> Charles


David B. Kronenfeld       Phone  Office 909/787-4340
Department of Anthropology       Message 909/787-5524
University of California            Fax   909/787-5409
Riverside, CA 92521           email  kfeld@xxxxxxxx

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