Today being the official Columbus Day holiday in the U.S., it’s a good occasion for people here to reflect on the similarities between the history of this land and what’s happening in Palestine
h/t Anna Baltzer
News
Columbus Day reflection
Since it’s pretty clear anyway the United States will soon dissolve — no one pays back 20 trillion dollars, and half of America can’t stand the other half — it’s time to do the right thing and when it comes to divvying the land allocate a fair share to the natives.
The maps illustrate a rarely discussed point: the ties between Israel and the US go far beyond the influence of the Israel Lobby. Both countries were originally colonies of Britain. In both cases, settlers led an independence movement. Both countries developed a self-image of settlers, fleeing persecution, building an idealistic new society in a previously empty land. Both cases involved ethnic cleansing of the indigenous inhabitants.
For example, President Andrew Jackson said “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”.
Every American knows the words to the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner. “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air…:” There is a second verse, which is rarely sung:
Then conquer we must,
when our cause it is just.
And this be our motto,
“In God is our trust!”
In 1948, the UN adopted the Genocide Convention (came into effect in 1951). The US refused to ratify it for decades, until finally in 1986 the US ratified it, after making a proviso that nobody in the US could be prosecuted under the Genocide Convention without the consent of the US.
Why the decades-long delay in ratifying the Genocide Convention? High-ranking US government administrators warned the US could face lawsuits by descendents of African slaves, and/or by Indians.
Of course, doing the same sort of thing is much more reprehensible in the modern era as opposed to the early and middle Renaissance period.
As German-Polish-Irish-Portuguese mix, I don’t feel as though I have to be accountable because I’m “white”– especially since my family first set foot in Canada (I know, but same sort of deal, more or less) in 1951/52.
That being said, trying to excuse what happened to the indigenous population “because it was a different time” would still be pretty awful.
I suppose that doing something which is both objectively wrong and also generally recognised as wrong – as ethnic cleansing now is – is worse, indicative of greater moral perversity, than doing something which is objectively wrong but generally accepted in the world of the time. Not that ethnic cleansing and dispossession were as completely acceptable in early modern times as we sometimes like to think. There was quite an argument about it within the Spanish Catholic world, led by las Casas.
It’s also relevant that Native Americans are now fully enfranchised citizens of the United States and Canada, so that the wrong of former times does not continue unabated now.
I agree with Ned that the affinities between England, Scotland, the United States and Israel are very deep, Zionism being only one form of a colonial project with both an economic and a mystical character.
I have renamed Columbus Day “Taino and Arawak Remembrance Day”.