It's Columbus Day, or as a lot of guilty, white liberals like to call it, "Indigenous Peoples Day". European colonists didn't, as Hollywood would like you to believe, invade an already peaceful, developed, settled land occupied by forest pixies communing with nature. The "peaceful natives" were comprised of thousands of primitive, nomadic tribes warring and slaughtering each other in ways too savage to imagine.....not unlike middle-east Muslims of today.
European settlers brought industry, government, commerce, and modernity to an otherwise backwards, barely populated wilderness. Consider the grievance groups who whine about white, European colonists being evil usurpers, specifically Native Americans, Inuits, Mexicans, and even some African-Americans. Look at how they currently live in lands where they are still the majority after all these centuries......they live in decrepit squalor for the most part, as unevolved non-participants in the modern world.
Christopher Columbus, or which ever European you believe settled the Americas, did this part of the world a favor 500 years ago.
3 comments:
Touche' Ed!
Here is just one of the many “favors” the Europeans did for the indigenous peoples of the New World:
The Cherokees of Georgia, on the other hand, used legal action to resist [forced relocation]. The Cherokee people were by no means frontier savages. By the 1830s they developed their own written language, printed newspapers and elected leaders to representative government. When the government of Georgia refused to recognize their autonomy and threatened to seize their lands, the Cherokees took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court and won a favorable decision. John Marshall's opinion for the Court majority in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia was essentially that Georgia had no jurisdiction over the Cherokees and no claim to their lands. But Georgia officials simply ignored the decision, and President Jackson refused to enforce it. Jackson was furious and personally affronted by the Marshall ruling, stating, "Mr. Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!"
Finally, federal troops came to Georgia to remove the tribes forcibly. … About 20,000 Cherokees were marched westward at gunpoint on the infamous Trail of Tears. Nearly a quarter perished on the way, with the remainder left to seek survival in a completely foreign land.
I'm not saying everything was hunky dory between the pilgrims and the Indians. But it is axiomatic that more modern, advanced cultures dominate, displace, and replace more primitive cultures. (This axiom of anthropology does not apply to primitive Muslims.....they're just too damn many of them) It's the natural progression of civilization in a closed system such as a round planet with finite land and resources. If Europeans hadn't settled the Americas, the Asians would have, and if not them then eventually the Russians or Scandinavians or somebody else. To argue that some modern nations from somewhere, settling and displacing the natives from North America wasn't inevitable, would be farcical.
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