Posted by pancho from pool0157.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.216.157) on Sunday, September 08, 2002 at 12:31PM :
Watching an old Western. There they are, I mean those Apache and Comanche terrorists. 150 years of white man propaganda telling us the Natives were "savages" who unreasonably resented having their lands stolen...their families killed and uprooted, their way of life destroyed then relegated to servile status while they watched the white man distort their history, kidnap their children to brainwash and on and on.
It's the same thing they're doing with Muslims now. Trying their damndest to get us believing these people are born savages, destructive and murderous...that their religion and their schools and their upbringing teaches them to be so...never mind what we do to them...they have no human right to complain...and never ever to take a page from our own book and fight back...in whatever fashion they can. We have to make us believe they are monsters so we can justify our monstrous treatment of them...even their children. We've done it before...I mean distort the truth to justify our crimes.
The United States military had the most sophisticated means to wage war against the Plains Indians...why'd they choose instead to play the part of terrorists...sneaking into deserted villages to kill the women and children...to disorient the men, break their spirits...kill what should have been there to cherish and fight to protect? The first chemical warfare the United States used was against Native families who accepted diseased blankets, shot through with smallpox, the Army gave them taken from dead soldiers...wiping out hundreds of, again, women and children. It was the Christian Spaniards who taught the Natives the art of scalping...not the other way around.
Years later and all that propaganda, and we know better. Native Americans were robbed, with every trick imaginable and murdered, in every vicious way conceivable...that's the truth of it. And the United States will no more give the land back to its rightful owners than Iraq will give anything back to Assyrians or anyone else.
In this movie, like hundreds before it, every time the camera pans to an Indian, he is as menacing as can be, even the music turns evil...glaring at a kind and friendly family of white settlers...theives by any other name. The message always comes through as..."Look at these nice white folks...and look at that murderous savage lusting after THEIR land, or just plain trying to kill them cause that's the way those people are"! ARE YOU GOING TO BLAME IT ON THE VICTIMS...THE POOR WHITES????
Everything about native American history informs us that they were no match in savagery to the white man...that they were a gentle people who never fought to the death...wiping out whole tribes and clans as they were merrily doing in Europe. That they respected the land...saw spirits and gods in the rivers and forrests where the white man saw only money.
It must have been the weirdest thing to the natives to see the white man kill his neighbor over gold...taken from the ground at what cost and ruin...only to be gathered together and put back into the ground in Fort Knox.
There has been no savage in modern times as the white man...the Christian white man...none. At the same time this race has produced men and women of great brilliance...but the best and the brightest of them have condemned with all their hearts the other side of what it has meant to be white and "superior". The best white people...have a deliciously deep brown and chocolaty heart . I can't imagine my life without Shakespeare...but I'd give all of his works away if the people England killed could have been spared...because we'll never know how many Shakespeares were killed in their infancy. In the end it isn't literature that makes Humanity...it's Humans who do.
Imagine American history if the Natives had written it...or imagine the Gulf War and Sanctions and Israel's founding if the Muslims wrote the books and made the movies. If only Islam would embrace the Arts...drop its pious and sanctimonious aura and get down in there in the mud with the Christians and Jews...get a PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRM goddamn it!!!
-- pancho
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