A Little Matter of Genocide On the Christian White Nationalist Extermination of Indigenous People in North America
A Little Matter of Genocide | | | | | | | | | | | A Little Matter of Genocide Paul Street On the Christian White Nationalist Extermination of Indigenous People in North America | | | Monthly Review | The Truth About the First Thanksgiving When was America “great” for white nationalists in the neofascist mode, Trumpist or otherwise? Above all during the great 19th Century expansion, when a rugged white male republic pushed its territorial frontier ever further westward, subjugating and often destroying and rolling over every living person, being, and thing in their way. [As the historian Richard Slotkin told Bill Moyers in 2013: ‘…. The United States is a settler state. And this begins with colonial outposts in the wilderness. ..Our origin has a story [and it] is “how did we go from being these small outposts to being the mightiest nation on planet earth?” Well, we did it by pushing the boundaries of the settlement out into Indian country. We did it by ultimately fighting wars against Native Americans, driving them out, displacing them, exterminating them in some cases. And in the process of pushing our boundaries out, we acquired certain “heroic” virtues— an ability to fight cleverly both as individuals and cooperatively, and a connection with nature which is particularly critical. As [the] country develops you get an…American exceptionalist notion …that American progress is achieved not by man exploiting man, but…by conquering nature, by taking resources from nature, farmland originally, timber resources, ultimately gold, minerals, oil and so on. In the American model, in order for it to work, you have to say that Native Americans, Indians, are not quite human. And therefore they, like trees in the forest, are legitimate objects of creative destruction. And similarly blacks, African Americans, are legitimate objects of exploitation because they are considered to be not fully human…So what you get in the evolution of the American national myth, up through the Civil War is the creation of America as a white man’s republic in which, different from Europe, if you’re white, you’re all right. You don’t have to be an aristocrat born to have a place in the society. You don’t absolutely even have to be Anglo-Saxon, although it helps. But… among whites you can have democracy. But the white democracy depends on the murder, the extermination, the driving out of Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks. Both of those boundaries, the western frontier, the Indian frontier, and the slave frontier, are boundaries created and enforced by violence, either literal or latent, potential violence.’ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#33788): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/33788 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109825417/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
