Louis Proyect wrote: > > > --Rocky Mountain News, April 23, 1859. > > To give you an idea of how shameless this disgusting rag is, they include > this openly racist crap on their website: > (http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/aboutus/creekjoa.shtml) > > The newspaper's founder was one William T. Byers. Showing that he was dead > serious about the advancing wave of Anglo-Saxon civilization subduing the > wild Indians, he called for the extinction of the Cheyenne in 1861. After > Cheyenne leader Chief Black Kettle had signed a "peace treaty" (in reality, > a surrender of all their land and rights at the point of a cannon), his > people chafed at the miserable hunting afforded them after resettlement and > began to launch forays against the colonizers. Cheered on by Byers, Colonel > Chivington made a speech on August of 1864 that included these infamous > words: "...kill and scalp all, little and big... nits make lice." > > This rancid newspaper has basically been leading the campaign to fire Ward > Churchill.
Lou, sometimes you astound me. The Rocky Mountain News is undoubtedly a rancid newspaper, especially for its campaign against Churchill. But putting this passage on their web site is the very opposite of rancidness. It's honesty about history, quoting words from its past which it describes as "infamous." Sometimes your understanding of history seems to be the very reverse of Marx's understanding, which is epitomized in the sentence, "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape." Quoting that web page as evidence against the paper in effect assumes that "The anatomy of the gorilla is a key to the history of humanity." It isn't -- that's the point of Gould's _Wonderful Life_, which confirms that in evolutionary as in political history, the historical method is to read history backwards, not forwards. There are too many different results that can flow from the same beginning. Carrol
