File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 43


Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 11:05:34 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Native American land claims


In message <3.0.3.32.19980104000658.006a5414-AT-pop.columbia.edu>, Louis
Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> writes
>Leave it to Lou Godena to go off on a reactionary tangent.

> Frankly, your erudition is
>impressive but utterly bonkers.  Why don't you put together a page or so
>that makes the pro-slavery sympathies of the Indians crystal-clear instead
>of making these sort of scurrilous innuendos? Are you lacking guts or are
>you lacking intelligence?

>This is the most irresponsible and unscholarly garbage that I have seen on
>this mailing-list since Malecki was expelled.

> Reading this fills me with the kind of disgust
>that I used to feel when I used to hear the phrase "Vietcong terrorism" in
>the 1960s.
>
>Simply dropping historical trivia into the discussion is not what we need
>to understand the 19th century.

This kind of ill-tempered contribution exposes the fragility of Louis
P's exhortative history. For him, history is not something to be
understood in all its complexity, but a resource for moral uplift today. 

Unfortunately that is very bad for historical understanding. Instead of
looking at what is specific to any given era, this kind of exhortative
history has to be re-written to demonstrate timeless moral truths, such
as the Indians are the always the good guys and the Americans are always
the bad guys. In itself this is only the mirror image of that prior
moral schema in which the Cowboys were the good guys. But the real work
of history is not done to fulfill a moral framework, but to understand
what happened. 

Louis P becomes very angry when new information is contributed to the
discussion that does not fit his moral schema. What should we do?
Repress these unfortunate facts that fail to fit our hypotheses?
Likening historical investigation to agitation over Vietnam reveals the
problem: History is not political agitation and it should not be written
according to political expediency. God knows we have had enough of that
from the official historians of the West and of the Soviet bloc.

In particular Louis' desire to supress any facts that put native
Americans in a 'bad light' is peculiarly ill-considered. What such a
method does is to reconstruct the history of native Americans as the
fulfillment of a moral outlook that is in fact alien to their culture.
It seems particularly perverse that, like Jim, Louis wants to reinvent
native Americans as bourgeois landowners, when one of the more
attractive aspects of their society was that they held property in
common. This is the kind of Disneyfication of native American culture
that one sees in Dances with Wolves (written by a Ku Klux Klan
supporter) or Pocahontas, in it is reduced to a backdrop for entirely
modern American themes.

Louis is outraged that anyone would suggest that native Americans sided
with reactionaries like the Confederacy. But this is to impose our own
contemporary moral outlook on people who had no reason to share it. In
fact it made perfect sense for Indian tribes, from their own point of
view, to side with whichever social forces promised the least
development of the West. Overwhelmingly native Americans sided with the
French against the colonists and the British in the French and Indian
Wars, and again with the British against the American revolution, and
again with the British in the war of 1812, in 1861 after defeat at the
hands of Juarez Liberal Party in Mexico, General Marquez Catholic Party
was dependent on an alliance with the leader of the Indians Mejia for
his survivial (Marx, Collected Works, vol 19, p68).

Louis takes these facts as a calumny against native Americans. Why? Why
should native Americans favour the Eastward expansion that the Northern
forces offered as the likely outcome of the War. Why would native
Americans side with the farmer settlers of the North West, whose numbers
had doubled in a decade? Clearly, from their own point of view they had
no interest whatsoever in seeing the victory of the North, just as they
had no interest in seeing the victory of the War of Independence, or of
the British against the French. Their interests were best served by the
least development of the West.
-- 
James Heartfield


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