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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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