See? That's what I talking about; your insistence that the US and Euros are responsible for most all societal catastrophes around the globe.
Eric, who invaded Vietnam? The French and the Americans and their idiot allies. Of course the North Vietnamese were ruthless. But do please read their account of what happened, not just ours.
See? That's what I talking about; your insistence that the US and Euros are responsible for most all societal catastrophes around the globe.
Okay, I didn't say that - but let me be clear by listing the list of culprits - all of us - European, US, Australian, Russian, Chinese, Indian etc until we get through the whole list. But also let us be really very clear - over the past 500 years or so the most disproportionally significant agents of radical societal change have been the English, followed the Spanish - and a few other European nations.
You make a fair point that this might be a necessity of evolution and I confess I cannot contrive a convincing argument against that proposition. But that is not my point in any case. You can argue against intergenerational guilt - and here I am also compelled to admit an insufficiently compelling counter argument.
But my focus is on intergenerational trauma, which is real, profound and deeply destructive. Here you and I fundamentally differ. I do not want to turn my back on people whose trauma arises from what I now benefit from. I do not want the truth of their suffering erased from history because it has become an inconvenient truth that should not be told to generations who 'don't have to feel guilty'. Compassion has nothing to do with guilt.
I do not want to persuade you to my way of seeing things. But I would like you to acknowledge that I can hold my point of view without it threatening you.
The hard reality is that maybe our cultures need people like you and people like me.
I see a madness gripping your country, and increasingly mine, that forces irredeemable polarity - as if we must choose between one POV or another. That's not real, and its not good.
BTW, The US totally smashed Japan and helped the Russians to totally smash Germany. Yet Japan is a thriving country today and is friends with the US. Point being that some responsibility lies with the indigs to pick themselves up and get with the new game. Your obsession doesn't help the indigs. Rather, it makes them weak with a perpetual victim mentality.
Yes, but do please explore the investments from the victors into the vanquished. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese picked themselves up after their defeats entirely on their own account. Not only did the victors contribute to the rebuilding of their respective economies, they also embraced them within a global trading system. For a long time Germany was the economic powerhouse of Europe and Japan the economic powerhouse of Asia, post WW2.
We have not treated our respective indigenous people in like manner - and that's because we presumed from the outset that they were inferior and without standing in any way. I do not accept this interpretation, so I do not accept the response.
The role of perpetual victim is trauma based and requires denial and exclusion as well. Trauma is intergenerational in families and it is worse if we bake it into cultures - and we did this with indigenous peoples. I am not obsessed. I am just owning up to a truth. I don't have conditioning that inures me to brutality, so I have a choice of turning away or looking it in the face. I gave chosen the latter. Handle it.
The truth that you dare not see is that indigs were plenty screwed up themselves all on their own and the US and Euros did a lot of good in the world; so much good as to outweigh the bad.
Actually, Eric, this is precisely what I had believed for a great deal of my life, until I started to digging into history. The ideas that indigenous people were "plenty screwed up" seems more like propaganda than anything else. But then, I have been reading in the fields of ethnography, anthropology, mythology and history for decades. I wrote a thesis looking into animism. So I am pretty comfortable that I have covered most bases in a comprehensive and critical way.
As for you last comment, let me tell you that in 200 years Europeans have royally screwed up Australia's ecology. Not only have we brutalised the indigenous people, we have wrecked the ecology through introduced animals and plants, dried up the rivers and destroyed the soil. This isn't white guilt - the is just plan, bare, ugly fact. Our fragile ecology was managed for tens of thousands of years and in 200 years we have crapped all over it. The US is very different, so I make no inferences. I am just saying that the good outweighing the bad is not an easy measure here.
You seem unable to deal with the fact that natives fought each other, enslaves each other, hunted each for heads and for meat, often lived short brutish lives. I don't know much Australian aboriginals, but I know that was a fact in the US and Africa and the South Pacific.
I am entirely aware of the fact that indigenous people around the world were tough on their neighbours. So are we whites. I am not sure I agree completely with your comments about "hunting" each other for heads and meat. While cannibalism was an element of warfare in some cultures (and not always warfare) I think it was rarely the goal of a 'hunt'. I'd be interested to be directed to instances otherwise.
History is multifaceted and multidimensional. There is always more than one truth about it. You are stuck on one layer/one dimension/one narrative.
Totally agree with the first 2 sentences. As to the last, what can I say? I read in history, sociology, ethnography, psychology, anthropology, mythology, cultural studies, religious history, economics, politics. I don't do single perspective anything. I have two passions - the nature of religion and the nature of belief. I have Masters and Masters Honours degrees in Social Ecology.
If I am stuck on anything it is that I am informed by a presumption of the duty of love and compassion as a foundation for inquiry. All inquiry must have a moral foundation to it (it does in any case whether we are conscious of it or not). So yes - I have one layer, one dimension, one narrative as a foundation of my inquiry. That's what grounds me. I can look at the other side of human conduct because of that.
I think we are fundamentally grounded in different moral perspectives. That's okay. Reality is big enough for both of us. We don't have to be foes - there's plenty of room for us both. :)