By Rachel Marsden
I'm talking about the people who can be credited for turning the city from a giant wilderness into the budding metropolis of today. The place, and indeed the whole of my country, Canada, was pretty third-worldish until the English, French, and various other Europeans arrived and started planning and building infrastructure and government, and teaching the natives discipline, order, and capitalism. Canada or the USA without European immigrants would look somewhat like Africa.
It's no coincidence that the best countries in the world are either European or founded by Europeans. Everywhere they go, European immigrants make things better--until they're asked to leave, at which point everything usually descends back into chaos. Not that they ever get any thanks for it.
So how are the Vancouver 2010 Olympics paying tribute to these increasingly marginalized European immigrants and their defining contributions to Canada? By ignoring them completely, it seems.
The logo for the Games is some sort of native Indian stone carving resembling a bloke with massive oedema of the legs. While the natives were carving away at such lovely things, the Europeans were busy building an entire world around them, but that's conveniently overlooked. The mascots for the games are various hybrids of legendary native indian animals that could only ever exist only after a good toke-up of Canadian weed: a half-whale half-bear hybrid (Miga), a whale-thunderbird-bear hybrid (Sumi), and a sasquatch (Quatchi).
A feature on the 2010 Games website allows you to take a quiz to find out which mascot you are. I can tell you, without even taking the quiz, that even as a Canadian I would be exactly none of them because I'm not some sort of native Indian hallucination with a Japanese name who resembles an Asian cartoon character. I'm descended from the people who built my country, but they've been forgotten.
Discipline and order = kings and popes
America's Founding Fathers loved kowtowing to British discipline and order. America's fortune-seeking pioneers loved kowtowing to the federal government's discipline and order. Yeah, that's really what American history is about: marching like little goosesteppers when an authority tells you to.
As for capitalism, Indians traded widely with each other and with the Europeans they met. Much of their initial interaction with Europeans was based on the fur trade. The Indians kept up their end of the trade for a couple centuries, so they must've known what they were doing.
Bottom line is which people lived happier, more fulfilling lives? We know the answer--Indians--because of what happened whenever they took captives. White people almost always preferred the Indian lifestyle and resisted being returned to "civilization."
Europeans = Nazis and Communists
By many standards, the Scandinavian countries of Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland are the best in the world. Why? Because they don't share the greed and selfishness inherent in American culture. Because their mix of economic competitiveness, government regulation, and environmental consciousness produces the best results.
For more on the subject, see The Myth of Western Superiority, This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco: A Columbus Day Rant, and Native vs. Non-Native Americans: A Summary.
Below: A sterling example of Western discipline and order: Joan of Arc burned at the stake as a witch. That'll teach her not to contradict the powers that be.
Of course, truth be told, Natives societies did and do have their own order and discipline. Complex customs, ways of raising and fostering good citizens of their societies, and the like.
ReplyDeleteTo say they had no order or discipline until the Euros came is to portray than as unsocial autonomous savages (at best) or sub-human animals (at worst).
This article is so horrible... words fail me... Is this 1909 or 2009?! Why don't they reopen Carlisle again?! WTF!
ReplyDeleteTry 1809.
ReplyDeleteYes, Native societies had their own version of order and discipline. There's never been a society that was pure chaos and anarchy. (Which is why the libertarian ideal of existing without government is a silly fantasy.)
ReplyDeleteWhat I meant was that Native societies didn't have elaborate sets of laws and regulations imposed by an oppressive hierarchy of kings, popes, lords, bishops, et al. Native societies were less rigid and doctrinaire, more open and egalitarian.
Relatively speaking, therefore, Indians had less order and discipline. Yes, their lives were structured, but like workers in a small business, not a huge corporation.
thanks for this and whatever other words you have for a "tight-assed, greed-driven, culturally-intolerant, and my-way-or-way America" who refuses to see that all good things can't be bought or conquered.
ReplyDeletei am a fan of howard zinn and wish he was required reading for all students.
unfortunately, we only use this "useless holiday" of columb-ass day to proclaim these truths.
it's a start.
kmr
"What I meant was that Native societies didn't have elaborate sets of laws and regulations imposed by an oppressive hierarchy of kings, popes, lords, bishops, et al. Native societies were less rigid and doctrinaire, more open and egalitarian."
ReplyDeleteExcept that Europe has also had free and egalitarian societies even during the dark ages, the Basques or the Norse or the gender equality of Visigothic law. So the idea that Europe was nothing but a cesspool of brutal monarchies is a complete myth.
"Which people had more political and social freedom? Indians."
ReplyDeleteWrong as I posted before there were European cultures and societies that were free and egalitarian, ie Poland abolishing slavery in the 15th century.
"Which people didn't suffer the Hundred Years' War"
The Hundred years war was a battle between two French royal houses, in other words only one European nation, that's like equating every single Indian culture to the Inca empire.
"the Black Death"
Thank you for that classic example of blaming the victim.
"and the Inquisition"
There were Roman, Spanish and Portugese inquisitions but once again only a few European cultures.
"Bottom line is which people lived happier, more fulfilling lives? We know the answer--Indians--because of what happened whenever they took captives. White people almost always preferred the Indian lifestyle and resisted being returned to "civilization."
Once again you're equating English colonists with every single European culture, which is absurd and biased.
Also as for this amusing theory:
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/enlightn.htm
The article tries to make it sound as if Europe was nothing but a bunch of monarchies who had no symbols or ideas of freedom. That idea is false seeing as Europe already has free and egalitarian cultures and 'savage' examples of freedom (ie the Scottish highlanders or the Cossack) not to mention revolts against monarchies.