Manifest Destiny, Segregation, and Lebensraum

This is getting way off the original subject presented by the OP, but regarding just the dealings with the Native Americans, I believe bronk has just asked some very important questions. Whether it was correct or not, The American government treated the land as "belonging to the NA". This is why it continued to make them deals ( treaties) to occupy their land in trade for food and other things. If the government outright conquered them without all the treaties, (that they never planned to honor) I believe there would be much less confusion. And being the warring type society the Indians lived by, they would have accepted and understood it. The way they were treated they have every right to feel deceived and cheated.

Now the United States still has a nation (Indian nation) within the borders of a larger nation. What other country has to deal with something like that? The US was so involved in the Civil War in the mid 19th century that they couldn't muster the men to adequately have a stand-up fight .That would have settled the problem. But now, Since the U.S. is a country of laws, we are trying to honor what is left of the old treaties.

Every area has a conflict over Indian rights. Here in the Northwest it's fishing and hunting rights, other places it's other problems.
I have read a great deal about how the government handled the NA and feel it should have been handled better--but I still believe the reservations and government subsidies are hurting them. Indian casinos is not the answer to all their problems.

 

Casino ownership was just something they decided to do with their land.
Las Vegas
Reno
East Coast Gambling
Gambling Boats of The South
etc etc etc
They can deal with it being a mistake, or not.

Who legally owned the land...?? The people that lived there for thousands of years.
Who owns your house...you.? .....every square foot.?
Does France own France.?
Does Dublin own Dublin.?
Does the USA own all the states.....ALL 50 of them.?
The whole World knows who "owned" the land.

The fact that Europeans drew imaginary lines on a piece of paper does not give them the right of "ownership".
A Jew does not take over a catholic Church because Jesus never existed.....you would think that type of logic was insane.
You do not impose your way of life on others.....and then say....."OK that's it, no more of this crap, if somebody pulls this stunt now, they are terrorists, and we are going to defend Our Land/Religion/Culture form these aggressors".
If it is wrong now, it was wrong then.

North America existed the way it did for thousands of years.
Europeans came here, and to South America, and claimed (by military force) the land to be "theirs".
The Nazis invading East has many similarities.....all colonial empires do..... colonialism, "the policy and practice of a power in extending control over weaker people or areas"
Cristobal Colon...the European.....it is where we derive the basic meaning of the term from.

If the KKK hangs 20 Black People, you do not justify/diminish the occurrence by saying ....."Well come on man.....Blacks killed 20,000 Blacks in that time frame".
THAT is THEIR crime to fret over. People need to worry about their own lives.

I am not some naive, theorist.
I am a "white guy". I have no desire to be pigeon holed as some kind of evil from Hell, and I rarely see that happen. But the truth remains....nobody ever told my Mom....."Whites at the back of the bus" x1000.
I know the violent, murderous history of man kind. There is Plenty to go around. We can turn the magnifying glass inward, and stay busy for the foreseeable future.

A friend of mine was bitching about getting a speeding ticket.
He said ....."But everybody was speeding. The guy in front of me was going faster than I was. The guys behind me were going just as fast as me. Everybody should have gotten a ticket".
I said....."You were speeding. The cop gave you a ticket"
good luck

 

Not really.

Human skeletons from as early as the Woodland Period (250 B.C. to A.D. 900) show occasional marks of violence, but conflict intensified during and after the thirteenth century, by which time farmers were well established in the Plains. After 1250, villages were often destroyed by fire, and human skeletons regularly show marks of violence, scalping, and other mutilations. Warfare was most intense along the Missouri River in the present-day Dakotas, where ancestors of the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras were at war with each other, and towns inhabited by as many as 1,000 people were often fortified with ditch and palisade defenses. Excavations at the Crow Creek site, an ancestral Arikara town dated to 1325, revealed the bodies of 486 people–men, women, and children, essentially the town's entire population–in a mass grave. These individuals had been scalped and dismembered, and their bones showed clear evidence of severe malnutrition, suggesting that violence resulted from competition for food, probably due to local overpopulation and climatic deterioration. Violence among farmers continued from the 1500s through the late 1800s.

Bamforth, Douglas B. "Indigenous People, Indigenous Violence: Pre-Contact Warfare on the North American Great Plains."

 

did they live on every single acre?[ I know that's kind of funny ] I'm not trying to diminish anything, just fair and just [ a lot of ''justs' ]<>pointing out all the facts.....to point out many perspectives ] ....the ticket analogy is off...how about a robber [NA] robs you [another NA ] and shoots some1 you know....later on the robber gets shot and robbed by another robber [ white ]....how about that analogy?? I admitted the whites were evil....now, how about the NAs?? were they?..
''whites at the back''<>that's just it ---if the blacks had the technology, and power, the colors would be reversed!! the blacks would have white slaves and telling them ''back of the bus''.....the blacks would've done the same...as stated before, no race has a monopoly on evil or peacefulness....
humans will be humans, and fight/murder/rob/etc....and it wasn't all whites that wanted the NAs dead.....and here's a little fact for everyone, <> most whites in the South did NOT own slaves....

 

I guess I was just trying to point out similarities in mindset and political thought in regards to territorial expansion and the reasons for it, and how some Nazis used the Americans push West and the force and brutality used at times to justify what they did in the East. I wasn't thinking in regards to who was more evil, and they were separated by a more than a century. If we want to get into that conversation, the Segregated South, the KKK, the unfair justice system of the South, and the beatings and lynchings and suppression of Blacks is more to what the Nazis had in mind, and Hitler stated the Segregation policies of the US as an influence for the Nuremberg Laws.

 

The Indians took every square inch of "their" land from some other tribe living there before them. And the people they took it from took it from somebody else, and on and on and on as far back as you want to go. I suppose if you could identify the original people who came down the continent when it was still virgin country 12,000 or 15,000 years ago then they might have a valid claim, but those people are long gone, killed by waves of others who followed them.

Pick a tribe, any tribe - the Sioux perhaps, since they get so much play in Hollywood. Where do they come from? Well, since they leave no written history we can only go back to the first European contacts and way back then, they were in the western great lakes region. They didn't spread out into the plains until the horse came along - introduced by the Europeans. And who was out there before the Sioux killed them? Somebody else, it doesn't matter. The Sioux and other great horse tribes of the plains only held the plains for a couple hundred years before being displaced by other invaders. Us.

Our claim is every bit as valid as theirs. They took the land by conquest, and so did we.

 

There is no question that Nazism, European Colonialism and American Expansionism share some common DNA markers, the way Horses, Mules and Zebra's are clearly related, but very different equine's. Basically coming down to 'we are better, more deserving than you'. Then again this was common between any two city-states in Mesopotamia say 2,500 years ago.

Any shame we might feel, and I do wish there could have been a better solution, stems not so much from what 'we' did than from the feeling that we failed to honor our own moral codes. This is particularly true of late Colonialism and America's Manifest Destiny. These were carried out not by absolute rulers or oligarchy's but by nations with democratic histories.

This is where the two travel separate genetic path's, modern European Colonialism and American expansion both saw themselves as 'guardians' of less developed and 'childlike' races, be they yellow, red, brown or black. All paid at least lip service to the concept of integrating them into modern, 'civilized' society. The term used most commonly was "White Man's Burden".

This still left a good deal of room for excessive actions by individual's and government's, but absolute extermination was a step that these colonial society's simply were not willing to make. You might kill them in substantial batches, if you had good reason (uprising's and such), but the general will was to absorb them in some acceptable (but unequal) capacity.

Nazism operated as a zero sum equation. There was no place for those 'not like us'.

 

Exactly, And an excellent comparison it is--this has completely morphed off the original point.
To answer KB, the land belongs to whoever can take it. It has always been that way. The problem in America was not that the government took the land, but the decet and wishy-washey way that it was done.

And who ownes my house? Don't kid yourself Denny. Try not paying your property taxes and see who ownes the property, or it the government wants your property for a public project--bingo, it belongs to the government.
'

 

Since no one and indeed no one group has live in one spot in North America for "thousands of years" the logical conclusion is that no one legally oned it. Also rather implies that no one could sell it.

A house by the way is a rather flawed analogy for land. A house is a man made structure. The land isn't. Indeed some peoples didn't even have a concept of the land as something one owned (it's my understanding that this includes some Indians as well as Scotts at some points in time).

By your defintion above since neither France nor Dublin have existed for thousands of years then neither owns them. The land of course has but even the city of Dublin has chanbed hands a number of times since its founding by the Norse.

As for the USA owning the states it can be argued that that is rather turned around it's the states and their people that own the US.

The whole World doesn't "know" who "owned" the land indeed it's from some of the place names it's pretty clear that even the Indians don't claim to have known who owned parts of it.

In regards to your first sentence, that and their ability to enforce it certainly appearse to have.
In regards to the second. I agree it's insane, why did you post it and what does it have to do with the topic at hand.
As for the next. It's not the same people so again your analogy fails. Certainly a useful trick if you can manage it thoug.
As for the last that implies if it was right then then it's right now. I don't think I want to subscribe to that. Indeed I think most would disagree with it. We as a species have made progress to judge those who lived in the past by todays standards is to deny that progress.

Indeed and then people showed up and messed it up.

Actually that's a badly flawed understanding of the word and meaning of colony and colonialism. Look for instance at:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/colony

Looks like a bit of a strawman to me. Certainly an attempt to make an emotional rather than a logical argument.

And your point is?

 

Could you have your publisher condense that to a short story length rebuttal.?

 

Well if you want a short summary:

I find your argument to be one sided and based on emotion rather than fact and logic. Futhermore it is one that seams designed to limit understanding rather than further it.

 

http://www.jewishjournal.com/sacredintentions/item/hitlers_inspiration_and_guide_the_native_american_holocaust

I'll find the one on segregation as well.