>>> Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> 08/28 8:27 AM >>>
Tom Lehman:
>I would be willing to bet that anytime during the first 150 years of the
>European tribes attempted colonization effort of North America, if the
>native Americans had made a concerted effort to get rid of the Europeans
>they could have. Match-lock guns were no big edge in the North American
>rain forest. The numbers of the Europeans were not that big and they
>were spread out and could be knocked off one settlement at a time. Why
>didn't the native Americans do it?
Jim Blaut, "Colonizer's Model of the World," pp. 183-186: "The Americans were not defeated ,they were infected."
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Charles: I agree with the longer statement by Jim Blaut that concludes with the above. Also, with respect to North America there was no state, i.e. repressive apparatus as an institution. And there was no "national" unity of the various groups. And there was no ideology of conquest and war on the scale that Europeans had developed going back to Greece and Rome.
What I am getting at is that the indigenous people didn't have a conception of what the Europeans were doing in the long run: Conquering the whole continent. The European genocidal conquest of the whole "continent" was not forseeable to the indigenous peoples because they didn't have a full conception of such an empire. They didn't conceive of themselves as one people or nation in the European sense , with accompanying chauvinist and imperial concepts. The indigenous people's were innocent of the final solution within European conceptions and so did not have a counter-final solution conception.
Charles Brown
Detroit