From: "Daniel Davies" <dsquared at al-islam.com> Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 01:03:31 -0600
>Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 10:11:04 -0800
>From: Bradford DeLong
>Subject: Re: Hitchens on genocide
>>They can think of the Western expansion of the
>>United States only in terms of plague blankets, bootleg booze and
>>dead buffalo, never in terms of the medicine chest, the wheel and
>>the railway...
>A far cry indeed from the "glorification of genocide" we >were led to
expect...
Hmmmm. It was a genocide, and he says it was glorious, so you can kind of see where the phrase "glorification of genocide" comes from.
Furthermore, I'm not at all sure which of two (both fairly nasty) points are being made in the article. It's either claiming
1) that the conquest of America by Europeans was a good thing because the Europeans' superior technological advancement brought huge net benefits to the Native Americans which they would otherwise have lacked.
which seems fairly obviously empirically false, as measured by a simple headcount.
or
2) that the conquest of America by Europeans was a good thing because it allowed Europeans to kill Native Americans and steal their food, which is good because Europeans are a superior expression of the World-Spirit than Native Americans.
which can quite clearly be used to justify anything you care to mention.
Of course, the tendency on the Left to regard all historical events as terribly bad is irritating, but Hitchens was writing at least ten years after John Cleese's "What have the Romans ever done for us?" speech, which surely rendered subsequent efforts at skewering this tendency otiose.
dd
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