Consider if you will: a corny politically correct politician falls through a time warp. His views alter 15th century Europe. Suddenly everybody cares about each others’ feelings. This is the effect:A leaky, barnacle-encrusted ship lands upon pristine shores. Its passengers, weary and sick with scurvy and malnutrition, take the life boats and row them excitedly to the coast. On the beach, natives gaze awkwardly at the white men emerging on the sand.
“Look at ’em,” the chieftain mutters to his collection of warriors. “No tans. Their melanin is going to bug them something fierce. Ouch. I would just hate to see their burns tomorrow.”
A bedraggled man stalks his way up the shore, motherland flag in hand. Planting the flag firmly in the ground, he collapses. A solitary figure walks up beside him, grinning wildly and holding a piece of parchment.
“Hi!” the man says enthusiastically. “My name is Bob, and I’ll be your conqueror today!”
While the natives look puzzled, Bob continues, “Now what we’ve got here is a preliminary invasion force from the Old World, but we’re gonna do it your way. Do you want your choice of a prolonged and bloody war against a superior army, or do you want it simple and just surrender now, leaving you to a lifetime of plunder, rape and slavery?”
“It’s all up to you. We can spear you in the side and leave you to die or decapitate you. Either way, your family is covered in the CDPIF, Corn Dispersion Program for Impoverished Families. We, as a nation seeking to prolong its life span and power, are dedicated to doing whatever it takes to get as much gold and precious artifacts from you while maintaining the prospect that you’ll do the work for us! Because, you see, we care about you..
“Now, about employment. You’ll agree, of course, to work on spacious haciendas for menial pay and even less freedom! We’ll oversee the whole process. Viceroys will control the whole operation but we’ll know you’re doing your best. It’s all hunky-dory and in the interest of foreign relations!
“We want to share the land and make it our home. Is that okay? Can we be brothers? I hope so! You see, we’re not what you’d think of as ‘cruel’ and ‘barbaric’ anymore! We’re politically correct! We came over here knowing full well that destroying a culture is not an option. We respect alternative civilizations. Here! Check out this ‘I DIG INDIGENOUS!’ T-shirt.”
There you are folks! There is the perfect colonizer. He’s kind, outgoing and says up front exactly what’s going on in his mind. He loves pillaging, but if it’s not in the general interest of those about to be pillaged, he backs off! He’s just a great guy.
I’m almost sorry if this upsets you, but this isn’t how history turned out. Our ancestors did bad. But there are people out there who find the mere mention of the European expansionist period to be an affront to their very personage. Why? They are a product of the very cultures they are seeking to condemn.
The Hispanic cultures of South, Central and North America are a mesh between the Spanish influence and the lifestyles of the Indians living in those regions. As the centuries have passed, this combination has formed a mixture resulting in the governments and countries we see today. Now we’ve got hundreds of people denouncing the past because it destroyed a certain culture. Go ahead! Yell at the past! It can’t listen. How they can possibly expect their anger to be justified is overwhelming; none of them are full-bred Indian – at most, they are maybe 10 to 15 percent native.
The Aztecs had a sub-culture living within their society for the sole purpose of sacrifice, just in case they needed a virgin to on the block to appease the Sun God. The Mayans, the Incas and the Aztecs all fought with not only each other, but with other tribes! American natives battled each other to the death, much in the same way Europeans brutalized each other. They aren’t perfect. But the European settlers are catching all the hell because we wrote down what we did.
Never mind the fact our ancestors did some bad things. Consider that this country was founded by a bunch of Anglo-Saxon white people who had just suffered some serious oppression in their homeland. The point is that it happened to a lot of other people’s ancestors. My family crossed the Atlantic in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Does that still make me a genocidal maniac? Nope. You can say the same thing about millions of other Caucasians.
We (and when I say we I am referring to the Caucasian population) extend our greatest apologies to the families of the indigenous peoples murdered by our direct descendants. But how many can claim pure indigenous ancestry? Perhaps some. Now just let it go. This shit only happened five hundred years ago.
