Injuns

Periodically, one sees spasms or burps of PC MC in comments on Jihad Watch:

"The word savages also have been used as a derogatory term to describe, American Indians..." 

Well, the American Indians were savages. 

 Our currently fashionable inability to call a spade a spade (such as with American Indians, as well as dozens of other issues) is symptomatic of the broader disease that continues to cripple our ability to condemn Islam and all the Muslims who enable it. 

As David Forsmark put it in an excellent article published on FrontPage Magazine back in 2009, The 10 Big Lies About America (a review of Michael Medved's book The 10 Big Lies about America: Combating Destructive Distortions about Our Nation -- which Forsmark described as "a beautifully reasoned, well-argued defense of America that would be a welcomed lifeline for any beleaguered college or high school student fed up of feeling defensive about loving his country"): 

The Dances with Wolves mythology -- the idea that Indians were at one with nature and their fellow natives -- has been the template for everything from national historical sites to textbooks for years. 

Medved starts by demolishing the notion that American tribes were largely peaceful before the white man began his wars of extermination to steal the land. Medved points out that it is not unusual for archeological digs of ancient sites to resemble exhumations of modern war crimes, with stacked skulls and even evidence of cannibalism. 

And tribal warfare didn't stop with the arrival of Europeans -- the Indians continued to slaughter each other on a regular basis, which contributed mightily to the success of the settlers. While it's true atrocities happened on both sides, Medved makes an argument I had not heard before: Nearly every infamous atrocity by whites followed a much-publicized massacre by Indians. He also observes that only one side in the conflict -- the whites -- ever punished those who committed murderous acts.  

Medved takes to task those who use the word "genocide" to describe what happened in North America, pointing out that the word has a specific legal meaning — and that it doesn't include the unintentional, and inevitable, communication of disease between two pre-antibiotic cultures. Especially useful is Medved's dismissal of the once marginal and now widely accepted myth that Europeans intentionally spread smallpox to the Indians by selling them blankets infected with the diseases. Medved reveals the main source material for this myth is idle (and minor) chatter in letters between two Redcoats during the French and Indian War.

It might be added too that various American Indian tribes routinely practiced slavery against other tribes, as well as wife-beating and child abuse.  Indeed, one can say the American Indians (and their southern brothers the Aztecs and Mayans) were a lot like Muslims but simply lacked the blueprint for expansionist supremacism, along with that sense of overarching identity, which Muslims possess (even if the fanaticism encoded in that blueprint tends -- thank Allah! -- to manifest itself all too often in centrifugally internecine violence undermining the Pan-Islamic vision they profess).

Note:  The photograph I use for today's essay is a still from probably the only movie -- post-60s that is -- that is, for the most part, not PC MC about Injuns:  Bruce Beresford's excellent 1991 movie, The Black Robe.