Every so often, you read a book which profoundly alters your way of thinking. That's happened to me recently. The book in question is What is America? by Ronald Wright, which was given to me as a Christmas present by my father-in-law.
Those who like their politico-historical writing balanced and even-handed won't appreciate Mr Wright's book. But it is a pacy, colourful, and fascinating read. It's essentially a re-telling of the story of America, but it glosses over most of the well-known and often-told stories (Columbus, the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War, etc.) in order to explode some of the myths and, as he claims, lies about American history.
For example, he shows that the original European settlers (or 'invaders', as he calls them) arrived not in a virginal wilderness peopled by a few nomadic tribes, but in a sophisticated and civilized country, whose inhabitants had large towns, farms, and established political systems. He goes on to describe the Europeans' treatment of these societies - which included deliberate eradication by disease and ethnic displacement as well as more conventional warfare - as 'genocide'. Later, he expounds on America's imperial strategies in the 19th century, for example invading and occupying Hawaii and the Philippines for no real reason, and of course culminating in the tragic and ill-fated military adventures of recent years - Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. He also shows how the plundering of American wealth - particularly gold and minerals - helped to finance and make possible the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Of course, there are always other ways of looking at things. I've no doubt many Native American tribes were as bloodthirsty in warfare as popular imagination suggests. And you can't judge morals and prerogatives of hundreds of years ago by the standards of today - for example, the Europeans obviously thought they had a divine imperative to 'civilize' the barbarians, and if they were triumphant in battle, that was the will of God. So I don't necessarily feel personally responsible for what my ancestors did. But at the end of the day - as Mr Wright says - we invaded their country, not the other way around.
Most importantly, what happened did eventually pave the way for the birth of a new country which had a profound effect on the Enlightenment, and set (until recently) global standards for freedom, equality and human dignity - even though the treatment of African-Americans, in particular, has always compromised those ideals.
Reading this book has certainly made me think again about how America got to be the way it is. It may be 'a great country', as I said in an earlier post, but I didn't quite realise before at what cost this was achieved.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Great perspectives from a Brit in Oklahoma! One of the most tragic aspects of America's early history is the fact that about 95% of Native Americans died of the plague; the disease, brought by the 'settlers' from Europe, had spread like wildfire through the continent. So by the time the Euros encountered the Native Americans, their populations had already been decimated, hardly a remnant of what they had been just a few years earlier. We can only imagine how rich and impressive their civilizations might have been in their full glory.
Thank you!
And smallpox too, I understand. Apparently the first outbreaks were unplanned accidents, but later there were incidences of the Europeans using disease as an instrument of war - germ warfare, in effect.
Post a Comment