Once again this fascist pundit screeches. Once again Stanford University sponsors a corrupt Hoover Fellow, whose racism fairly oozes from his pores.
Fascists love to cast blame everywhere but to themselves.
The overwhelming evidence that a genocide was waged against both Native and African Americans is lost in the clever play on words.
Resiliency is depicted as being destroyed in white people because of the scholarship of those who have discovered the truth of cultural annihilation; in everything from the slave trade to boarding schools.
I graduated from Stanford. I know Stanford pretty well. In 1965 is was a bastion of white privilege. The civil rights era was in full force, but the Stanford community was still stuck in 1950, with a cap on female undergraduates, quotas leaving people of color out, in short a white privileged college.
And the Hoover Institute, a bastion of straight up fascism, led the charge of older white alumni who wanted Stanford to stay lily white. Hoover, a product of the same privilege, ran the country into the ground, by adhering to the lies and stereotypes about the American economy that had grown to world wide leadership by killing a lot of people.
Even Hitler patterned his Third Reich on this brutality.
East Palo Alto was always there to counter balance the myths of America. It was always there, in contrast to the glittering college of whites privilege right across the Highway…we didn’t visit East Palo Alto much, because “those people” lived there.
Stanford’s mascot was Indian, named by Pop Warner, a particularly hateful man, who had coached at a Boarding School and who nefariously had farmed out his players to minor league baseball teams, for a fee of course.
He profited off of the misery of children who were held against their will, having their cultures beaten out of them.
The Stanford Daily depicted freshman teams as papooses! Where is the resiliency, the charm of pioneers in that? After a genocide of historical proportions, white privileged children of Stanford had the gall to make fun of the culture they had murdered.
Today Stanford is a bastion of change: the Serra roads are renamed, the student body is one of the most diverse on earth, the teams are no longer Indians; only the Hoover Institute stays untouched on campus, a sop to rich old alumni who still live the the myth of white supremacy.
Just a few of the truths that this pundit ignores.
- Resiliency is the pioneer spirt. Fact: The conquering of the West (Manifest Destiny) was by the gun, destroying the buffalo to starve Native People to steal their land. The genocide was wide spread and very effective; and not all caused by diseases that were in fact weaponized by Civil War general generals to kill Native Peoples. There was no resiliency here, it was our greed and avarice, carried out by vigilante killers who “won the West”. And, the economy of Amerikka was made into a world leader by the most brutal chattel slavery in history!
2. There is no glory in criminal behavior. Junipero Serra was an out and out racist killer, who brutalized Native Peoples. His statue remains as a symbol of genocide and religious bigotry.
3. Ishi the “wild Indian” who was captured around the turn of the century, was poked and prodded as scientists of the time then proclaimed this surprise: “he was a human being”.
Imagine that? Then a wave of pity literally killed the man.
Still, after the poor man died of the white man’s tuberculosis his brain was “preserved” to be studied for its aboriginal characteristics. This at a time that science had no idea what brain development was.
4. The taking of Ishi’s brain was a hedonistic act, typical of the inhuman behavior of white people toward people of color at the time.
There was no extraordinary resiliency in the pioneers. The U.S. Army, the strongest army on earth after the civil war, used modern weapons of war, that had killed thousands in the Civil War, on an opponent who had bows and arrows. There was no heroism in what amounted to out and out murder in every “battle” save one.
And the “battles won” category grew huge in what amounted to an armed genocide of millions of people.
Those are facts, and the newspapers of the times lionized this barbaric behavior with breathless lie after lie. If you wonder about the west’s genocide just read the newspapers of the time…the mythology is a murderous excuse for conquest and theft by the “resilient pioneers”
Pioneers were fed a constant diet of lies, even Mark Twain noticed it, of justifications for the largest land grab in human history. Wagon Trains were arsenals of firepower, urged on to overkill by pulp fiction writings, that encouraged genocide. The Donner Party is not an example but of utter stupidity, trying to cross the Sierras in the winter.
There is a lot of proof of pioneer stupidity and barbaric behavior; recently a town in California finally dropped it’s nickname of hangtown, whose victims of people of color is well documented.
There is no honor here: In spite of the despicable double and even triple standards that the Stanford “Fellow” uses to depict the most despicable era in the history of mankind.
That is what won the west and what is killing Amerikka once again, with a nation divided between those who know the truth and those living a fantasy land of denial and lies.
It all can be summarized into a book title of apartheid: “Cry the Beloved Country”.