“A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:
1492
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.
The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.
Color was everything.
Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.
The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions"
"Native American Power Drums, Spirit Pride"
- CP, Choctaw/Euro mongrel as I am...
The “Sea Pirates” acquired the North American continent from its previous owners via the accepted real estate protocol the previous owners used and agreed to; conquest. We are not pirates because they decided to loll about in the Mesolithic
ReplyDeleteVonnegut uses the universal image and characterization of sea going predators as "pirates". "Population figures for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before European colonization have been difficult to establish. Estimates have varied widely from as low as 8 million to as many as 100 million, though by the end of the 20th Century, many scholars gravitated toward an estimate of around 50 million people."
ReplyDeleteRapid, repeated outbreaks of European infectious diseases such as influenza, measles, and smallpox (to which they had no natural immunity), resulted in as high as a 90 percent Indigenous population decrease continent-wide post-contact. The pitiful remaining 10% of tribal population and strength resisted ferociously the absolutely undeniable very deliberate racist genocidal slaughter being inflicted on them for hundreds of years, but were numerically overcome. But you know, I wonder just how all this might have been different if the tribes were at 100% warrior capacity? This would be a very different continent indeed...