JUDGING AMERICA Part I

Four young congresswomen known ominously as “The Squad” are getting a lot of attention right now. Talented, attractive crackpots, they represent a mindset that, until recently, was only held by cranks and college professors. But I repeat myself. To them, the birth of America and Rosemary’s Baby are essentially the same story. To anyone with sense, this seems, well, stupid. But history shows that whole nations can go mad. The liberty we now enjoy is unnatural and against all human history. We take it for granted at our own peril. And now, arguments that were once self-evident must be pulled from dusty shelves and fed like mother’s milk to babies who believe that 2 + 2 = 4 is “white people math”.



When America is condemned as uniquely oppressive, the obvious question is “compared to whom?” Let us tackle the question by first looking at the two most resonant issues: slavery and Native American genocide.



When the Constitution was ratified, slavery was legal in eight states. Some argue this tolerance of slavery is like an Original Sin which can never be expiated. Far from eager acceptance, the debate over slavery during the convention was acrimonious. Compromises were made without which the embryonic nation would have been stillborn. Of these were the greatly misunderstood 3/5 compromise, which Madison introduced to limit slave states’ power, and the banning of the Atlantic slave trade in 20 years.



A few nations and locales abolished slavery around the 14^th and 15^th centuries but bans were never permanent until the modern era. The first modern sovereign state to abolish slavery permanently was Vermont in 1777. In Great Britain, abolitionist sentiment mirrored northern states’ discomfort with slavery. Yet, despite Britain’s economic dependence on slavery largely consisting of house maids and landscapers, they did not abolish slavery until 1833. Peter the Great in Russia and the Chinese Qing Dynasty abolished slavery in 1723 but the bans did not last or were not enforced. Several European nations banished the slave trade by 1820 but only Spain had full abolition by then. Mexico and Central America abolished slavery in 1824, France in 1848. After the 1791 slave revolt in Haiti, France threatened to invade. Haitians agreed to extortionist “reparations” amounting to ten times their GDP. Payments finally ended in 1947. Slavery was abolished in most Western countries in the 19^th century but continued to be ubiquitous worldwide well into the 20^th. Most African and Middle Eastern nations ended slavery between 1900 and 1950. It was abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962, Oman in 1970, and equality-loving Mauritania in 1981, which finally criminalized it in 2007.



Few of these nations had purely agrarian economies almost wholly dependent on slavery. The Antebellum South is held up as an archetype of human evil but abolition was an unfathomably difficult proposition. It meant certain impoverishment and the obliteration of their culture. Yet, slavery was morally corrupting in a way that extended far beyond their treatment of blacks. White southerners’ blindness to this cost them dearly for generations.

While there are plenty of examples in history, defining genocide can be thorny. There are few issues more hotly debated than whether America’s shameful treatment of natives qualifies. The U.S. violated treaty after treaty, committed massacres and exiled tribes to unfamiliar lands. 90% of indigenous peoples may have died from contact with Europeans. While tragic, the historical record shows no intent to eradicate or destroy whole peoples. In other words, no genocide. The vast majority of these deaths were from diseases to which they had little natural defense.

We must also draw a distinction between the brutality of early Spanish colonists and later American settlers. Despite later government policies, many American settlers tried earnestly to coexist with natives. Early American literature is saturated in racial and cultural superiority but also with awe and reverence for natives. Feelings were mixed and sentiments were not monolithic. Despite attempts to link Manifest Destiny with Nazi ideology, they are not the same.  

There is also the matter of the moral nature of Indians themselves. The trope of Rousseau’s “noble savage” suffers under the weight of historical evidence. Intertribal warfare was pervasive and the dogma of natives’ harmony with the earth is more complicated. Often overusing and abusing lands, the effect was sometimes devastating and permanent. Tribes cleared whole forests with slash and burn techniques. Anasazis nearly caused the extinction of native Junipers. Their collapse was also due to some familiar issues: “…recent ideas include extremist politics and religion, and an unsustainable stratification between the rich and poor—the ancient equivalent of income inequality that so infuriated the masses, they couldn’t take it anymore and left.”

Murders and kidnappings of white settlers were common. “The Last of the Mohicans” was inspired by the real-life events of Daniel Boone rescuing his daughter from Cherokee-Shawnee raiders. Many tribes participated in the slave trade, selling native captives to white slave traders before Africans became the preferred commodity. Many tribes themselves owned African slaves. Cherokees owned slaves at a higher rate than Southern whites and brought them on the Trail of Tears. The 1842 Cherokee slave revolt inspired rebellions in other tribes. In a sad, greedy irony, Cherokee Nation elders, mumbling something about getting their own dang casinos, expelled descendants of Cherokee slaves from membership in 2007.

Controversy surrounds Aztec human sacrifice but recent scholarship suggests it was as bloody as Spanish conquistadors portrayed. One historian stated Aztecs were “a culture obsessed with death: they believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing. When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.”

Steven Pinker calls the advancement of freedoms in the world “The Rights Revolution”. For all of human history, slavery was uncontroversial and there were no such things as voting, free speech, or fair trials. Women had the right to shut up. Criticism of kings, who ruled by Divine Right, meant imprisonment or execution. Ancient man was ruled by an ethic of conquest. Nearly every people group on earth has a history of attacking, killing and raping their neighbors. What changed was the Enlightenment. The Protestant Reformation gave people the idea that individuals could decide for themselves what was good and right. By the 18^th century, Western thinkers determined that the rights of individuals were inherent and that man should be governed by reason. America was born from these ideals. If America’s founding and by proxy, the ideals that formed it are attacked, what foundation is there for the rights of women, gays, or minority groups of any stripe?  

The point of all this what-about-ism is not to excuse America’s crimes but to wrap them in a blanket of context without which there is no truth or understanding. America has many sins but why not speak of the virtues as well? The question should always be, “Compared to whom?” The sins of America are the sins of humanity itself. For some, this is hard to accept. Truth often is.