Five Stars
The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America by James Wilson
This book is excellent, thoughtfully written, insightful, and well-delivered. I loved the book for its fabulous flow of history that cut to the bone the turn of events and changed the attitude for the winner take all with manifest destiny as their slogan where tricky treaties only held off hostilities long enough for the next genocidal larceny.
Excerpts:
Spanish conquistador colonialism was truly about land acquisition. Columbus, claiming that his importance has been over-estimated (he died believing he had reached Asia, and someone else would have reached the Americas if he hadn’t), or that he was a calculating villain rather than a visionary hero. But the myth of the “discovery” of the New World has not been easy to shift.
The romance of “the frontier” and the beauty of the “unspoiled wilderness”. Native Americans, far from still being seen as a military threat, had, in fact, demonstrated their “patriotism” by volunteering in their thousands to fight for the United States during the First World War, even though most of them, as non-citizens, were not eligible for the draft.
So many loop-holes this was a farce
1924 the government acknowledged this contribution by granting citizenship to all Indians, irrespective of whether or not they had proved their “competence”.
Melancholy self-examination that gripped many European countries following the Armistice in 1919. The slaughter of the Western Front - in which, according to Allied propaganda, even “racially advanced” Germans had behaved like “savages” - and the turmoil of the Russian Revolution raised disturbing doubts about the superiority of European civilization and the power of capitalism.
