The “liberal” news media <snort>. Watch this and try not to throw anything heavy across the room.
CNN's Rick Santorum: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture" pic.twitter.com/EMxOEYDbg7
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) April 26, 2021
There it is. There’s the great American myth. We are a nation that coalesced out of nothingness around two ideas: FREEDOM (for white landowners) and CHRISTIANITY (oh, judeo-Christianity) and the Ten Commandments and Jesus, despite none of those appearing in our constitution. Meanwhile, the people who were already living here were just sitting around slack-jawed and drooling, not a single thought in their heads, no art, no culture, no religion, no technology, no music, no traditions, so it was OK to slaughter them. It’s one grand smug lie, repeated over and over, and the rich white people sit there and lap it up.
The fact that that slimy fraud hasn’t been canceled and has in fact been prospering is all the evidence you need that cancel culture does not exist.
It gives me some slight satisfaction that I lived at a time in Pennsylvania when I could vainly vote against that horrible human being.
So much wrong with this.
.1. It was no big deal.
You could say the same thing about Canada, all of Central and South America, Australia, Oceania, and parts of Africa.
.2. We didn’t start from nothing.
We imported people from Europe and Africa (slaves against their will) along with materials, technology, and supplies.
The original colonies are basically copies of where they came from, mostly what is now the UK. Well, duh, why is it we speak English anyway?
.3. 90% of the Native Americans that were here just died, one way or another.
Chiefly from our diseases that they had no immunity to, but also by force of arms.
The genocide of the Native Americans is candidly, nothing to celebrate!!!
If it’s any consolation, the word “santorum” itself is an insult to most people. http://spreadingsantorum.com/
Satanorum is a crackpot lunatic fringe Catholic with a long history of saying stupid and extremist things.
Use of contraception by relevant cohorts of women in the USA is 99%. It’s 98% for Catholic women.
Responsible adults don’t have more children than they want or can support.
Not in a world with 7.8 billion people.
How the Iroquois Great Law of Peace Shaped U.S. Democracy
https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/how-the-iroquois-great-law-of-peace-shaped-us-democracy/
Republicans — a party dedicated to spreading assholery.
According to lunatic fringer Satanorum, both the US universities and Hollywood are controlled by satan.
The proof for this is nonexistent.
Satan doesn’t even exist.
Colonists who kept dying like flies because they didn’t know how to farm or what to eat. Like the ones who starved because they didn’t know oysters and lonster were going to be celebrated luxury foods in a few century. They hung on doggedly, murdering eachother regularly, then imported a captive labor force. Anyone who sees the building of the US as a glorious story is probably a racist and definitely ignorant.
Right, “not much of Native American culture”… So I guess Rick wouldn’t mind if Native Americans just took all the corn back? Or tomatoes? Chocolate? The potato!?
The culture of North American first-nations are deeply integrated into global human culture… What a self-important asshole.
raven@1
The indirect allusion to DW Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which celebrated the KKK, has got to make the short list. I mean, Santorum’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but could he really say this with no awareness at all?
Plus, “not much Native American culture”. Yeah, genocide’ll do that for you. (Pardon if you mentioned this one. He really lost me at “birthed”).
BTW, in @9 I don’t mean to deny the contribution of Native Americans, strikingly in the form of New World cultivars that completely changed how most of the world feeds itself, as well as the Iroquois confederacy, though I know very little about that.
However, it is undeniable that much Native American culture was eliminated through direct or cultural genocide. A lot of American culture is derived from Europe and not from the indigenous people we killed so we could steal their land. That’s not something to be proud of, though.
I’m a bit puzzled here. This is one commentator. One.
He’s not the only moronic fool in the liberal press, Simon Jenkins in the Grauniad immediately comes to mind.
One.
This site, FtB itself, has had a few.
Explain again — actually, for the first time (ever?) — how these individuals — and there are more — warrant the contempt and seeming-posturing about “liberal media(/sites)” in their entirety? Is there, as one point, no such thing as rational doubt or fact-checking when it comes to the “liberal media(/sites)”, or the possibility there are some not-always-rational actors?
(Admittedly, FtB did eject the morons, whilst, as one example, the Grauniad hasn’t.)
I mean, if Americans are descended from Europeans, why are there still Europeans?
blf @11
How many serial-killers are acceptable for a peaceful and friendly community (suppose said community does nothing to expel those members) before we can use scare quotes around “peaceful and friendly”?
That’s nonsense. Robert Evans hasn’t been a driving force in Hollywood for decades.
“It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”. Always amazing how keen such people are to control the sexuality of others. And how certain they are that something their preacher has told them (no reference to contraception on the bible I think? well, except for Onan…).
Satanorum is a Catholic so he got that from Catholic dogma and the Pope.
No contraception isn’t in the bible.
The “things are supposed to be” is the Catholics using “Natural Law” to make up their religious beliefs.
The main problem is that Natural Law doesn’t even exist.
There is no way to determine what Natural Law claims or doesn’t claim.
You could argue on the basis of Natural Law that if god wanted humans to live in Minnesota in the winter, we would all be covered by thick coats of fur.
In Realityland, even the vast majority of Catholics simply ignore their rulings on contraception. It’s just obviously wrong and people make their own decisions on how they are going to live their lives.
It’s odd that when we’re talking about Latin American immigrants, they’re always bringing tons of culture with them, much of it indigenous to the Americas, which is supposed to have all sorts of pernicious effects and must be stopped now, before it destroys us all….
… but not when we’re supposed to be talking about how “European” or “Judeo-Christian” we are, without any other major influences on our culture.* No, not then. In that case, what we were talking about before is just a whole lot of nothing.
Two very different fairy tales to tell to your white children, or if they’re not listening to you anymore, maybe your dog. Possibly also a cable news channel.
*I guess all the “important” stuff was in 1776 or some such nonsense. That seems like the most bullshit-fueled option, so it’s probably on the right track.
Just in Florida alone a good number of towns have names coming from Muskogee or some such language. The FSU football team is named for a tribe that was coming into being when William Bartram was exploring the area and met them. Bartram’s prose, including his accounts of Native Americans, has been quite influential on many through the generations.
Also this is now trendy:
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20210223-yaupon-the-rebirth-of-americas-forgotten-tea
A species in the same genus as what gave us yerba mate, but that’s from South America.
The persistence of Native American names and other cultural influences doesn’t exonerate us from carrying out a genocide. I assume nobody here claims it does, but Santorum’s remark is so backwards that I don’t think the right rebuttal is to point out that the genocide wasn’t entirely successful. I mean, it is certainly not because of the best efforts of European settlers to create a nation that treated the indigenous people as a blight on the land. The genocide was plenty successful. Possibly the most successful in world history, or at least recorded history.
The main thing is that Santorum is either ignorant or proud to claim genocide as part of his heritage. It’s a combination of both to be sure. For all the Native American names that remain in some mangled form, there are languages that are extinct, cultural practices that are lost to time, and probably entire tribes who succumbed to European disease before those intrepid “pioneers” could catch up to them and do the job themselves.
I live in so-called Silicon Valley, which nobody calls Ohlone valley, and where nobody has gathered and pounded acorns for sustenance in a long time, except as a reenactment. Until recently, there were some middle schools here named after eugenicists in that fine Western tradition that was apparently all the rage in early 20th century Palo Alto. The big semiconductor companies got their start from William Shockley, inventor of the transistor and notorious “scientific” racist.
I mean, sure, there are reminders of the cultures we destroyed, but I am sitting here in a house that has no Native American architectural elements, typing at a cheap wooden desk that would have fit in fine in any Western nation over the past few hundred years. We really did a hell of a job of wiping out this land as it existed before settlers came. Mexico, and Central and South America have a different story, and more indigenous culture remains. Here most of it exists purely for show.
I think that the average CNN IQ was too high (140+) so they needed someone to lower it a bit so they hired Santorum. Mission accomplished! Now the average is in the low 110!
Isn’t Santorum supposed to be Roman Catholic?
Like, that really powerful European organization that’s been pretty influential for about a millennium or so?
And, which is still a majority of practiced religions in several European nations?
what an asshole
He really lives up to his surname, doesn’t he?
There was nothing here.
That’s what the alien conquerors will say after they land in NYC, raze the city with their ray guns and infect all of the humans with the Eridani plague.
R. L. Foster@22 I finally got around to reading John Christopher’s Tripod books as a middle aged adult when one of my kids had them out of the library. My favorite part is where the protagonist befriends his alien overseer enough to hear a little of their side. Christopher presents it like European colonialism, but without really attacking it. The fact that a few brave human teenagers can outsmart the aliens is the least believable part. Granted the aliens are not all that bright and underestimate their foes.
The most depressing tale of alien conquest I ever read was Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides, told from the perspective of the last humans and with entirely impersonal aliens treating earth as crop land. That’s a more realistic scenario, though I do not believe that anyone with sufficient technology would see much purpose to destroying inhabited planets in distant star systems.