Interlude

Wild Flowers (May 24, 2014)

The End of the War (?)

After about six weeks of effort, I finished the book, The War That Made America. This has been a major influence on me. It opened my eyes to the cycle of history as well of the ignorance of the masses (including me). To do justice to the effect this book has had on me would require a detailed essay (but as you know I don't really even have time for this blog entry). I probably doesn't make any difference one way or another because no one pays any attention to me anyway.

The Warriors

If you read my previous blog entry (see the link above), you may recall that the book is about the French and Indian War. A portion of my interest involves the controversy about the mascot of the Cleveland Indians, Chief Wahoo. In addition, last year there was a similar issue regarding the mascot of his high school sports teams, The Warriors (the school principal arbitrarily decided to ban the logo as demeaning, etc.).

The book deals with the treatment of the Indians (i.e., Native Americans), the French, the British, Colonial Americans, and more.  The story involves many broken promises, betrayal, religion, violence, greed, power, death, struggle, and hope. In other words, the same kinds of things we face today.

I selected some sentences from the Prologue and the Epilogue which I think summarize key concepts:

The French and Indian War (aka, The Seven Years War) overthrew what had been a stable balance of power in both Europe and North America and helped to foster a secessionist rebellion in Britain's North American colonies.

In bringing to an end the French empire in North America, the French and Indian War undermined, and ultimately destroyed, the ability of native peoples to resist the expansion of Anglo-American settlement. The war's violence and brutality, moreover, encouraged whites to hate Indians with undiscriminating fury.

The widespread Indian hating that the French and Indian War engendered would be reinforced by the War of Independence and contribute to the formation of American cultural identity, sanctioning the removal or annihilation of native peoples as necessary to the advance of civilization.

The French and Indian War is a story in which imperial ambitions produced unpredictable, violent results; in which victory breeds unanticipated disaster for the victor; in which the evidently benign growth of a population of peaceable farmers leads to the wholesale destruction of native peoples.

Just the other day, I heard talk of the appeal of possibly ongoing reparation payments to the relatives of former African-American slaves...as if cash payments could rewrite history and right all wrongs. I guess that is a modern American idea: throw money.

Relatedly (to this book), the media is reporting this weekend of a catastrophic failure of a western-backed government in Iraq. Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives (millions if collateral damage is included) have apparently been needlessly wasted in our invasion of Iraq. "Victory breeds unanticipated disaster for the victor."

...to grasp the story of the great transformation that the French and Indian War began is above all to understand it as a cautionary tale: one that demonstrates the unpredictability and irony that always attend the pursuit of power, reminding us that even the most complete victories can sow the seeds of reversal and defeat for victors too dazzled by success to remember that they are, in fact, only human.

I highly recommend that you read this book or a similar one about the founding of our country.

Links:

http://ricketwrite.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-war-that-made-america.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War

written Sunday 15 June 2014