Cultures, Wars, Wiping Asses off the Planet

[Monte Davis]

> Is it so much "our own culture's misguided tendency" to wipe other
> peoples' asses off the planet or is that just a side-effect of the
> Technology (i.e. fire-power) we have?

I lean to the latter. I doubt we'll ever reconstruct what-all led to the
cultural kicks in the ass that Europe got, from the Bronze Age to the
Industrial Revolution, sending its peoples around the world "firstest with
the mostest." But there were cities, elites, armies, and expansionist
states in China, India, Africa, and the New World before We (or They, for
those who prefer it) showed up. Slave trading was old in Africa before
Arabs, and then Europeans, provided overseas markets; Chaka Zulu was on the
move in Zimbabwe, kicking black asses with his own black Sonderkommando,
before Cecil Rhodes was born.

We feel guilty. We have many, many reasons to feel guilty. But guilt also
makes us idealize the victims. Remember those noble, harmonious,
one-with-nature Native Americans in "Dances With Wolves?" Well, the Lakota
had only had their horses for a couple hundred years, since they'd spread
north from the conquistadors' horses in Mexico and Florida. From what
little we know, by the time the US Cavalry hit them, they were expanding in
the same kind of horse-people sweep the "Aryans" and later waves out of the
steppes had done in Eurasia... and as the Comanche had already done to some
nice, quiet farming peoples in the Southwest.

A-and why did the Spaniards have to bring their horses to the New World?
Because the native horses of the Americas (along with dozens of other meaty
species) had been wiped out, most likely by overhunting, ten millennia
before. Maybe someone can figure out a way to blame that on the Awful
European Power-Liebestod Thang, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was
those first Native Americans arriving in Paradise, fresh off the Bering
land bridge, who unslung their spears and did the deed.

As Pynchon reminds us, there are technologies of thought, control, and
virtu' every bit as important as the hardware. Read up on Cortes vs. the
Mexica ("Aztecs" -- another amiable, peace-loving group). The storybook
version is that he did it with steel, gunpowder, horses, and the myth of
Quetzalcoatl. In fact, he did it mostly with swarms of local allies he
acquired within months, and held on to through some terrifying reverses.
Can you imagine the cojones it took to say (through two or three
translations) "I'm here on behalf of his Most Catholic Majesty across the
sea, let's take on your overlords in Tenochtitlan down the road" -- and
pull it off?!?!

He out-THOUGHT and out-PLANNED and out-PERSUADED the Mexica -- not because
he was smarter, but because he'd inherited tactical and political and
rhetorical "technologies" from Rome and Byzantium, from the wars against
the Moors in Iberia, from the triple-crossing condottieri in Italy.

Nope: much as I might like to take all the sins of the world on my white,
Anglo-Saxon, Judeo-Christian, industrially Enlightened,
kinda-fascinated-by-science&technology head, I don't think I can. Sorry,
Murthy... I just think We/They happened to come up with bigger clubs
faster.

Pynchon is terrific in tracing those threads of original sin that *are*
peculiarly European, But so far he's told three stories set in the 20th
century, when the deal was already down -- and stacked the deck with
extra-pure "outsider" victims: the dodos, the trees of the Berkshires, the
Herero, the Kirghiz.

I'm convinced that was a deliberate aesthetic choice, not a historical or
philosophical stance; no one who could create Crutchfield and Whappo thinks
*anything* is that...uhh... black and white. It should be interesting to
see what he does in stepping back two hundred years, when at least some of
the issue was still
in doubt.

-Monte <apologies to the Iroquois>