Torture and Human Rights Abuses – we gotta stop thinking of ourselves as the good guys gone bad because if the bad sleep well then America has had more than its fair share of many well-rested nights

Over at Nightbird’s Fountain the other day was made this post linking to the very pink Torture Tree.

Someone remarked in the comments area since when did we represent torture and human rights abuses and we needed to stand for freedom again.

As I noted in response in the comments area, I always feel like the bad downer drug at the party when I bring up generations of genocide and ethnocide of American Indians (how many nations utterly destroyed, reduced to a very few) and that many South and Central Americans don’t exactly love us. Plus Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Bikini Atoll and the extreme radiation carelessness with the Columbia River Basin that has made it the most toxic site in the western hemisphere. And there was slavery and the KKK and lots of lynchings of which the American public thought it a good thing to take photos and burn those photos onto postcards so as to spread the cheer. Plus the conducting of deadly science and medical experiments on unsuspecting individuals. Radiation thrown at people who had no clue and were expecting helpful health care from their government. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Hitler studied the Trail of Tears and the reservation system.

No questions asked, the U.S., well into the 20th century, was taking the children of American Indians and shipping them off to boarding school, away from families and their nations, forcibly stripping them of their language and culture. H.o.p. knows about this, I’ve discussed it with him, but he was still freaked by the exhibit on those boarding schools he saw at the Heard Museum in Phoenix earlier this Autumn. He looked at the exhibit of the barber’s chair knee deep in locks of shorn hair (not all American Indian nations believed in growing the hair long but many did) and he saw in it a torture chair and had to get out of the room. No one literally died in that chair but its intent was to kill culture. He talked about that chair for a couple of months and he still brings it up occasionally because for him it is a symbol of bad-bad-wrongs-being-done-unto-others.

The U.S. broke every single treaty made with American Indians and the ink was often not dry when a treaty was wastebasketed.

The argument that these were policies and attitudes scripted by the times and we can’t judge them is bullshit. There are numerous surviving examples of people who spoke out against abuses against American Indian nations. But the majority of Americans quite simply wanted the land and what was on it or in the ground and were furious with American Indians who said, “Stop! Thief!” And so American Indians were the bad guys standing in the way of the spread of America’s brand of free capitalism and democracy. It’s a very recent despicable history and, as the Cobell versus Norton lawsuit shows, it’s not done yet.