Gazza and the Dakota Sioux

 

Whenever anyone asks me my opinion on Gazza, Israel or the Middle East, I say I don't know. I have no opinion.

Then, if they allow it, I ask what their opinion is.

And if they have one, I ask them how they know what they know.

Me, I've never been there, either literally or figuratively.

Just no feel for the history of the place. Never been there.

What I do know is that it's best not to form an opinion from superficial bits of information; you'd best ask, "what else?"

Just to take the most obvious example:  Abraham Lincoln has been denigrated as a phony great liberator, as a man who was, at heart a racist. One of the most shocking bits of evidence for this is the fact he signed the death warrants for the largest mass execution in American history, and none of those who were hanged were White Confederates; they were Indians, 38 of them, all hanged on a single day in Minnesota. Ipso facto: Lincoln was an Indian hater and for Lincoln the only good Indian was a dead Indian. (That was actually said by one of Lincoln's most important generals, Phil Sheridan.)

But, if you ask more questions, you discover that act, of condemning 39 men to death may not mean what it sounds like it means. 

It turns out, Lincoln was presented with something of a Sophie's choice: The local militia and the federal army had captured 2,000 Sioux and were determined to execute  303 of them and they said if Lincoln did nothing, they would kill them all.  Lincoln said he wanted nothing to do with this. It was August, 1862 and he had a little more on his mind, namely the Civil War, and he hated killing people who weren't actively trying to kill him or his troops.

Fine then, we'll execute all 300. 

Oh, all right, send me the files on the trials of these men, all 300 files. 

After sifting through this load, he came up with 39, thereby sparing 264, actually, as it worked out, 265. 

So, the moral of the story is just knowing the action does not inform, unless you know the back story.

And actually, the back story here is oddly interesting when thinking about Gazza, the Palestinians and Hamas.

In 1859, the US government persuaded the Dakota Sioux to stop hunting buffalo and leading a nomadic existence and to move into a small reservation and raise crops, but in 1862 with a drought the crops failed and the Sioux were literally starving and they were forbidden to hunt and having been displaced by these European descendants and pushed off their land, and confined to small strip of land, they erupted and in August, attacked a government station and settlers and raped and murdered hundreds of white American settlers.

A local militia was formed, and the army, being busy trying to put down the Southern insurrection, was delayed in arriving in Minnesota and by the time they did, there were hundreds of dead women, children, raped women and the Indians had taken hostages. The settlers wanted revenge and blood, and they were barely restrained and the 2,000 Indians, were women, children and some warriors. 

Sound familiar?

I've read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and a host of other books about the Trail of Tears and the depredations visited upon the Indians as the continent was cleared, farmed, crisscrossed with railroads, bridges, steamboats and all the infrastructure of a modern 19th century nation. I wish I had been the benign dictator back then, who could have helped the Indians more and spared them the horrors visited upon them, as men like Sheridan and Buffalo Bill slaughtered their buffalo herds, in an effort to drive the buffalo to extinction and thus drive the Indians to extinction, or at the very least, to reservations.

And looking at those vast, unoccupied parts of our continent, it seems to me there may have been better options for the Indians.

But, you know, I can say without apology, I'm not sorry "we," as in the European descendants, took control of the continent, and replaced a nomadic, superstitious civilization with an industrial, scientific civilization. The role the United States of America has played over the ensuing 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries could never have happened if "we" hadn't displaced those Indians.

The same may be true of Palestine and the Palestinians.

Or, maybe not. I just don't know.

I don't know if the Palestinians were just goat herders who got shoved out of some homes when a more technologically advanced civilization arrived and made the desert bloom.  Or maybe, they had homes and communities which were ruthlessly stolen from them and they responded violently, as the Dakota Sioux did.

All I know, is I don't know.

I do know, however, there are some times you don't need to know the whole back story:  When they opened those cattle cars at the concentration camps across Germany and Poland, and all those shattered, dead and dying Holocaust victims were discovered, you don't need any more background or context.

Then you get into the problem of who actually should get punished. We can be sorry for those children at Hiroshima, who may have known nothing of what their parents and countrymen did to Nanking and the rest of Asia. We can be horrified at the immolation of women and children at Dresden, who were, after all, possibly unaware of Auschwitz. 

When big, nasty atrocities are committed, the people who get mauled in the retribution are often "innocents." So it is with the people of Gaza. They may not have launched the rockets into Israel; they may not have dug the tunnels, or dug command centers underneath hospitals.  But some of them at least voted for Hamas as opposed to the Palestinian authority. 

Civilian populations may know only the joy of unity with a cause, but they may not have the foresight to see where that cause is leading. 

But, about Palestine, I'm willing to reserve judgment, for now.