OT RE: Aboriginal peoples
In my opinion, it is all a matter of the rule of law. Either you believe in settling disputes through law or through force. There is no question that organized whites can blow everyone else off the face of the earth. Usually they lack the brass to cover up their use of force with hypocrisy. Thus the Spanish Conquistadores brought Christianity to the poor suffering, misguided Aztecs and Quechua. True, the Aztecs were great ball players and heart snatchers, but the Church and Spain were still engaged in slaughtering Moors, and Jews, and heretics (including Protestants in Germany. Who gave the Spanish the right to destroy other people? Anyone who can assert that the Roman Church of the 15th and 16th century was a moral institution has a strange set of values or is sublimely ignorant.
America's 18th and 19th century struggle with the Indians was conducted with extraordinary inhumanity. Fallen Timbers, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee come to mind. The Army was hardly a welfare organization. The Indians were hardly innocent of cruelty -- but they had the virtue of defending themselves, while the Army was seizing their land. The United States, whatever its faults -- and they are extensive -- provided in the Constitution and in its negotiations to treat Native American Peoples as independent nations with some of the rights of nations under international law. It signed treaties -- establishing rights enforceable in American courts. It then widely neglected them for years. The recent successes of Native American Peoples in US courts is evidence of one of the most honorable acts in American history. The American Constitution provides (5th Amendment) that no life, liberty, or property may be taken without due process of law. It is time for the United States to respect the promises into which it entered, and to protect the vested rights of all people and to compensate any that it has seized for overriding public purposes, such as protection of the environment. If a species is not threatened, it is hard for me to justify protection of all its members at vast expense when many other animals -- Kossovian children for instance -- are not being protected. I am an animal lover, and I especially like marine mammals. I would like to protect them all. But there are easier ways to protect innocent life. I ask you -- are you a vegetarian? Do you fight to protect experimental animals against abuse? Have you ever adopted a neutered dog from the pound? I think these are steps that can have much more influence for the welfare of animals than criticizing the legal behavior of other people who have their own values and their own rights. |
