Kevin Graham wrote:On the other hand, I'm not prepared to view the Natives as characters from 'Pocahontas'. There were a lot of Indian raids that had nothing to do with 'reclaiming their land' or 'fighting the foreign oppressors' and everything to do with stealing and exploiting the new people.
Are you referring specifically to the Lakota tribe that Dunbar meets, or the film's depiction of Native American's in general? Because in addition to the scenes of inter-tribal warfare, there was the flashback of Stands-with-a-Fist's family getting massacred by the Pawnee, as well as their murder of Timmons, the driver who takes Dunbar to the fort.
Certainly, you can argue that the Lakota were somewhat idealized (I've heard it suggested they were actually much more warlike than depicted), but the overall presentation of the Native Americans was hardly rose-colored.
I would also take the perspective that since Dunbar was a guest among the Lakota, the scenes we see with him may reasonably show them on their "best behavior", as anyone is around a guest.
(Also, if anyone is a Dances With Wolves fan and still hasn't seen the extended director's cut, I highly recommend it. It doesn't supplant the theatrical version, but it's a worthy companion to it).
cinepro wrote:Are you referring specifically to the Lakota tribe that Dunbar meets, or the film's depiction of Native American's in general? Because in addition to the scenes of inter-tribal warfare, there was the flashback of Stands-with-a-Fist's family getting massacred by the Pawnee, as well as their murder of Timmons, the driver who takes Dunbar to the fort.
Just the Lakota tribe.
Certainly, you can argue that the Lakota were somewhat idealized (I've heard it suggested they were actually much more warlike than depicted), but the overall presentation of the Native Americans was hardly rose-colored.
I suspect based on my reading that their warlike nature was toned down to make the Pawnee the 'bad injuns'.
I would also take the perspective that since Dunbar was a guest among the Lakota, the scenes we see with him may reasonably show them on their "best behavior", as anyone is around a guest.
I could see that in the beginning but he was integrated into the tribe by the end. He was also a borderline enemy in the beginning. I can see the best behavior thing but once you're married into the tribe I can't see it holding up.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics "I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
Kevin Graham wrote:You're right about this Richard, but I don't think it is a coincidence that the operation was initiated shortly after we threatened to bomb them, and after Clinton had already sent a few cruise missles into the area. I think bin Ladin has always considered America and the USSR and even Saudi Arabia as an axis of evil.
I don't think 911 had anything to do with a supposed May 2001 threat to the Taliban. It had been planned for at least a couple of years. Once they had four trained pilots and three to four heavies for each flight, the plot proceeded. Tuesday was a day with low passenger light loads. September had good weather and far fewer thunderstorms than during the summer. They obviously wanted all four flights to take off at approximately the same time to deceive the passengers about the intent of the hijackings. They'd already attacked the WTC in 93 along with the Khobar Towers, the embassies in Africa, the Cole, etc. All of these were prior to the Bush administration.
Well it gets more complicated than this too because the Taliban and Al Quaida are not one and the same. Unocal executives had meetings with Taliban representatives in Texas back in 97 and they also met with Clinton officials in Washington to discuss the pipeline deal. Osama bin Ladin knew very well what they were up to and he didn't like it, so he was trying to cause all sorts of problems to convince Unocal to back out of the effort, and civil war and embassy bombings served that purpose, and it worked too. But Unocal did make an argument before congress that our profits could increase by 500% if we were able to replace the Afghan government, which meant to overthrown the Taliban. It said the best thing to do would be to run a pipeline through that cuntry but because the Taliban is not a government recognized by the United Nations, they would not be able to proceed as planned... UNLESS... they were overthrown.
So when we bombed the hell out of Afghanistan and overthrew their government, we were doing what American corporations had already encouraged us to do, and so we used 9-11 as an excuse. Osama bin Ladin made it easy for us to justify an invasion, but we still had to confuse the American people who were ignorant of who was guilty of what. After all, it was Al Quaida who was guilty of that crime, and we could have bombed Al Quaida and left the Taliban in control of the country as they had always been. But we didn't. We saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, using a valid justification for one, but an invalid justification for the other.
Again, 9-11 never would have happened if not for our corporate interests shaping foreign policy and getting us into areas of the world where we only intend to exploit its resources.
I would also add that we justified taking over the Taliban by pointing out their crimes against human rights, but the fact is those same crimes have been commited by our allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and whenever they occur, America doesn't so much as lifts a finger to protest. Most of the women in Pakistani prisons are victims or rape, and are imprisioned because they were raped. In Saudi Arabia women have it much worse, and I remember a few years back girls school was on fire and the security guards refused to allow some women to leave unless they covered their faces. Many femal children burned alive that day because they didn't have their face covers. But this is OK because, we are in business with these countries. Whenever the time comes that it would be more profitable to overrun their governments as well, we can always claim to be doing it in the name of human rights.
An interesting interview with Noam Chomsky back in 2002:
Chomsky: On October 12th [2001], a couple of days after the bombing [of Afghanistan] started, [George W.] Bush publicly announced to the Afghan people that we will continue to bomb you, unless your leadership turns over to us the people whom we suspect of carrying out crimes, although we refuse to give you any evidence. That's probably because they don't have any. And we dismiss without comment the offers of your leadership for negotiations about extradition.
Notice that is a textbook illustration of international terrorism, by the US official definition. That is the use of the threat of force or violence, in this case extreme violence, to obtain political ends through intimidation, fear and so on. That's the official definition, a textbook illustration of it.
Three weeks later, by the end of October, the war aims had changed. They were first announced as far as I can find out, by the British Defense Minister, Sir Admiral Boyce. Admiral Boyce informed the Afghan population that we will continue to bomb you until you change your leadership. Well, that's an even more dramatic illustration of international terrorism, if not aggression. And that was the goal that was followed. This had nothing to do with finding the criminals and bringing them to justice.
ES: You say one of the great hypocrisies here is that the United States, as you say, is a leading terrorist state.
Chomsky: Well, these two examples illustrate it. And these are minor ones. You know there are much more serious ones than this.
ES: The question that arises is if the United States is a leading terrorist state, if as you say, Britain is another example of a terrorist state, how do you distinguish between what you describe as terrorism and what they are saying — Osama Bin Laden who's a terrorist? Make the distinction.
Chomsky: It's very simple. If they do it, it's terrorism. If we do it, it's counter-terrorism. That's a historical universal. Go back to Nazi propaganda. The most extreme mass murderers ever. If you look at Nazi propaganda, that's exactly what they said. They said they're defending the populations and the legitimate governments of Europe like Vichy from the terrorist partisans who are directed from London. That's the basic propaganda line. And like all propaganda, no matter how vulgar, it has an element of truth. The partisans did carry out terror, they were directed from London. The Vichy government is about as legitimate as half the governments the US has installed around the world and supports, so yes, there was a minor element of truth to it, and that's the way it works. If somebody else carries it out, it's terror. If we carry it out, it's counter-terror. I think perhaps one of the most dramatic examples right at this moment is a place where I just was a couple of weeks ago, southeastern Turkey. Southeastern Turkey is the site of some of the worst terrorist atrocities of the 1990s.
ES: This is the attacks on the Kurds.
Chomsky: The attacks on the Kurds created a couple of million refugees. It left much of the countryside devastated. Tens of thousands of people killed. It was every imaginable barbaric form of torture you can dream of. It's all well documented in Human Rights Watch reports and so on. How did they do it? Well, they did it with a huge flow of U.S. arms, which peaked in 1997. In that one year, the arms transfers to Turkey from the United States were higher than the entire Cold War period. You know up until the counter-insurgency started. But look at the way it's treated. This massive international terrorism run and supported by the United States is considered a great triumph of counter-terrorism.
If you read the State Department reports on terror they praise Turkey for its success in showing how to counter terror. You read a front page article in the New York Times and it praises Turkey for showing how to deal with terror. Turkey was selected as the country to provide the forces for what they call the international force for Afghanistan. Actually it's for Kabul alone. It's Turkey that's being paid by the United States extensively to carry out the repression of terror, thanks to their achievements in countering terror — namely by carrying out some of the worst terror of the 1990s. Massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities with U.S. support. Now you know this is a real achievement of the intellectual culture to be able to do this. But it illustrates very well the answer to your question. Terror and counter-terror. If some enemy state did this, we'd be not just outraged, we'd be bombing them.
ES: Is Bush justified in calling Bin Laden a terrorist when, as you say, he's running a terrorist state himself?
Chomsky: Yeah, I agree that he should call him a terrorist.
ES: But you say even Jonathan Swift would be baffled at the irony of that?
Chomsky: To say that Bin Laden is a terrorist, a murderous terrorist is certainly correct, but what about Clinton [and Bush]? I just described one of his [Clinton's] minor escapades in Turkey [and Bush's terrorism in Afghanistan]. This example is particularly striking, not only because of the massive atrocities, but because of the way it's treated, and because remember this was at the same time when there was an orgy of self-congratulation among Western intellectuals because of their magnificence in opposing terrorism by bombing Serbia because of what Milosevic had done in Kosovo.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics "I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
Where is all the oil the liberals said we were over there for? I see the Chinese and the Europeans got all the lucrative oil contracts in Iraq. I personally agree with the liberals that we should just take some for ourselves to pay for the war.
That is one of the biggest reasons why Avatar misses the mark on Iraq. The movie is but a left wing fantasy version of their historical revisionism.
Kevin Graham wrote:Well it gets more complicated than this too because the Taliban and Al Quaida are not one and the same.
Agreed. I wrote that in my first post. "How much control did the Taliban have over OBL and Al Qaeda in May 2001."
So when we bombed the hell out of Afghanistan and overthrew their government, we were doing what American corporations had already encouraged us to do, and so we used 9-11 as an excuse. Osama bin Ladin made it easy for us to justify an invasion, but we still had to confuse the American people who were ignorant of who was guilty of what. After all, it was Al Quaida who was guilty of that crime, and we could have bombed Al Quaida and left the Taliban in control of the country as they had always been. But we didn't. We saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, using a valid justification for one, but an invalid justification for the other.
How effective was the bombing of the camps by missiles in 1998? It accomplished little. Could we have done anything substantive against al Qaeda without invading Afghanistan. Perhaps. But they would have left the camps and started again after we stopped bombing. Note too that Al Qaeda killed the head of the Northern Alliance on 9/9. They obviously thought that they had a pretty close alliance with the Taliban.
Again, 9-11 never would have happened if not for our corporate interests shaping foreign policy and getting us into areas of the world where we only intend to exploit its resources.
What is your preferred approach? Should we only trade with democracies? Heck, even the saintly Europeans don’t do that.