The Euro-American Tradition: Killing, Stealing, and Lying
By: Mitchell Giles
Society in America today is made up on a foundation of lies, murder, and theft. The thought processes, misinterpretations, blatant lies, and preconceived notions that gave reason to the expansion and explanation for the conquest of the Aboriginal society and the advancement of European settlement were the result of the language used to demonize the Natives, the collective belief and afterthought strengthened by language, and the false classifications made up by Christopher Columbus himself. Europeans justified their inhabitation with means of defining the Native Americans as lesser humans, common myths and anxieties about and toward not only the Indigenous people but also their own culture and way of life, and building up class systems and acting as if it was their moral, religious, and civil duty to exploit the land and either convert the peoples, enslave them, or just completely wipe them out. The European love, and possibly human need, for war, conquest, and destruction ultimately and especially lead to the deaths of millions of innocent people and control by the powerful and colonizing entities. Words used in the right way can convey a positive message to elicit an array of emotions or a response from a number of people. Used in the wrong way, words can do exactly the same thing, but with negative, sinister, and selfish purposes. If you don’t, like many and more Europeans and settlers did not, understand language and the way any person or group can manipulate it to use it to their means and ends then you are vulnerable to being misled and misguided into thoughts and actions that have dire consequences for yourself and to the group they are aimed toward. The Europeans used their language and ability to print widely to their advantage. This gave them an advantage of having men in power, mainly those in the political or religious sphere, spread their view to all the people that shared their ideologies. For the Europeans to properly and effectively conquer the New World they had to be rid of the current occupants of the land. The Aboriginal peoples of the Americas posed a threat to those wishing to take control of their land and resources. Naturally, as any human would, the Native Americans fought against the invaders. What we can tell today is that they were vastly outgunned, speaking literally. When vast amounts of immigrant start to settle in the New World they would come in contact with the Native peoples. Maybe some of them would ask questions about why they attack each other or if they came face-to-face and ask about their people and how they cope with the new settlers on their land. It could be possible that the colonizing powers realized this and saw it as a problem. They wouldn’t want to have their rule and law questioned by their citizens and have them disagree and riot and rise up against them. No, they were cleverer than to let the settlers casually interact with the Natives and see them as friendly and just as human as they were. To truly take control of the entire land the Monarchs had to convince the people that the people that dwelled there were terribly evil creatures and it would not be safe (or in their best interest) to be frequently socializing with and intermingling amongst them. To express this effectively Stevenson writes, “The invention and application of such language, replete with its vivid imagery of the grotesque, provides its composers with advantages. The use of these words suppresses their human capacity to identify with the ‘other.’ The litanic repetition ensures an in-built, structured inhibition of the dangerous growth of feelings of empathy, compassion and the sense of a shared humanity.” With the spread of this type of mentality toward the Native peoples there would be no possibility of alliance with the settlers and cease to the much required expansion.
Separation and slander were key to
