Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

On the scariness of watching the Western world revert to paganism

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There’s a scary paganism to the unbridled blood lust that appears wherever Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism is in retreat.

PaganismEthical monotheism underpins Western civilization. It’s a gift from the Jews, transmitted to large parts of the world through Christians. It is the idea that there is a single God.

Unlike pagan gods, this God is not a larger than life human (complete with human foibles) nor is He an animist spirit endowed with the attributes of whatever earthly thing (whether animal, vegetable, or mineral) He happens to represent. In addition to being the creator of all things (see Genesis) and a covenanter with the Jewish people (something that has been a mixed blessing for them), He is also the absolute and only fount of the core moral values that have governed the Western world for two millennia.

The Judeo-Christian concept of absolute moral values flowing from a creator in whose image we are created, means that there is no moral relativism. There are nuances, as for example in the distinction between murder and self-defense, but the dictates of the Ten Commandments make it perfectly clear what is and is not core ethical behavior. Murder — the cold-blooded killing of another without extenuating circumstances — is wrong. Stealing, whether stealing someone’s life, liberty, or property, is wrong. Coveting, not in a way that makes one try harder to achieve some through ones own efforts, but in a way that makes one greedy, resentful, and dishonest, is not only wrong, it is soul-destroying.

The God of the Jews can be a harsh task master, obsessed as He is with justice and moral virtue. Christ tempered that harshness with a concept I’ve always called, for want of a better word, grace. The combination of the  two — moral justice and grace — led the way to the end of slavery, a condition existing since time immemorial; the end of child labor, a condition existing since time immemorial; the elevation of women to shared status with men, something that got a huge boost through the cult of Mary worship; and, most importantly, to the amazingly important idea of individual worth.

To the extent that we are all children of the Judeo-Christian God, shaped in His image, we have an unparalleled value. We are not merely cosmic dust. We are not the products of some Greek god’s ego. We are not meaningless animals. We are something exceptional and precious. Moreover, history has shown that, when we are given liberty, coupled with that ethical monotheism, we will thrive, creating societies that are safer, happier, and more prosperous than most in history.

Having said all that, I know that, more often than not, we humans, being fallible, have fallen far short of the purest Judeo-Christian dictates. Whether as nations or as individuals, we have enslaved, killed, robbed, cheated, and done all the things the Ten Commandments tell us not to do. But would we have been better had there been no Ten Commandments at all? Would the human condition have improved if we weren’t constantly, one generation after another, trying to learn and figure out how to optimize the rules of ethical monotheism? And most importantly, would the world be a better place if we hadn’t slowly, slowly, crept towards an understanding of individual worth? I think not.

All of the above is a predicate to a couple of news stories, a short history lesson, and a long-ago comment from my friend Danny Lemieux. [Read more…]

Another drunk woman and another fake rape story from Stanford

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At Stanford, another woman who refused to take responsibility for her own self-destructive acts cried rape and is determined to destroy a man’s life.

Rape Sinead Talley

Phote credit: Screen grab from Sinead Talley’s website.

Rape, real rape, is a terrible crime. It’s a violent assault against a person’s bodily integrity that attacks the very core of their being. To the extent that women are the most common victims (outside of prisons), it’s a ferociously misogynistic display of the worst masculine brute force.

True rape is an act that deserves to be treated with the utmost seriousness in the criminal law system. I’m not an advocate of the death penalty for it, but I support long prison sentences (unlike the delicate hand slaps Nordic countries are meting out to their new Muslim overlords when the latter practice their culturally sanctioned rape against the dhimmi women in their new caliphates).

Well I am ferociously opposed to real rape — the forcible sexual penetration of another human being — I am equally ferociously opposed to fake cries of rape. Long-time readers know that I was absolutely furious over the Brock Turner matter: older woman goes to frat party, gets black-out drunk, makes out with an equally drunk younger man, he’s later caught rutting over her unconscious body (which may have been clothed in the relevant places), and his life is destroyed.

Both Turner and the woman were stupid, stupid, stupid to get that drunk, but to the extent there’s no evidence one way or another whether she consented, and it’s obvious he was every bit as incapacitated as she was, it’s outrageous that she gets sympathy and he gets ruined. The fact that this pathetic modern women “feels” like a victim is of infinitely less consequence than the complete wipe-out of Turner’s life.

Which leads me to a story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, which interestingly enough again involves a so-called “rape” at Stanford. Here’s the premise, straight from the Chronicle: [Read more…]

Trump trolled the Left when he called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas”

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Trump was clever, not racist, when he used a ceremony honoring Navajo Code Talkers to remind people that his nickname for Elizabeth Warren is Pocahontas.

Elizabeth Warren fake Pocahontas Native AmericanThe media and other Progressives in my world have been focusing non-stop on Trump’s decision, at a ceremony honoring WWII Navajo Code Talkers, to throw in a reference to Elizabeth Warren, whom he invariably calls “Pocahontas.” The media is correct that the line seemed weirdly out of place and that, if one assumes it was a joke, it failed to get any laughter — or, indeed, any response at all — from the assembled audience:

While the room was silent, within seconds of his referring to Warren as Pocahontas, the drive-by media and its political class went into action. How dare Trump be so “racist”! Old media and social media were flooded with a declamation from Warren herself about the utter racism behind calling her Pocahontas:

“There he was, at a ceremony to honor Native Americans, men who have really put it all on the line to save American lives, to save lives of people, our allies, during World War II, really amazing people. And President Trump couldn’t even make it through a ceremony to honor these men without throwing in a racial slur,” Warren told Cooper on “Anderson Cooper 360.”

Well, golly, I thought. Racist insults sure have changed since I was a kid. Back in the day, there were a lot of specific words of racist opprobrium floating around, such as kike, nigger, yid, spic, and pollak. Thankfully, except in small, ugly redoubts, those words have vanished from popular usage.

There were also insults tied to ugly stereotypes: “he jewed me down,” “look at that lazy negro boy,” “what a dumb pollak,” and “there goes another drunken Irishman.” We children in the 1960s had a lot of stupid jokes, which I won’t repeat here, tied to some of those stereotypes. Again, those insults have died away, as they should have.

And of course, there were “guilt by association” insults that tied a disfavored person, race, or religion to a particularly horrible representative of his class. No Jewish person ever wants to be called a Shylock. For a certain class of educated American, it’s still an insult to be called a Benedict Arnold. And we conservatives live in a world of reductio ad Hitlerlum. So yes, certain proper names can be insulting. [Read more…]

Look to the pagans to understand why Western Civilization matters

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Without Western Civilization, we veer dangerously close to reverting to our pagan roots — roots watered with the blood of human sacrifice.

Western Civilization No Human SacrificeFor millennia, Jews have forbidden human sacrifice. Although there are myriad more sophisticated interpretations examining the Biblical narrative about the Binding of Isaac, the most basic interpretation was that God created this dramatic scenario to impress upon Jews that he did not crave human flesh and blood. This is hardly unexpected, given that man is made in God’s image. One doesn’t deliberately despoil His creation.

When Jews took this principled, doctrinal stand against human sacrifice, they were outliers. The book of Genesis, in which the Binding of Isaac appears, probably dates back to around the latter half of the 15th century BC (that is, about 1450-1410 BC). Everywhere else in the known world human sacrifice was normative. In a world controlled completely by animistic polytheism, the notion of mere animal sacrifice, which kept from the Gods the tastiest, most important offerings, was ludicrous.

Eventually, both Greece and Rome turned against human sacrifice, but they still remained dedicated to animal sacrifices. These rituals often involved slitting an animal’s belly open and “reading” its entrails while the animal still lived.

Moreover, when it came to humans, neither Greece nor Rome was known for its humanist impulses towards life. Indeed, both Greece and Rome heartily approved of infanticide, rape, torture, and blood sports. Meanwhile, outside of these nations and their first, dainty steps towards modern Western Civilization, the Celts and the Germanic tribes continued with gusto to placate capricious gods with human blood and flesh.

The genius of Christianity was that, over the centuries, it successfully convinced pagans, from Rome to Britain to Norway, that Christ was the ultimate human sacrifice. Through the ritual of transubstantiation, worshipers would receive the eternal benefit of that voluntary sacrifice without having to destroy another human being to placate the Gods. Throughout Europe, these newly created Christians joined with Jews in their understand that man is unique in that he is created in God’s image; one doesn’t mutilate that image and throw it back in God’s face.

The fact that both the Jews and the Christians eschewed human sacrifice didn’t instantly turn them into vegans. In Biblical times, the Jews continued to wage bloody war long after the binding of Isaac and the Christians did the same long after the crucifixion. The Christians also maintained torture and blood sports. Nevertheless, this humanist seed, once planted and cultivated, burst forth in the Enlightenment with all sorts of interesting ideas:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Those words, and the ideas and practical consequences behind them, changed the world. War did not end, but it lessened. Men did not eschew violence, but societies under the umbrella of Western Civilization continued the long slow process of becoming less violent. (For more on the genetic reality that Westerners are less violent, I recommend Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, an honest science book that got its author banned from the New York Times.)

These revolutionary ideas about mankind’s worth would have been incomprehensible to pre-Christian pagans. To them, man was a plaything of the gods, and the gods were the embodiment of the cruel, irrational, omnipresent natural world surrounding the pagans. These hungry, angry, capricious figures needed to be placated and human blood was their favorite food. [Read more…]

@MuslimIQ mis-schools “white supremacist” on question about “Christian ISIS”

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Fifty years of mis-education in American schools culminates when a lawyer provides a laundry list of myths to justify claiming the existence of a Christian ISIS.

Alleged proof of a Christian ISISA couple of days ago, the internet was abuzz with excitement because Qasim Rashid (Twitter name @MuslimIQ), an attorney and Muslim, claiming to have received a Direct Message from a “white supremacist” about the absence of a “Christian ISIS,” gave him a purported laundry list of Christian sins. It’s an impressive list of sins . . . if, as to many of the claims, one is ignorant about history and can be bamboozled with sophistry. Otherwise, well, not so much.

Because Rashid is not alone in his ignorance and, indeed, comes by it quite honestly considering the misinformation floating about, I thought it would be useful to go through the list of his accusations against Christians to correct out-and-out errors and to put factual statements in their proper context. One of the most important contextual points is that ISIS defiantly makes clear that Islam drives its conduct. That is, we’re not talking about bad actors who happen to be Muslim. Instead, we’re talking about Muslims who march under the banner of their faith to justify their bad acts.

Given the ISIS context, for Rashid to have properly rebutted the question about a “Christian ISIS,” he should have returned with examples of Christians who use their faith directly to justify their acts. It’s cheating to identify bad actors who happen to be Christian but whose conduct is not justified by, or in fealty to, their faith.

I’m not trying here to attack Rashid personally. I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice man and a good lawyer. It’s just that he summed up in a small space so many misrepresentations and misunderstandings about Christianity that he provides a perfect framework within which to challenge those errors. Also, I’m not trying to defend horrible things such as the world’s slave trade, the deaths of aboriginal populations around the world, white supremacy, or anything else. I’m just saying that, subject to a few exceptions that can be roughly analogized to Christian versions of ISIS, most of Rashid’s comparisons are inapt.

Having said that, here’s Rashid’s Twitter list, which I’ve broken into segments so as to address each assertion separately. First, to give context, here is Rashid’s own introduction to his DM conversation:

And here’s the subject-by-subject breakdown:

[Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 9/8/16 — the “my dog is crazy” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265The older of my two dogs is very high-strung and she got so frightened by the wind that carried the fog in tonight that I’ve had to sequester her and me in my home office so that Mr. Bookworm, who needs to get up for work tomorrow, can sleep. She shows no signs of settling, so I’m blogging.

No matter how you slice it, Trump is the less risky gamble. Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Publius Decius Mus quite graphically presents the issue that I have been arguing all summer:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

Precisely. Trump, with all his flaws, is better than Hillary. Up until a few months ago, one could argue that Hillary is just another garden-variety Leftist and that the American republic will survive despite her.

That’s all changed now. Knowing as we do of her extraordinary corruption — whether in running the State Department as a Pay-for-Play profit center for herself, her husband, and her daughter, or deliberately exposing all of America’s state secrets to try to hide her gross malfeasance — electing her to the presidency means that America has fully embraced banana republic status.

In the wake of a Hillary victory, thanks to Comey and the American voters (including all those #NeverTrumpers), there will no longer be a rule of law in America that applies equally to all citizens. We will in one fell swoop have destroyed a legal system that goes back 1215 when England first put into writing in the Magna Carta a policy saying that no one, not even a king, is above the law. As of now, Hillary and her cronies are above the law and it will be a disaster if the American people put their imprimatur on that utterly corrupt, anti-democratic principle.

One more thing: As Publius Decius Mus explains, Hillary’s been wrong about every single policy stance she’s ever taken (including the ones where she’s changed her stance repeatedly according to the latest poll data), while Trump, in his fumbling, bumbling way, has been right about all of the most important policy issues facing America. So maybe he’s not so bad after all.

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On taking a stand — when it’s a good thing to the Left and when it’s a bad thing

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To the Left, this is a BAD protest.

To the Left, this is a BAD protest.

Cliven Bundy and his cohorts took a stand against the federal government for its land grabbing behavior in Nevada.  (The federal government controls 81% of Nevada land.) Bundy was and is extremely hostile to the Bureau of Land Management, which he sees as antithetical to state and individual rights under the Constitution. A lot of Americans resonated to the tone he struck in his battle against the government. The Leftist hive, however, was appalled. Mother Jones compared him to Ted Bundy, the infamous serial killer. Harry Reid, who has apparently never come across an actual Islamic terrorist was quick to label Bundy a “domestic terrorist.” Slate castigated him as reckless, lawless, and racist.

Apropos the racism charge, Bundy looks at today’s African-Americans on the Democrat welfare plantation and says that, while they may not work much, the social ills of welfare — the crime, the abortion, the relentless poverty — mean that they’re not necessarily better off than they were when they were actual slaves on physical Democrat-owned plantations. Bundy’s phrasing is infelicitous, but I’ve said much the same; that is, not that slavery was better, but that the Democrats are still destroying black lives in America.

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Stuck on Stupid: Progressive Facebook edition (Part 2)

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facebook-thumbs-downIt’s not a very deep dive to plumb the depths of Leftist intellectual positions on most issues, but it’s still a worthwhile exercise to expose the fallacies that they use to try to dominate the debate on pressing issues — with the most pressing issue being whether to admit Syrian refugees.  The easiest place for me to find examples of Leftist thought is my Facebook feed. Because I’ve spent my life in Blue enclaves, almost all of my friends — and they are really nice people in day-to-day interactions — are Progressives.  It gives me pleasure to deconstruct some of their more foolish or vicious posters:

I have to admit that these first two posters are my favorite “stupid Progressive Facebook” posts.  Because Thanksgiving is coming up, both chide anti-refugee conservatives for forgetting that the first Thanksgiving came about because the indigenous people in North America extended a welcoming hand to European immigrants.

Whenever I’ve seen one of these posters pop up on my Facebook feed, I’ve left a polite comment to the effect that we all learned in public school (thanks to Howard Zinn and others) that the Europeans, once having gotten a foothold in North America, promptly turned around and murdered as many Native Americans as possible. If they couldn’t murder them, they dispossessed them of their land and otherwise marginalized them.  There’s certainly a lesson to be learned here but the lesson isn’t to welcome refugees, it’s to cry out “For God’s sake, don’t let them in!”

Indians refusing pilgrims

Pilgrims should be supportive of immigration

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Two stupid questions in need of intelligent answers

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question-mark-1376773633jUs

Question 1: Yesterday, I heard a radio commercial asking listeners to support a college fund for America’s indigenous people (aka American Indians; aka Native Americans). The commercial made the point that most Indians on reservations live in poverty. If the reservations are so poor, why don’t the residents leave? Is it really more important to them to score points against the U.S. government by living on guilt-land than it is to thrive? It’s the same with the Palestinians — the leaders are making a point and the followers are living in squalor. Is there something I’m missing here?

Question 2: Putting aside the fact that there’s nothing to celebrate about having coerced 7 or so million people to buy insurance, why does the Left now claim that Obamacare can no longer be repealed? How complicated is repeal? Isn’t repeal simply the absence of force? You’d be saying “The government won’t force people to buy a product; employers can decide whether it’s to their benefit to offer insurance benefits to their employees; and the insurance companies will once again be able to shape insurance policies according to their company values and profit goals, not according to government diktat. It seems to me that, while implementing has taken years and will take constant effort, undoing it will take no energy at all. It’s like physics. It takes energy to hold the thing together, and entropy will allow it readily to fall apart. Again, is there something I’m missing here?

Is it racist to remind people that the American government first disarmed Native Americans and then decimated them?

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A week or two ago, I put this poster on my site:

Guns in government hands

I think it’s an un-racist poster.  It reminds people that government will always be a minority’s worst enemies.

What I didn’t know was that, in Greeley, Colorado, someone put up a billboard echoing that sentiment:

The friend who sent me this video said exactly the right thing about those who are now crying foul:

I love the premise here: “Pay no attention to history, it may offend someone!”

The appearance of “Indigenous Muslims” at the DNC offends America’s true indigenous people

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Identity politics worked very well for the Democrats for a long time, provided that they played the various little groups off against “white men.”  Barring some in-fighting in academia amongst various “victim” subgroups — a spectacle that Christina Hoff Sommers described to hilarious effect in Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women — Democrats mostly managed adroitly to hide from their interest groups that, if you define the economy as a finite, government-controlled pie, eventually there will not be enough pieces to go around.

Or maybe the Democrats shouldn’t get even that credit.  Because the obsession with identity politics didn’t gain traction until the Reagan years (although it existed before), there was usually enough pie to go around once one had successfully dispossessed those poor white males.  Now, however, despite or because of 3.7 years of Obamanomics, the pie is small and crumbly.  And with that small pie, the allegiances are getting frayed as well.

A friend Servo1969 sent me a link to an interesting post contending that Native Americans have had it up to here and beyond with the Democrat team’s game-playing.  They were offended when it turned out that Elizabeth Warren had parlayed a false (or, at least, incredibly attenuated) Native American heritage into a well-paid legal career.  Now, some are even more peeved, and rightfully so, by the fact that the Democrats are pandering to a Muslim group that identifies itself as representative of “indigenous Muslims”:

Native Americans are very angry to learn that Muslims in the United States of America are being touted as “indigenous”, a complete falsehood.

[snip]

Twenty-thousand Islamists and their sympathizers are expected to attend the opening of the Democratic National Convention on August 31 [BW:  It’s actually September 4 to September 6] to focus on Islam with Jumah[sic], the Friday prayer, to draw in Muslims to the DNC. The important prayer and two days of events are being coordinated by the Bureau of Indigenous Muslim Affairs (BIMA), a national Muslim non-profit claiming that the event is non-political. Being a part of the actual convention makes it pretty hard to claim that it isn’t a political event. The initials BIMA quickly caught my attention because I’m keyed in to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the agency that my husband works closely with in his capacity as Director of Security for an Indian casino. I was appalled when I went to the BIMA website and saw the words “Indigenous Muslim.”

The word “indigenous” is a term of art.  It does not mean that someone is born within a country’s borders.  Instead, it refers, always, to the original people who populated a country before an imperialist force (Western or Eastern) took over.  One can have American-born Muslims, but there are no “indigenous Muslims.”  It’s either foolish, disingenuous, or dishonest for Muslims to try to parlay their non-white status into a simulacrum of the United States’ true Native American population.

Lesson to Democrats:  You can successfully complain about pie allocation when there’s lots of pie.  If you destroy the pie, however, you may regret trying to slice it into so many different pieces.

UPDATE:  As you can see, I substituted “Servo1969” for “A friend.”  I mention that here because, if people send me emails with information, I always ask people’s permission before using their name in a post.  When I wrote the post, I hadn’t yet confirmed that Servo1969 wouldn’t mind showing up in here.

Elizabeth Warren’s “minority status” certainly goes a long way to explaining her career trajectory

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I had some brilliant teachers when I was at law school in Texas.  Elizabeth Warren was not among their number.  While she knew her stuff, her disjointed, elliptical communication style made her one of the poorer teachers I’ve had during my 20 years as student (from kindergarten through my J.D.).  I’ve always said that she was a nice lady (never mean or cutting to students), but teaching was not her skill.

I didn’t follow Warren’s career after she left Texas, so I was unaware that she had moved on to Harvard.  I learned that only recently, when the Obama election caused her to become a player on the national scene.  By then, I was so focused on what she was saying or doing, that it didn’t occur to me to ask how the heck she got to Harvard.  After all, she really wasn’t “all that.”

Now that the news has broken that she falsely claimed minority status based upon her alleged 3% (or may 1.5%) drop of Native American, her Harvard employment makes sense.  Harvard needed a Native American law professor — and there Warren was.

I realize that Warren’s coming out as a race hustler is somewhat stale news, but my history with her popped into my mind when I read Alana Goodman’s little summary of the effect Warren’s lies are having on her campaign:

The growing narrative about Warren, on the other hand, is that she’s an ivory tower liberal with some shady character flaws. This latest Trail of Tears development also makes her something of a punchline, similar to how Coakley became a running joke after she cluelessly claimed former Red Sox pitcher and Brown supporter Curt Schilling was a Yankee fan. While the Coakley’s meltdown happened shortly before Election Day, Warren still has time to repair her image. But her window of opportunity is quickly closing, and the drip-drip of details like this will make it difficult for her to turn things around.

Reading that made me realize that her shady days go back a long time, and have propelled her forward on a body of lies.

How America’s classrooms celebrate Columbus Day

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We used to view ourselves as a shining City on the Hill, a nation that hadn’t always done right but that, more than any other nation, had changed the world’s concept of liberty — and that in the last century had saved more people from tyranny than any other nation in the history of human kind.

Our children, however, are simply taught that Western culture is an evil that destroyed perfect indigenous people.  Columbus is the perfect scapegoat for this world view.

I’m all for a nuanced view of history.  Teaching that humans are saints is always a mistake — and that’s true whether you’re trying to create plaster saints out of explorer’s or Native Americans.  Yes, the explorer’s were often brutal by today’s lights and they were certainly avaricious.  They were also brave, creative, innovative, ignorant of the dangers they carried with them in terms of disease, and many, especially the priests, acted out of a genuine belief that they were bringing a light around the world.  And yes, the Indians suffered an invasion of their enclosed world; yes, they lost their land; and yes, diseases decimated them.  But that overlooks the fact that they couldn’t have lived in a hermetically sealed bubble forever, and that no one understood germ theory in those days.  As to land loss, yes, that was a tragedy, although perhaps inevitable with a 90% decimation rate from the bacteria the Westerners never knew they carried with them.

But the Indians were also real people.  Some were helpless, hapless souls, but these souls had long been victims of other Native American tribes, even before the explorers came.  Indeed, many were delighted that the explorers had come, because they saw these armed men on horseback as a way to level the playing field.  Some tribes were vicious killers (even cannibals), some were just go-along-to-get-along people.  Their reverence for nature sprang in part because they lived closely with nature and in part because, as stone age people, they were unable to dominate nature as the westerners did.  When they had the ability to destroy, they did (as many of the Plains tribes did with their overwhelmingly wasteful buffalo hunts, which saw them drive hundreds and thousands off of cliffs).

When cultures clash, it’s rare for them to integrate and live in harmony.  One wins, and one loses.  Some cultures and conquerors are more evil than others, and some are simply more powerful.  All are products of their time.  And it’s utterly stupid for our school systems to try to pretend that the explorers were the respositories of all the world’s evil, while the Native Americans were saints on earth — pretty much virgin souls waiting to be sacrificed.  That’s a stupid and boring way to teach.