not to let anyone else off the hook,
http://www.alternet.org/rights/148478/exposing_the_gop%27s_shameful_historical_role_in_the_native_american_genocide/By Thomas DeLorenzo
Exposing the GOP's Shameful Historical Role in the Native American Genocide
How the Native American extermination campaigns merged the dangerous forces of a standing army with the business/political interests of the Republican Party.
October 11, 2010
Editor's Note: The genocide against Native Americans remains one of the most shameful chapters of U.S. history (and indeed one that continued through Ronald Reagan’s presidency with U.S.-backed slaughters in Central America).
However, from the Civil War through the end of the 19th Century, the extermination campaigns also merged the dangerous forces of a standing army with the business/political interests of the Republican Party, as the Independent Institute’s Thomas J. DiLorenzo writes in the following excerpted guest essay:
The real culture of violence in the American West of the latter half of the 19th Century sprang from the U.S. government’s policies toward the Plains Indians. It is untrue that white European settlers were always at war with Indians, as popular folklore contends.
Trade and cooperation with the Indians were much more common than conflict and violence through the first half of the 19th Century.
Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney relate how Thomas Jefferson found that during his time negotiation was the Europeans’ predominant means of acquiring land from Indians. By the 20th Century, some $800 million had been paid for Indian lands.
..more..
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