07/13/2006
I was surprised to read this injudicious quote by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth. Judge Lamberth has been removed from a case in which Native Americans, (which here means Indians rather than "nativists")
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited Lamberth’s own words to illustrate why he should be removed from the case, Cobell v. Kempthorne , including a July 2005 opinion in which he called the Interior Department "a dinosaur — the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind."[At U.S. Urging, Court Throws Lamberth Off Indian Case,by Eric M. Weiss, Washington Post, July 12, 2006]
While I admit that the Interior Department may be in the wrong here, the remark about the "disgracefully racist and imperialist government " shows a bias against the United States, not just the United States Government, which is a party to the case, but the United States itself, or putting it another way, the American nation.
As usual, when people apply the anti-racist standards of 2006 to the actions of, for example, the US Cavalry in the 19th century, there’s no context, nothing about raids, scalping, looting, burning, or general savagery, committed regularly by the Indians that might cause non-"Native" Americans, if they thought that way, to demand reparations.
It’s the same as the tired story of the Japanese Internment, which is the only thing that schoolchildren are taught about the Japanese in World War II, when of course, the Japanese conduct towards Western prisoners was abominable, and their conduct towards occupied China and elsewhere was worse than abominable.
No, US history only looks "disgracefully racist and imperialist" if you don’t compare it to the history of any other country — otherwise it looks pretty good.
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