Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (12 page)

Hillary and Obama have both learned the Alinsky lesson that you should aggressively pursue power while pretending to be motivated by pure altruism. How do they do this? They do it by denouncing money as a motive for a career, and by flamboyantly demonstrating to the public that they are not motivated by money. Note that Hillary, despite her Yale Law School credentials, meekly followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas and became a “good wife” during his scandals. Never has she pursued a lucrative law career, and the same is true with Obama. Obama spurned big-money law firms that courted him, preferring instead to work as a community organizer. These are the kinds of decisions—Alinsky knew—that fill people with wonder. What people don’t realize is that Hillary and Obama are just as ambitious and self-motivated as any avaricious careerist. The only difference is that they are going after power instead of personal wealth. With power, they can direct the affairs of society, and in time positions of power can easily be converted into personal wealth.

More important, Hillary and Obama both adopted Alinsky’s strategic counsel to sound mainstream, even when you aren’t. Since Hillary ran for the U.S. Senate in New York, she has sounded a moderate tone. This is the “new Hillary,” as the press dubbed her. Most of America has fallen for it. They think that because Hillary dresses “square” and sounds “square” therefore she must be “square” in her thinking. And it is the same with Obama. Like Hillary, Obama shows tremendous personal discipline. He is a master of giving the American people what they want to see and hear, while doing something entirely different. While Obama pursues radical policies, he sounds mainstream and lets people project things onto him that are not who he really is. In his own words, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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Lucifer was right: appearances make an easy substitute for reality. These are the ways in which our two Alinskyites make themselves palatable to the American middle class, which to this day has no idea how hostile Hillary and Obama are to middle-class values.

If Hillary Clinton is elected in 2016, the baton will have passed from one Alinskyite to another. In this case, Alinsky’s influence will have taken on a massive, almost unimaginable, importance. Obama will have had eight years to remake America, and Hillary will have another four or perhaps eight to complete the job. Together, these two have the opportunity to largely undo the nation’s founding ideals. They will have had the power, and the time, to unmake and then remake America. They may not be responsible for the suicide of America, but they certainly will have helped to finish off a certain way of life in America, and they will leave us with a country unrecognizable not only to Washington and Jefferson but also to those of us who grew up in the twentieth century. If they succeed there may be no going back. Then it will be their America, not ours, and we will be a people bereft of a country, with no place to go.

CHAPTER 6

THE RED MAN’S BURDEN

Let not America go wrong in her first hour.

C
HRISTOPHER
N
EWPORT
,
T
HE
N
EW
W
ORLD

T
he road up the mountain was steep and winding, on our way to see the woman who wanted to get rid of Mount Rushmore. She was an American Indian activist, a leader of the Sioux Tribe. As we approached the destination for our interview—which is featured in my
America
movie—I thought about how Columbus’s landing in America changed the world. Imagine if there was no America and Columbus kept going. He might have landed in his intended destination, India! That would have changed history a little, but only a little. The reason is that India was already a long-established civilization; at best, Columbus would have set up one more trading post. The America landing, by contrast, opened up a new continent not only to European occupation and settlement but also to the founding of a new country, the United States of America.

Today, in the schools, the progressives emphasize that Columbus didn’t “discover” America. He couldn’t have, since there were already people here. Rather, they say, Columbus “conquered” America. Yes, well. We’re going to get into the issue of conquest, but let’s begin by pondering the “discovery” question. Rarely do the progressive pedants ponder the significance that it was Europeans who landed here in America, not native peoples from this continent who landed on the shores of Europe. If native Indians could have conquered Europe and sailed up the Thames or the Seine, would they not have done it? Of course they would. But they didn’t, because they couldn’t. It’s worth asking why things happened the way they did.

We were in the Black Hills region of South Dakota, where the carved faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt emerge unexpectedly out of a mountain. It’s an oddly thrilling sight, made even more special for me because I got to fly in a helicopter and see Rushmore from the sky, coming almost face to face with the four presidents. Mount Rushmore is a popular site for visitors, and the town has become a kind of “trading post,” selling cowboy hats, holsters, and all kinds of wild west paraphernalia. During the day there are staged shoot-outs, and in the evening the beer flows in the bars and country singers sing songs from another era, such as “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.”

Charmaine White Face is a Sioux Indian and a spokesperson for the tribe’s national council. She hates Mount Rushmore, and wants to see it disappear. White Face is a small woman, a little frail even, and I could hardly imagine her setting off explosives to blow up Mount Rushmore. She said she wouldn’t get rid of it that way although there may be other native Indian activists who would happily light the fuse. White Face would prefer that Mount Rushmore not be maintained. A monument requires constant preservation, she points out. Rushmore, she says, should simply be abandoned. That
way, nature would take its course, and erosion would first obscure and eventually eliminate those four iconic faces. To White Face, they are the faces of tyranny, conquest, and genocide.

Genocide is a strong word—it suggests not only murder on a massive scale but also the desire to wipe out an entire people. White Face believes it, and she believes it goes back to Columbus and the white settlement of the Americas. She’s not alone. Russell Means, the American Indian activist, has said that “Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.” Writer Winona LaDuke deplores “the biological, technological and ecological invasion that began with Columbus’s ill-fated voyage 500 years ago.” Writer Tzvetan Todorov faults Columbus and other European invaders with producing “the greatest genocide in human history.” Historian Glenn Morris accuses Columbus of being “a murderer, a rapist, the architect of a policy of genocide that continues today.” Literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt claims that Columbus “inaugurated the greatest experiment in political, economic and cultural cannibalism in the history of the Western world.”
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The native American indictment can be summed up this way: the white man systematically killed us off, and then stole our country.

White Face wants the country back. Specifically, she wants the Black Hills to be returned to the Sioux, who had it before it was taken by the United States government in violation of its treaty obligations. There have been court cases about this, and the Sioux seem to have a valid claim. An 1868 treaty affirms that the Black Hills are “set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians.” Yet the treaty was abrogated by Congress in 1877. The courts have recognized this, and awarded the tribe money—lots of it. Currently there is more than $1 billion on offer to the Sioux. The money continues to gather interest. That’s because the Sioux won’t take it. The Sioux don’t want money, insisting that the Black Hills are “not for sale.”
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The Sioux position, conveyed by White Face, is that the land needs to be returned; it needs to become tribal land again. White Face showed me what used to be several ancient sacred sites “where the Great Spirits dwell” and she wants those sites restored, so Sioux people can once again commune with the spirits. I reminded White Face that before the Sioux, there were Cheyenne Indians and other tribes on that land. So if America stole the land from the Sioux, didn’t the Sioux steal the land from the Cheyenne and other tribes? If the land is returned to the Sioux, shouldn’t the Sioux turn around and give it back to those who had it before? White Face looked flustered. She said that, long before the white man came, American Indians had certain “dominant” tribes, and the Sioux happened to be one of them. Some tribes were in charge and that’s all there was to that. If the land was returned to the Sioux, she said, perhaps the tribe would let the Cheyenne and others worship at the holy sites.

But how did these “dominant” tribes become dominant? White Face’s euphemistic rhetoric aside, they became dominant by defeating the weaker and smaller tribes. So the Sioux indeed got land in the typical way that Indians got land—by defeating and displacing the previous inhabitants. Stronger warlike tribes like the Sioux, the Apache, and the Comanche have always done it and weaker pacific tribes like the Hopi and the Pueblo have always known it. Here, in a nutshell, we see the problem of asserting a “we got here first” land claim: almost inevitably, there was someone who was there earlier who can assert the same claim against you.

We’ll come back to this, but for now, let’s move to Columbus and the charge of genocide. The historical Columbus was a Christian explorer. Howard Zinn makes it sound like Columbus came looking for nothing but gold, but Columbus was equally driven by a spirit of exploration and adventure. When we read Columbus’s diaries we see that his motives were complex: he wanted to get rich by discovering
new trade routes, but he also wanted to find the Garden of Eden, which he believed was an actual undiscovered place. Of course Columbus didn’t come looking for America; he didn’t know that the American continent existed. Since the Muslims controlled the trade routes of the Arabian Sea, he was looking for a new way to the Far East. Specifically he was looking for India, and that’s why he called the native peoples “Indians.” It is easy to laugh at Columbus’s naïveté, except that he wasn’t entirely wrong. Anthropological research has established that the native people of the Americas did originally come from Asia. Most likely they came across the Bering Strait before the continents drifted apart.

We know that, as a consequence of contact with Columbus and the Europeans who came after him, the native population in the Americas plummeted. By some estimates, more than 80 percent of the Indians perished. This is the basis for the charge of genocide. But there was no genocide. Millions of Indians died as a result of diseases they contracted from their exposure to the white man: smallpox, measles, cholera, and typhus. There is one isolated allegation of Sir Jeffrey Amherst (whose name graces Amherst College) approving a strategy to vanquish a hostile Indian tribe by giving the Indians smallpox-infected blankets. Even here, however, it’s not clear the scheme was actually carried out. As historian William McNeill documents in
Plagues and Peoples
, the white man generally transmitted his diseases to the Indians without knowing it, and the Indians died in large numbers because they had not developed immunities to those diseases. This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it is not genocide, because genocide implies an
intention
to wipe out a people. McNeill points out that Europeans themselves had contracted lethal diseases, including the pneumonic and the bubonic plagues, from Mongol invaders from the Asian steppes. The Europeans didn’t have immunities, and during the “Black Death” of the fourteenth century
one-third of the population of Europe was wiped out.
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But no one calls these plagues genocide, because they weren’t.

It’s true that Columbus developed strong prejudices about the native peoples he first encountered—he was prejudiced in favor of them. He praised the intelligence, generosity, and lack of guile among the Tainos, contrasting these qualities with Spanish vices. Subsequent explorers such as Pedro Alvares Cabral, Amerigo Vespucci (from whom we get the name “America”), and Walter Raleigh registered similar positive impressions. So where did Europeans get the idea that Indians were “savages”? Actually, they got it from their experience with the Indians. While the Indians Columbus met on his first voyage were hospitable and friendly, on subsequent voyages Columbus was horrified to discover that a number of sailors he had left behind had been killed and possibly eaten by the cannibalistic Arawaks.
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When Bernal Diaz arrived in Mexico with the swashbuckling army of Hernán Cortés, he and his fellow Spaniards saw things they had never seen before. Indeed they witnessed one of the most gruesome spectacles ever seen, something akin to what American soldiers saw after World War II when they entered the Nazi concentration camps. As Diaz describes the Aztecs, in an account generally corroborated by modern scholars, “They strike open the wretched Indian’s chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets.” Huge numbers of Indians—typically captives in war—were sacrificed, sometimes hundreds in a single day. Yet in a comic attempt to diminish the cruelty of the Aztecs, Howard Zinn remarks that their mass murder “did not erase a certain
innocence” and he accuses Cortés of nefarious conduct “turning Aztec against Aztec.”
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If the Aztecs of Mexico seemed especially bloodthirsty, they were rivaled by the Incas of South America who also erected sacrificial mounds on which they performed elaborate rites of human sacrifice, so that their altars were drenched with blood, bones were strewn everywhere, and priests collapsed from exhaustion from stabbing their victims.