38 Comments

1. Fausta:

Fall Weekend, pfffffffftt!
What are we, Druids?

Apr 9, 2009 - 6:20 am 2. RB:

Considering that Brown was founded by a slave-owner, what’s next: rename it Acme University??

(Full disclosure: I graduated from Brown)

Apr 9, 2009 - 6:31 am 3. Hurf:

“Moreover, the European settlers have this large achievement in the credit column of their moral reckoning: they brought civilization, spiritual as well as material, to the various backward populations they subdued.”

Surely this is outweighed by the many millions killed by European exploitation in India, China and other already-”civilized” nations? Or would you argue that every other scrap of land was populated with savage barbarians too? I mean, when you’re peddling absurd justifications for imperialism, you might as well fully embrace your belief in white supremacy…

Apr 9, 2009 - 7:05 am 4. Rowland:

It’s only a matter of time before the students demand and faculty agree to changing the name of the university altogether. After all, John and Nicholas Brown made a large portion of their fortunes in the slave trade, building slave ships and trafficking human chattel.

Apr 9, 2009 - 7:07 am 5. thomas patrick:

Extra Extra credit question.
What Liberal Arts university is named after a family who participated in the triangle-slave- trade system, used slaves in their factories, and used slaves to build their university buildings?

Apr 9, 2009 - 7:31 am 6. steveaz:

Roger,
It looks as if a key debate, that between Brown’s central American history department and various students’ unions, needs to take place, but has been conveniently side-stepped by radical student factions.

Most institutions of learning fear such blatant expose’s of their students’ ignorance about key, historical facts. I think that, leaving her vocal, raucous student unions’ desires off to the side for the moment, Brown University is no different.

It’s just that the education that such a didactic debate would award to the rampaging students is conveniently avoided by the university’s solicitousness to racialist student unions, making Brown into a microcosm of America’s dumbed-down, adolescent political sphere.

Either Brown’s historians need to grow a pair and begin to stand up for their curriculum of facts, (like, say, by calling out student leaders for their ignorance), or, the university should look to GM’s or United Airlines’ models and let the student’s mold the institution into a dumb, political-advocacy arm of the Democrat(ic) Party.

At best, if they choose the latter, they’ll get a tax-payer funded bail-out for their abandonment of empiricism. At worst, if they choose the first, their students will learn something about early American history.

Apr 9, 2009 - 7:35 am 7. Vinny Vidivici:

“you might as well fully embrace your belief in white supremacy”

The shorter Hurf: Questioning the academy’s bogus oppression narrative makes you a racist.

Bigot much, Hurf?

Apr 9, 2009 - 8:24 am 8. ROB:

Sticking only to the role of the Spaniards in America, it is not just this one university that views their role as essentially evil. Both the Guggenheim and the Chicago Natural History Museum have mounted exhibits apologetic to the centrality of human sacrifice to the Aztecs. At the Guggenheim an obsidian knife used in those practices was displayed. The only disparaging note was voiced against the catholicism allegedly imposed upon the natives. Of course no consideration was given to the possibility that those natives (actually the majority under Aztec domination)subject to wholesale slaughter at the hands of the Aztec priests might actually have welcomed a less sanguinary religion. Is it any wonder that the students at Brown have fallen for this line hook line and sinker when eminent institutions peddle it.

Apr 9, 2009 - 9:25 am 9. Davy:

My fellow Brown graduate, RB, suggests that our alma mater be rechristened Acme University. Although I suspect he was being facetious, I think that’s a fine idea. But if Acme doesn’t make the cut, I’d like to propose Blue University as an alternative.

Apr 9, 2009 - 10:29 am 10. Peter Leavitt:

Well, since the Brown moralists wish to do away the evil Columbus Day, maybe they could teach on that day, however unusual that activity is among their days off.

Apr 9, 2009 - 10:55 am 11. Jon Z:

Mr. Kimball,

I’ve been an academic for thirty-five years. I regret that there is no idiocy of my colleagues that surprises me any longer. I agree that college is likely the worst investment a family can make, unless the offspring are going into science or engineering. Even in these fields, standards are ludicrously relaxed.

Here’s an anecdote about the monolithic academic culture: at a recent scientific conference, I had dinner with one of the field’s great luminaries. He is not only an eminent scientist but a wonderful guy who interacts with everyone in science and meets with scores of colleagues on a regular basis. When some mention of politics occurred, he told me with a puzzled frown that I was the only person he knew who had not voted for Obama. Diversity anyone?

Apr 9, 2009 - 11:45 am 12. vanderleun:

Hummmm…. “victims would either be battered to death in the open and then dismembered, or tied up and burned to death over a fire. The early Europeans were shocked to find that sacrifice was often accompanied by cannibalism.”

Sounds like what happens when the mainstream media latches onto the politically incorrect.

Apr 9, 2009 - 12:34 pm 13. Professor Guvinoff:

Whoops… They did not jump quite far enough: “Fall” is an allusion to the Christian calendar! One should keep some dry powder for the next round, shouldn’t one?

@#11, Jon Z: Yes, I fondly remember how smart was my daughter was before going to college. She will eventually climb out of the hole, but what a waste!

Apr 9, 2009 - 1:35 pm 14. Daniel:

In a strange flip, my university, Texas A&M, always has a peculiar “reading day-” meaning no classes are held- during the Spring semester. The reading day always happens to land on Good Friday. How obtuse, this academia! They just can’t acknowledge a religious (maybe just Christian) holiday, and conjure some secular event to provide a day off for commemoration.

Apr 9, 2009 - 1:41 pm 15. 11B40:

Greetings:

Another very good book on American Indians is “Comanches; The History of a People” by T.R. Fehrenbach (Anchor Books, 1974. Mr. Fehrenbach has also written about Mexican Indians in “Fire and Blood”.

I recently read “Comanches” and was struck by the number of parallels between them and out Muslim brothers and sisters.

Apr 9, 2009 - 2:54 pm 16. Wil:

Hurf

About the millions killed in India , you should really read your history , the millions of death was not caused by the Europeans , those deaths was the result of successive Islamic invasions of India . In regards to China , with the exception of the Boxer Rebellion , the Europeans were not much of a factor in killing millions of Chinese . Those deeds were caused by the Chinese themselves , Mao Tse-Tung killed more than 20 million Chinese during the the Great Leap Forward and a half a million to more than a million Chinese and that did not include the Chinese Civil War . Learn to read and learn to ask and above all , don’t just swallow what your professors are teaching you , hook ,line and sinker . Do some research and think for yourself . It will not make you look foolish when post on opinion pieces like this .

Apr 9, 2009 - 3:13 pm 17. SENTINEL:

“Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short”
——————————————

Describing the “natural state of man”, the redoubtable English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had few if any kind words for Man before the foundation of states and legitimate governments.

He was also, unwittingly, describing the lot of American Indians before the arrival of Europeans.

The fact is, most native Americans were a pathetic band of roamers and foragers living off the land, in poor health, covered with vermin and seldom living beyond the age of 30 or so. Their religious beliefs and rites never got beyond a primitive voodoo level and they were fond of painting their woman (and themselves) with extracts of dung beetle juices, lizards and wild vegetation.

It is true that millions of Amerindians died as a result of the European conquests, but this was due to disease, not to any pre-conceived program of extermination as the received wisdom would lead you to believe was the case. And Europeans too died by the baleful thanks to diseases which were new to them.

In fact, the very early conquerors did not have “conquest” on their minds at all – what they were intent on was conversion of the natives to Christianity, a most laudable mission.

Brown University faculty and students can go ahead and proclaim Columbus Day as Fall Weekend if they so desire. But by doing so, they are simply exhibiting their ignorance of the facts and their denial of realities. And…….no one else cares really what they proclaim. The ½ billion inhabitants of Latin America all loudly and proudly celebrate Columbus Day.

I don’t so much celebrate Columbus Day anymore. What I do celebrate is anno domini 1492, the *year* of the discovery of America. And it has nothing to do with America.

For on that year, just at about the same time that Columbus was setting foot in the New World, the Catholic Kings of Spain conquered the last stronghold of the Saracens in Granada, Spain and expelled all Moslems who refused to be converted to Christianity from that venerable country.

A most memorable year indeed !

Apr 9, 2009 - 3:46 pm 18. MCMJR:

The students upset by the “Columbus Day” holiday should demonstrate their displeasure of the University Administration by leaving Brown and attending a more ’sensitive’ academy. Surly, daddy will continue his tuition and board support?

Wasn’t Columbus motivated to find a western trade route to the orient by some ‘Man-Caused Disaster’? Something about Constantinople’s fall of to Islamic ‘radicals’?

Apr 9, 2009 - 3:56 pm 19. Jim:

Really, who cares. I don’t feel like giving up my way of life to the descendant of some goddam Native, and I’m definitely not going to feel bad about something for which I’m neither an actual nor proximate cause.

Apr 9, 2009 - 4:52 pm 20. sam:

We have to stamp out Colombus because he was a first white man in Americas. That is he represents the Original Sin. We should really kill ourselves to make room for the noble savages.

Apr 9, 2009 - 10:54 pm 21. Tina Trent:

And how fitting that this story provides a perfect opportunity to consider Philip Roth’s screed on his own identity-sodden specialness, the novel Goodbye, Columbus, in which “WASP” culture is depicted as a vast, evil, sexualized refrigerator to rummage through, and WASPs themselves are sorts of Nazis simply by existing and liking to play tennis (thus, sexually humiliating their daughters is considered “revolutionary”) — they are barely human in Roth’s imaginary universe. Fifty years after Roth created the narcissistic Neil Klugman, whose complaint seems to consist mainly of the fact that he is forced by circumstances to hold (horrors of horrors) a work study position in the library, Klugman has become the template for a campus identity politics and a psychopathics of resentment that could not have been imagined then.

Apr 10, 2009 - 5:05 am 22. Larry Winters:

The epitome of hypocrisy from an institution founded with slave trade profits by brothers John and Moses Brown, the former going to his grave an unrepentant slave trader, although the later became a Quaker and renounced the trade. Maybe they should change the name of the University?

Apr 10, 2009 - 6:24 am 23. Gerald Chandler:

Hurf says (Apr 9, 2009 – 7:05 am) “Surely this is outweighed by the many millions killed by European exploitation in India, China and other already-”civilized” nations? Or would you argue that every other scrap of land was populated with savage barbarians too? I mean, when you’re peddling absurd justifications for imperialism, you might as well fully embrace your belief in white supremacy…”

In fact the situation in China and India pre-colonization was bad, just as in the Americas. In India a Moslem minority ruled a much large Hindu majority. It would have been nice if the British could have introduced 20th century democracy and social welfare. They couldn’t and didn’t. But the Hindu majority was better off under the foreign British than they were under the foreign Moslems. And the British didn’t kill millions.

China is not now and has never been an ethnically homogenous country. In the same way as the French, Spanish, and Italians speak related languages while using a near-common alphabet, the “Chinese” of the north, west, and south speak related languages and use a near common writing system. In fact, it is easier for Spaniards and Italians to understand each other than it is for people using Sechuan and Guandong languages. The situation before 1912 was always that one invading minority conquered another, much like Napeoleon conquering most of Europe. Just before the European conquests most of what is now China was dominated by the foreign Manchus; so foreign that they used a unique alphabet, bearing no relation to Chinese writing. It was a bad situation that the Europeans did not make worse. And the Europeans did not kill millions.

Apr 10, 2009 - 1:37 pm 24. Michael DeLong:

The human sacrifices and cannibalism committed by the Aztecs and other Native Americans were horrible and deserved to be condemned. But how does this justify atrocities committed by the Spanish and British? Moreover, at this time the British were persecuting religious dissenters and committing huge massacres in Ireland, and the Spanish were burning heretics and killing or forcibly converting Muslims and Jews in their lands.
None of these things are excusable. Surely the cultures could have been improved, and without this we wouldn’t be where we are today. But at the time were the Europeans morally superior to the Native Americans? And if so, does this mean that the conquest and subjection (and in some cases, massacres and ethnic cleansing) of other societies is justified if it leads to civilization? And who and what defines civilization?

Apr 10, 2009 - 1:41 pm 25. JJM:

Who exterminated the Mohicans in The Last of The Mohicans? The Hurons, among others. Who was killing whom in Black Robe?

The fact is, we’re trying to impose modern sensibilities on people and cultures of earlier centuries. How imperialistic. How ego-centric. I am so sick of academe – the ignorance, the cant, the meme, the trope – all stale. Moral fatuousness. Cheap posturing, requiring no examination of any kind. Recall what Socrates reputedly said.

To those who hate the USA and what Columbus/Europe wrought – go elsewhere. Europe’s out, right? So, walk south until you get killed by the drug lords. Please. Or, better, go live in a Muslim country. They’re tolerant of such foolishness.

Apr 10, 2009 - 5:41 pm 26. Cristina:

“Surely this is outweighed by the many millions killed by European exploitation in India, China and other already-”civilized” nations? Or would you argue that every other scrap of land was populated with savage barbarians too? I mean, when you’re peddling absurd justifications for imperialism, you might as well fully embrace your belief in white supremacy…”

The many millions killed by European exploitation in China??? How about the many millions killed by the Mongols in said China, or by the Chinese commies killing their own? Read some history, moron.

Apr 10, 2009 - 8:33 pm 27. Cristina:

# 24 Michael DeLong:

“But how does this justify atrocities committed by the Spanish and British? Moreover, at this time the British were persecuting religious dissenters and committing huge massacres in Ireland, and the Spanish were burning heretics and killing or forcibly converting Muslims and Jews in their lands.
None of these things are excusable. Surely the cultures could have been improved, and without this we wouldn’t be where we are today. But at the time were the Europeans morally superior to the Native Americans? And if so, does this mean that the conquest and subjection (and in some cases, massacres and ethnic cleansing) of other societies is justified if it leads to civilization? And who and what defines civilization?”

Oh boy, another moron who should be sent to live in North Korea or Iran or Somalia or Sudan to understand what defines civilization.
You don’t deserve to live here.

Apr 10, 2009 - 8:57 pm 28. Fred Z:

“But at the time were the Europeans morally superior to the Native Americans”

It’s a pretty simple calculation. A culture which allows more people to live longer and healthier lives is more moral. So yes, the Europeans were vastly more moral than the Native Americans, the Indians and the Chinese, whose lives were nasty, brutish and short.

Lefties don’t do math.

Apr 11, 2009 - 7:40 am 29. Cristina:

Roger:

Sorry for losing my temper on your blog, but thanks to the moderator for letting my “offensive speech” go through… There’s only so much school/academia-cultivated ignorance I can take. No matter how polite you want to be, what do you call someone who believes millions were killed by “European exploitation” in China and has, moreover, the nerve to assert it as evidence in an argument, without any sign of skepticism in the facts and numbers he/she deploys?? An “ignoramus” or “stultus”? Or maybe “idiota,” which takes us straight back to “moron”:

http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8632

I think we’ve come to a point where what I call “directed/cultivated ignorance” (nothing to do with simple lack of education; people like “Urf” are, usually, “well-educated” in academic terms) has to be named as such, pointed out, its voluntary practitioners exposed at every step they utter lies and propaganda.

I also want to thank you for mentioning Keith Windshuttle and his superb book. His is pure scholarship, flawless analysis in debunking post-modern myths about the evils perpetrated by the “white man.” Plus, each chapter reads like a mystery, an exquisite exploration of facts entangled with their interpretive history.

Apr 11, 2009 - 1:56 pm 30. Cristina:

# 28 Fred Z:

So it is, though I would exclude China from your example: until the advent of communism, it had been a fully articulated and rich civilization, despite its authoritarianism, conformity, and the ups and downs of history.
Your Hobbesian definition fits the Muslim world perfectly.

Apr 11, 2009 - 4:43 pm 31. jack simms:

in the Ann Arbor area, Columbus Day is often rechristened, sorry of course I meant “renamed”–”Indigenous Peoples’ Day”

Apr 13, 2009 - 9:39 am 32. Jake:

So not paying homage to an Italian born, Spanish-paid man who found the Caribean is “anti-American?”

@ Christina

Study Chinese history. Really. Study it and leave your generalizations at home.

Apr 14, 2009 - 11:27 am 33. Gaffe Prices:

Perhaps lefties can pry open their imaginations and imagine what it would have been like, if it had not been European (Spanish first, then Dutch, English, french and so on, no wait, Erikson was first) and was others, instead, to be the first to colonise the western hemisphere, instead.

Let’s look at the other “powers” who couldn’t but would’ve, if they could’ve, shall we?

Islam- already in deep decline by 1492, but they would’ve slaughtered everyone in their path, as they are wont to do. In fact, because they lost to the Polish army in Vienna, the pathetic, beaten, hulk fixed its sights on India, where they thought resistance was less of a risk. And guess what? They slaughtered and destroyed everything in their path there. Do a google search of Islam 1499-1750 and behold the carnage there in Asia.

Russia- Peter the Great said that if he could conquer all the way to the Persian Gulf for russia, he would then rule the world. He didn’t succeed, and soviet union was keenly aware of Peter’s strategy, russian republic of today (such as it is) is too. Look at history of Eastern Europe under Soviet rule, Romania, Moldova, Yugoslavia, etc. Bloody fripping repression.

China- Colonized most of Asia, but were starting to decline by this point. They measured their influence culturally, and could not enforce it militarily after a while. Chinese, with their frugal, hard working ethic, were and are to this day resented in places such as Indonesia, Malaysia. When Geithner crashed the Indonesian and Malay economy in 1997, much anger and resentment toward ‘ethnic chinese’ there spilled over into outright violence against ethnic chinese there, based on centuries of ‘ethnic’ chinese presence there.

So, who’s left?

Japan, Japan unified in 1700’s, but would have to wait until 20th century to begin their reign of terror, after their defeat by U.S., Soviet Union would try to annex what Japan controlled in Manchuria, and were driven out.

No nation or empire was able to do what they wanted to do in 1492, except disparate and competing nations such as Holland, Spain, etc in 1492.

That competing nations in Europe held no single monopoly on colonisation in 1500’s: they fought for influence in the Americas. If there was such a thing as a ‘Europe’, beyond the geographical designations, then they were poised to expand based on the progress they had made specifically for having fought expansionist, Imperial Islam for centuries, and defeated them decisively the very year Columbus set sail.

I’ll take European progress and influence over the evil empire of Islam any day, and the casual, lazy leftist, who cloaks his european, marxist ideology in a finger-pointing exercise directed at “all things” “europe” and “america” [read U.S.] conveniently omitting all things, I emphasize all things historically Islam in favour of europen marxist expansionism is just so much Ward Churchill and the Gnome Chompski. Specious, irrelevant, lazy, slacker, vapid, morose, vacuous, nihilistic, pagan, psychotic, projective, deceptive, disingenuous, propagandik, racist, totalitarian, Imperialistic excrement and dogma. Lacking any real, plausible context whatsoever.

Perpetrated by those of no imagination, who never created anything of value whatsoever. and their toadies.

There are roughly 300,000,000 millions murdered through the use of athiest totalitarian socialist regimes. Under the despotic rule of names such as Pol Pot, Whore Chi Men, Mao (70 millions murdered), Stalin (“One murder is a tragedy, 1 millions murdered in a statistic), Lenin, Hitler, Castro, Chichescu, Castro, Chavez, Chirac, Blair, Mussolini, Wilson, FDR, Mufti of Jerusalem, Saddam, Bashir Assad, Gamal Nasser, Mullah Omar, Ayatollah KKKhomeini (he is (was) 1/2 scottish and 1/2 Indian, not Persian) and so on.

Some with a bullet to the back of the head, but the vast majority worked and starved to death.

American Indian tribes murdered each other, in centuries old revenge cycles for centuries. american Indian tribes continually allied themselves with European colonists with the intent of obliterating, or at lest severely harming their (other) rival Indian tribes: Even the Apache were terrified of the Comanche: the comanche would wait until the men left the village to hunt, and kill and steal everything in the village, and then eat the bodies of those they slaughtered, women and children. Noble savages. Yeah right…

the leftist paradigm is a nihilist, cult of death, with infant sacrifice as its sacrament. No wonder they have so much in common with other, superstitious cults of murder and death, and their proclivity for specious argument, and Sophistry.

How else to put themselves in charge, in power, in “control” of that which they did nothing, nothing to earn? And by doing so, merely con the weak and blitzkrieged into guilt and surrender of those things they worked honestly to gain.

I won’t apologise for European or United states heritage in the face of psychotic, pathological liars posing as “academics” with absolutely no scholarship under their belts, other than the trojan horse propagandikkk brainwashing ruse of european atheist marxism as their contribution

And 0 is a europeed’on, marxist oreo cookie. Raised on that Sheid, by europeon ideologist Frank Davis and others his white europeon grandparents brainwashed him with. And he throws them under the bus, or evokes their war service, when convenient, as the opportunistic coward he is.

“Brown” University academics can kiss my hind, and suck up all that europeon marxist death cult nihilism, since that’s where it all originates, in the first place.

Apr 14, 2009 - 1:23 pm 34. pub:

Our young people are going to destroy our country.

Apr 14, 2009 - 6:56 pm 35. Errol:

Another worthwhile read on the subject:

The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians‎
by Richard J. Chacon, David H. Dye (2007)

There’s a primer via Google Books.

Apr 18, 2009 - 12:22 pm 36. Becky:

I just finished reading a book about the history of various ancient north american native tribes that really opened my eyes. The book is titled, “Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten,” written by George Feldman. I must admit, I didn’t know our early pious settlers were head-hunters. Truly interesting information.

Apr 29, 2009 - 10:47 pm 37. Don:

Why do we define people and entities by their mistakes rather than their accomplishments?

Thomas Jefferson is no longer a Founding Father he is simply an evil slave owner.
Christopher Columbus no longer is the man who opened America to Western Civilization he is a American Indian Oppressor.
The United States is no longer the country that fought a war to abolish slavery, we are simply slave owners.

If that reasoning continues what will come next?

Obama is no longer the poster child for liberal radicals, he is a cokehead (he admitted to using cocaine)

How does that sit with you Anti-American revisionists?

Oct 9, 2009 - 8:02 am 38. Ruth Blue:

@ Don

I guess we should forget the death of millions in Germany at the hands of Hitler because he brought around economic change in Germany(post ww I) and under his leadership the Nazis brought forth the Autobahn, jet propulsion, and the Volkswagon.

Oct 17, 2009 - 7:24 am

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