Anyone who tends to hold a diminished view of the capacity that greed holds to distort morality need only look to the history of the American continent.  And I mean way back,  before the 1400’s when the Europeans arrived.  I’m eyeing a book called 1491,  which is an archeological/sociological survey of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus,  and it promises to unveil new findings about the “civilizations” that existed long before the Europeans brought their brand to the continent. 

When one reads the accounts of the activities of the United States government AFTER 1776 (since before then there obviously wasn’t a US government),  the language changed but the methods changed little.  The history of “Indian removal” was one of constant broken promises,  and a constant stream of the use of certain incidents to “manufacture consent” for the continued forceful evacuation of who knows how many Natives of the Americas.

Howard Zinn’s chapter on the “Move Westward” is entitled “As Long As the Grass Grows or Water Runs”, calling down the wording of the “treaties” that were reneged again and again,  each time promising that the “new” treaty will be the final “adjustment”.  Every time ,  the lust for land and gold and “progress” wins out and brings a stream of “adjustments” further compressing the “land that will be yours forever” into smaller and smaller parcels and more restrictive and impoverished conditions.

Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine describes the 20th and 21st century continuances of that theme,  based on economic theories of “free market”.  Bush’s Iraq is a fitting representative of the chaos that is experienced by the victims of such greed,  which is portrayed to the citizens of the perpetrating governments (aka corporate conglomerates) as “spreading freedom”.

I am presently reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, written in 1972 by a white Arkansas male librarian,  Dee Brown.  I watched the DVD from the HBO production,  which really just covered the last couple of chapters (pages 415-445).  The DVD also expanded into other sources to fill in the story of the Wounded Knee massacre,  like adding the Charles Eastman story,  which Brown did not include.