Americans and their allies reacted en masse on the
Atlantic Review 11 years ago after
Jörg Wolf reported from Germany on the anti-American caricatures of a national politician.
Peter Gauweiler of the
conservative CSU party in Bavaria is a member of parliament and even
member of the Bundestag committee on foreign relations. In an interview
with the Deutschlandfunk radio about Chancellor Merkel's visit to the US
and transatlantic relations, he called for some "tough talk among
friends."
He expressed his opposition to US foreign policy in
extremely drastic terms: After talking about the "Iraqization" of
Afghanistan and saying that Germany should not support US policy in
Southern Afghanistan, he opined:
"We must make clear to Americans -- or
to be more exact: to the current American government -- that not
everything is automatically terrorism and that they cannot exterminate
cultural aspirations on this Earth as they did with the Apaches and the
Sioux."
Lots of interesting reactions, from among others,
Jabba the Tutt and
Isolationist. Two of the latter's four points are as follows:
(2) Many Americans know that Navahoe Americans were used as radio
operators during the Pacific War, using their own difficult language in
the open and driving the Japanese crazy in their code breaking efforts.
Fewer people know that a company size unit of Comanches Americans was
landed on Utah Beach on or right after D-Day. These Comanches were also
used as radio operators and "wind talkers" against Germany just like the
Navahoes were used against Japan. It is nice to know that these
Comanche Americans helped bring Dr. Gauweiler's Germany to its knees.
(3) The statements above about the Comanche confrontation with the
Apache are true. In fact, so severe and relentless were the Comanches
against the Apache that the latter, at one point, sought frontier peace
with the Spanish in order to better defend themselves against the
Comanches.
Indeed, among the posters reacting to Herr Gauweiler's facile oversimplifications was
a No Pasarán blogger who had earlier expanded on
Isolationist's third point:
Concerning the Apaches, why would the members of that tribe live in the
arid rocks of Arizona rather than on the cooler and more fruitful plains
of the Midwest? Well, the main reason is that they were chased away
from their homeland, which was the plains. That's right, their land
was stolen. Whom by, you ask? Those terrible white Americans? (Tch, tch,
head shaking…) No, their land was seized by the Comanches.
Concerning extermination, meanwhile, if we can hardly find a single
survivor of the Erie nation, it is because they were annihilated.
Annihilated to the last woman and child. Likewise, the Hurons, massacred
to the very last tribe member. Warriors scalped, women killed, babies
with their brains smashed in. Whom by, you ask? Those genocidal
whites? No, by the Iroquois.
Those are historical facts liberals and Europeans don't know about and
do not like to focus on, because if they can't depict the Indians as
harmless, Buddhist-monk-like beings interested in nothing but peace and
harmony with the earth and with forces of nature, it becomes much harder
to depict (white) Americans as monstrous beings and their policies
(past as well as present) as of a criminal nature beyond rational
control.
You may have heard the sentence attributed to Sheridan, "The only good
Indian is a dead Indian." The truth is that type of sentence (or the
idea it contained) was much more often expressed by members of one
Indian tribe about another (e.g., The only good Sioux is a dead Sioux)
but that's something we must forget about in order to be able to shake
our heads mournfully at those clueless (white) Americans, past and
present, while congratulating ourselves incessantly for our top-notch
lucidity, our unrivaled love of peace, and our rationality the kind of
which the world has never seen.
Related: Apparently, one Latino protesting against Uncle Sam is
supposed to speak for all the other citizens of his country, if not the entire continent
