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Originally Posted by MarieMarie
He is certainly not denying a genocide and hardly migitating responsibility.
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No, he is. His ultimate point is that bad things happen in history but you can't let that rule your perception of the present. This has been the general view in my country of the American/Native American "problem" for a very long time and it is fostered by a significant majority of citizens from politicians to individual citizens to make it okay to sit on this land and not feel guilty.
The difference between this and the Holocaust is that the Holocaust is seen by the entire world as being a depraved, horrifying thing that can only be denied by fringe crazy people, and so the only people who deny it are fringe crazy people. But in America it's totally seen as reasonable to whitewash our history without being a fringe crazy so there isn't the same immediate condemnation of anyone who says "You know it wasn't as bad as they say." It's the same difference between being in a cult vs. being a Catholic. Both might believe in nonsense but the public perception makes being a Catholic totally reasonable.
And for it to be acceptable to the public it can't be as hardline as pure Holocaust denial. There has to be room for accepting that yes
this thing happened and
that is bad, but accepting
this and
that with "reason and nuance" allows for reason and nuance to let genocide slide in under the door unremarked. That is what Ant is doing.
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It's true that I might be naive about this as a European, but keep in mind that you have the opposite problem as an American: you might have heard so much of the actual genocide denial **** that it triggers a response.
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Not really. A few decades ago it was totally acceptable to have Westerns showing Injun savages being put down by heroic cowboys. Now we just don't have those movies but we also don't have movies about what we did to them cause we don't like to talk about it. The best we have is mother****ing Dances with Wolves where we fetishize Injuns with a white savior to show how we can all be friends if you ignore how it all turns out in the end.
Americans are absolutely not trained by any political or cultural narrative to be triggered by Native American genocide. We're trained to just ignore it. If I went out and asked a hundred people on the street about their thoughts on Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears I'd probably be greeted with 95 people asking me what Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears are.