[snip]You say potaytoe and I say potahtoe. You say tomaytoe and I say Tomahtoe. Lets call the whole thing off.
Sorry I don't have time to do this more than cursorily but there is a good book that I've been reading that begins to take over the intellectual territory that has been claimed unjustly. Its called "American Indian Contributions to the World, 15,000 years of Inventions and Innovations."
Historically, it does not matter if a Syrian anchorite monk discovered
quantum physics in 400CE in his cave before dying without telling anybody
about it ("it" referring both to his cultural discovery and his
personal death).Whatever the native Americans discovered was largely erased from history by the Conquistadoers and their follow on'ers....
*On the other hand*! The Japanese show that there can be a different outcome -- in fortunate circumstances -- between the Dewey and the ducks. Maybe the Indians tried. The Roanoke Colony did not exactly succeed in Britifying the Carolinas. I think Pearl Harbor stands as the one case where a pre-capitalist culture managed to get its act together and really stand up to the Imperialist Europeans in their ironclads. And Japan started from a less advanced place than the Chinese or the Ottomans, if not the XXtecs.
Imagine if the Incas had been able to make a substantive attack on Cadiz (or wherever)? The heads of British royals rolling down the side of Teotihuacan?
Did someone mention "911"?
Are there any other examples?
Europe can justify itself only by disowning itself as ethnically European, and identifying with the idea of universality (which is very different from totality!) that, somehow or other, emerged in Ionia ca. 600 BCE. If it emerged elsewhere, there may be others who are similarly charged.
If not us, who?
If not now, when?
(--Poster on wall at Daisen-in Temple, Kyoto --
but note the ceramic tanukis in the garden!)\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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