History is not what happened but what we think happened. What the Watchdog was taught about American History, Native Americans and African-Americans in his youth was already being questioned in some circles and was in large part turned on its head with the publication of Howard Zinn’s highly influential and still popular “Peoples History of the United States.”
(As has been noted in the past, when the Watchdog was at Cal Berkeley lapping up what was being taught as Economic history and racking up high grades, students from South America were challenging the fairness of commodity pricing and likely earnings “C”s. The Watchdog went on to business; the students’ theories went on to win Noble Awards!)
Below is a quote, not from Zinn, but from a predecessor…who will be identified. “To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from these events [contact with European civilization] have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned…At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at the quality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the justice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another.”
The quote is from none other than the father of modern Economics, Adam Smith, 1723-90. Sometimes history takes a full circle!
