Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
02 April '10
As I reflect on how U.S. history is being distorted into seeming like one long hate crime, I recall how interesting it is if one really presents it in three dimensions rather than as a cartoon. It can even teach us about contemporary issues.
In the summer of 1876, the U.S. army sent an expedition to fight the Sioux who had left the reservation where they had been forced to live. One of the units sent in this task force was the Seventh Cavalry, commanded by the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer.
Instead of waiting for the other forces to join him outside the giant encampment whose warriors outnumbered his troops by at least six-to-one, Custer took about one-third of his men and charged. Custer quickly became even more famous for foolishly getting himself and five companies of his soldiers wiped out by the Sioux. This battle at the Little Big Horn river became known as Custer's Last Stand.
But that's not the point of this story.
Among his forces were a number of "Indian scouts," men like Hairy Moccasin, Yellow Robe, and Iron Hawk who knew the ways and languages of the enemy. They were smart enough to warn Custer not to attack. Not only did he ignore their good advice but--luckily for them--angered by their opposition, he sent them off with another part of his force.
On a discussion group about these events last year, someone wrote the kind of note typical of thinking today. Shame on those scouts, the anonymous correspondent virtually shouted, for betraying their Native American brothers and not fighting together against the white man in national solidarity.
Sort of sounds like the equivalent of Arab nationalist and Islamist arguments today in the Middle East.
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There is no such thing as blind group loyalty. Ironically enough, the Germans who were convinced the Aryans were superior to every one else, ignored this rule in eastern Europe and Russia by mistreating and turning against themselves peoples who have would willingly helped them to further their own interests and in doing so lost an empire. It was not through brute force that Alexander, Caesar, Cortes and Napoleon conquered an empire. You do need allies to run one and that is how historically empires existed for a long time even if force was the initial impulse behind their expansion. The notion that people think alike and act in a certain way was a determinist view common to both Nazi and post-modern Western thinking today. They don't and man has free will and can make his own choices in a very complex world.
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