http://www.bluecorncomics.com/2009/12/educating-tony-about-genocide.htm

MUSLIM
And The Foolishness Of The Fight

I’ll eat no swine,
I’ll drink no wine,
I’m a Muslim

I’ll fly your planes into your walls,
I’ll show you that we too have balls.
I’m a Muslim.

I am the young man with a cause,
Exploding without pause.
I’m a Muslim.

I’m as stupid as are you,
Waving flag red white and blue,
I’m a Muslim.

Your boys kill people in Baghdad,
I kill myself because I’m sad.
I’m a Muslim.

I am as stupid as you,
And until our lives our through,
I’ll be Muslim.

Shoot me now or I’ll shoot you,
It will make no sense till you
See that I’m Muslim.

My fathers have tought me to be tough,
Yours have made you tough enough.
You are Muslim.

We’ll kill each other a little more,
We’ll settle each and every score,
Because we’re Muslims.

Allah will love me for my fight,
Your God will love you for the might
You shower down into our night
Of Shock And Awe into the sight
Of children who cower ‘neath the plight
Of being Muslim.

We are no different, you and I,
Both have guns, both easily die,
Because we’re Muslim.

When the fuck will fathers learn
There is no reason more to burn,
Our people
‘Cause they’re Muslim?

You are dying, so are we,
It is time that both we see
The Infidel is you and me,
And we’re both Muslims.

Ed Gruszecki

Walt’s ‘Blades Of Grass’ are, these days, too often split by bullets hurling. It is nice to be a fan of the old Poets. It is nice to be an old poet (which I am). But is terrible to understand how war continues on, and for so supercillious a reason as religious nonsense.
Anyway, those were the thoughts on my mind this morning. I thought I’d share them with you. The aforementioned poem is only ‘broadly’ copyrighted (under a body of work), but not in any exclusivity, so you can do whatever you want with it (should you choose).
Good night, O Pioneer.

About your statement, “Jimbo, if that were true, then how come people still say they’re settling in Ohio or NYC? ”

No one is settling in Ohio. We are just passing through and end up staying for longer then we expected.

He served as a combat nurse in the Civil War. Now before you get your dander up, consider the working conditions in that place and time period. We cannot imagine the horror, blood, stench, and death of a Civil War medical tent. It would take a man with nerves of steel to both treat the injured solders and keep their sanity the whole time. Now some would argue that a real man’s place is on the battlefield. I say that one of the essential characters of a real man is to stand by his principles. A conscientious objector, Whitman served his country without violence. Sometimes it takes strength not to fight.

Lastly, let’s consider his patriotism. His service in the crucible of war only strengthened his love of country. We need poets to express and preserve the values and ideas that shape us as a culture, and Whitman was the poet our country needed at the time. His verses speak of independence, manly fellowship, and reverence for nature. That’s manly in my book. Who cares if he was gay?

United States of America
Authors such as the Holocaust expert David Cesarani have argued that the government and policies of the United States of America against certain indigenous peoples constituted genocide. Cesarani states that “in terms of the sheer numbers killed, the Native American Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust”.[27] He quotes David E. Stannard, author of American Holocaust,[28] who speaks of the “genocidal and racist horrors against the indigenous peoples that have been and are being perpetrated by many nations in the Western Hemisphere, including the United States …”[29] Michno estimates 21,586 dead, wounded, and captured civilians and soldiers for the period of 1850–1890 alone.[30]

In God, Greed, and Genocide: The Holocaust Through the Centuries, Grenke quotes Chalk and Jonassohn with regards to the Cherokee Trail of Tears that “an act like the Cherokee deportation would almost certainly be considered an act of genocide today”.[31] The Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the Trail of Tears. About 17,000 Cherokees — along with approximately 2,000 black slaves owned by Cherokees — were removed from their homes.[32] The number of people who died as a result of the Trail of Tears has been variously estimated. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who made the journey with one party, estimated 4,000 deaths.[33]

“The Aboriginal notion of progress was not based upon the superiority and exploitation of nature, as is the European notion, but was based on the equality of people.”

I’m not sure what kind of equality you’re referencing, but although tribes were largely matriarchal, women were seen as inferior. They also believed that others tribes were inferior. If you are talking about economic equality, than that is true.

As far as not exploiting nature, that is a romantic myth. Native Americans exploited nature to the extent that their technology allowed. They often hunted and farmed in ways that were wasteful.
http://www.perc.org/articles/article651.php

“This is a euphemism for genocide. By subdued you may mean that Natives were systematically murdered through disease, war, and starvation for their land. It is well known that disease was used to facilitate Native population decline – in the form of contaminated blankets and other trade items.”

You’re really overreaching here. Genocide is a term easy to throw around to pump up your point, but it’s really not appropriate here. You say the Indians were “systematically murdered,” but by far the thing that killed the natives the most was the diseases that they contracted when the Europeans arrived. These diseases were not spread will ill intent. If I have swine flu and I give it to someone else and they die, did I murder them? I hope not! The bit about the Indians being given blankets infected with smallpox is mostly myth. There is only a single documented case of this tactic even being discussed, there is no evidence that it was ever carried out, and it was discussed by a British general as a war tactic.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1088/did-whites-ever-give-native-americans-blankets-infected-with-smallpox
http://www.thefurtrapper.com/indian_smallpox.htm

There was never any systematic policy in place to wipe the Native Americans out. Disease is not a system-it just happened. War was not waged against the Indian to kill him, but simply to move him off his land (still unconscionable, but not genocide), and starvation (the killing of buffalo) was also not used to kill the Indians but to force them onto reservations. Again, there was never a system put in place to commit genocide against Indians. Most of the Indian policies were motivated by a desire for land, but also out of a misplaced belief that assimilating the Indians through reservation life and schools was the best thing for that culture. It’s easy to look back now and see how wrong-headed these ideas were, but they were not attempts to murder the Indians.

Finally the premise of your whole argument is ultimately flawed. You seek to see virtue in the NA culture because they were equal, and more gentle to the environment, and so on. But this is true of every people before they had writing and more efficient agriculture. The African people, the Caucasian people, every pre-historical tribe. But lived like that not from choice, but from a lack of an alternative. They lacked written language which kept them from record keeping, which kept them from property ownership, which kept them from a formal economy and so on. There is no virtue where there is no choice.

Relativism is silly-some cultures are superior to other cultures. A superior culture came to this land and the results were incredibly unfortunate. But it also brought progress. We can sing the praises of a tribal culture all day long, but no one wants to go back and live like that. Like I said earlier, we wouldn’t be having this argument online if the white man hadn’t come and taken over. The Indians were a warring people, who went to battle against one another. If our roles had been reversed, they would have assuredly conquered us.

It’s important to look beyond what you read from Howard Zinn or what your college professor told you to get a full understanding of history.

When Europeans first arrived in America, they were given welfare in the form of food and local knowledge about how to survive scurvy, winters, etc.
The vast majority of Native tribes were not hunter gatherers as you see it. Native Americans settlements were primarily based on Agriculture, growing: squash, cotton, tobacco, corn and beans. Row planting, and crop rotation were widely used.
In southern parts of the US complex canals systems hundreds of miles in length were built to provide irrigation to crops in the desert. Settlements were based around wells.
Native Americans did in fact have towns, the largest consisting of between 8-40 thousand residents, Cahokia was the largest American urban area until 1800.
Native Americans were advanced in preventative medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and jewelry design.
The Aboriginal notion of progress was not based upon the superiority and exploitation of nature, as is the European notion, but was based on the equality of people.
This does not sound very primitive to me.
The only thing I find primitive is your statement: “See them for what they were – a technologically inferior people who were subdued and assimilated as happens when any advanced culture encounters a lesser one”
This is a euphemism for genocide. By subdued you may mean that Natives were systematically murdered through disease, war, and starvation for their land. It is well known that disease was used to facilitate Native population decline – in the form of contaminated blankets and other trade items. The buffalo were exterminated in an effort to starve Natives into signing treaties. Finally those who would not sign treaties were invaded by the army.
Assimilation was the final strategy to eliminate Native culture in America, using Christian boarding schools. Fortunately this was unsuccessful, 2.7 million Natives live in America, but this is a far cry from the 8-112 million pre contact population.

There is no romanticization here, and the only revisionism are the myths which you insist on continuing.

Although I’m skeptical of Noble Savage claims, I’m equally dubious of those who think the value of a people or culture can be measured by technology or trinkets, or those who conflate what they’ve seen in Pocahontas with the entirety of Mesoamerican civilization. As for revisionism and not glorifying the past, let us not forget that when Europeans arrived, Europeans were still pooping in streets.

Indigenous Americans were massacred by a more powerful foe, as has happened countless times in history. To glorify that is not “truth”, it is barbarism.