Where I Differ From David Horowitz

David Horowitz has more compassion than I do. I actually expect that. He is Jewish. I'm 'heathen.' Yes, he comes from a communist background, and that ideology involves a forced equality. Yet, the Jewish person I think naturally has more advanced capacities of understanding, and, in a way, he is the same person, former liberal (communist) or present conservative. He is larger than any ideology. He cares about people. All people.

Therefore, I am particularly troubled by yesterday's Columbus articles, which indulge in hurtful, degrading remarks about American Indians. (See Oct.14 BadEagle Journal entry). These remarks obviously are meant to assuage or remove any remorse or guilt non-Indian people feel toward Indians. If Indians were so ungodly, were such hrrible, filthy, rotten animals, it can only be the mercy and God, through Columbus and the Europeans, that destroyed such evil Indian life. (Interesting that yesterdays authors, Sabia and Berkowitz, don't represent the White Anglo Saxon Protestant ethnicity, though they are obviously cultural Americans.)

This rhetoric, to degrade Indians so as to feel less guilty about history, is certainly not helpful to Indians, but also not necessary, and probably not really useful to white America. Only true Christians have reasonable motive for such thought. But even the Christian motive to change people is never to involve force or coercion. And that is exactly what happened to Indians. It was the inevitable course of history. Gen. George Armstrong Custer said civilization was like a locomotive. It could not be stopped. He felt regret for what it did to Indians.

I think it is better to leave the American story as a tragedy for Indians, and a triumph for White Anglo Saxon Protestants. I think there was a tremendous role Indians played in the shaping of America, both politically and even psychologically, but, I don't see the point in any rhetoric that tries to degrade one people to exalt, or even cleanse another.

I personally want Indian people to understand our Indianness as a fundamental factor in the creation of America's national identity. I want Indians to feel profound ownership of that, in positive ways. The Indian warrior image, so beloved by America, is just one example of our Indian influence.

Last month, when OU's conservative Fountainhead newspaper published a reparations joke, saying that if white people pay reparations today, they should each get a slave, David Horowitz was offended. He was contacted by myself and the paper, and he strongly condemned it as hurtful and not helpful. He even called for an apology.

I should do the same for the statements made in FrontPage on Columbus Day.
However, I won't. Rather, I simply learn a lesson. Even someone as profoundly committed to 'people improvement' as David Horowitz behaves differently toward the Indian. Why? Indians are different. Indians love who we are. We don't want to be like anyone else. We want to preserve ourselves and our ways. We don't want to assimilate. We don't want to be "equal" to other people. Non-Indians simply cannot understand that. I'm hoping Mr. Horowitz can come to understand that.

I'm not asking for sympathy, or that white people should feel guilty. I know Indians must take responsibility for ourselves. I advocate that. But I must object to any rhetorical dramatization of our miseries and failures, presently or historically. This is certainly not helpful to Indians, and I doubt that such indulgence is all that restorative to the conscience of non-Indians.

Posted by David Yeagley at October 15, 2002 09:40 AM