Democracy and Indians

Native American Series

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

Native American ideas may be partly responsible for our democratic institutions. Democracy is an example of syncretism, combining ideas from Europe and Native America. Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Through 150 years of colonial contact, the Iroquois League stood before the colonies as an object lesson in how to govern a large domain democratically.

American Indians are directly or indirectly responsible for the public-meeting tradition, free speech, democracy, and all those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights. Without the Native example, do you really believe that all those ideas would have found birth among a people who had spent a millennium butchering other people because of intolerance of questions of religion?

For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era cartoonists used images of Indians to represent the colonies against Britain. Virginia’s patriot rifle companies wore Indian clothes and moccasins as they fought the redcoats. When colonists took actions to oppose unjust authority, as in the Boston Tea Party, they chose to dress as Indians, not to blame Indians for the demonstrations, but to appropriate a symbol identified with liberty.

Test Pattern Indian – Wikipedia Link

Differences of an Economic Vision

Whiskey Rebellion Series

The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hodgeland, 2006, Excerpts

The whiskey rebels weren't against paying taxes. They were against what they called unequal taxation, which redistributed wealth to a few holders of federal bonds and kept small farms and businesses commercially paralyzed. Farmers and artisans, facing daily anxiety over debt foreclosure and tax imprisonment, feared becoming landless laborers, their businesses bought cheaply by the very men in whose mills and factories they would then be forced to toil. They saw resisting the whiskey tax as a last, desperate hope for justice in a decades-long fight over economic inequality.

Some of the whiskey rebels envisioned stranding the seaboard cities, vile pits of unrestrained greed, on the far side of the Appalachian ridge and leaving the coast a vestige. Some imagined a new west, spiritually redeemed, with perfect democratic and economic justice: small farmers, artisans, and laborers would thrive, while bankers, big landowners, and lawyers would be closely regulated, even suppressed. Believing they could wrest their country back from frontier merchants and creditors, the rebels wanted to banish big businessmen as traitors to the region even while fending off the distant federal government in all its growing might.

Alexander Hamilton and his allies saw enforcing the whiskey tax as a way of resolving that fight in favor of a moneyed class with the power to spur industrial progress. 

Helmand Province: World’s Leading Opium Producer

Opium Series

Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters, 2009, Excerpts

Helmand Province is about the size of West Virginia. If it were a separate country, it would the world’s leading opium producer, with the rest of Afghanistan in second place. It’s also where links between the Taliban and the opium trade are strongest.

Poppy cultivation has been increasingly concentrated in southern provinces where the insurgency holds sway, but command and control of the southern Afghanistan drug trade is mainly located in Pakistan. Opium is processed into morphine base or heroin in unstable border areas. Profits from the southern drug trade are laundered between Quetta and Dubai, often ending up in western banking institutions.

Major campaigns to wean Helmand’s farmers off of poppy have been expensive failures. Helmand receives more U.S. aid than any other Afghan province. Much of the money is being spent on large infrastructure projects. More that $200 million in U.S. and British funding was designated for Helmand in 2008, a year when poppy output there still increased by 45 percent.

In 2008, Afghanistan produced about twice the amount of opium that the world’s addicts smoke, eat, or shoot for several years now. So where is all that extra dope? UN official s estimate the Taliban and the smugglers they work with have stockpiled as much as 8,000 tons of opium – enough to supply the world’s heroin addicts for two years.

Afghanistan suicide blasts 'kill 18' in Herat, Helmand

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17660785

10 Apr 2012

In the first Helmand attack, four policemen were killed when three suicide bombers attacked a police compound in Musa Qala district. Two of them detonated explosive belts strapped to their bodies, while a third attacker was shot by police. Helmand police and intelligence officials told the BBC that the Taliban were attacking the security forces after failing to fulfill a promise to help local farmers prevent a poppy eradication program currently under way in the province. Helmand is one of the most volatile provinces of Afghanistan, frequently witnessing attacks by insurgents.

US opens 'major Afghan offensive'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8129789.stm

02 Jul 2009

The US army says it has launched a major offensive against the Taliban in south Afghanistan's Helmand province. The US military says about 4,000 marines as well as 650 Afghan troops are involved, supported by Nato planes. It is the first such large-scale operation since US President Barack Obama authorized the deployment of 17,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan, as part of a new strategy for winning the conflict. Many of them are being redeployed from operations in Iraq, to help with training Afghan security forces and to tackle the insurgency.

The operation - codenamed Khanjar or Strike of the Sword - began when units moved into the Helmand river valley in the early hours of Thursday. Helicopters and heavy transport vehicles carried out the advance, with Nato planes providing air cover. UK-led forces in Helmand launched their own operation to combat the Taliban insurgency last week, in what the Ministry of Defense described as one of the largest air operations in modern times. Thousands of British forces under Nato command have been fighting the Taliban in Helmand since 2006.