I was very excited to come home for Thanksgiving this past weekend. It is not one of my favorite holidays (I enjoy the thought behind it, but I cannot get past the country’s past treatment of the Native Americans and how many people choose to gloss over these events) but I was eager to go home to visit my family and friends.
The discussions in class, during the very appropriate time of the week before Thanksgiving, really articulated different issues I have with the idea of conquest and with the founding of America. However, there was one issue that Todorov brought up in “The Conquest of America” and that we discussed in class that I had never considered. What is the link between understanding and elimination? Is understanding necessary to elimination? Is elimination a natural effect of understanding?
These are very hard concepts to wrestle with. It is hard to disagree with the notion that understanding has a very important role to play in the elimination of a group. It undeniably helped Cortes conquer the Aztecs. This idea has also played out in different genocides throughout time, too, though sometimes in different ways. The Holocaust is one of the more recent and probably the most-often talked about genocide in history, and it probably would not have happened if Adolf Hitler did not have understanding. However, his was not understanding of the people he targeted and ordered to be murdered. This understanding was of the people he manipulated into his way of thinking. Understanding and elimination might have a connection, perhaps in more ways than one.
No comments:
Post a Comment