How America’s Foundation was Built on Propaganda

We may have seperated from the British Empire but we clearly inherited their ways, lol

He didn't have blacks or native Americans in mind? He didn't have whites or Gypsies in mind.

Overstated. Most pilgrims were democratic upon arrival (e.g. Mayflower Compact) and ultimately formed 13 locally democratic colonies. The Iroquois may have influenced Benjamin Franklin to unite the colonies, but ultimately it was the existing democratic structure of the 13 colonies, the history of the Roman Republic, the Baron's Revolt (Magna Carta), the Enlightenment and tensions with King George III that cemented the Founding Father's commitment to democracy. And 4:28 is false, Jefferson's original draft contained a clause denouncing the slave trade, but was removed for political reasons.

I always wondered why the Crow tribe helped the US to fight the Sioux. But then I found out it was because for the Crow, it was the Sioux who were the imperial colonizers who invaded and took their land and drove them out. The Black Hills were Crow lands, sacred to them, that the Sioux came in and took from them. The Sioux attacked, killed lost of Crow, drove them out, took their land for themselves, and colonized it. The Sioux once came upon a large group of Pawnee women and children who were butchering the buffalo the Pawnee men had killed in the big yearly hunt. The Sioux attacked, killing everyone they could. Then they took all the meat and the horses and went home and had a big celebration. Their goal was to kill all the Pawnee; their goal was genocide. The result of this attack and all the others was the Pawnee fled their land. These kinds of things were as common with Native American groups as they were with Europeans or any other peoples in the world. All of us human beings have a dirty history. And all of us have great things we have contributed or can contribute to the world as a whole.

One of the odd things about what most Americans know about Native Americans is that the tribes we are most familiar with, such as the Iriquios, the Cherokee, the Sioux, the Comanche, are well known because they all established empires. They all attacked neighboring tribes, took their land, drove them out, killed them off, and/or forced these other tribes to give up their own cultures and tribal identities and assimilate into the conquerors culture and tribe by force. And for
Native American tribes, killing men, women, and children of other tribes in attacks was considered normal. The behavior of European invaders was not seen as bad in what they were doing, as Native American tribes did the same thing, but rather in that they were doing it to their tribe. Luckily, we've all come to see that colonizing, conquering, ethnic cleansing, genocide, slavery, forced assimilation, is wrong not only when it it done to "us", but when it is done to anyone. All of us human beings have done horrible things in the name of tribe, race, religion, nation. It's about time we stop it.

It's possible their form of govt had some influence on the formation of the US govt, though there is little evidence for this. Benjamin Franklin did comment on the confederacy, saying that if the Iroquois can do it, then the colonies should be able to form a union, a confederacy. His comment was not on any democratic or representative elements. On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that the history of England, including the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, where they killed the King to establish Parliament as the main power that controlled the power of the purse, etc., are the inspirations for US govt. There's a bit of propaganda in most people not knowing more about that, though. The idea was to make England seem like a tyrannical monarchy with an all powerful king, rather than a constitutional monarchy where much of the power rested in the Parliament, whose members were elected. The founding fathers were quite aware of the English precedents for the ideas of freedom, representative govt, checks and balances, a limited executive, the legislature controlling taxation. etc.

The fact is native Americans where not the first people living there and there is oral stories by real native American elders who State they slaughtered a whole people not even spared the babies and farm animals. Total genocide of a group that was according to them their before they even came to America. And there's is archeological evidence of a group of people that were there before them that suddenly disappeared. The fact that it is agreed by the scientific community that native Americans came from a war like group of people who from some evidence started a war and ended up losing so had to migrate away.

Down with the Burger-reich.
Free Turtle Island.

Another non-white telling us to hate ourselves. We are fully aware of how we settled land, secured independence from an empire, tamed a vast wilderness, conquered an entire continent, countered and subjugated foreign races and built a global superpower. We’re through listening to you guys.

Aaaaaand this history is now repeating itself in Palestine using the exact same playbook, classic colonial ideology

There is a reason why the Nazis saw America as a blueprint for genocide

Thank you PBS

"I bet you didnt learn this in school." No, I did. Not always in great detail, but I did.

Ayeeee PBS lets goooooo

😮The cruel irony, is the land was stolen, and now, through tribal casinos they r buying their land back. 😊

Not indigenous, lifelong advocate for landback and indigenous sovereignty though, huge W for PBS for posting this instead of some freedomslop propaganda. The genocide is still happening!

I guess I had I good teacher of history but I was actually taught all of this and it’s disgusting. I am hoping we can be better but I’m not going to hold my breath.

This is a brutal anachronistic judgment.

Land was not stolen – it was conquered – get over it.

Lands have been conquered since time immemorial.

If anything, the indegenous peoples still having any land apportioned with their ways of life allowed to persist is entirely abnormal and an extreme gesture given the standards of the past.

No reparations are owed to anyone anywhere.

However indegenous people are citizens – and do deserve the same preferential treatment as any citizen.

Rather than allowing a non stop inflow of foreign net consumers of the tax base – we should be diverting and using our tax spending to elevate prosperity to our citizens including those indegenous peoples who are our fellow citizens

Instead of inventing hyper specific out of context judgements of our past to sew hatred of our nation – we should focus on today and the future.

@pbsorigins will you please do an episode about how settlers forced Indigenous women & children into prostitution as yet another way of enriching themselves at our expense? It's widely known that we were murdered and raped, but very few people know how widespread sexual slavery has been, or how it led to the jurisdictional dead-zone in Indian Country that makes MMIWG2S such an ongoing issue. It's one thing to steal land, resources and labor, but I think it might change things a bit if people knew their ancestors either paid for the chance to rape Native women/girls, made money off of it or both. It would also be fascinating to see a rough calculation for all of the theft from Europeans; I've long believed that every country would go bankrupt if they had to repatriate their crown jewels and compensate global communities for the value of everything they stole during colonization (including the labor)