Further on the last post: conflict
Oct. 1st, 2010 01:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urocyonI posted the last one right before I went out the door earlier, and didn't have time to go into anything more serious. I'm mostly rambling here, and certainly not expecting any kind of answers. *wry smile*
While I do admire and have to get tickled at their style in dealing with the mining speculator Tubeuf, this was also an unfortunately good example of when trying to avert trouble through less-violent (wouldn't call it completely nonviolent) means just didn't work. A lot like later Oglala, Cheyenne, and Arapaho (that I remember offhand) hopes that repeatedly disrupting rail construction/transport, blockading roads, harrying wagon trains--just generally making things difficult enough--would make people give up the idea of overrunning their lands as too much trouble.
Or you can pretend to be a guide, lead Tubeuf around in circles, and leave him in a sinkhole to find his way home if he can. Meanwhile, your buddy in a different kind of costume pops out to scare him, and drive home the point that maybe it's time he goes home and stays there. If you can get a chuckle out of it later, even better.
Unfortunately, that kind of plan depends on the other person understanding what you're doing, behaving reasonably by your standards, and viewing you as a fellow human being. Otherwise things escalate so that you have to "[invent] decoy tricks to taunt, infuriate, and then lure soldiers or emigrants into well-laid traps" with more violent intent (Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, p. 133, this time by some of Red Cloud's allies). Note that by this point there are militia/soldiers/etc. to deal with. :-| And Tubeuf--and who knows how many Native people and militia--ended up getting killed. And we know how things continued to escalate, in both cases.
Yeah, it's a longtime quandary, and the main reason I am pessimistic about the results of applying John Mohawk's very reasonable observations on peacemaking from a standpoint of progressive pragmatism. While this is so much more reasonable than how states are choosing to deal with conflicts and terrorism now ("You have to negotiate with them; they are the people who are trying to kill you!"), it worked so well before with people who just didn't want to negotiate and find common ground, because ideology was more important. (When both sides are like that? Ouch.) This seems a bit overly optimistic from the historian who wrote Utopian Legacies, but what else is more likely to work?
A classic set of problems which nobody has found a good solution to thus far. Sometimes I really, really wish they had.
May as well laugh at those "black tricks" gotten over on someone with delusions of superiority. *shakes head*
While I do admire and have to get tickled at their style in dealing with the mining speculator Tubeuf, this was also an unfortunately good example of when trying to avert trouble through less-violent (wouldn't call it completely nonviolent) means just didn't work. A lot like later Oglala, Cheyenne, and Arapaho (that I remember offhand) hopes that repeatedly disrupting rail construction/transport, blockading roads, harrying wagon trains--just generally making things difficult enough--would make people give up the idea of overrunning their lands as too much trouble.
Or you can pretend to be a guide, lead Tubeuf around in circles, and leave him in a sinkhole to find his way home if he can. Meanwhile, your buddy in a different kind of costume pops out to scare him, and drive home the point that maybe it's time he goes home and stays there. If you can get a chuckle out of it later, even better.
Unfortunately, that kind of plan depends on the other person understanding what you're doing, behaving reasonably by your standards, and viewing you as a fellow human being. Otherwise things escalate so that you have to "[invent] decoy tricks to taunt, infuriate, and then lure soldiers or emigrants into well-laid traps" with more violent intent (Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, p. 133, this time by some of Red Cloud's allies). Note that by this point there are militia/soldiers/etc. to deal with. :-| And Tubeuf--and who knows how many Native people and militia--ended up getting killed. And we know how things continued to escalate, in both cases.
Yeah, it's a longtime quandary, and the main reason I am pessimistic about the results of applying John Mohawk's very reasonable observations on peacemaking from a standpoint of progressive pragmatism. While this is so much more reasonable than how states are choosing to deal with conflicts and terrorism now ("You have to negotiate with them; they are the people who are trying to kill you!"), it worked so well before with people who just didn't want to negotiate and find common ground, because ideology was more important. (When both sides are like that? Ouch.) This seems a bit overly optimistic from the historian who wrote Utopian Legacies, but what else is more likely to work?
A classic set of problems which nobody has found a good solution to thus far. Sometimes I really, really wish they had.
May as well laugh at those "black tricks" gotten over on someone with delusions of superiority. *shakes head*
