Is This the Death of Europe?

[maxparrish]

Do you even read what you are responding to and then read what you wrote as a reply? I quoted where your own source impeached your original objection to my comment, showing that the Indian Tribes were outside the social compact - just as I pointed out. Kinda missed that part when you posted it, eh?

As far as "the woh-woh influence", that is a folkloric myth. Unfortunately Congress often passes ignorant proclamations, placating some identity group. I already canned this nonsense on the prior (or other) boards, citing academic journal articles that debunked this belief.

Yeah right. If the choice is between white supremacist "academy" over mainstream or IOW western(ie superior according to you) scholarship, I'll take the one unblinded by ideology.

That's the trouble with putting some quality of the producers of culture over their result; the essence is lost because it's become a secondary consideration.

Clearly you are untutored in American History, and it seems that you think that burping a tired liberal-multicultural chestnut is a form of sophisticated learning. Although amusing, I normally don't bother to use the scholar's hammer of overwhelming evidence and reason on a tiny gadfly...but as I have already done a fair amount of research on the subject I am feeling charitable.

Let's start with the Iroquois and North-Eastern tribes anthropologist Elisabeth Tooker:

Tooker, Elisabeth. “The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League” Ethnohistory, 35 (1988): 305-336.

A number of writers have suggested that the League of the Iroquois provided the model for the United States Constitution and the ideas embodied in it. A review of the evidence in the historical and ethnographic documents, however, offers virtually no support for this contention. Instead, these data only affirm that the Iroquois Confederacy rested on distinctive Indian principles...

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_democracy#Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas

Temple University professor of anthropology and an authority on the culture and history of the Northern Iroquois Elizabeth Tooker has reviewed these claims and concluded they are myth rather than fact. ...The relationship between the Iroquois League and the Constitution is based on a portion of a letter written by Benjamin Franklin and a speech by the Iroquois chief Canasatego in 1744. Tooker concluded that the documents only indicate that some groups of Iroquois and white settlers realized the advantages of a confederation, and that ultimately there is little evidence to support the idea that eighteenth century colonists were knowledgeable regarding the Iroquois system of governance. ...Tooker concludes that "...there is virtually no evidence that the framers borrowed from the Iroquois" and that the myth that this was the case is the result of exaggerations and misunderstandings of a claim made by Iroquois linguist and ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt after his death in 1937.[78]

Finally, a historian of early America of equal stature is Jack Rakove, who also debunked your mythical history:

http://hnn.us/articles/12974.html

...But what disappointed me about this piece is that it recapitulates the tired and dubious argument about the purported Iroquois influence on the Constitution, and the more general proposition that important elements of Euro-American democratic culture have origins in "the democratic, informal brashness of American Indian culture."

What's wrong with the Iroquois influence hypothesis? There are two principal and, I think, fatal objections to the idea that anything in the Constitution can be explained with reference to the precedents of the Haudenosaunee confederation.

The first is a simple evidentiary matter. The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois...

(second)... All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents: bicameralism, separation of powers, confederations, and the like. Even on the egalitarian side of the political ledger, 17th-century English society did give rise, after all, to the radical sentiments and practices we associate particularly with the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, the Levellers and the Putney debates, and the abolition of the House of Lords and the monatchy. And on this side of the water, New England colonists managed to set up town meetings before they had made much progress creating vocabularies of Indian words. The same can of course be said for the famous meeting of the Virginia assembly in 1619.

None of this is to deny that prolonged contact between the aboriginal and colonizing populations were important elements in the shaping of colonial society and culture. Whether those contacts left a significant political legacy, however, is a very different question.

Should you ACTUALLY be interested in Constitutional History and the ideological influences I suggest you read Bernard Bailyn's "The ideological Origins of the American Revolution" and just about any book by Gordon Wood.

In the meantime, don't rely on some left-wing mimic of disinformation to tell you "the truth" about history...rely on real scholars in the fields of constitutional, social, and cultural history

 

[Ford]

Clearly you are untutored in American History...

Says the guy who claims that White Europeans are the "native" Americans.

 

[bilby]

Four hundred rioters, with only fourteen injuries?

I've seen worse at a Leeds-Millwall match at Elland Road.

If you stick people in refugee camps, then occasionally they will get sufficiently bored and uncomfortable to start brawling.

I doubt you could find any comparable situation in history that was better behaved than this. Fights of much greater magnitude and frequency were notorious amongst Irish steerage passengers migrating to America in the 1800s.

This is a non-story.

If the people of Leeds and Millwall rioted because of different religious beliefs and cultures, my suggestion to Germany is to not import them. The history of Northern Ireland for that matter, should not be someone's ideal.

The problem with Millwall is that no one likes them, but they don't care.

People fight over all kinds of stuff. The fight you are making a big fuss about is of no real importance, except that you are desperate for something that supports your prejudices.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Clearly you are untutored in American History, and it seems that you think that burping a tired liberal-multicultural chestnut is a form of sophisticated learning. Although amusing, I normally don't bother to use the scholar's hammer of overwhelming evidence and reason on a tiny gadfly...but as I have already done a fair amount of research on the subject I am feeling charitable.

If a distorted white supremacist view is what you call tutored, then yes I'm unhappily untutored.

Let's start with the Iroquois and North-Eastern tribes anthropologist Elisabeth Tooker:

Tooker, Elisabeth. “The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League” Ethnohistory, 35 (1988): 305-336.

A number of writers have suggested that the League of the Iroquois provided the model for the United States Constitution and the ideas embodied in it. A review of the evidence in the historical and ethnographic documents, however, offers virtually no support for this contention. Instead, these data only affirm that the Iroquois Confederacy rested on distinctive Indian principles...

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_democracy#Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas

Temple University professor of anthropology and an authority on the culture and history of the Northern Iroquois Elizabeth Tooker has reviewed these claims and concluded they are myth rather than fact. ...The relationship between the Iroquois League and the Constitution is based on a portion of a letter written by Benjamin Franklin and a speech by the Iroquois chief Canasatego in 1744. Tooker concluded that the documents only indicate that some groups of Iroquois and white settlers realized the advantages of a confederation, and that ultimately there is little evidence to support the idea that eighteenth century colonists were knowledgeable regarding the Iroquois system of governance. ...Tooker concludes that "...there is virtually no evidence that the framers borrowed from the Iroquois" and that the myth that this was the case is the result of exaggerations and misunderstandings of a claim made by Iroquois linguist and ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt after his death in 1937.[78]

Finally, a historian of early America of equal stature is Jack Rakove, who also debunked your mythical history:

http://hnn.us/articles/12974.html

...But what disappointed me about this piece is that it recapitulates the tired and dubious argument about the purported Iroquois influence on the Constitution, and the more general proposition that important elements of Euro-American democratic culture have origins in "the democratic, informal brashness of American Indian culture."

What's wrong with the Iroquois influence hypothesis? There are two principal and, I think, fatal objections to the idea that anything in the Constitution can be explained with reference to the precedents of the Haudenosaunee confederation.

The first is a simple evidentiary matter. The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois...

(second)... All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents: bicameralism, separation of powers, confederations, and the like. Even on the egalitarian side of the political ledger, 17th-century English society did give rise, after all, to the radical sentiments and practices we associate particularly with the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, the Levellers and the Putney debates, and the abolition of the House of Lords and the monatchy. And on this side of the water, New England colonists managed to set up town meetings before they had made much progress creating vocabularies of Indian words. The same can of course be said for the famous meeting of the Virginia assembly in 1619.

None of this is to deny that prolonged contact between the aboriginal and colonizing populations were important elements in the shaping of colonial society and culture. Whether those contacts left a significant political legacy, however, is a very different question.

Should you ACTUALLY be interested in Constitutional History and the ideological influences I suggest you read Bernard Bailyn's "The ideological Origins of the American Revolution" and just about any book by Gordon Wood.

In the meantime, don't rely on some left-wing mimic of disinformation to tell you "the truth" about history...rely on real scholars in the fields of constitutional, social, and cultural history

Nothing is debunked, as these positions are irrelevant. No one here is claiming the Iroquois constitution as a model for the US constitution. The point is Iroquois and other NA societies influenced early political American thought, which is indisputable. I thought I was supposed to be the moonbat here, but you've morphed a narrow academic question into a blanket denial. Evidence of NA thought is all over the writings of the founders.

Also, I suggest toning down the bombast. If you are a scholar immersed in and intimately familiar with these issues, a peer, then you're allowed to airily dismiss me, and talk up your "hammer". But you're a forum poster appealing to authority. Get over yourself.