The UmBlog

In the early 1600's religious separatists fled their country from fear of persecution. The location was known to other explorers, but an epidemic had left the native population decimated and weak. The immigrants considered the epidemic and the stores of food left behind as God's blessing. However, they suffered terribly adjusting to the new world, nearly half of them died. The indigenous people had mercy on them and helped those remaining. Other immigrants came and joined the struggling outpost. They made treaties with the people who owned the land and cared for it for hundreds of generations. Then they violated those treaties, over and over and over. Not one treaty was kept. Natives were captured and sold into slavery in the sub-tropics where they died. Since they were no good as agricultural slaves, african slaves were imported. The natives were continually pushed out of their land, even the ones who converted to the immigrant religion. Natives were promised an entire ter...

World War 2 was started by agressive nations motivated in part by racial supremacy. Hitler told Germans and Austrians that they were the superior race of Aryans. He also used the European Jewish population as a scapegoat for all the ills they had brought on themselves when they lost WW1. The Japanese also considered themselves a superior race and saw a distinction between themselves and all other Asian people in China, Korea, and the Pacific islands. In Japan, anyone not Japanese was sub-human. In central Germany, anyone not "Aryan" was sub-human as well. The United States sent to the slaughter nearly 300,000 Americans to defeat these racist ideologies. Ironically, the United States had its own racist ideologies to defeat within. Eighty years prior to WW2, over 200,000 Americans died in conflict over this very issue in the Civil War. Before and after that war, the US used genocidal means to eradicate it's own aboriginal population. A footnote in American history Hitle...

Bible translation is not simply replacing a hebrew, aramaic, or greek word for an equivalent in the receiver language. Take for example the greek New Testament word, "agape". In modern English translations it is translated to the word "love." In Jacobian England, the translators of the King James Bible chose "charity." I think we Americans might need to go back to the KJV word. As many evangelicals know, ancient Greek has at least 4 words  that could be translated into "love". Agape is the word given special emphasis by the New Testament writers. But when we Americans think "love" we water it down. But when we hear "charity" we are forced to think about personal expense, compassion for one in need, generosity, withheld judgment, as well as love. Charity can also remind us of being lied to, of turning the other cheek when slapped, of blessing those who are our enemies, and of taking risks that sometimes turn out poorly. The t...

As the Guardian reports , Turkey has recalled its ambassador from Berlin after German MPs approved a motion describing the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a century ago as genocide – a decision that the Turkish president said would “seriously affect” relations between the two countries.  Those whose families were traumatized by Turkey's actions are grateful for the acknowledgment of their suffering. Turkey's offense over this acknowledgment is so notorious there are even several wiki articles about it. Here is one . Armenian embassy members hold posters reading ‘Recognition now – thank you’ during the meeting in Berlin. Photograph: Michael Sohn/AP It's not like Germany doesn't know anything about committing and apologizing for genocide. Atrocities are not unknown in the United States either. I have 87 posts here on the treatment of native Americans by the white government. The ongoing treatment of African Americans is no longer as bad as slavery b...

The subtitle is important to appreciate Inskeep's aspiration, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab . It's a good reality check to read American history. Dirty politics? Check. White privilege? Check. Abuse of minorities? Check. Broken promises? Check. Political doublespeak? Check. The Cherokee Trail of Tears was caused by the implementation of Andrew Jackson's first political policy when he became President in 1828, get them out of Georgia. Did the Cherokees have treaties signed by the federal government protecting the right to their land? Yes. Did Georgian land speculators want the land in order to line their pockets? Yes. Did Georgia threaten nullification if the federal government stepped into their constitutionally proper role? Yes. Am I asking to many rhetorical questions? Yes. Jackson campaigned with a platform of limited government, not unexpected for a slave owner. Georgia was able to throw that in his...

This week I realized that my capacity for empathy is greatest when those who are hurting are the farthest removed from me. My sense of empathy can be debilitating at times. The murder of Michael Brown in Fergusen, Missouri, among many recent black victims of police violence has bummed me out. But all I've done with my sadness is retweet, write a blog , and pray. The situation in Gaza, same thing, including writing a blog . The Islamist fanatics in northern Iraq, same thing, the blog . I haven't really considered myself an empathetic guy until recently. I think I go through phases, then I harden up. It's very difficult to stay soft hearted, hopeful, and open-handed after a few weeks of evil in the news. As I processed some of these thoughts with my wife, she reminded me that my empathy can be sparse at times at home. As I rode my bike home today, I wondered how it is possible for me to be so empathetic to those at a distance and not so much to those near. I think it has t...

Renaissance Ronin's blog first attracted me because he's building affordable houses around the world out of shipping containers. He's been around the block for awhile and has seen the darker side of humanity take advantage of other's generosity in crises, such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. That aid boondoggle is well documented, see this Haitian news blog . Good organizations do exist, they probably don't spend as much money advertising themselves. When it comes to housing, Habitat for Humanity , has done good in Haiti . But a recent blog at Ronin's, How do you help? , also shares how the poor who need to be helped get taken advantage of despite the good intentions of donors and helpers. He's not saying where to invest, I have suggestions for you, but he wants us informed. You have to start at the grass roots community level. If Haiti taught us anything, it was that dealing with multi-level “.coms and .orgs”, tied in closely with government just didn’t...

Cover via Amazon I thoroughly enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick 's history of the Pilgrims,  Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (see my previous multi - part book report ) and was more than willing to learn again from him about an historical subject I know nothing about, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn . This book was available for a Kindle loan through my local library and a great read on the Kindle, but I have the same complaint with all the Kindle books that include maps; the maps are very hard to read. The short summary is this book is excellent. Philbrick credits Sitting Bull 's success to prophecy and Custer's defeat to his own hubris, his fellow officer Reno's cowardice and drunkenness, and his fellow officer Benteen's passive aggressive attitude. This way he can appease all the hard-core amateurs who like to single out a single reason for the loss of over 200 US soldiers at the Little Bighorn ...

I borrowed The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans by Charles Royster from my public library for my Kindle. I learned many things from the book about the Civil War and two of its generals which I will share below. If only Royster's compelling prose filled more of the books pages than the dry, academic and philosophically meandering that predominates. I will also air out my one other grievance before getting to the historical meat of this book. The editor should have asked Royster to avoid the overuse of the two words "repudiate" and "apotheosis" in the book. I forgot to search "repudiate" on the Kindle before I had to return the book, but it seemed like he used the word or it's cognates a hundred times. Of course he wrote this book over 18 years before Sarah Palin brought "refudiate" to our common lexicon, which makes its progenitor grate on my ears. Confederate sympathizers like to trumpet ...

David Holmes contends in his book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers , that our first few presidents of the United States were not orthodox Christians, but probably deists. I think he has done an excellent job of making his case but in a poorly organized fashion. All of his chapters are excellent, but I wish they were shifted around some. He starts the book by describing the religious trends in the american colonies, then focuses on the Anglican church and Deism . He launches off from the deism chapter and looks at the writings, speeches, letters, and actions of various revolutionary leaders: Franklin, Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and their wives and daughters. After all this does he provide a "Layperson's guide to distinguishing a deist from an orthodox Christian." In this chapter he lists his method for evaluating an historical figures faith. This is an excellent chapter that should have been put before an evaluation of any figure. First he distinguis...

It is no myth that the Wampanoag tribe had a feast with the Pilgrims. They could have wiped them out. Instead they broke bread with them at the Pilgrim's tables. The hosts were the guests. After that, the relationship got complicated. Eventually, the guests became invaders and land thieves and the hosts hit back violently and almost drove the guests all out during King Philip's War, see my previous report here . It's not our proudest moment. But what I like about this holiday of Thanksgiving is that we remember our neighborly time and not our victory. For all the accusations of belligerence made toward our country, the veracity of which I am not commenting on, one of our national, non-religious holidays is in honor of peace. It's non-religious in that even the non-religious can celebrate it without some counter expression and it is not derived from a feast on any religious calendar. Certainly, it's religious for me, and many other Americans. I'm thankful to God...

A couple years ago, reporters from the Hartford Courant published a book on slavery in Connecticut called Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery and in my immature self-righteous belief that the North did little compared to the South, I refused to read it. I figured it was a white, liberal self-flagellation. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and I encountered the book this report focuses on, Ten Hills Farm, The forgotten history of slavery in the North by C. S. Manegold. This time I was ready to learn. And I did. Ms. Manegold smacks my northern arrogance around. She confronts it directly. This matter of station has consistently and perhaps conveniently been confused with ideas about the supposedly "gentle" culture of slavery as it evolved in the North. Yet that assumption breaks down with even the scantiest analysis. The great shibboleth of northern slavery is that it was somehow "benign," softer than its southern cousin, ev...

One thing I like about the Obama administration is his attempts to dealjustly with American Indian tribes. One example of this is a recent settlement with the nations to settle royalty payments for century old leases, see story at Buffalo Post . The AP story includes this important context and information,  Under an agreement announced Tuesday, the Interior Department would distribute $1.4 billion to more than 300,000 Indian tribe members to compensate them for historical accounting claims, and to resolve future claims. The government also would spend $2 billion to buy back and consolidate tribal land broken up in previous generations. The program would allow individual tribe members to obtain cash payments for land interests divided among numerous family members and return the land to tribal control. The settlement also would create a scholarship account of up to $60 million for tribal members to attend college or vocational school. If cleared by Congress and a federal judge, the sett...

Cover via Amazon I've been meaning to read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The fates of human societies by Jared Diamond since it came out over 10 years ago. I finally finished it. I don't know if his argument still holds water 10 years later, but it did win a Pulitzer Prize, and I found his ideas persuasive. The book is written in reponse to a question posed by a friend of Diamond's in New Guinea. He asks, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" p. 14 The ignorant answer is that whites are better than non-whites. The answer Diamond gives is geographical determinism . Whites benefited from their origins in the fertile crescent with its abundant grains and domesticate animals. The sedentary life allowed class stratification, where people could trade abilities and craftwork for food. The animals in close proximity introduced diseases that eventually led to genetic resistance....