Day of Barren Swarm, 27th of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Castor): "If you white men had never come here, this country would still be like it was. It would be all pure here. You call it wild, but it wasn’t really wild, it was free. Animals aren’t wild, they’re just free. And that’s the way we were. You called us wild, you called us savages. But we were just free! If we were savages, Columbus would never have gotten off the island alive." - Leon Shenandoah, former Tadodaho of the Grand Council of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy.

The fascist takeover of the U.S. government, the militias in our cities kidnapping people and murdering citizens, the kleptocracy, the corruption, and the abrogation of civil rights is the karmic consequence of two and a half centuries of the existence of the United States of America. A country founded on the twin practices of genocide and slavery can't expect things to go well in the long run. 

But it's not completely our fault. To those white supremacists who laud European heritage and values, and who boast that all great ideas and progress stemmed from Europeans, I say that it was the European values that insisted on cleansing the continent of its indigenous people, and instituting slavery to spur productivity and profits. The sins for which we're paying the karmic price now were the sins of the European monarchies and not the American colonialists, although the colonists eventually took to them with a disturbing passion.

Acolytes of the Stable Genius say, with their tongue only slightly in their cheek, that a little bit of dictatorship may not be a bad thing, and maybe we do need a king to get things done around here. But Western civilization has tried it with royal kings and queens before, and it wound up with endless wars between competing monarchs, not only militarily but economically as well.

England and France and Spain and Portugal and Rome and others had been competing for domination for centuries before the discovery of the New World, each kingdom convinced of their absolute moral and spiritual superiority, each determined to see their rivals perish and fail. The New World simply presented a new sphere of competition, as well as a source for raw materials to further the kingdoms' ambitions. England in particular saw its North American colonies as nothing but vassal states to grow crops, mine ores, fell wood for the ambitions of the King, and to consume the goods and pay tribute to its sovereign overlord. Spain saw the continent as an open land ripe for plundering and looting. The other kingdoms were no better.

The fact that indigenous people were already living on the new continent was merely an inconvenience to the competing monarchies, an obstacle to their imperial goals. Killing, looting, raping, and kidnapping the natives was considered the divine right of the superior nation, so if the presence of the indigenous got in the way of their goals, they were to simply be eliminated, and if they, god forbid, fought back, they were to be exterminated.

The Portuguese, having taken the lead in the exploration of West Africa, were able to take over the Arab trade of African slaves, and the New World, which needed labor to raise crops and do all that farming, mining, and felling, was simply a new market for their new trade. It was the English and Spanish who introduced slavery to these shores, with the Portuguese aiding and abetted the practice not to mention forcing an astonishing number of Africans to relocate to Brazil.

The colonists went along with the royal competition, including the genocide and the slavery, until it was no longer in their interest and they declared their independence, only to continue the genocide and the slavery on their own. And so here we are now, four centuries after 1619 and two and a half after 1776, paying the karma for those dirty European kings on their filthy continental thrones.                           

"Our religion," Shenandoah said about the Iroquois and other indigenous nations, "is all about thanking the Creator. That’s what we do when we pray. We don’t ask Him for things. We thank Him. We thank Him for the world and every animal and plant in it. We thank Him for everything that exists. We don’t take it for granted that a tree is just there. We thank the Creator for that tree. If we don’t thank Him, maybe the Creator’ll take that tree away... We are made from Mother Earth and we go back to Mother Earth. We can’t “own” Mother Earth. We’re just visiting here. We’re the Creator’s guests."

If only the "superior" Europeans were that enlightened, we might not be in the mess we see today.