What would you think about a race that had a history of doing the following to others without provocation and for the enjoyment of it?

The race attacked the camps of innocent people, killing or capturing men, women and children.  Captured men were tortured in gruesome ways, such as having parts of their bodies cut off while alive and then being slowly roasted to death over open fires.  Captured women were gang raped in front of their children and then tortured to death.  Before dying, the women saw their babies clubbed or stabbed to death, or dragged behind horses until their skin was torn off on rocks and thorns.  If not killed, their pre-pubescent sons and daughters were turned into slaves.

Certainly, this has to describe the depravity of the white race, right?  Certainly not.  It describes what the Comanches did to other Indian tribes long before the white man came on the scene.  With few exceptions, it was typical of Indian life on the North American continent, especially on the plains and prairies running from present-day Nebraska through central and west Texas.  Life was brutal, primitive, ignorant, and short.

A superb history of the Comanches and the warfare between them and other tribes and white settlers is Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne.

This is not the politically-correct version of history that is taught in K-12 schools and universities or portrayed in movies.  In the PC version, Indians, er, Native Americans, are portrayed as peace-loving, environmentally-sensitive, and living in a communitarian utopia.  Then, as the narrative goes, the evil white man and his imperialistic government came along and stole their land, massacred them, broke treaties with them, and destroyed their idyllic way of life by putting them on reservations.  This version was reinforced by such movies as Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves.

Yes, the white man committed atrocities against Indians.  Yes, massacres such as Wounded Knee happened.  Yes, the trail of tears was a fact.  Yes, generations of Americans were taught a Euro- and white-centric version of history and watched westerns in which the white man was good and the Indian was bad.  Yes, this version of history was so patriotic and nationalistic that it bordered on jingoism.  Movies directed by John Huston and starring John Wayne were some of the most popular of this genre. 

Today’s PC version of history is just as silly, inaccurate, and unbalanced as the earlier version.  While the earlier version was based on an idealized view of the United States, the PC version is based on the opposite--on anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism.

If unvarnished and unbiased history were instead taught in schools and reinforced by Hollywood, the left’s edifice of social justice, diversity, multiculturalism, affirmative action, and redistribution would collapse, because the edifice is built on a foundation of white guilt, stemming from the left’s canard that only whites have been oppressors.  That’s why factual history isn’t taught and reinforced.

But imagine if it were.  Instead of colleges across the land pandering to Native Americans and other imaginary victim groups with diversity role plays, skits, and readings on campus about oppression at the hands of whites, they might have role plays, skits, and readings in which Native Americans barbecue other Native Americans.  Students might then realize the universality of human nature in terms of both good and evil.  They also might understand the inherent danger of all forms of social organization in which the individual is subjugated to a coercive collective, whether the collective be a clan, a tribe, a city-state, a nation-state, a college administration, or an “ism,” such as nationalism, socialism, fascism, liberalism, conservatism, or statism.

Even more threatening to the PC establishment would be a widespread realization that if the tables had been turned--that if white Europeans had been 2,000 years behind Indians in science, language, military prowess, and social organization, instead of vice versa--the outcome would have been the same, in the sense that the more advanced culture would have prevailed over the less advanced one, as has happened throughout human history.  It was just an accident of history and geography that white culture prevailed.  Contrary to the beliefs of the racist left, the race of the prevailing culture was incidental to the outcome, not the determining factor.

To this point, the Comanches were able to conquer other tribes, not because of an inherent evil trait in their race, but because they used the weapon of mass destruction at the time, the horse, which they took from Spaniards.  If they also had had cannons, sailing ships, wealth, and sophisticated social and military organizations, we might be living in a Comanche nation today and having a different kind of barbecue on holidays. 

As it was, the Comanches used the horse to force the Apaches out of western Texas and New Mexico and into the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona, where Geronimo would later fight the white man.  Mexicans were so fearful of the Comanches that they encouraged Anglos to settle in Texas and kill as many Comanches as they could.   Thus the seeds of the Republic of Texas were sown, which would later blossom into the War with Mexico.  But this history isn’t taught in American schools, especially those with large Mexican student populations, because it runs counter to the PC claptrap that Mexicans, er, Hispanics, have been victims of white oppression and were never victimizers themselves or descendants of evil white Europeans.