Friday, Greg Popovich regaled us with a lecture on the evils of Columbus. Popovich’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. You’d think that an Air Force Academy grad would have a better head on his shoulders. One reason that a half-wit like Popovich can get away with this moral flim-fllam is the pile of Red Chinese money going into the pockets of people like Popovich and Le Bron. Bash a guy dead for centuries but don’t disturb the CCP money train. It’s revolting.
A Himalaya-size hypocrisy envelops Popovich and the NBA when it comes to a “just” society. Ask the people of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs. As the people of Hong Kong face “disappearance”, as a surveillance state with its chain of gulags blankets the nation in ways that rival anything in Orwell’s imagination, as the Uyghurs face certain annihilation, Popovich and other millionaire titans of Big Sports, Inc., conveniently go mum, so long as the flow of Chinese cash from sneakers, caps, and jerseys continues unimpeded.
The NBA’s conspicuous moral blackout is even more galling when we come to know that Red Chinese officialdom is conducting a snuff film of the Uyghur people with forced sterilizations and the officially-sponsored rape and adultery of Uyghur women by ordering Han Chinese men to live in the homes of jailed Uyghur husbands. Now that’s racist, racist with a capital R.
To set the record straight, let’s go back to real history. The world’s 15th,16th, and 17th centuries were a violent time, and it wasn’t limited to Columbus and company. Cortez’s conquest of the Aztec empire was made easy by the defection of the indigenous Aztec-oppressed from daily, ritual human sacrifice. Other Native Americans peoples were not immune to culturally-based brutality. “Marauding” is applied by anthropologists to tribal assaults on rival tribes, usually at night or in the early morning. Massacre sites of men, women, children, the old, the young, and the infirmed are the stuff of the archeological record.
An example Mohawk savagery occurred in 1642. A band of Hurons with two French priests accompanying them were attacked by a force of Mohawks. Many were killed while others were taken captive, including the two priests. One of them would survive to tell the tale. In a letter in 1643, Father Jogues wrote,
“On the eighth day we fell in with a band of two hundred Indians going out to fight (on an island in Lake Champlain); and as it is the custom for savages, when out on war-parties, to initiate themselves, as it were, by cruelty, under the belief that their success will be the greater as they shall have been the more cruel, they thus received us: First rendering thanks to the sun, which they imagine presides over war, they congratulated their countrymen by a joyful volley of musketry. Each then cut some stout clubs in the neighboring wood in order to receive us. After we had landed from the canoes, they fell upon us from both sides with their clubs in such fury, that I, who was the last and therefore the most exposed to their blows, sank overcome by their numbers and severity before I had accomplished half the rocky way that led to the hill on which a stage had been erected for us. I thought I should quickly die there; and therefore, partly because I could not, partly because I cared not, I did not rise. How long they spent their fury upon me He knows for whose love and sake it is delightful and glorious thus to suffer. Moved at last by a cruel mercy, and wishing to carry me to their country alive, they ceased to strike. And thus half dead and covered with blood, they bore me to the scaffold. Here I had scarce begun to breathe, when they ordered me to come down to load me with scoffs and insults, and countless blows upon my head and shoulders, and indeed my whole body. I should be tedious were I to attempt to tell all that the French prisoners suffered. They burnt one of my fingers, and crushed another with their teeth; the others already thus mangled they so wrenched by the tattered nerves that even now, though healed, they are frightfully deformed.”
I suppose that Indigenous Peoples Day would have a different ring to the indigenous peoples who were captured to keep the sacrificial altars of Tenochtitlan filled with a steady supply of open chests. Yeah, you’d be right to say that two wrongs don’t make a right, but at least admit cruelty isn’t the sole possession of those from European locales. Europeans landed on a continent that was beset with savagery.
Popovich, please stop the moral grandstanding. Your hypocrisy in the service mammon is loathsome.
And you wonder why the NBA’s popularity is fading in the US. Thank people like the money-grubbing charlatans of the NBA.
RogerG