Interesting Historical Parallel

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

From "The Religious History of America" by Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Schmidt. Simply transpose the following two paragraphs into the terms of our current situation in Iraq:

"The royal city of Santa Fe (Holy Faith) established in 1610 (three years after Jamestown, Virgina) developed into a political and religious capital for the surrounding region. Such develoment, however, came at high cost. The original governor, Don Juan de Onate, leading his first expedition in 1595, visited great cruelty upon the New Mexico pueblo dwellers. A Franciscan friar in 1601 wrote to the Spanish Viceroy to protest Onate's totally unjustified behavior as he robbed and plundered, burned villages, and men, women and children. What Onate had managed to do, the friar reported, is alienate the entire population, when it would have been possible for a more intelligent and compassionate commander to control this whole territory with fifty men, if only the conquest had been effect "in a Christian manner without outraging and killing these poor Indians, who think we are all evil and that the King who sent us out here is ineffective and a tyrant.

"Such undeserved treatment also played havoc the the missionaries' reason for being in the New World. Because of Onate and his like, the Fransciscan acknowledged, "We cannot preach the gospel now, for it is despised by these people on account of the great offences and the harm we have done to them." That was the short-term effect of the brutality. The long-term effect was an Indian revolt in 1680 led by the Indian shaman Pope. Santa Fe was virtually destroyed, with over four hundred lives lost, many of those Franciscan. Spain prevailed, however, with Diego Jose de Vargas leading a powerful military force into the region a dozen years later. The capital city was rebuilt, even as mission arose once more on the dessert landscape. Here as elsewhere, however, the cost of early European cruelties was high, coloring all future contacts among conquerors, missionaries and Indians."

What I got from this is that the Iraqi people will not accept "democracy" as offered to them by the Bush Administration any more than the Native Americans accepted western religion. And let's not forget that ultimately, the Spanish failed at converting the native population, and their invincible empire crumbled into dust.

Sic semper tyranis!