Leni Riefenstahl 1902-2003
{Conscientious has a blog entry on the death of Leni Riefenstahl, which :::wood s lot::: links in a subtly grave manner. It ends like this:
So Frau Riefenstahl finally is dead. She was a talented photographer and film maker. But she sold her sold to the devil. Maybe now she can have another toast with Hitler - the person she admired so much. May she rot in hell.As long as we're going to be completely unforgiving, I'd like to point out that the parallels drawn here are black and white moral choices a teenager could make:
Nazis�bad, don't help them, even for 'Art's sake'. Pay the price if you do.
Bush and Co.�bad, don't help them, and by extension pay if you do.
German people�willfully in denial, scorn their weakness.
American 'patriots'�by extension...
But the speaker, the person responding with repugnance to Riefenstahl's enthusiastic participation in the propaganda of the Third Reich�unstained observer, violated relative, innocent bystander.
There's a moral bank shot that is mostly invisible even in this time of micro-analytic concern. The pioneer, the original, does some heinous thing, destroys a city, an army, a people.Later, moral individuals agree, in principle, it's morally wrong. But the pioneer dies and the second generation inherits the results, land, peace, prosperity, or, on the other side of the coin, vengeance and vendetta. By the third generation and on, the title is clear. It's theirs.
"My Dad never killed no Indians. We've been working this ranch for 100 years, hard work and plenty of it. I never stole anything from anybody."
The vendetta side of the coin is of course entirely determined by might, by force, and removes the whole thing from any kind of moral arena.
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There may be a much stronger and more pervasive component of recovery from horror in the collective human psyche than any of us know. All we have are the fragments of history. Obviously the record is more complete the closer to the present. What else happened? How much of the possible was cut away before it became real? How long ago?
There's a common misconception that only Jews were victims of the Holocaust. Certainly numerically they were and are. But biology has shown us smaller populations are more vulnerable to extinction. Is there a measurable difference? Is it in the numbers or the faces? The sound of the ghosts or the size of the graveyard?
What about the unclassifiables? The freaks? Statistically irrelevant freaks also perished in the Holocaust.
If a child has the only remaining genes for a specific quality, is her death more significant than the deaths of a thousand people who share a common genetic heritage, when they leave behind a hundred thousand more like themselves?
It's impossible to maintain perspective in such awful light. It becomes personal, a matter of sympathy, or loyalty, or shame.
My point is a simple one: one way or another we're all survivors, if not of this particular Holocaust, of another unremembered one, of a hundred others, whose echoes have faded into the long silence of time.}
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Early in the twentieth century, James Mooney estimated individual tribal populations for regions north of the Rio Grande and arrived at a total of only 1.15 million Native Americans (American Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts) at the time of, in his words, "first extensive European contact." (The dates of extensive European contact, according to Mooney, varied from 1600 to 1845 across the different regions.)
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In subsequent decades other scholars generally reaffirmed Mooney's low estimate; Alfred Kroeber even reduced it to 900,000. In 1966, however, the anthropologist Henry Dobyns introduced the idea that European diseases may have dramatically reduced native populations long before settlers actually came into contact with Indian people. Thus, he argued, Native American population losses were far higher than Mooney and his colleagues might have imagined and, logically, Native American populations far larger. Dobyns proceeded to use mortality rates from epidemics as well as estimates of environmental carrying capacity in specific regions to speculate that there were as many as 18 million native inhabitants north of Mesoamerica at the time of first European contact.
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...other scholars have arrived at estimates falling between those of Mooney and Dobyns. For example, Douglas Ubelaker summed individual tribal estimates produced by new scholars to estimate an aboriginal population north of Mexico of 1.85 million; similarly, this author concluded that the aboriginal population north of present-day Mexico numbered over 7 million people in 1492�somewhat over 5 million for the U.S. mainland and somewhat over 2 million for present-day Alaska, Canada, and Greenland combined. Another scholar, the geographer William Denevan, has produced yet another population estimate for the area north of Mexico: 3.79 million.
Despite these differences, there is a general consensus that Native American populations experienced declines that began after 1492 and continued for around four hundred years. Not until about 1900 did the native population reach its nadir, after which some population recovery occurred. At the beginning of the twentieth century�when the total population of the United States and Canada had grown to over 80 million�the two nations' census figures indicated a total of about 400,000 native people in North America.
Russel Thornton, UCLA Cherokee
Houghton Mifflin Encyclopedia of North American Indians
