Un texte à lire absolument sur le Webzine Salon:
America's Forgotten Atrocity.
L'atrocité oubliée de l'Amérique.
Il s'agit d'une entrevue avec John Mack Faragher, un intellectuel américain qui vient d'écrire un essai sur la déportation des Acadiens: A Great and Noble Scheme.
Faragher affirme qu'au 18e siècle, les Acadiens (qui formaient un peuple hybride) étaient en train de prouver qu'on pouvait coloniser l'Amérique de façon sage et pacifique. Malheureusement, pour les récompenser, on les a déportés.
Pour Faragher, qui a déjà écrit une biographie de Daniel Boone, le Grand Dérangement est ni plus ni moins qu'une campagne de nettoyage ethnique. Vous avez bien lu…
Un texte très intéressant sur les Acadiens.
En voici un extrait…
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QUESTION: You're using the modern concept of "ethnic cleansing" to describe what happened to the Acadians.
RÉPONSE: Yes. The comparative study of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century has revealed some broad outlines about how such operations are conducted. They're planned in detail, planned with a great deal of foresight. Before, in the history of the Acadian expulsion, it was really a kind of antiquarian question: Whether or not the operational plan was written the year of the event or five years before. In comparison with other ethnic cleansing operations, the fact that it was written, I believe, four to five years before the operation was set in motion puts it in the same category. It was highly planned, top-down, hierarchically controlled. So that puts it in the context of something that is depressingly familiar to us.
One of the fundamental questions that American historians have pondered for the last hundred years at least — and by implication, since the Revolution — is whether the history of the United States is an exception to patterns that are much larger: patterns of the conduct of nations, international law, patterns that are inherent in the expansion of Europe in world history. What this suggests to me is that in many ways American history is part of a much larger global pattern. American history is not exceptional; it needs to be considered along with the history of all other countries.
That might seem like a benign statement. But the notion that the history of this nation is exceptional, and stands outside the normal behavior of nations and colonies, remains a very powerful idea.
QUESTION: One could argue that idea is still driving our national conduct.
RÉPONSE: Absolutely. So the question of the exceptional or unexceptional nature of American history — that's really how this project began.
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Par le biais de l'histoire tragique des Acadiens, l'auteur tente de montrer que les Américains ne se comportent pas de façon différente que les autres peuples. Ils sont capables de commettre les mêmes atrocités, les mêmes horreurs. Ils ne sont pas spéciaux ni bénis des dieux ni moralement supérieurs.
Un texte important, qu'on devrait faxer à George W.!
Tenez, je vous en offre un autre extrait savoureux:
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QUESTION: In your account, the Acadians were repeatedly blamed for events they had nothing to do with, or could not control. Indians attack settler villages in Maine or Massachusetts, and Puritan preachers stir up hatred against the "neutral French" because they're seen as sinister figures, possibly in cahoots with the Indians. You don't want to look into the past and see the present, but I don't know: the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Gulf of Tonkin, the spurious connection between al-Qaida and Saddam. Is this a pattern in American history?
RÉPONSE: Certainly there are plenty of comparable incidents in a situation where states are looking for rhetorical public justifications for their actions. And sure, the Acadians are a case in point. But there's no discounting the extent to which the Native raids on New England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries completely terrorized the population. One can sympathize with the felt need on the part of the colonists to find people against whom to retaliate. They found it extremely difficult to locate these Native attackers. The Natives knew the forests, they could shift from place to place, they were able to avoid destructive raids on their own people for the most part. In that context, the Acadians — who were friends of the Indians and who were fixed in a location — became very attractive and inviting targets. It's easy to understand it even while criticizing it as misplaced hostility.
QUESTION: That all sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? Being subjected to a terrible attack, and then taking it out on somebody else when you can't find the people who did it.
RÉPONSE: Absolutely.