pouring out, once again.
This is my third blog posting for today, but I don't know how long it's
going to be until I'll be able to post these. As I'm writing this, it's
July 8, but I might not be able to get this up online for another couple
of weeks, depending on what the internet situation is in Uspantan. It's
not hard to imagine that wi-fi might be hard to come by in such a place.
The last couple of days, I've been listening to Nathaniel Philbrick's
_The Mayflower_ on tape (actually, on my iPod), which is a really
interesting history of the settlement of the Plymouth colony, leading up
to the time of King Philip's War forty (I think) years later.
According to Philbrick, the pilgrims were (a) fanatical, (b) bloody, and
(c) ruthless, and the Indians surrounding the colony were not the
benevolent helpers they are made out to be in high school history
texts. Rather, the Native American groups surrounding Plymouth were
eager to manipulate the Pilgrims as a way to become a dominant regional
power, in a way that would look familiar to International Relations
realists like Mearscheimer or Walt. Squanto, for example, every
schoolboy's favorite noble savage, attempted (but failed) to use the
Pilgrims to catapault him to the status of the most powerful regional
Native leader--in a true sense, to make him the head of a regional
hegemon by attempting to convince them to attack a rival tribe.
Massasoit, another Native leader, successfully pulled of the same plot a
few years later.
Indeed, it seems to me that one could make an argument that the Pequots,
Massachusetts and other New England Native tribes were "states" in the
Realist sense of the term, and they certainly played a game of
balance-of-power that looks an awful lot like the politics played at the
Congress of Vienna.
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