Hate speech, propaganda alive and thriving by: Scott Richard
Lyons It takes about five seconds to persuade an Indian that
hate speech is dangerous. We learned long ago that such
propaganda harmed us by representing Natives as inherently
different from others, and specifically evil or bad; threatening
to others, themselves portrayed as innocent and good; and
obstructing some better future that would presumably transpire
if only the ‘‘problem’’ we posed were eliminated. We endured,
for example, the Jan. 3, 1891, Saturday Pioneer editorial on the
occasion of Wounded Knee, published in Aberdeen, S.D., by L.
Frank Baum just a decade before writing ‘‘The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz.’’ Baum wrote, ‘‘Our only safety depends upon the total
extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for
centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization,
follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and
untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies
future safety for our settlers and the soldier