Excerpts from "American Genocide"
by
David Stannard
Epilogue
p247
... one
of the preconditions for the Spanish and Anglo-American genocides
against the native peoples of the Americas was a public definition of
the natives as inherently and permanently-that is, as racially-inferior
beings. To the conquering Spanish, the Indians more specifically were
defined as natural slaves, as subhuman beasts of burden, because that
fit the use to which the Spanish wished to put them, and because such a
definition was explicable by appeal to ancient Christian and European
truths-through Aquinas and on back to Aristotle. Since the colonizing
British, and subsequently the Americans, had little use for Indian
servitude, but only wanted Indian land, they appealed to other Christian
and European sources of wisdom to justify their genocide: the Indians
were Satan's helpers, they were lascivious and murderous wild men of the
forest, they were bears, they were wolves, they were vermin. Allegedly
having shown themselves to be beyond conversion to Christian or to civil
life-and with little British or American need for them as slaves-in this
case, straightforward mass killing of the Indians was deemed the only
thing to do.
***
p251
"Well,
you know, that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being
inhuman"-for surely the purpose of this passage is to demonstrate as
powerfully as possible just how absolutely inhuman the Africans truly
seemed, and how close to the murky borderland of the animal world they
really were; thus the impact of the European's haunting sense "that
there was in you just the faintest trace of a response" to-and a "remote
kinship with"-such brutal, monstrous beings. As Achebe says in a
different essay: "In confronting the black man, the white man has a
simple choice: either to accept the black man's humanity and the
equality that flows from it, or to reject it and see him as a beast of
burden. No middle course ,exists except as an intellectual quibble." In
fact, however, it is precisely that "intellectual quibble" that has
poisoned Western thought, not only about Africans, but about all peoples
of non-European ancestry, for centuries long past and likely for a good
while yet to come. And therein lies the true heart of Western darkness.
For the line that separates Martin Luther's anti-Jewish fulminations
from those of Adolf Hitler is a line of great importance, but ~t also ~s
a line that is frighteningly thin. And once crossed, as ~t was not only
m Germany in the early twentieth century, but in the Indies and the
Americas four centuries before, genocide is but a step away.
From time
to time during the past half-century Americans have edged across that
line, if only temporarily, under conditions of foreign war. Thus, as
John W. Dower has demonstrated, the eruption of war in the Pacific in
the 1940s caused a crucial shift in American perceptions of the Japanese
from a prewar attitude of racial disdain and dismissiveness (the curator
of the Smithsonian Institution's Division of Anthropology had advised
the President that the Japanese skull was "some 2,000 years less
developed than ours, ' while it was widely believed by Western military
experts that the Japanese were incompetent pilots who "could not shoot
straight because their eyes were slanted") to a wartime view of them as
super-competent warriors, but morally subhuman beasts. This
transformation became a license for American military men to torture and
mutilate Japanese troops with impunity-just as the Japanese did to
Americans, but in their own ways, following the cultural reshaping of
their own racial images of Americans. As one American war correspondent
in the Pacific recalled in an Atlantic Monthly article:
We shot
prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed
or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed
the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh
off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved
their bones into letter openers.
Dower
provides other examples of what he calls the "fetish" of "collecting
grisly battlefield trophies from the Japanese dead or near dead, in the
form of gold teeth, ears, bones, scalps, and skulls"-practices receiving
sufficient approval on the home front that in 1944 Life magazine
published a "human interest" story along with "a full-page photograph of
an attractive blonde posing with a Japanese skull she had been sent by
her fiancée in the Pacific." (Following the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend in
1814, Andrew Jackson oversaw not only the stripping away of dead
Indians' flesh for manufacture into bridle reins, but he saw to it that
souvenirs from the corpses were distributed "to the ladies of
Tennessee.")
A little
more than two decades after that Life photograph and article appeared,
General William C. Westmoreland was describing the people of Vietnam as
"termites," as he explained the need to limit the number of American
troops in that country:
If you
crowd in too many termite killers, each using a screwdriver to kill the
termites, you risk collapsing the floors or the foundation. In this war
we're using screwdrivers to kill termites because it's a guerrilla war
and we cannot use bigger weapons. We have to get the right balance of
termite killers to get rid of the termites without wrecking the house.
Taking
their cue from the general's dehumanization of the Southeast Asian
"gooks" and "slopes" and "dinks," in a war that reduced the human dead
on the enemy side to "body counts," American troops in Vietnam removed
and saved Vietnamese body parts as keepsakes of their tours of duty,
just as their fathers had done in World War Two. Vietnam, the soldiers
said, was "Indian Country" (General Maxwell Taylor himself referred to
the Vietnamese opposition as "Indians" in his Congressional testimony on
the war), and the people who lived in Indian country "infested" it,
according to official government language. The Vietnamese may have been
human, but as the U.S. Embassy's Public Affairs Officer, John Mecklin,
put it, their minds were the equivalent of "the shriveled leg of a polio
victim," their "power of reason . . . only slightly beyond the level of
an American six-year-old."
p253
...
During the brief duration of the [Gulf] war itself, American pilots
referred to the killing of unarmed, retreating enemy soldiers as a
"turkey shoot," and compared the Iraqi people- otherwise known as "ragheads"-to
"cockroaches" running for cover when allied planes appeared overhead.
Graffiti on bombs slung under the wings of American aircraft labeled
them as "Mrs. Saddam's sex toy" and "a suppository for Saddam," while
the American field commander subsequently admitted in a television
interview that he wished he had been able to complete his job: "We could
have completely closed the door and made it a battle of annihilation,"
he said; it was "literally about to become the battle of Cannae, a
battle of annihilation" before-to his disappointment-the general was
called off.
It should
be noted that the third century B.C. battle of Cannae, during which
Carthaginian troops under the command of Hannibal almost completely
exterminated a group of 80,000 to 90,000 Romans, is still regarded as an
exemplar of total destructiveness to military historians. Even today,
Italians living in the region where the attack took place refer to the
site of the massacre as Campo di Sangue, or "Field of Blood." In his own
words, this is what General Norman Schwarzkopf had hoped to create in
Iraq. And when confronted by the press with evidence that appeared to
demonstrate the American government's lack of concern for innocent
civilians (including as many as 55,000 children) who died as a direct
consequence of the war-and with a United States medical team's estimate
that hundreds of thousands more Iraqi children were likely to die of
disease and starvation caused by the bombing of civilian facilities-the
Pentagon's response either was silence, evasion, or a curt "war is
hell."
***
p255
To some, the question now is: Can it happen again? To others, as we said
in this book's opening pages, the question is, now as always: Can it be
stopped? For in the time it has taken to read these pages, throughout
Central and South America Indian men and women and children have been
murdered by agents of the government that controls them, simply because
they were Indians; native girls and boys have been sold on open slave
markets; whole families have died in forced labor, while others have
starved to death in concentration camps. More will be enslaved and more
will die in the same brutal ways that their ancestors did, tomorrow, and
every day for the foreseeable future. The killers, meanwhile, will
continue to receive aid and comfort and support from the United States
government, the same government that oversees and encourages the ongoing
dissolution of Native American families within its own political
purview- itself a violation of the U.N. Genocide Convention-through its
willful refusal to deal adequately with the life-destroying poverty, ill
health, malnutrition, inadequate housing, and despair that is imposed
upon most American Indians who survive today.
That is
why, when the press reported in 1988 that the United States Senate
finally had ratified the United Nations Genocide Convention-after forty
years of inaction, while more than a hundred other nations had long
since agreed to its terms-Leo Kuper, one of the world's foremost experts
on genocide wondered in print whether the long delay, and the obvious
reluctance of the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention",
derived from "fear that it might be held responsible, retrospectively,
for the annihilation of Indians in the United States, or its role in the
slave trade, or its contemporary support for tyrannical governments
engaging in mass murder." Still, Kuper said he was delighted that at
last the Americans had agreed to the terms of the Convention.
Others
were less pleased-including the governments of Denmark, Finland,
Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United
Kingdom, who filed formal objections with the United Nations regarding
the U.S. action. For what the United States had done, unlike the other
nations of the world, was approve and file with the U.N. a
self-servingly conditional instrument of ratification. Whatever the
objections of the rest of the world's nations, however, it now seems
clear that the United States is unlikely ever to do what those other
countries have done-ratify unconditionally the Genocide Convention.
***
Greatly
varied though the specific details of individual cases may be,
throughout the Americas today indigenous peoples continue to be faced
with one form or another of a five-centuries-old dilemma. At the dawn of
the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the
Indians they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion and
culture and land and independence, swearing allegiance "as vassals" to
the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown, or suffer "all the mischief
and damage" that the European invaders choose to inflict upon you. It
was called the requerimiento. The deadly predicament that now confronts
native peoples is simply a modern requerimiento: surrender all hope of
continued cultural integrity and effectively cease to exist as
autonomous peoples, or endure as independent peoples the torment and
deprivation we select as your fate.
In
Guatemala, where Indians constitute about 60 percent of the
population-as elsewhere in Central and South America-the modern
requerimiento calls upon native peoples either to accept governmental
expropriation of their lands and the consignment of their families to
forced labor under criollo and ladino overlords, or be subjected to the
violence of military death squads. In South Dakota, where Indians
constitute about 6 percent of the population-as elsewhere in North
America-the effort to destroy what remains of indigenous cultural life
involves a greater degree of what Alexis de Tocqueville described as
America's "chaste affection for legal formalities." Here, the modern
requerimiento pressures Indians either to leave the reservation and
enter an American society where they will be bereft and cultureless
people in a land where poor people of color suffer systematic oppression
and an ever-worsening condition of merciless inequality, or remain on
the reservation and attempt to preserve their culture amidst the
wreckage of governmentally imposed poverty, hunger, ill health,
despondency, and the endless attempts of the federal and state
governments at land and resource usurpation.
The
Columbian Quincentennial celebrations have encouraged scholars worldwide
to pore over the Admiral's life and work, to investigate every rumor
about his ancestry and to analyze every jotting in the margins of his
books. Perhaps the most revealing insight into the man, as into the
enduring Western civilization that he represented, however, is a bland
and simple sentence that rarely is noticed in his letter to the Spanish
sovereigns, written on *he way home from his initial voyage to the
Indies. After searching the coasts of all the islands he had encountered
for signs of wealth and princes and great cities, Columbus says he
decided to send "two men upcountry" to see what they could see. "They
traveled for three days," he wrote, "and found an infinite number of
small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance."
People
without number-but nothing of importance. It would become a motto for
the ages.
reprinted from the Third World Traveler
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