The Third
Reich was, after all, never so much a deviation from as it was a
crystallization of the dominant themes – racial supremacism, conquest, and
genocide --- of the European culture Columbus so ably exemplifies. Nazism was never unique; it was instead only
one of an endless succession of “New World Orders” set in motion by “The
Discovery”.
In
the United States, the native population bottomed out during the 1890s at
slightly over 237,000 --- a 98% reduction from its original size.
As long as there appeared to be an unending supply of brute labor it
was cheaper to work an Indian to death, and replace him or her with another
native, than it was to feed and care for either of them properly.
When
the Indians grew exhausted, they cut off their heads without untying them from
their chains, leaving the roads full of bodies.
The
answer to the oft-posed question as to why, given their preponderant military
advantage in the early years of Jamestown and Plymouth, that native peoples in
each area didn’t simply annihilate the invaders, is thus rather straight
forward: it didn’t and couldn’t occur to them.
Put simply, neither the Tsenacommacahs nor the Pequots, the
Narragansetts, the Wampanoags nor any other known pre-invasion Indigenous
people pursued warfare by way of killing their opponents’ women, children, and
elders. Indeed, the terms of native
warfare didn’t emphasize killing at all.
John
Underhill wrote of the Pequots that wars were more for pastime than to conquer
and subdue their enemies, and Henry Spelman, who lived among the Powhatans,
said that “they might fight 7 yeares and not kill 7 men”.
Contrary
to Hollywood’s history book, it was the white man who created the tradition of
scalping as we know it today. … The English purpose in taking heads was not
only to terrorize the populace. It also served to confirm the count of enemy
killed, first in Ireland, then in New England.
Overwhelmed
by the sheer viciousness of the European/Euroamerican drive to extermination,
and thus confronted with what Tzvetan Todorov has called “facing the extreme”,
many – but not all—of North America’s indigenous peoples internalized much of
their exterminators’ bloodlust, engaging in large scale killing, scalping, and
mutilating in a bitterly desperate effort to forestall their own looming
eradication. The dynamic of death
imposed upon them left no viable alternative in most cases.
By 1894,
virtually the entire range of indigenous spiritual practise had been outlawed,
a measure expressly intended to eradicate all vestiges of the traditions which
afforded cohesion and continuity to native cultures. Meanwhile, the bulk of all American Indian
children were forcibly removed from their communities at the earliest possible
age and sent to remote boarding schools where they were systematically
decultured.
Alcohol,
consciously used by Europeans/Euroamericans since colonial times as a sort of
“chemical weapon” to dissipate indigenous societies.
The
American holocaust was and remains unparalleled, both in terms of its magnitude
and the degree to which its goals were met, and in terms of the extent to which
its ferocity was sustained over time by not one but several participating
groups.
All told, it is probable that more than 100 million native people
were “eliminated” in the course of Europe’s ongoing “civilization” of the
western hemisphere.
Las Casas’ Brevisima relación, among other contemporaneous sources,
is also replete with accounts of Spanish colonists (hidalgo) hanging [Haiti and
Dominican Republic] Tainos en masse, roasting them on spits or burning them at
the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking their children into pieces
to be used as dog food, and so forth, all of it to instill in the natives a
“proper attitude of respect” toward their Spanish “superiors”.
We hear
only of “Indian wars”, never of “settlers’ wars”. It is as if the natives, always “warlike” and
“aggressive”, had invaded and laid waste to London or Castile, rather than
engaging in desperate and always futile efforts to repel the hordes of
“pioneers” and “peaceful settlers” overrunning their homelands.
