THE HISTORIES OF ATROCITIES page 25

         AND THE FORMULATION OF THE ELITIST'S PRINCIPLES , TO ENGINEER THE  DECIMATION OF THE HUMAN FAMILY, TO BRING IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER, AND OR TO PREPARE THE EVACUATION OF  THIS PENAL COLONY WE CALL EARTH,

                                                 "Genocide in The Americas"

by David E. Stannard

in The Nation, (October 19, 1992 pp. 430-434)

A few years ago, in their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward
Herman and Noam Chomsky described the ways in which modern
societies discriminate between "worthy and unworthy victims"--for
example, outrage in the U.S. press over Khmer Rouge atrocities
against "worthy" victims in Cambodia; silence about Indonesia's
murder of hundreds of thousands of "unworthy" people in East
Timor, up to a third of the native population. Today, we are
being treated to a similar hypocrisy. Expressions of horror and
condemnation over "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and Herzegovina
routinely appear on the same newspaper page or television news
show as reports of the latest festivals surrounding the Columbian
quincentennial. Bosnians and Croatians are "worthy victims." 
The native peoples of the Americas never have been. But of late,
American and European denials of culpability for the most
thoroughgoing genocide in the history of the world have assumed a
new guise.
It has become fashionable to acknowledge what for the most
almost five centuries was ignored but what outspoken native
people today have made it impossible to disregard--that the
voyages of Columbus launched a bloodbath--while at the same time
explaining away or even justifying the slaughter. Thus, noted
anthropologist Marvin Harris describes post-Columbian
devastation, both in the West Indies and throughout the Americas,
as accidental, an "unintended consequence" of European
exploration. It was disease that killed off the indigenous
peoples of the Caribbean and the Americas, disease innocently
carried in the breath and on the bodies of the European
adventurers. As Alfred Crosby, a leading scholar on the impact
of disease in history, recently put it, "The first European
colonists...did not want the Americans to die," but unfortunately
the natives "did not wear well."
Like the histories of so many conquering peoples, this is a
comforting lie. Epidemic disease undeniably contributed in large
measure to the carnage, but in many volumes of testimony the
European explorers themselves detail their murderous intentions
and actions. In the Caribbean and in Meso-and South America they
enslaved the native people, chaining them together at the neck
and marching them in columns to toil in gold and silver mines,
decapitating any who did not walk quickly enough. They sliced
off women's breasts for sport and fed their babies to the backs
of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that accompanied the Spanish
soldiers. "They would test their swords and their manly strength
on captured Indians," wrote a Spanish witness to the massacres,
"and place bets on the slicing off of heads or cutting of bodies
in half with one blow."
On the island of Espanola, under Columbus's governorship,
50,000 native people died within a matter of months following the
establishment of the first Spanish colony. That is the
proportional equivalent of 1.5 million dead Americans today--more
than twice the number of U.S. battle deaths in the Civil War,
World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War
combined. When the Caribbean holocaust exhausted itself around
1535, the extermination, in number of deaths and proportion of
the population affected, vastly exceeded that of any of the
hideous genocides that have occurred in the twentieth century
against Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese,
Cambodians, Ugandans, and others.
By this time, however, destruction on an even grander scale
was under way in Mexico and Central America. In November of
1519, Hernando Cortes and his accompanying conquistadors became
the first Westerners to gaze upon the magnificent Aztec city of
Tenochtitlan, an island metropolis far larger and more dazzling
than anything they had ever seen in Europe. Less than two years
later that incredible city, which had had at least five times the
population of either London or Seville at the time, was a
smoldering ruin.
Tenochtitlan, with its 350,000 residents, had been the jewel
of an empire that contained numerous exquisite cities. All were
destroyed. Before the coming of the Europeans, central Mexico,
radiating out from those metropolitan centers over many tens of
thousands of square miles, had contained about 25 million people-
-almost ten times the population of England at the time. 
Seventy-five years later hardly more than 1 million were left. 
And central Mexico, where 95 out of every 100 people perished,
was typical. In Central America the grisly pattern held, and
even worsened. In western and central Honduras 95 percent of the
native people were exterminated in half a century. In western
Nicaragua the rate of extermination was 99 percent--from more
than 1 million people to less than 10,000 in just sixty years.
And then the holocaust spread to South America. Before the
arrival of the Europeans the population of what today are Peru
and Chile was somewhere between 9 million and 14 million. A
century later it was barely 500,000. In Brazil and the rest of
the continent the story was the same.
Death of this magnitude eventually becomes incomprehensible. 
Thus, sometimes the vignette is more revealing, such as the case
in Peru of one Roque Martin, who, in words of Pedro de Cieza de
Leon, the Spanish chronicler of the Inca conquest, kept "the
quarters of Indians hanging on his porch to feed his dogs with,
as if they were wild beasts."
All told, it is likely that between 60 million and 80
million people from the Indies to the Amazon had perished as a
result of the European invasion even before the dawning of the
seventeenth century. Although much of that ghastly population
collapse was caused by the spread of european diseases to which
the native peoples had no immunity, an enormous amount of it was
the result of mass murder. A good deal, as well, derived from
simply working the enslaved native laborers to death.
On this last point, the conquerors of the southern half of
the New World were forerunners of those twentieth-century Germans
who extinguished the lives of what they called "useless eaters"
in the Nazi camps. In both cases, from the so-called silver
mountain of Potosi in the sixteenth-century Andes to the
synthetic rubber factory of Auschwitz in the 1940s, the slave
drivers calculated that it was cheaper to work people to death by
the tens of thousands and then replace them than it was to
maintain and feed a permanent captive labor force. The life
expectancy of Indians forced to labor in the South American
silver mines was, therefore, about the same as that of Jewish and
other forced laborers at Auschwitz--three to four months.
Yet, while it is patently untrue that the Spanish and
Portuguese did not wish to kill the indigenous peoples whom they
enslaved and burned and hacked to death and fed to their dogs, it
is true that most of them placed some value on the Indians as a
source of labor, and thus did not desire their immediate
extermination. And therein lies the major difference between
Spanish invasion to the south and the British invasion of what
are now the United States and Canada. The British--and,
following their lead, nineteenth-century white Americans--quite
openly sought nothing less than the complete annihilation of the
Indian.
The number of people living north of Mexico prior to the
European invasion remains a subject of much academic debate, with
most informed estimates ranging from a low of about 7 million to
a high of 18 million. There is no doubt, however, that by the
close of the nineteenth century the indigenous population of the
United States and Canada totaled around 250,000. in sum, during
the years separating the first arrival of Europeans in the
sixteenth century and the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee in
the winter of 1890, between 97 and 99 percent of North America's
native people were killed.
The English who settled Jamestown early in the sixteenth
century looked upon a New World quite different form the one that
greeted the Spanish. There was no gold of silver, and native
population densities were much lower than in most of Mexico and
Central and South America. With relatively little in the way of
mineral riches to exploit, and with a population explosion under
way in the British Isles, North America offered just one thing to
the English: land, or what a later generation of Europeans would
call Lebensraum.
Since the Indians stood in the way of unlimited access to
North America's magnificent landmass, the Indians would have to
be eliminated. And so they were. In Virginia, following on the
heels of the inevitable epidemics, the British initiated a
relentless series of purges. They burned entire Indian towns and
surrounding cornfields. They poisoned whole communities. And
they capped off these homicidal enterprises by abducting Indian
women and children for sale as in the slave markets of the
Indies, an unusually farsighted genocidal technique, since it
prevented population recovery.
After a half-century or so of this, Virginia's largest
Indian confederation was "so rowted, slayne and dispersed," wrote
one British colonist, "that they are no longer a nation." By
1697 the native population of Virginia was less than 1,500; prior
to the arrival of the Europeans it had numbered in the tens of
thousands, perhaps upward of 100,000.
In New England as elsewhere, disease laid the groundwork for
the massacres that followed. the epidemics were regarded by the
English as the handiwork of God. For most colonists, however,
the Lord needed a helping hand. One after another after another,
Indian towns and villages were attacked and burned, their
inhabitants murdered or sold into foreign slavery . As William
Bradford, the pious governor of Plymouth Colony, described the
reaction of the settlers to one such mass immolation:

"It was a fearful sight to see [the Indians] thus frying in
fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and
horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory
seemed a sweet sacrifice, and [the settlers] gave the praise
thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them."

By the close of the seventeenth century there was, at most, one
native person of New England alive for every twenty who had
greeted the English colonists less than a hundred years earlier--
a 95-percent die-off.
During the first decade of settlements the Massachusetts
colonists had instituted a law making it a crime to "shoot off a
gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an Indian
or wolf." The association of Indians to wolves was a common one. 
In 1703--by which time most of New England's native people had
long been wiped from the face of the earth--Boston's Rev. Solomon
Stoddard urged the Massachusetts governor to train a large pack
of dogs to hunt down those who remained. Such "dogs would be an
extreme terror to the Indians," he noted, and would "catch many
an Indian that would be too light of foot for us." Recognizing
that the faint of heart might think his plan "to hunt Indians as
they do bears" to be a bit extreme, Stoddard acknowledged that he
might agree "if the Indians were as other people," but in fact
the Indians were wolves "and are to be dealt withal as wolves."
Following the Revolution, while virtually all of the new
nations's early leaders supported the Indian eradication effort,
few did so with such evident glee as Andrew Jackson. Fond of
calling native peoples "savage dogs" and boasting that "I have on
all occasions preserved the scalps of my killed," Jackson at one
time supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses,
cutting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the
dead, and slicing long strips from their bodies to tan and turn
into bridle reins. On another occasion he ordered his troops to
slay all the Indian children they could find, once they had
killed the women and men, because failure to do so allowed the
possibility of group survival. Merely killing the women, he
cautioned, was like pursuing "a wolf in the hammocks without
knowing first where her den and whelps were."
It was President Jackson as well who was responsible for the
famous Trail of Tears, when U.S. Army troops drove the dwindling
remnants of the Cherokee nation out of their homes and across the
country in a march alongside which the Bataan Death March--the
most notorious japanese atrocity in all of World War II--pales by
comparison. Indeed, the 50 percent death rate on the Trail of
Tears, like that of numerous other presidentially ordered death
marches of Indian peoples, was approximately the same as that
suffered by Jews in Germany, Hungary and Romania between 1939 and
1945.
Finally, there was California, geographically the last stop
on the road west. When Mexico ceded it to the United States in
1848, 75 percent of the native population had already been wiped
out during seventy-five years of Spanish rule. In the next
twenty-five years the Americans presided over the annihilation of
80 percent of those Indians who had survived the Spanish. Under
official gubernatorial directive urging the extermination of
California's Indians, native adults were hunted down like
animals, while their children were enslaved. By the time the
nineteenth century drew to a close, in California as throughout
the country, the indigenous population was barely 1 or 2 percent
of its former size; and that small fraction, largely locked away
on impoverished reservations, constituted less than one-third of
1 percent of the nations's overall population. Killing Indians--
at least as far as the government was concerned--no longer seemed
worth the trouble.
There are many ways to destroy a people. The United Nations
Genocide Convention lists five techniques, ranging from mass
murder to "deliberately inflicting on [a] group conditions of
life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
or in part." Michael Marrus, a student of the Nazi Holocaust
against the Jews, puts it well when he writes: "It is clearly
wrong to separate from the essence of the Holocaust those Jews
who never survived long enough to reach the camps, or who were
shot down by the Einsatgruppen in the Soviet Union, or who
starved in the ghettos of eastern Europe, or who were wasted by
disease because of malnutrition and neglect, or who were killed
in reprisal in the west, or who died in any of the countless
other, terrible ways--no less a part of the Holocaust because
their final agonies do not meet some artificial standards of
uniqueness."
Even in Auschwitz, it is now recognized, more people died
for hyperexploitation, malnutrition and disease than from
gassing, hanging or shooting, and certainly few would deny that
the "indirect" deaths were as much a part of Auschwitz's
genocidal purpose as were those that occurred "directly." The
same issue is true of the Euro-American genocide against the
native peoples of the New World.
Nonetheless, says Charles Krauthammer in an essay in Time,
while duly insisting that he would never "justify the cruelty of
the conquest," the fact is that "mankind is the better for it. 
Infinitely better. Reason enough to honor Columbus and bless
1492." Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing in The Atlantic for
September, hastens to add that while "in general, the European
record in dealing with the indigenous peoples of the Americas was
miserable--and indefensible....there are benefits, too, and these
require to be factored into the historical equation." Had
Europeans not conquered and destroyed the Aztecs and the Incas,
Schlesinger contends, these societies of dazzling accomplishment
might have continued indefinitely with their unpleasant practices
of "ritual torture and human sacrifice." Further, "they would
most likely have preserved their collectivist cultures and their
conviction that the individual had no legitimacy outside the
theocratic state, and the result would have been a repressive
fundamentalism comparable perhaps to that of the Ayatollah
Khomeini in Iran."
Of course, it is idle to speculate about what "might have
been," a flimflam construction that is quite likely wrong but
impossible to disprove. And one needn't romanticize the pre-
Columbian world. Let us remember that ritual torture and human
sacrifice were common practices in the Old World at the very same
time that they characterized Aztec and Inca society. The
sixteenth-century European habit of killing heretics and witches
by the thousands was clearly human sacrifice to the jealous
Christian god, yet no one has proposed that genocide against
Europeans at the time would have had some "benefits...to be
factored into the historical equation."
More seriously and more generally, to attempt to mitigate
culpability for genocide by applauding the end result--as
Krauthammer and Schlesinger and others in effect do--is to follow
down a treacherous path. Would similar historical explanations
proffered by the grandchildren of German storm troopers and S.S.
doctors get so polite a hearing, or is this simply the
prerogative of victors? Indeed, so bombarded are most Americans
with the unexamined ideology of "worthy" and "unworthy" victims--
so unwilling is this country to face up to the underside of its
own historical experience--that only by imaginatively
substituting the word "Jew" or the collective name of some other
group of worthy victims each time "Indian" or "native" appears in
essays such as this is there any hope of recognizing the
grotesque nature of what in truth is being honored on this and
every October 12.
Moreover, the devastation is far from finished. Year in and
year out confirmed reports are published of the torture,
enslavement and murder of Indians in Central and South America--
almost 10,000 dead and "disappeared" annually in Guatemala alone
during much of the 1980s, the proportional equivalent of more
than 300,000 Americans deaths each year--virtually all of it
carried out with the complicity of the United States government. 
And here at home native people, many of them suffering life-
threatening Third World levels of hunger, disease, and
impoverishment, remain in constant struggle against federal and
state and local government agencies for control of the meager
lands and resources they still have.
If a moment of reflection can be found amid the din of
quincentennial self-congratulation, it will be worth recalling
that the year 1992 is not only the 500th anniversary of
Columbus's first voyage to the New World. It is also the
fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi's conversion of Auschwitz from a
prisoner-of-war and concentration camp into an extermination
center. It is no exaggeration to say that glorifying the one is
little different from venerating the other.