Genocide/democide/politicide

[alewbail]

Coincidentally, I'm reading "King Leopold's Ghost", by Adam Hochschild, about the Belgian Congo. The author claims ten million deaths there. Granted, the killing started in the late 1800s, but a significant fraction were in the early 1900s. I'm haven't finished the book yet, so there may be some caveats I'm unaware of. But why doesn't it rate?

[Nametag]

The column which alewbail refers to is Was Andrew Jackson one of the world's biggest mass murderers?
(http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021018.html)

And King Leopold doesn't rate because the list of those "leaders" who killed their own people.

[alewbail]

Sorry, but it should be areas _controlled_ by the regime. Otherwise, the Nazi number would be much lower, right? If it only included German victims, not Polish Jews, etc., it wouldn't approach the 21 million figure. Certainly the Congo was as much a "property" of Belgium as Poland was a "property" of Nazi Germany?

And the ethnicity of the ruler vis-a-vis the victims shouldn't matter, again taking the Nazi example.

So I think my original question's still valid.

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

Part of the problem is documentation. Leopold's people destroyed absolutely everything they could in the way of records when Belgium lost the Congo.

Your question is valid. But the evidence to answer it is largely gone.

[DonnyOsmond]

Cecil changed the question.

The guy asked "how does Jackson rank among practitioners of genocide". Cecil ignored that question and answered, "Was Andrew Jackson one of the world's biggest mass murderers?", further narrowing it to include only state-sponsored murders.

The question he chose to answer had a simple answer "no, of course not, not even close".

The original question was more complex, and the answer could be formulated in several ways.

One possibility: excluding combatants in wartime, how many people of a specific race were sent to death by the perpetrator?

Another possibility: how close did the perpetrator come to the extermination of an entire race, tribe, or ethnic group?

By the first formulation, Jackson was still off the leader board. But that interpretation is not a reflection of a man's success in genocide, but only his ambition. Jackson terrorized a small ethnic group while Stalin went after a massive target. By this definition, Jackson couldn't even claim the lead among U.S. Presidents. For example, Harry Truman would be higher on the list, having killed far more Japanese non-combatants than Jackson killed Cherokee.

Interpreting the question the second way - the one that essentially measures how close a perpetrator came to successful genocide, Jackson may have a case as the kingpin.

I don't know

But it would be interesting to see the answer to the original question.

Pol Pot killed x% of the Cambodian population, Hitler y% of European Jewry, Stalin z% of ethnic _____ (whatever group he killed the highest percentage of).

I wonder if Jackson approached or surpassed x, y, and z in terms of the percentage of the Cherokee nation? He may not have been the most ambitious genocidal maniac because he terrorized a small group, but was he the most efficient? Did he, in fact, come closest to successful genocide in the past two centuries?

[SlowMindThinking]

I can't believe Jackson was even close to the top, but I doubt there is a good way to answer this question. Should the Cherokee be counted as different ethnic group than related tribes? Even if so, 4000 would not be that big a percentage, relative to the ones who were really good (bad?) at this sort of thing. Hitler certainly wiped out far larger percentages of some of his hated groups. (What percentage of Gypsies survived?) Even in America, Jackson is second rate. It was either the Navajo or the Utes that were forced marched at a much higher death rate in the Southwest - to a camp with conditions that appalled all but the General. On my last trip to the Grand Canyon, I was told that stragglers on that march were shot without delay.

From what I recall, Jackson considered what he was doing a military action. Genocide was not his aim, although I doubt he was greatly troubled. Relocating people after a conquest was hardly a new idea. Let's see, it happened to the Jews with Assyria, Chaldea, Rome, .... To the best of my knowledge, Assyria was the first state, empire, nation, political entity to make forced relocation a policy. Ironically, there are more Americans claiming Cherokee descent than other tribes precisely because of the Trail of Tears. Many who just know they have some "Indian blood", claim Cherokee.

[Froggyv]

You mention "only 4000" Native Americans died. Do you have any figures for what percentage this is?

[substatique]

I'd have to hazard the guess that Leo doesn't rate because Rummel's statistics are deliberately doctored to make the United States look good. The USA is probably the biggest killer of the 20th century, but it doesn't tend to kill its own people in large numbers, and most of its murders take place during nominal wartime. You can't really pin it on a single despot. The blame is well-spread in a democracy.

And what about trade sanctions that result in famines?

I don't know anything about King Leopold, but his aquittal is probably just a lucky side-effect of Rummel's shifty definitions.

[C K Dexter Haven]

<< The USA is probably the biggest killer of the 20th century, but it doesn't tend to kill its own people in large numbers, and most of its murders take place during nominal wartime. >>

Oh, please. This is about the most ludicrous statement I've seen here in weeks.

Excluding war deaths, Cecil mentions 62 million killed by the USSR, USSR, 35 million by the People's Republic of China, 35 million and 21 million by Nazi Germany. There's no way that the US came anywhere close to these number, even if you include war deaths caused by the US and exclude war deaths caused by other countries.

Oh, wait, I forgot, the US is the Great Satan and is responsible for every death, disease, earthquake, fire, flood, or plague since 1492. Bah.

[Irishman]

DonnyOsmond does have a point about how Cecil shifted the answer from being about genocide to being about democide. I think Cecil was responding with a list of mass murderers, as opposed to mass murderers for the intent of ethnic cleansing. I suppose it is subjective as to whether that was an appropriate response.

SlowMindThinking said:
Ironically, there are more Americans claiming Cherokee descent than other tribes precisely because of the Trail of Tears. Many who just know they have some "Indian blood", claim Cherokee.

Do you have some justification for that remark?

[MEBuckner]

Originally posted by Froggyv
You mention "only 4000" Native Americans died. Do you have any figures for what percentage this is?
The Encyclopedia Britannica estimates the total Cherokee population at about 22,500 in 1650. About 15,000 people were forcibly relocated in the Trail of Tears, and about 4,000 died. That works out to just under 18% of the total Cherokee population, and around 27% of those who marched died.

World Jewish Population (http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/worldpop.html) in 1939 was under 17 million. Estimates of Jews killed in the Holocaust range from 5 to 6 million, or 30 to 35% of all the Jews in the world. (The population figures on that page--16,728,000 in 1939 and 11,500,000 in 1948--add up to 5,228,000 murdered, or 31% of all Jews worldwide.) This page (http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/totaljews.html) indicates there were something over 9 million Jews remaining in Europe when the worst phase of the Holocaust, the establishment of the extermination camps, began. Well over half of the Jews of Europe were murdered. This page (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/killedtable.html), with somewhat different numbers, indicates about two-thirds of the Jewish population of the areas occupied or controlled by the Nazis were killed; 90% of the Jewish population in Poland--the largest single community of Jews in the world--were murdered.

So, without in any way excusing the actions of Andrew Jackson or the United States government with respect to the Cherokee, I don't think they are anywhere near being in the same league as Hitler.

[Adam P.]

Originally posted by C K Dexter Haven
<< The USA is probably the biggest killer of the 20th century, but it doesn't tend to kill its own people in large numbers, and most of its murders take place during nominal wartime. >>

Oh, please. This is about the most ludicrous statement I've seen here in weeks.

Excluding war deaths, Cecil mentions 62 million killed by the USSR, USSR, 35 million by the People's Republic of China, 35 million and 21 million by Nazi Germany. There's no way that the US came anywhere close to these number, even if you include war deaths caused by the US and exclude war deaths caused by other countries.

Oh, wait, I forgot, the US is the Great Satan and is responsible for every death, disease, earthquake, fire, flood, or plague since 1492. Bah.

Hm. Tap the knees and it kicks. The above poster may have overstated things when he said that the U.S. is "the biggest killer
of the 20th century" but his basic idea--that the U.S.,mainly through the use of proxy armies, was often a perpetrator of genocide--is by now generally accepted, not only in the leftist circles that CKDH derides, but in mainstream academia. The Bush administration has implicitly acknowledged this fact by its refusal to endorse the World Court because of the very real possibility, if the American sponsored wars of the last 50 years are any indication, that Americans might be tried for genocide at some point in the future.

I wasn't going to go all the way back to 1492. But, since you mentioned it in a rather snippy, dsmissive way I'll comment on it. By any definition, Columbus was a perpetrator of genocide. This charge is not the product of some new leftist historical revisionism, as many conservatives seem to think, but was first proposed nearly 500 years ago by Bartolome de la Casas, whose father sailed with Columbus. Commenting on Columbus' bloody slaughter and enslavement of the the natives of Hispaniola (now The Dominican Republic and Haiti) he said that "it marked the beginning of the spilling of blood, later to become a river of blood, first on this island and then in every corner of the Indies." By 1496 it is esimated that a third of the people of Hispaniola had been killed--causes ranging from imported diseases, mistreatment, and, in many instances, outright slaughter. Just short of two generations later, the entire population had been wiped out. Columbus' administration was widely recogized as a disaster. He was later jailed and his patrons generally believed that he was slowly going insane, as his bizarre journals form this period seem to confirm. So, I wouldn't be so flippant when dismissing Columbus-related perpetrations of genocide.

On recent examples of American genocide I would refer you to Christopher Hitchens' book "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" which, in a reasoned, well documented way, lays out the case for a a charge of genocide against Kissinger, specifically for the illegal invasion of Cambodia in which civilians were targerted with mass carpet bombings. K's approval of the invasion of East Timor, in which ten of thousands of civilians were slaughtered, is also cited, though I don't think that comes under the definiton of genocide unless you were to use the term in a vague rhetorical sense. Certainly I don't think that K is in the same league as Hitler or Mao. His utilitarian doctrine of "realpolitik" actually constituted a refusal of any governmental racial, ethnic, or utopian ideology. He was interested in the pragmatic needs of nation-states, not in recreating the world as Hitler or Mao tried to do. But his crimes were crimes against humanity nonetheless and are probably best compared, not with Auschwitz or the Gulag, but with the British bombing of Dresden in WWII in which civilians were targeted and killed in the hundreds of thousands.

Cecil seemed fixated on numbers in his column, as though you could somehow quantify human suffering. His basic point is that Jackson wasn't guily of genocide in the sense that Hitler was, not because of any difference in ideology (similar, actually) but because he didn't achieve the gargantuan numbers Hitler did. I would point out that the under the laws of the modern War Crimes Tribunal, a modern-day Jackson could be tried for genocide. Milosevic, for example, is charged with being directly complicitous with the execution of perhaps 5,000 people. His influence and ideology certainly created the condiitons for the ethnic cleansing we saw throughout the 90s, but there is no direct evidence linking him with it--a smoking gun--as may be the case here. So numbers are by no means the only criteria for a charge of genocide or "democide", an ungainly term that I doubt is going to catch on.

[MEBuckner]

Hm. Tap the knees and it kicks. The above poster may have overstated things when he said that the U.S. is "the biggest killer of the 20th century"....
It's the sort of "overstatement" which immediately shuts down all hope of reasonable discussion by virtue of its breathtaking inaccuracy. It's like the teenager who complains that the new school policy banning all backpacks is "the worst injustice in the history of humanity". It's such an obviously stupid thing to say that no one takes the complaint seriously, when a simple protest that the new policy is unfair or counterproductive might actually be heard.

In fact, such sweeping overstatements have the paradoxical effect of letting their targets off the hook completely. "The U.S. has committed a lot of injustices you know, and not just back during the Indian Wars....Cambodia....Mossadegh....Allende...etc." might actually elicit some genuine embarassment and/or discussion from defenders of U.S. foreign policy. "The U.S. during the 20th Century was worse than Stalin and Hitler!" is so obviously stupid that it immediately gets a well-deserved reaction of contemptuous dismissal.

[Chronos]

And if you pull in America's wars as examples of mass killings, then to be fair, you must also hold other countries accountable for their wars. All countries fight wars, you know, and if the wars the US has fought have been bigger than most, that's to be expected, the US being a bigger country than most.

As far as Jackson and the Trail of Tears: While I think that we can all agree that what he did was wrong, his intent wasn't to kill the Cherokee. His intent was to relocate them. Yes, it's still reprensible, but it's not premeditated murder.

[MEBuckner]

And if you pull in America's wars as examples of mass killings, then to be fair, you must also hold other countries accountable for their wars.
Indeed. For example, Rummel excludes deaths due to war, which if included would surely add many millions to Hitler's total. All the major powers fought World War II, but Hitler started it (at least in Europe), so (excluding casualties in the Pacific War), I think we would have to say Hitler was morally responsible for all those deaths, soldiers and civilians, of the Western Allies, of the Soviet Union, of the Axis-occupied and allied territories, and of his own people, which were caused by his own twisted ambition.

[WWW]

Cecil notes the forced Cherokee relocation known as "The trail of tears" occurred in 1838-1839. I am new to this board but I have yet to discover any reference to the fact that Martin Van Buren was President of the United States of America from 1836-1840. It is difficult to minimize Andrew Jackson's culpabilily for the relocation policy, but it is perhaps a backhanded tribute to the force of his personality that he so overshadows the individual who carried it out...and who must, therefore, bear the blame for casulties of neglect and incompetence. Granted, the mind boggles at any effort to equate Van Buren with Stalin, but the Cherokees did not forgive him, or those of their own corrupt Cheifs who signed the treaties that provided the legal "fig leaf" for the relocation.

[substatique]

Sorry, C K Dexter Haven; my comment seems inflammatory a day later. However, at the time I thought I was wording it as an opinion. :o I wish I could back it up with numbers, but numbers are hard to find exactly because any research in this area is suspect. I'm not a holocaust-denier, but I don't believe everything I read about "history's most evil men," even when it comes from Cecil.

By the way, in order to debunk my statement you used the very research I was attacking. This seems circular. Here's a list of more figures for people to throw around if they wish: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm

(Here are some more moral judgements.) The United States should be held responsible for many deaths merely because it is the most powerful country in the world, and it could prevent many tragedies if it so desired. American foreign policy is callous and often hypocritical, and its attitude towards world democracy is one of contempt. A more human-oriented use of power would have brought the century's death total down considerably.

On the other hand, I recognize that no other country would do as good a job of managing the world. Britain and Rome were awful in their respective days. As a superpower, the USA has shown the planet to a fruitful golden age that will collapse soon enough, leaving us all begging for the return of the so-called Great Satan.

[Steve MB]

Cecil changed the question.

The guy asked "how does Jackson rank among practitioners of genocide". Cecil ignored that question and answered, "Was Andrew Jackson one of the world's biggest mass murderers?", further narrowing it to include only state-sponsored murders.

The question he chose to answer had a simple answer "no, of course not, not even close".

The original question was more complex, and the answer could be formulated in several ways.

One possibility: excluding combatants in wartime, how many people of a specific race were sent to death by the perpetrator?

Another possibility: how close did the perpetrator come to the extermination of an entire race, tribe, or ethnic group?

It pretty clear from the question that the intended interpretation was the former:

What I want to know is, how does Jackson rank among practitioners of genocide? Does he even make the all-time top-ten list? I figure he has to come in way behind Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Turkish triumvirate Talat, Enver, and Cemal (who orchestrated the Armenian genocide), and the recent Hutu leaders in Rwanda. Can you think of any others who rank ahead of Jackson?

[alewbail]

Originally posted by Adam P.
Cecil seemed fixated on numbers in his column, as though you could somehow quantify human suffering.


Granted, due to historical/technological/etc. differences, you can't always compare numbers as apples-vs-apples.

However, I think we should be more "fixated" on numbers; we often don't pay any attention to numbers. It's about time we did try to quantify human suffering, and I'm not talking about how much to pay the WTC families.

What would recent history have looked like if the response were proportional to the numbers? Take Yugoslavia and Rwanda as examples. The Rwandan genocide was an order of magnitude larger than all the strife in Yugoslavia put together (correct me if I'm wrong). If the response had been proportional, maybe a few hudred thousand lives could've been saved in Rwanda. I'm not saying the response to Yugoslavia was too great (far from it), but that the response to Rwanda fell incredibly short.

And I found Cecil's numbers enlightening. I'm a left-leaner, and my basic idea was, "Well, yeah, Stalin and Mao really sucked, but they were no Hitlers." Well, clearly they were in the same league, regardless of how you run the numbers.

[SlowMindThinking]

(Here are some more moral judgements.) The United States should be held responsible for many deaths merely because it is the most powerful country in the world, and it could prevent many tragedies if it so desired. American foreign policy is callous and often hypocritical, and its attitude towards world democracy is one of contempt. A more human-oriented use of power would have brought the century's death total down considerably.

You have to explain this one to me. What exactly are we supposed to do? It is folly to suppose we could have done much in Rwanda. We have no military presence anywhere near there. Preventing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people (in a very short period of time) requires tens of thousands of men, plus we would have to kill at least thousands. Surely we are not blameless. (Why exactly did we bomb that pharmeceutical plant in North Africa? Oh yea, Clinton was having political troubles. Why did we go into Somalia, oh yea, Clinton was having political troubles....) But, the worst you would find would be the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden. Certainly, one can argue that those actions saved more lives than they cost.

Or, perhaps you are referring to attempting to feed everyone in the world? We can try, but it is much harder than you think. One of the reasons Somalia was such a mess was that food could not reach the population most in need. Those with power used food as a weapon. But even in places without corruption, blanketing poor areas with food is often considered as undermining the local population's ability to feed itself. E.g, what stops the rich landowner from converting all of his land to a cash crop for export? Why should the poor farmer grow food and not a cash crop? It goes on.

As far as,
was often a perpetrator of genocide--is by now generally accepted, not only in the leftist circles that CKDH derides, but in mainstream academia
is concerned, I was a member of mainstream academia. It was leftist when I left in the 80's, and probably still is. Has the US killed innocent civilians? Without question. Has the US does so as a matter of policy? Perhaps in a few locations such as Cambodia. Have we committed genocide since we stopped trying to wipe out Indian tribes? I don't think so.

[ALLIGATOR]

THE BIGGEST MASS KILLING IS THE KILLING OF POOR WHITES AND BLACKS AT A RATE FAR ABOVE THE PERCENTAGE OF THEIR ACTUAL NUMBERS IN THE POPULATION.
ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS CONVINCE THEM THAT IT'S WHAT THE RICH DO WHEN THERE IS A PREGNANCY THAT THEY DON'T WANT.
OVER 43,000,000 AND STILL COUNTING.
APPROXIMATELY 40% ARE MINORITY ABORTIONS WHILE THEY ARE ONLY ABOUT 12% OF THE POPULATION.
ADOLF WOULD BE PROUD.

[waterj2]

I was about to dismiss the above as a drive-by pro-life troll, but then I noticed that he backed up his argument with the use of all capital letters. I'm convinced.

[MEBuckner]

Originally posted by SlowMindThinking
Why did we go into Somalia, oh yea, Clinton was having political troubles....
The U.S. went into Somalia during the last days of the presidency of George H.W. Bush.



ALLIGATOR: Please look on your keyboard, probably on the left edge, between the [Tab] key (above) and the [Shift] key (below). You will find a key labeled [Caps Lock]. Please tap this key once. Thank you.

[WWW]

I admit to being confused by the actions of President Clinton, who pulled US forces out of Somalia while it was still in chaos and yet, in the last months of his administration, toured Africa pledging US forces would protect those living there from genocides such as those that occured in Rwanda. Yet his proposals and those actions planned by his successor in Iraq bring into sharp focus the question of a UN delegate at the time of the (first?) Gulf War: "Is the United States (now) the constable of the world?"

How could we afford such a position? We are now committed to rebuilding Afghanistan, even though we came out of the Cold War with the greatest national debt of any nation in the history of mankind. Yet President Bush speaks confidently of going to war in the Middle East then rebuilding Iraq as well...all without raising taxes. One wonders if our leaders have decided our public debts simply do not matter. Our citzens wallow in private debt as well ($7,000 to $8,000 in high interest credit card debt alone among card holders who carry unpaid balances) and a disconcerting number of families depend on their place at the public trough for their private wealth. Clearly, those well to do who hope to preserve their private assets if our Federal government dissolves in debt will be little better than first class passengers on the Titanic.

We can and should forestall any genocidal movements within our own borders. We have neither the resources or the military might to police the whole world. Morover, any attempt to do so will inevitability put us in morally ambiguous situations such as attended our recent intervention of the genocidal Vietnamese civil war, where in one celebrated incident an officer admitted he had to destroy a town in order to save it.

[Irishman]

Hey WWW, you should bone up on the etiquette here. This thread is in the forum called Comments on Cecil's Columns. That means the topics are supposed to be about what Cecil actually discussed. The thread in question was about genocide and how Andrew Jackson measured up. Political diatribes belong in the forum called Great Debates. Go over there and you will find plenty of people happy (or at least willing) to discuss America's political endeavors, budget problems, etc. Over here, let's stay on topic, okay? Or do we need a moderator to come in here and bash some heads?

I'm sure we can all point fingers at several others in this thread. Let's not and just all stay on topic.

[alewbail]

Hear, hear! Here's a way to get back on thread...

Now that I've progressed a ways in "King Leopold's Ghost", I can report how Hochschild arrives at the ten million figure for the Belgian Congo.

He cites four main causes for the ten million loss in population from 1880-1920 (apparently in ascending order of influence):
- murder
- starvation/exhaustion/exposure
- disease
- plummeting birth rate

Obviously, murder -- which actually accounts for the smallest loss -- should be included in any accounting of genocide.

Starvation, etc. are direct effects of the regime, due to burning down villages, stealing foodstuffs, forced labor, etc., and I think clearly should be included.

The third is less clear. In some cases, the introduction of disease is purposeful, such as the infamous story of the small-pox-infected blankets given to American Indians as gifts. But usually disease is a side-effect of other genocidal processes. People are forced together into refugee camps; people are under-nourished; transportation avenues are opened that didn't exist before.

The last is interesting. These aren't deaths at all, but rather births that didn't occur. However, in some cases (like the Congo), this is a very large effect. In the Congo, men were killed at a greater rate than women, so a gender imbalance was created. In addition, women were often taken hostage in order to force the men to work, creating physical separation of the sexes. Shortages and disease meant that pregancies were less viable, and certainly less desirable, since they put a severe strain on the women.

[The birth rate effect isn't as difficult to calculate as you might think, assuming you can get good population statistics before and after the genocide (a difficult task in itself). Subtract the "after" population from the "before", and you have the total loss, assuming the population would've been stable without the genocide. Then, from the result, subtract the amounts for the other causes (if you know them), and the remainder is the loss due to drop in birth rate.]

I'd argue that all four causes should be included, since it's a simple measure of what the population would've/could've/should've been, had they just been left alone.

[A side-effect of this scheme is that a regime could get an "anti-genocide credit" in some cases, if population increased due to food/medical/diplomatic aid provided. OK, that's taking the quantification a bit far, and it would reward overpopulation. But as it is, the equation is pretty one-sided. It's difficult to quantify your good deeds ("Look at all the people who didn't die today! We did that!"). It's much easier to quantify your bad deeds, as long as you keep good records.]

[Kwyjibo]

Taken Biblical events into account, where on this list would God fall?

[SlowMindThinking]

Let me slip in an apology for going off topic earlier. I clearly drifted.

Back to King Leopold. I don't see how you use missing people due to a drop in birth rate as a genocide statistic. In this case, it is indicative of the general suffering, but counting unborn and unconceived people as genocide victims is ill founded. That kind of logic would imply that birth control and industialization are forms of genocide. Of course, one could eliminate an ethnic group by permanently separating the boys and the girls, but I don't know that anyone has done that.

There is another genocide that isn't in that list. The aboriginal Tasmanians were completely wiped out. Even though the numbers are small, that has to list as one of the all time atrocities. As in the Americas, I believe this was mostly done by a independent acts of hatred, and not as a deliberate policy by a government or other group..

[Spoke]

Back onto the hijack:

I think it's wrongheaded to call Andrew Jackson's (or Martin Van Buren's) actions with respect to the Cherokee "genocide." There was never any intent to wipe them out. (If there had been, it would have been an easy task to accomplish.)

The Trail of Tears owes its death count to bureaucratic bungling rather than to intentional killing.

Was the fate of the Cherokee the result of an unconscionable land grab? Yes. Was the removal carried out in an incompetent, even criminally negligent manner? Yes, clearly. Was it a "genocide?" No. The object was to relocate the Cherokee, not to destroy them.

In fact, Jackson would have been perfectly happy if the Cherokee had remained in the East and become US citizens. The treaty ceding Cherokee lands gave Cherokee families the option of remaining in the East, becoming citizens, and receiving 160 acres per household. (Most did not pursue this option, of course.)

[C K Dexter Haven]

Just to be clear -- I am in no way excusing the US for its wrong-doings. But there's a question of proportion. Not every murderer is immediately in the same league as Hitler and the Nazis. Calling the US the "biggest killer of the 20th Century" is clearly nonsense.

[neil and bob]

The original column clearly took this issue beyond the Cherokee to a governments' attempts to exterminate large numbers of people. The Unites States government should clearly be held to that same standard.

The Native American population in what is now the United States is considered by historians and anthropoligists to have been between 60 and 70 million prior to the arrival of Columbus in the 1600's. The following link to the U.S. Census shows that in 1900, there were 237,000 remaining

http://www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0056/tab01.xls

C K Dexter is correct, in that the United States is not the biggest killer in the 20th century, but certainly ranks close to the all time leader. The American policy of extermination of Indians was in effect from the 1700's through the late 1800's and was remarkably effective. Somewhere near 60 million natives were slaughtered, infected with disease (Capt. Ecuyer gave smallpox infected blankets to tribes hoping to kill them without risking his men) and hunted like animals (the Governor of New England offered a bounty for the scalps of Indian men, women and children (search for Spencer Phips to see the documents)).

There is much to be learned by those willing to seek out new information about understanding what happened in your own yard.

[Tamerlane]

Originally posted by neil and bob
The original column clearly took this issue beyond the Cherokee to a governments' attempts to exterminate large numbers of people. The Unites States government should clearly be held to that same standard.

The Native American population in what is now the United States is considered by historians and anthropoligists to have been between 60 and 70 million prior to the arrival of Columbus in the 1600's. The following link to the U.S. Census shows that in 1900, there were 237,000 remaining.

Actually the Amerindian population figures for pre-colonial North America remain in dispute. AFAIK 60-70 million is not the accepted number by a consensus of workers in the field, but rather the high estimate in a wide range of proposed figures. Regardless, the demographic collapse was enormous. However the vast majority of it, if we take those higher figures in particular, occurred long before the United States was in existence.

Further, though the European conduct was frequently atrocious and at times even locally genocidal, the bulk of those deaths ( again particularly if accepting that very high estimate ) came through imported disease, that, a few incidents aside, were not deliberately introduced with the goal of decimating native populations. Rather it was a unexpectedly devastating lethal byproduct of "cultural exchange". Indeed in some areas like early colonial Mesoamerica, this demographic collapse was much lamented by priests ( who despaired at the unconverted souls lost ) and local magnates and governors ( who lost the enormous labor pool on which they were parasitic ).


The American policy of extermination of Indians was in effect from the 1700's through the late 1800's and was remarkably effective.

An overstatement, though containing some real elements of truth. Again, while American behavior was hardly exemplary overall ( the British and French were actually rather better for a variety of reasons, lack of bigotry not being one of them ), genocial policies went hand in hand with local alliances ( like the Covenant Chain linking New England colonies with the Iroquois ) and the general pattern was nothing if not schizophrenic - i.e. there was no consistent pattern of extermination. Still, some settlements and whole colonies really did seek peaceful acccomodations from time to time for altruistic reasons as well as strategic ones ( i.e. Quaker Pennsylvania ). Not nearly often enough, obviously.

Somewhere near 60 million natives were slaughtered, infected with disease (Capt. Ecuyer gave smallpox infected blankets to tribes hoping to kill them without risking his men) and hunted like animals (the Governor of New England offered a bounty for the scalps of Indian men, women and children (search for Spencer Phips to see the documents)).

Again only the tail end of that occurred under the United States' watch, though that was more than bad enough to feel a real sense of shame.

I say all the above not to exculpate the U.S. from all blame, but just to point out that if we are being bean counters here, it shouldn't take the undiluted rap for 60 million Amerindians. Morally, however, I agree the U.S. does indeed have dirty hands, both in terms of native populations and as has been mentioned elsewhere, such ugly incidents like the Phillipines campaign and the tacit support of the non-native coup in Hawaii. Sadly that is something that can be said, to one degree or another, for most modern states.

- Tamerlane

[JRDelirious]

spoke-, there have been recent threads in GD and the Pit about Jackson and the Cherokee that go deeper into this, but one problem with the Government's "alternative" was that it would have anyway involved having them surrender the landholdings they already owned fair and square -- large tracts of prime, developed, agricultural land -- and having the established communities displaced and fragmented, in order to let whites have at those lands and resources.

[Cecil Adams]

neil and bob write:
The Native American population in what is now the United States is considered by historians and anthropoligists to have been between 60 and 70 million prior to the arrival of Columbus in the 1600's.
This is nonsense. I have the Nov. 29, 2001 New York Review of Books in front of me; in it Christopher Jencks reviews, among other books, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History by Shepard Krech III. Jencks writes, "In 1492 the Indian population of today's United States numbered at least two million. Krech guesses that the number was probably more like six million, and some writers propose even higher figures." One of the higher figures is the one I cited in my column, 15 million. In fairly extensive reading on this subject I have never seen anyone, including complete lunatics, estimate the pre-Columbian population of what is now the U.S. at "between 60 and 70 million."

One may ask why I cited 15 million rather than a more conservative figure. The answer has to do with the slippery nature of the numbers tossed around in discussions of mass murder. Readers will appreciate that, given the scale of the killings, the wide geographical range, the totalitarian nature of many of the regimes involved, the lack or destruction of records, the lapse of time, and the sheer number of incidents, any estimate of state-sponsored killing is an educated guess at best. It's difficult even to find a comprehensive list of massacres, never mind the number of deaths. In that respect the Encyclopedia of Genocide (EG) is invaluable - whatever its shortcomings, it provides the only synoptic account of worldwide mass murder that I have seen. When I wrote the column I resolved to take all my statistics from the EG in order to assure rough comparability of numbers. Granted, EG articles were contributed by a variety of authors, some more reliable than others; still, all the work had passed through the same set of editorial hands, and I could only hope that some effort had been made to iron out the more blatant contradictions and implausibilities. In short, I gave the pre-Columbian population of the (now) U.S. as 15 million because that was the number in the EG. One exception to this policy was the number of deaths during the American occupation of the Philippines - I did not see a mention of this in the EG. There is reliable authority for 300,000, but the conservative (and more commonly cited) figure is 200,000.

The perceptive reader can now guess why I interpreted "genocide" to mean "state-sponsored mass murder." Answer: because R.J. Rummel interpreted it that way. A towering figure in "genocide studies," he is the only one to have attempted a comprehensive statistical account of state-sponsored murder during the 20th century. His argument, which I found entirely persuasive, is that it is foolish to quibble over whether a given massacre does or does not qualify as genocide strictly construed. We live in a time when individual rulers or regimes have been responsible for the slaughter of millions, but we are only vaguely aware of who those rulers and regimes are. Everyone knows about the murderous policies of Hitler; many know about Stalin's; some know about Mao's. But who would have added Lenin or Chiang Kai-shek to the list? Or Tito or Yahya Khan? Who but a handful now remembers the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks or the Serbians by the Ustasha regime in Croatia? Future scholars will refine Rummel's work, and individuals or regimes may be added to or removed from his lists. But his research is an important step in giving us a fuller sense of the horror of the era through which we have just passed. Or are still passing.

Forgive my having gone off like this. but you can see why somebody might get worked up.

[Spoke]

Originally posted by JRDelirious
spoke-, there have been recent threads in GD and the Pit about Jackson and the Cherokee that go deeper into this, but one problem with the Government's "alternative" was that it would have anyway involved having them surrender the landholdings they already owned fair and square -- large tracts of prime, developed, agricultural land -- and having the established communities displaced and fragmented, in order to let whites have at those lands and resources.

I assume you're referring to the option given to the Cherokee to remain in the East, accept US citizenship, and receive 160 acres of land per household.

I am not saying that this offer represented a fair exchange for the land being surrendered. Obviously, it did not. What I am saying is that it proves the government did not have a genocidal intent. It's hard to argue that Uncle Sam was trying to eradicate the Cherokee when they were being offered the alternative of becoming full citizens.

As I mentioned before, if the US had wanted to exterminate the Cherokee, it could easily have done so. The government wanted their land, not their lives.

(Sorry for the hijack.)

[RiverRunner]

Originally posted by Cecil Adams
Forgive my having gone off like this. but you can see why somebody might get worked up.

Forgive it? I welcome it. There have been a lot of ridiculous -- and some not-so-ridiculous -- claims made in this thread and a lot of numbers thrown around, with frightfully few cites. Vague appeals to unnamed "historians and anthropologists" or "mainstream academia" don't cut it. It's a relief to have some rationale explained for some of the figures, even if they can't be taken as gospel.

Which, of course, they couldn't be anyway, since "gospel" means "good news," and none of this is good news. But you get the point.

Thanks, too, to substatique, for his link to the "Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century." It's a fascinating site.

RR

[Spoke]

Oy yes, and neil and bob, it may interest you to learn that the first record we have of an attempted genocide in North America is from 1622, when the Powhatan Indians sought to exterminate the Jameston settlers. Cite. (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/vcdh/jamestown/phatmass.html)

Of course, one atrocity does not excuse another (and the Powhatan surely had legitimate grievances), but the fact is that massacres were committed both by Indians against European/American settlers and by settlers against Indians from 1622 right on through the 19th century.

[Tamerlane]

neal and bob: Perhaps you were thinking of the total native population in all of the Americas? That number has been cited in the 60 million range ( and higher ), with Mesoamerica having by far the densest population.

I did a little digging and Cecil seems to be absolutely correct ( what a suprise :p ). The highest number I can find anywhere is ~14.5 million estimated by Dobyns. The citation for that is:
Dobyns, H.F., Their number become thinned: Native American population dynamics in eastern North America. ( 1983, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. )

However even that number remains in dispute. See for example this brief essay: http://www.yorku.ca/ghistory/rgilmour/ithink/academic/papers/demography.htm

- Tamerlane

[Adam P.]

Originally posted by RiverRunner


There have been a lot of ridiculous -- and some not-so-ridiculous -- claims made in this thread and a lot of numbers thrown around, with frightfully few cites. Vague appeals to unnamed "historians and anthropologists" or "mainstream academia" don't cut it.
RR

I assume the "mainstream academia" remark was directed at me. I actually cited two reputable sources for every claim I made in that post so I wouldn't consider anything I wrote "vague" or unsupported by facts.

The first source is Bartolome de las Casas' "History of The Indies".
I was first turned onto this book by an article I read in last month's New Yorker. If you don't have time for the book, at least check out the article. It's fascinating. It reads like a 15th century version of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" with Columbus as a Kurtz-like figure, slowly going insane and imagining himself in his bizarre journals as the herald of the coming of the Anti-Christ. His behavior is almost explainable in light of his possible psychosis. How else to account for his actions in the fall of 1494 when he marched his personal army through Hispaniola butchering villagers with guns, swords and dogs? As I wrote above, it's important to note that this book wasn't written by some Yale "New Historicist", but by the son of one of Columbus' shipmates.

Information on Kissinger's career in the late 60s and early 70s can be found in the Hitchens book. Lest you assume that this book is some kind of leftist rant, the recent declassification of documents pertaining to that period has revealed that every one of its assertions is fact-based, not circumstantial. It was the opening of this archive and its confirmation of what many historians have been saying for years that convinced the French to bar Kissinger form its borders on penalty of arrest for war crimes. Again, if you don't have time for the book, maybe you could check out the recently released documentary of the same name.

True, my citations are books, not web-sites. Research-wise, the main advantage of a book over a web-site is the assurance that what you are reading has legitimacy as a piece of scholarship. It's also easier on the eyes. I recently googled some Holocaust-related topics and was treated to a list of Holocaust Museum sites right alongside neo-Nazi Holocaust-denial sites as though the two were somehow equally legitimate as sources of information. Say I was uninformed about the topic--how would I judge between the two? I guess this is what Jurgen Habermas would call a "legitimation crisis".

But I agree with you that some of the massacres being cited around here--colonial America's policy toward Native Americans, for example--don't qualify as genocide. This is actually the main sticking point of the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Its main reason for existing is to prosecute acts of genocide, but true acts of genocide, a governmental policy designed to destroy a racial, ethnic, or culturally aligned group, actually rarely occur.
Undoubtedly it did in the former Yogoslavia and in Rwanda. But the following have also been irresponsibly associated with the G-word: Britain (policy in Ireland), Israel (policy in Palestine), America (policy throughout S.E. Asia in the 60s and 70s; South America in the 80s) and Russia (policy toward Chechnya). The word is simply thrown around with impunity. These countries are guilty of heinous war-crimes, but their policy has never, either overtly or covertly, been to wipe out a group of people in its entirety (Stalin persecuted the Chechnyans mercilessly. As the brutal war there and this current hostage crisis shows, post-Soviet Russia is now reaping what he sowed).

[Adam P.]

New Yorker article I mentioned: Oct 14 & 21 '02 double issue.
"The Journeys and Crimes of Columbus" by Elizabeth Kolbert.

[Spoke]

Here's an interesting article from Atlantic Monthly (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/03/mann.htm) which gives a good overview of the effect of disease on Native American populations, as well as a nice summary of the raging debate over just how many natives there were in pre-Columbian America.

[SlowMindThinking]

Um, Adam? I think Cecil might have been referring to this quote
Hm. Tap the knees and it kicks. The above poster may have overstated things when he said that the U.S. is the biggest killer of the 20th century" but his basic idea--that the U.S.,mainly through the use of proxy armies, was often a perpetrator of genocide--is by now generally accepted, not only in the leftist circles that CKDH derides, but in mainstream academia.

Citing Columbus, who was put to death himself, is hardly proof. Kissenger may have pushed carpet bombing, but carpet bombing was not genocide, any more than the V-2 counts as a genocidal act by that genocidal maniac, Hitler. Your quote does refer to the use of proxy armies. Name them, since in your latest post you disqualify the only possible examples I could name. East Timor was hardly sanctioned or promoted by us. Not actively resisting is hardly the same thing as committing genocide by proxy.

Finally, there is this quote:

Jackson wasn't guily of genocide in the sense that Hitler was, not because of any difference in ideology (similar, actually) but because he didn't achieve the gargantuan numbers Hitler did.

It seems to me that there is a substantial difference between rounding up, as best as possible, all members of an ethnic group for the purpose of exterminating them or using them for slave labor, and forcing another group, with whom you have fought battles, to either relocate or join your nation.

The deaths attributed to Jackson can be attributed to incompetence and indifference. (And, in fact, might be attributed to Van Buren, according to some posts here.) Hitler actively sought to slaughter. I don't think I need a cite for this, but wasn't Hitler's rationalization that his dispised groups (Jews, Gypsies, even the Catholic Church) were responsible for suppressing the greatness of the German people? (The Catholic Church was blamed for destroying the Holy Roman Empire, which isn't a tremendous distortion of history.) Jackson just wanted his own damn way.

[Adam P.]

SMT: I was responding to RiverRunner's post, actually. I agree with him that Cecil's post injected this discussion with a much needed dose of reality, vis a vis actual numbers. As a numbers cruncher, Cecil is quite good as usual.

As far as naming a proxy army and/or an American-supported army that has perpetrated genocide, well, I'll simply name a guy who's been in the news of late: none other than Saddam Hussein. His treatment of the Kurds fits every definition of genocide. Recall that he was "a guy we can work with", as Reagan's Secretary of State called him, in the 80s when he was fighting Iran. During the Gulf War, there was considerable embarrassment when the military was forced to admit that much of the weaponry being used on the other side was American-made.

I think I amended my remarks concerning Jackson and America well enough. I said in my second post that America has never made it its policy to actively seek the destruction of a racial, ethnic, or culturally aligned group. No policy of genocide, in other words, and no chance of being the "biggest killer of the 20th century". My point in the first post was that the World Court probably wouldn't see it that way if another Vietnam or Trail Of Tears occured. That's the problem with The Hague and the notion of a World Court. The same venue used to prosecute Milosevic would theoretically be used to prosecute a future Westmoreland or Kissinger, as though their war-crimes were similar in some way.

It's simply not true to say that the invasion of East Timor wasn't actively promoted by us. A recently released transcript of a conversation Ford and Kissinger had with the Indonesions during a visit hours before the invasion reveal Kissinger being asked if the U.S. sanctioned an invasion. Kissinger replies in the affirmative. Literally, as his and Ford's plane left, the invasion began. This is from the Hitchens book and you can see the declassified transcript itself in the documentary version.

[SlowMindThinking]

Adam, w.r.t. Hussein and if I remember the events correctly, will happily sold arms to Hussein while he fought Iran, under the grounds that an enemy of our enemy is almost a friend. (Well, ok, some people will sell anything to anybody, and it is hard to stop them.) Once Hussein's treatment of Kurds and his use of poison gas became known, support for Hussein waned considerably - to the point that he became an enemy. Now it might be possible that the CIA or the NSA knew this before we the people, but given their record in the Middle East, it is quite possible that they were too incompetent. Either way, that is hardly the same thing as performing genocide of the Kurds by proxy. (Now that you include the American-supported army waffle, I suppose that might be admissable. Is any army to which we sell arms "an American-supported army"?)

As far as East Timor is concerned, I don't have the priviledge of having access to a copy of the book, so can I ask a question? Were we asked if we would go to war to stop Indonesia, or if we would appreciate it if Indonesia would invade? (This is right after we lost Vietnam, and our military had almost no respect, so I can see more than a little reluctance to do anything militarily.) I'm sure reality is somewhere in between. I can see something along the lines of: Indonesia, "We are taking East Timor." US, "We can't blockade an archipelago of your size, but we could prevent you from exporting to NATO countries." Indonesia, "Bull, only the Dutch would support you, and we can make things hard for you in Southeast Asia, where you are desperate for friends." During the Cold War, it was pretty much our s.o.bs and their [Soviet] s.o.bs. (And yes, I would site that paraphrase, but I can't find the quote.) What truly did happen? And why should we trust Hitchen's account?

As someone else on this thread pointed out, virtually every government on the planet has had its share of murderous thugs. Let's see in Nicaragua, we could have supported the government which was "performing genocide" on some of the aboriginal peoples, or we could have supported rebels, which included their own murderous thugs. We picked the latter.

[SlowMindThinking]

Sorry for the typos: sub "we" for the first "will" and "cite" for "site".

By the way, Adam, when an Iraqi plane hit one of our cruisers with a missile, during the Iran-Iraq war, was that civil war by proxy, or merely an American-supported act of civil war?

[Viva faustus]

"Millions of Africans died during the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade."

This is quite simply not true for the logical reason that it was not cost effective. Slaves being taken to the Americas and Carribean were considered precious possessions in that their labor was crucial and they were very expensive. It made no more sense to ill-treat or kill them than for a farmer to abuse his livestock or deliberately damage his machinery.

The trouble, these days, is that it is almost impossible to have a sensible discussion on this topic without being wrongly accused of racism. The movie "Amistrad" starring Anthony Hopkins had to be considerably amended, cut, rewritten and generally messed about with because Hollywood considered that African Americans could not grasp the concept that African tribal leaders rounded up their own people, kept them in "barracoons" and then sold them on to the white men.

Nowadays, slavery has been almost abolished thoughout the civilised world but only in the last 150 years or so, which in the the scale of history, is only a blip on the screen. All races and nations have at some stage in their existence been slaves/masters, alternating frequently, depending on their changing fortunes. Christians, who are very fond of quoting Jesus Christ on moral issues are strangely silent when reminded that He enjoined "slaves obey your masters." Obviously, even Jesus gave slavery his tacit approval.

Even you, Cecil, are falling into the great big elephant trap of political correctness by confusing emotional black/white race issues with bald historical fact and common sense when one pauses to think about it for a minute. This topic should not be introduced in an article about genocide but it illustrates the collective guilt re our ancestors too prevalent in our society. As if we are responsible for something when we weren't even born. Crazy.

[John W. Kennedy]

"Millions of Africans died during the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade."

This is quite simply not true for the logical reason that it was not cost effective. Slaves being taken to the Americas and Carribean were considered precious possessions in that their labor was crucial and they were very expensive. It made no more sense to ill-treat or kill them than for a farmer to abuse his livestock or deliberately damage his machinery.

Farmers have been known to abuse livestock. Since that seems to be all you can bring to bear against the universal testimony of historians and eyewitnesses, it doesn't count for much.

The movie "Amistrad" starring Anthony Hopkins had to be considerably amended, cut, rewritten and generally messed about with because Hollywood considered that African Americans could not grasp the concept that African tribal leaders rounded up their own people, kept them in "barracoons" and then sold them on to the white men.

I cannot speak to the history of the film. It is certainly true that there is tremendous resistance to the acceptance of the fact that nearly all the slaves taken from Africa were first enslaved by Africans, so here you have one valid point -- alas, your only valid point.

Christians, who are very fond of quoting Jesus Christ on moral issues are strangely silent when reminded that He enjoined "slaves obey your masters." Obviously, even Jesus gave slavery his tacit approval.

Wrong. Paul makes a few remarks along those lines (always in long lists of advice to Christians in general about behaving themselves), but Jesus does not.

Even you, Cecil, are falling into the great big elephant trap of political correctness by confusing emotional black/white race issues with bald historical fact and common sense when one pauses to think about it for a minute. This topic should not be introduced in an article about genocide but it illustrates the collective guilt re our ancestors too prevalent in our society.

If the slave trade killed large numbers of people (and, despite your a-priori appeal, it did), then it counts as genocide.

As if we are responsible for something when we weren't even born. Crazy.

When people stop hoorahing their ancestors, and taking credit for whatever good their ancestors did, then it will be time to dismiss their ancestors' shame. Not before.

[RiverRunner]

Originally posted by Adam P.
SMT: I was responding to RiverRunner's post, actually. I agree with him that Cecil's post injected this discussion with a much needed dose of reality, vis a vis actual numbers. As a numbers cruncher, Cecil is quite good as usual.


My use of the quoted "mainstream academia" was in reference to substatique's post, but it wasn't intended to be as snippy as it came out. I apologize to him/her if it was taken as spiteful. I do recognize that sometimes the cites are not at hand or a poster may have limited time at his disposal. I don't always provide a lot of evidence myself upon first post, for those reasons.

I must say, though, this has been a very educational thread.


RR

[Irishman]

Adam P., your example of an American proxy army does not support you. You seem to include any army that we supported at one time as being a de facto extension of our army in every action they took. The U.S. did not tell Hussein "Hey, why don't you go slaughter those Kurds, they're in the way." Your attempt to blame the U.S. for Hussein's actions is disingenuous.

[Chumpsky]

Originally posted by SlowMindThinking
East Timor was hardly sanctioned or promoted by us. Not actively resisting is hardly the same thing as committing genocide by proxy. Before the invasion took place, the U.S. gave the green light to Suharto. The invasion started literally hours after Ford and Kissinger left Jakarta. The U.S. backed the invasion all the way, provided military training, 90% of the arms used in the invasion and subsequent slaughter, and crucial diplomatic support. The invasion was immediately condemned by the U.N., but the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote in his memoirs that he went to the U.N. on State Department orders to ensure "that whatever action the U.N. carried out would be utterly ineffective." This he succeeded in doing, as he brags in his book, "with not inconsiderable success." He notes that within months 60,000 were dead, 1/10 of the population. This number would grow to over 200,000, 1/3 of the population.

As the occupation continued, the U.S. continued to supply Indonesia with diplomatic support and arms, often illegally. Jimmy Carter had to go through some back channels when the congress cut off aid to Indonesia for a brief time. This support continued right up until 1999, even after the Indonesians massacred almost 300 people at a funeral in 1993, a massacre that was caught on videotape by American journalists Amy Goodman and Alan Nairn, who were almost killed themselves. In 1999, after the independence referendum, the Indonesians went on a rampage, killing thousands and burning the country to the ground. Clinton then informed the Indonesian generals that the game was up, and the Indonesians withdrew within hours.

This showed that the U.S. had the power the whole time to stop the atrocities by simply withdrawing support. In every way, the U.S. is responsible for the genocide in East Timor.

East Timor Action Network (http://www.etan.org/)

[Chumpsky]

Originally posted by SlowMindThinking
As someone else on this thread pointed out, virtually every government on the planet has had its share of murderous thugs. Let's see in Nicaragua, we could have supported the government which was "performing genocide" on some of the aboriginal peoples, or we could have supported rebels, which included their own murderous thugs. We picked the latter. The Sandinistas killed, I think, 66 people in the process of population transfer from the border to another region in Nicaragua, in the process of the Contra terror war being waged by the U.S. This episode surely wasn't pretty, but in the region at the time, it doesn't even come up on the radar screen. Nicaragua's neighbors, Guatemala and El Salvador were massacring hundreds of thousands with total U.S. support. Furthermore, the Contras, a U.S. proxy terrorist army, killed some 30,000 Nicaraguans in the 1980's. It is wrong to call the Contras "rebels" or "gueriilas." They were nothing more than mercenaries and terrorists. They used U.S. intelligence provided by CIA spy planes to specifically avoid the Nicaraguan army, so that they could attack what are called "soft targets," undefended or lightly defended civilian targets.

The Contra terror war must rank right up there with the most extensive and destructive terrorist operations ever run, and it was run right out of Washington. Don't expect, though, for Bush to start bombing Washington, which he must if he is being honest about going after regimes that harbor terrorists.

The question we should really ask is, Why does the U.S. always chose to support Fascists and terrorists over socially progressive regimes?

[WWW]

East Timor? Sandinistas? And to think I was jumped for going "off topic" for replying to statements previously made by members here, which I was told should center on a topic the author of the seminal article dismissed in a offhand manner...Jackson and the relocation of the Cherokees...but obviously seldom do.

Yes, economics could have a bearing on the fate of the Cherokees, considering the economic depression that ripped through the USA during Van Buren's administration, but it seemed to me that more profitable lines of inquiry were neglected.

Why, for example, did Cherokees join the Confederacy and fight shoulder to shoulder with many of those who had profited from the seizure of their native lands? In those days Jackson was seen as a champion of the Union, and it was already obvious what that Union intended to do (and later did) with all native American cultures. Perhaps to their eyes the "melting pot" of the young United States appeared as the "Borg" seemed to the crew of the fictional starship "Enterprise" in the "Star Trek universe", and anything that accomplished its downfall seemed desirable?

Why did folk of that era think it so terrible that relocation had been forced on "civilized tribes"? Jackson, whom legend had almost scalped by drunken Cherokee braves as a youth, might have disputed the "civilized" part, but perhaps the more significant question was why no such objection was raised to the disposal of native peoples who had no settled habits, no roads or permanent towns? Many of those nomadic tribes still long for their vanished way of life. Could they be tolerated today if they could resume their old ways on their native lands? You could almost hear the calls to 911; drifters with guns and knives wandering all over other people's property, evicting those who occupied their desired camping grounds, killing animals and whoever resisted them.

But it seems the "etiqette" of the board is a de facto restriction of discussion to the leadership role of the United States in global genocide and Jackson's degree of culpability in establishing such a terrible regime. I submit those who advance such views are desperately needed in South Florida, to explain to the swarming Haitian boat people they are trying to enter a terrible place and should really be happy to return to their homeland, where racism has never troubled those of African descent. And others who speak of "busting heads" should enlist at once in the military, where training to pefect such skills (shortly to be needed) is readily available.

[MEBuckner]

Originally posted by WWW
Why, for example, did Cherokees join the Confederacy and fight shoulder to shoulder with many of those who had profited from the seizure of their native lands? In those days Jackson was seen as a champion of the Union, and it was already obvious what that Union intended to do (and later did) with all native American cultures. Perhaps to their eyes the "melting pot" of the young United States appeared as the "Borg" seemed to the crew of the fictional starship "Enterprise" in the "Star Trek universe", and anything that accomplished its downfall seemed desirable?
Whatever causes the Cherokee people may have had in the past, to complain of some of the Southern States, they cannot but feel that their interests and their destiny are inseparably connected with those of the South. The war now raging is a war of Northern cupidity and fanaticism against the institution of African servitude.... -- from the Declaration by the People of the Cherokee Nation of the Causes Which Have Impelled Them to Unite Their Fortunes With Those of the Confederate States of America (http://www.civilwarhome.com/cherokeecauses.htm)
The adaptation of Western civilization by the Cherokee--writing, cities, agriculture, constitutional government--for some of them also included the ownership of black slaves.

[C K Dexter Haven]

WWW: << But it seems the "etiqette" of the board is a de facto restriction of discussion >>

WWW, you're new here, and we're glad to have you with us. For a set of first posts, you've got a lot of interesting material. I just wanted to clear up, we almost never restrict discussion on these boards. The major restriction is to which forum is appropriate to which discussion.

Irishman made an earlier comment about not getting off into a discussion of East Timor here. I should note that Irishman is neither a Moderator nor an Administrator, and while he is a valued and respected member of these boards, he does not speak "official" policy. He stated his opinions.

Irishman did note, correctly, that a full discussion of East Timor belongs in a different forum. This forum is limited to a discussion of Cecil's columns. However, this one is a pretty grey area -- when Cecil's column was about comparative genocides, there's a large grey area where discussion of a single genocide is on topic, vs where it is straying into a different discussion.

All this is a long winded way to say that I think that mentions of other genocides (such as your posts) are certainly appropriate to this forum... in the context of comparative genocides. A lengthier, in-depth discussion/debate of any one specific genocide (such as East Timor) should be started in a different forum. I hope that's clear.

[WWW]

Thank you, moderator Haven. The chosen topic as treated covers a wide area, and many perspectives may be offered. I did feel a bit miffed when my take on subjects already under discussion was singled out as a "diatribe", though the facts it offered might make those of both the "left" and "right" uncomfortable.

But we live in a era in which nearly all facts have been subjected to "spin", and interpeted or simply ignored according to the needs of present day political ideaologies.

Yet the folk of the period in which Jackson lived would have simply not recognized the comic-book scenarios of their time offered by some present day political pundits. Treasured by some is the notion that Native Americans were peaceful and gentle children of nature until corrupted and nearly exterminated by the diabolical forces of western civilization. If such a tranquil folk ever existed it appears they had been long enslaved by the native peoples who met the arriving Europeans, folk who warred constantly with each other while routinely commiting atrocities that would make a SS man blush. At one time a mound builder culture city complex of some 300,000 folk had existed in the greater Nashville area. The first Europeans arriving there were astonished at the readily available evidences of this ancient civilization, and a Doctor who was excavating things like caved jade and obsidian inquired of a passing Native American hunting party who these folk of the past were. The Chief explaned that after bloody wars among adjoining tribes to possess that land they had finally decided it should be a hunting perserve held jointly among the tribes and none of them should actually live there. He correctly predicted the Europeans would get in trouble for doing so. Then he held an excavated skull at arm's length in a "Hamlet" like posture and commented that they had no information about these ancient folk since they were gone by the time his people got here. This scene (immortalized in the later County's official seal) points out that substantial Naive American cultures could and did disappear without European help, and also that tribes could and did displace each other.

One branch of the "Trail of Tears" passed close by Jackson's mansion called the "Hermitage." I have found no evidence that the former chief executive took any paticular notice of the deportees as they trudged by. But Jackson was not a happy man in his later life. He was greatly embittered by the sexual innuendo that surrounded his public life. He was convinced attacks on his "living in sin" with his questionably divorced wife Rachel had caused her early death (she passed away before he went to the White House). As a single President much was made of interactions with the opposite sex that might have otherwise passed unremarked. Upon his return from Washington a wealthy supporter who had foolishly married a much younger woman pressured a very reluctant Jackson into acting as a marriage consular. In private meetings Jackson learned the young bride was considering running off with a soldier more her own age. The results were predictible. The woman ran off with the soldier, the press got wind of the private meetings and at once Jackson was linked romantically to the runaway bride. The force of the resulting corrosive gossip cannot be overestimated; Jackson's protege Sam Houston was to later resign the Governorship of the State of Tennessee and flee to Texas in the face of sexual scandal.

So it is just possible that a fuming Jackson stared out at the distant lines of marching people, convinced in his heart they were telling "Bill Clinton" jokes about him.

[SlowMindThinking]

Chumpsky,
I assme you know that your "facts" are in dispute. I've also read of doctors examining mass graves of indiginous people slaughtered by the Sandinistas. You can view the Contras as mercenaries, hired to commit genocide, if you want nothing I can say will convince you, and maybe you are right. I know no one who was there, and I have little faith in anything I've read.

However, with respect to: Clinton then informed the Indonesian generals that the game was up, and the Indonesians withdrew within hours.
if you think that Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagen, George Bush, and Bill Clinton all agreed to slaughter the people of Timor, I have to ask you why? There ain't a hell of a lot they all agreed on; I find it hard to believe that they would all agree to genocide by proxy. And if you think that we have so much pull in a military regime ruling a Muslim country that we could instigate and stop genocide in a matter of hours, then you are a fool, and not worth arguing with.

[SlowMindThinking]

For those interested in facts, the slaughter in Timor came to an end after US and European pressure was applied to an elected government.

[Chumpsky]

Originally posted by SlowMindThinking
You can view the Contras as mercenaries, hired to commit genocide, if you want nothing I can say will convince you, and maybe you are right. I know no one who was there, and I have little faith in anything I've read.They weren't hired to commit genocide. The head of the intelligence arm of the Contra terror army, Horatio Arce, actually described the mission of the Contras as "making it impossible for the Sandinistas to carry out their program." The point was to destroy Nicaraguan society enough so that they would submit to coming under U.S. rule again.
However, with respect to:
if you think that Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagen, George Bush, and Bill Clinton all agreed to slaughter the people of Timor, I have to ask you why? There ain't a hell of a lot they all agreed on; I find it hard to believe that they would all agree to genocide by proxy. And if you think that we have so much pull in a military regime ruling a Muslim country that we could instigate and stop genocide in a matter of hours, then you are a fool, and not worth arguing with. It's not what I think, we just have to look at the record. The facts are not disputed: The Indonesian invasion took place after Kissinger and Nixon gave Suharto the green light; the U.S. provided diplomatic support, military training, and 90% of the arms used in the invasion and subsequent slaughter; the support continued from 1975 through 1999, after East Timor had been burned to the ground. Most likely the various war criminals in the white house didn't give two seconds of thought to a bunch of poor, brown people half a world away. They were more interested in maintaining a good relationship with their good friend Suharto, who maintained the "paradise for investors" in Indonesia, where multi-national corporations were free to rape the land of its resources and exploit the cheap labor force.

East Timor Action Network (www.etan.org)

[Chumpsky]

Addendum: It was Kissinger and Ford who gave Suharto the green light, not Kissinger and Nixon.

[Adam P.]

Originally posted by SlowMindThinking
Chumpsky,
I You can view the Contras as mercenaries, hired to commit genocide, if you want nothing I can say will convince you, and maybe you are right. I know no one who was there, and I have little faith in anything I've read.



I'd like to respond to this with an account of my oldest brother's personal experiences in Nicaragua in the late-eighties. After that, I'm done since 1) none of this has to do with the topic under discussion and 2) it's difficult to debate somene who regards "facts", even those documented by Amnesty International among other independant agencies as is the case with the Contras, as relative.

In 1987, my brother joined an aid group that traveled to Nicaragua to help build bomb shelters and housing for villagers displaced by the war. At 17, he was the youngest of the group and they were wary at first about letting him come. However, he convinced them that he wouldn't be fazed by the brutality of the war--he grew up in Brooklyn, after all-- and went.

Along with the intimidating sight of a Soviet-made helicopter gunship flying daily reconnaisance over the tent in which he was sleeping and the shock of seeing 12-year old soldiers recruited by the Sandanistas, he observed the following while travelling to villages razed by the Contras and in "witnessing" groups in which widows and mothers recounted what they'd seen:

--A frequent tactic used by the Contras was to first round up male villagers, all civilians and not affiliated with the Sandanistas, castrate them, stuff their mouths with their own testicles and then duck-tape them shut.

--Systematc rape of female villagers. This was a tactic of psychological terror and humiliation now made familair by the behavior of the Serb army in the 90s.

--Mass-executions. While scouting an area to be used for a shelter, his group was asked to vacate the area for a day out of respect for a mass grave containing 50 civilians executed by the Contras that had to be dug up and moved.

--While travelling to a village that was supposed to have been vacated by the Contras a few days earlier after they'd burned it to the ground, he stumbled onto a group of them torturing and executing five randomly selected civilians as object-lessons to other villagers who were forced to watch. It was only luck and his fluency in Spanish that allowed him to leave the area alive.

These were the tactics used by Reagan's freedom fighters, the "moral equivalent of the founding fathers" as he called them. Whether their CIA "advisors" instructed them to use these tactics is a matter of some debate. The things my brother witnessed had also been personally observed by aid-groups and journalists in the area throughout the late-eighties. They aren't the product of leftist fantasy or Noam Chomsky, but are a part of history.

Please do a bit more research before making such blanket assertions. I don't identify as either leftist or rightist and only someone totally deluded could believe that the left has been guilty of fewer war crimes than the right, but, in this case, culpability for war-crimes must rest squarely with the U.S. backed Contras, not the democratically elected govt. of the Sandanistas.
I also understand the impulse, in the present political climate, when everyone feels they have to assert their patriotism, to try to justify the tactics used in past U.S wars with a "blaming the victims" argument. But the sorry episode of the Nicaraguan Contras is really not the best place to start rewriting history. Trust me.

You can take this post however you like. I'm just a guy on a message board after all and you don't have to take my word for anything. After all, isn't that underlying ideology of the internet? -- that opposing view points, no matter how ludicrous, such as the notion that the Holocaust or even 9/11 never happened, are equally valid? There's no oversight commitee or research accountabiltiy here as there is in academia, so who's to say what's true? Bill Gates seems to subscribe to this idea with his notion of "virtual equity". But at least look into the subject a bit more, maybe visit a library, before dismissing Chumpsky's account of events both in East Timor and in Nicaragua.

This is an amusing site. As "infotainment" it's one of the best out there. It's fun to learn useless factoids such as whether or not Hitler really had only one testicle or the origin of the word "fuck". But at times, especially when the topic is concerned with more serious things like those under discussion here, the competing opinions of posters, whether they demonstrate knowledge of the subject or not, adds up to a misinformative picture of events that have been well-documented. It's also not clear to me what good it does to call another poster a "fool". Chumpsky's over-general denunciations of the U.S. military are occasionally shrill and one-sided (the military has been doing very good things lately, after all) but he has mostly debated in an informed, reasoned way.

None of this is meant as a personal attack, BTW. I agree with you on many points, such as the East Timor thing, since I don't think that war constituted a genuine effort of the U.S. to perpetrate genocide, as Chumpsky asserted.

[SlowMindThinking]

Adam P.
w.r.t.
These were the tactics used by Reagan's freedom fighters, the "moral equivalent of the founding fathers" as he called them. Whether their CIA "advisors" instructed them to use these tactics is a matter of some debate.

I guess I should have been more explicit when I stated that Chumpsky's facts with regard to Nic. are debatable. Your above quote is one of two things to which I was referring. The other was this quote:The Sandinistas killed, I think, 66 people in the process of population transfer from the border to another region in Nicaragua
That quote makes the Sandinistas sound like minor league versions of Jackson, which is distinctly debatable. Hence, my statement that
your "facts" are in dispute Nothing more. Let me know what "blanket assertion" I made with regard to the Sandinistas. As far as I know, I just said I knew no one there, and didn't believe anything that I read. (I did know a scientist that was in harm's way when Noreiga was "busted". He couldn't tell what was the truth, even while there.)

As far as East Timor is concerned, you will have to explain something to me. The only commonalities between Carter and Reagan, of which I know, are deficit spending and development of the B2. (Ignoring such obvious facts, as that they were both white males, etc.) Carter was, and is, far more concerned with linking human rights to US foreign policy than any president in my lifetime. I truly think it is foolish to presume that Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, and Clinton all pursued the same policy of genocide. Any one who believes foolish things is a fool. (I don't consider that a particularly damaging statement, I myself have often been a fool. I've even been stupid. I might even be both right now.)

Just because the weapons were "US supplied" means nothing. We could have supplied them to curry favor, and with the understanding that they would be used to suppress communist uprisings, to defend against the Vietmanese, etc. We could have just sold the weapons to Suharto. Since the only to whom we seem to be unwilling to sell weapons are Iraq, N. Korea, and Cuba, that is undoubtedly one reason. (You give someone a weapons system, and you can sell him supplies for life.) Anyone who believes that the above list of "war criminals" supplied weapons and training to Indonesia so that Suharto could commit genocide, is not someone with whom I can see holding a rational debate. If it is ready knowledge that Carter is a war criminal, then it must have somehow slipped the notice of the Nobel Peace Prize committee.

[WWW]

First, a minor correction; Sam Houston's sex scandal did not occur "later" than Jackson's last trip through the wringer, but before Jackson returned from Washington. Hard to keep these sex scandals in order! Yet Houston was no stranger to the Cherokees; as a schoolteacher in East Tennessee he had startled his neighbors by "going native" and living in a Cherokee villiage for nearly a year. When his young Southern Belle bride fled his bed and returned to her parent's home the buzz among the African Americans was that the lady had been given in marriage without a clue as to what the physical relationship among the sexes were, but malicious gossips said (among other things) that the proper young lady was outraged by bizarre practicies that Houston learned among the Cherokees. In any event the mortally embarassed Houston resigned the Governorship of the State of Tennesee and went to live among the Cherokee again in their Oklahoma territories, not entering Texas until 1833.

But the Contras have nothing to do with the time period of the stated topic and less to do with the United States government that many would have you believe. As few now remember the US Congress, fearing another Vietnam quagmire, forbade the CIA and US military to have anything to do with the struggle against the Sandinstias. Ollie North financed a covert White House operation with the proceeds of improper arms sales to Iran, and hired a very questionable group of operatives to run weapons and supplies to the Contras. Since these rascals could be shot just as quickly for running guns as running drugs, they were not about to have their delivery vehicles return empty. A surprising amount of dope was moved in this manner. Individuals high in the Contra camp were involved, and some say the Contra payrolls were in fact funded entirely by drug money. That being said, it should be noted that the Contras had a ample supply of atrocity tales about the Sandinstias, too.

Our problem is a early conditioning by Hollywood and Television to think in terms of absolute good and absolute bad, and cynics have been quick to take unfair advantage of this curious way of looking at the world. If I prove the cause I wish to discredit has had people working for it who have done deplorable things, this is held to also safely infer that those who fight that cause are champions of goodness and light. Consider the Iranian students who testified endlessly before the US Congress about the outrages comitted by SAVAK, the secret police of the Shah of Iran. Some in this country thought these students must be dedicated to the universal human rights so dear to President Carter's heart. Outrage and bewilderment followed when many of these individuals became revolutionary guards after the fall of the Shah and in the name of Islam committed atrocities that made the activities of SAVAK look like a Sunday School Picnic.

So I submit to you that we must take into account that the "spin" I previously deplored includes uncritical acceptance of suspect statistics (consider the latest election returns from Iraq) and selective outrage of those who want to apply the highest standards only to those who act against them. It is grimly amusing to see things like the Nazi effort to document the Soviet slaughter of Polish prisoners of war, a multimedia affair involving the finest forensic minds in occupied Europe, while the machinery of the Holocaust roared on unchecked all about them. The Nazi record was in time unearthed and used to force an embarassed admission from the Soviets, so no human rights violation should be undocumented; but such records should all be weighed against the same standards, and objective proofs demanded when the sources must be considered. In any such demanding analysis I submit the United States will fare exceedingly well.

[Chumpsky]

Originally posted by SlowMindThinking
I guess I should have been more explicit when I stated that Chumpsky's facts with regard to Nic. are debatable. Your above quote is one of two things to which I was referring. The other was this quote: "The Sandinistas killed, I think, 66 people in the process of population transfer from the border to another region in Nicaragua." That quote makes the Sandinistas sound like minor league versions of Jackson, which is distinctly debatable.It is obscene to compare the Sandinistas to the mass murdering Jackson. The Sandinistas did, in fact, kill several dozen Miskito Indians in the 1980's, in one program to relocate one population from the border, in the course of the Contra war. It was at this point that the Sandinistas almost reached to the lesser abuses of the U.S. client states in the region, who had a policy of terrorizing the indigeneous population. Naturally, that is no excuse, but it is enlightening to look at the record and observe the cries of outrage that came from the U.S. over Nicaragua's "genocide," while support continued to flow to the neighboring Death Squad Democracies.

Actual genocidal policies were carried out in Central America in the 1980's: by El Salvador and Guatemala.
As far as East Timor is concerned, you will have to explain something to me. The only commonalities between Carter and Reagan, of which I know, are deficit spending and development of the B2. (Ignoring such obvious facts, as that they were both white males, etc.) Carter was, and is, far more concerned with linking human rights to US foreign policy than any president in my lifetime. I truly think it is foolish to presume that Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, and Clinton all pursued the same policy of genocide. Any one who believes foolish things is a fool. (I don't consider that a particularly damaging statement, I myself have often been a fool. I've even been stupid. I might even be both right now.)Perhaps you could point out exactly which statement it is that you believe to be foolish.

Regarding U.S. support for the Timorese genocide, this is a simple matter of fact. The U.S. supported the invasion and slaughter the whole way. This support was at every level--economic, militarily, and diplomatic--and continued for 24 years. The U.S. gave massive amounts of economic and military aid to Indonesia, including more than 90% of the arms used in the invasion and subsequent slaughter, military training and joint military maneuvers. Crucial to the support of the genocide was the diplomatic support. Shortly after the invasion, the invasion was condemned by the U.N., even including the U.S. in words, but no action was taken. At the time, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He explained in his memoirs why the U.N. was unable to do anything about the invasion:The United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous PlaceMoynihan also makes clear that the U.S. knew well the consequences of its actions. He notes that by February 1976, "that some sixty thousand persons had been killed," which was roughly 10% of the population, more than the percentage of the population of Russia killed in WWII. When the final death toll had been reached, 1/3 of the population had been slaughtered by the U.S. client, in what is the worst genocide, as a percentage of population, since WWII.

Indonesian atrocities in East Timor reached their peak in 1978. This is an important year for Timor. For one thing, in this year coverage of East Timor in the American press dropped to zero. Go and do a Lexis-Nexus search for "Timor" in 1978 and you will find 0 entries in major U.S. newspapers, contrasting quite markedly with the fairly high coverage the country had recieved in the preceeding years, and with the daily chorus of denunciations for comparable atrocities being carried out in Cambodia. As atrocities reached their maximal peak, coverage of the slaughter dropped to zero, and arms shipments to Indonesia were stepped up. Carter had to authorize an additional $112 million weapon sales package to Indonesia, since they had literally been running out of bullets from killing so many Timorese.
Just because the weapons were "US supplied" means nothing. We could have supplied them to curry favor, and with the understanding that they would be used to suppress communist uprisings, to defend against the Vietmanese, etc.It is interesting that you bring up Vietnam. It is, of course, laughable that the U.S. was trying to defend Indonesia against Vietnam, but the two countries are linked in indirect ways. Indonesia became a U.S. client state in 1965 when Suharto led a U.S. backed coup to oust Sukarno. This led to a huge bloodbath in which Suharto and his cronies killed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people in Indonesia. This massacre was carried out to eliminate the only political party in Indonesia with any broad base of support, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The slaughter, though, was much broader than just killing everybody associated with the PKI, it became just a terror operation in which anybody who was even suspected or accused of being a "communist" was just killed. This bloodbath was met with unbridled euphoria in the U.S. and the west generally, since it brought Indonesia into the U.S. economic system, and eliminated the popular opposition to the rule of our puppet. From that point on, Indonesia became our critical "ally" in the region, making it unnecessary to capture Vietnam. It became sufficient to simply destroy Vietnam in order to make an example of a country that dared to arrange its society outside of the U.S. organized system.

The importance of Indonesia as an ally was why the atrocities in East Timor were supported by the U.S.
If it is ready knowledge that Carter is a war criminal, then it must have somehow slipped the notice of the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Yes, Carter has entered the ranks of Henry Kissinger, Frederik Willem de Klerk, Yassir Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, among other war criminals, as a winner of the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize is a political prize, it has nothing to do with actually working for peace.

If the powerful were ever held to the same standards that the vanquished are held to, people like Jimmy Carter would have been hanged for their war crimes. Just for his support of the Timorese genocide, he should have been hanged. And this is not even counting his support for Death Squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, for Duvalier in Haiti, for Somoza in Nicaragua as he slaughtered dissidents in the streets of Managua, or the Shah in Iran as he gunned down crowds of protesters in Tehran, and so on.

Somehow Carter has been transmografied from his acts in the real world to this image of the "human rights president." Perhaps the most telling statement of Carter came when he was asked if the U.S. should pay reparations or apologize to Vietnam for the monstrous crimes we committed against that nation. He responded that no, we shouldn't, because "the destruction was mutual," as could easily be discerned by a tour of the bomed out ruins of New York City, or the forests in Montana coated in cancer-causing chemicals, or the ruined dams, bridges and roads throughout the country.

[Chumpsky]

Originally posted by Adam P.
Chumpsky's over-general denunciations of the U.S. military are occasionally shrill and one-sided (the military has been doing very good things lately, after all) but he has mostly debated in an informed, reasoned way.

None of this is meant as a personal attack, BTW. I agree with you on many points, such as the East Timor thing, since I don't think that war constituted a genuine effort of the U.S. to perpetrate genocide, as Chumpsky asserted. Adam, your story of your brother's experience in Nicaragua is very much appreciated. It is tempting to get very depressed when discussing these issues, as it seems all so bloodless and cool, and we are so disconnected with the real human cost on the ground. It is tragic that so many of our victims suffer and die in silence, and their stories will mostly never be known to the populace that is asked to pay for their oppression and murder.

I do have a few points of disagreement with what you said, though. First, I have never asserted that the U.S. made an effort to carry out genocidal policies in East Timor. The U.S. supported its ally, Indonesia, as it carried out the Timorese genocide, for its own reasons. These reasons are cynical and disgusting, but the goal of the U.S. was not to carry out genocide in Timor. The people of Timor were simply irrelevant in the U.S. calculus.

I also disagree quite strongly with your statement that "the military has been doing very good things lately." In fact, I think the opposite is the case. Taking just three examples among many, the U.S. killed between roughly 3,000 and 5,000 with its bombs in Afghanistan and its war led to the deaths of over 20,000; the U.S. is actively carrying out genocide in Iraq and has been for over a decade, with a death toll approaching 2 million, shortly to rise very sharply; and the U.S. is flooding the Columbian oligarchy with military support to carry out its war against the Columbian people. Again, talking about these monstrous crimes in such a bloodless way seems a bit inappropriate, but the human toll in Iraq is orders of magnitude worse than what Nicaragua paid in the 1980's. The crimes being carried out in Columbia, with total U.S. support, are beginning to rival those of the Death Squad Democracies El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980's, and it will only get worse.

[Chumpsky]

Originally posted by WWW
As few now remember the US Congress, fearing another Vietnam quagmire, forbade the CIA and US military to have anything to do with the struggle against the Sandinstias. The congress briefly cut off aid to the Contra terror army in 1986, which necessitated the state going underground to carry out its war. However, with the exception of this brief cut-off, support for the Contras was massive. The Contras are second only to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the degree of support supplied by a foreign power to a so-called "guerrilla" army.

The majority of the Contra terror army was drawn from the ranks of Somoza's National Guard, many of whom were trained in the U.S. at the School of the Americas. When the Sandinistas threw out the bload-soaked Somoza in 1979, the U.S. flew a bunch of his national guard out of Nicaragua in planes disguised with Red Cross markings, a war crime. The CIA then started organizing the ex-National Guardsman into a terror army to fight the Sandinistas. The Contras were trained by the U.S., supplied by the U.S., and were stationed out of U.S. bases in Honduras. The U.S. supplied reconnaissance data to the Contras with CIA overflights of Nicaragua in order to inform the Contras where the Nicaraguan army was, so that the Contras could avoid them and attack "soft targets"--undefended or lightly defended civilian targets.

The U.S. is the only country ever condemned by the highest international body, the World Court, for international terrorism, for its activities in Nicaragua. The ruling against the U.S. came in 1986, when the court ordered the U.S. to cease its murderous attack and pay $17 billion in reparations. The ruling was dismissed with contempt, and the attack on Nicaragua was stepped up, the congress voting $100 million in aid to the Contras. After the World Court ruling, the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to abide by international law, and voted alone with Israel and El Salvador against a General Assembly resolution calling on all states to abide by international law.

This was one of the, if not the, most massive terrorist operations in history. It had the effect of demolishing Nicaraguan society and creating 30,000 corpses. Unlike those who commit terrorism against us or our allies, the terrorists who organized the attacks are praised here, given their own TV and radio talk shows, appointed as the ambassador to the U.N., and honored with the renaming of the national airport after them.

[Irishman]

It's funny how when the US uses military action (i.e. bombs) to effect a change in government that is culpable in terrorist strikes on our country, somehow the US is the bad guy. Yet when it uses political methods instead (like embargoes and controlled borders) to control an agressive dictator, it is comitting genocide.

[WWW]

I had crafted a scholarly posting to detail how the Sandinistas had embraced Mao's doctrine of socalist advance through third world revolutions and how as a Soviet client state they had in doctrine and practice committed to spreading "wars of national liberation" throughout Central America. In short, how they had engaged in the very things they had condemned the US for before the World Court. When I pressed the "submit reply" button I got an error message stating the web site was not responding....and the same error message repeated again and again. I finally signed off without being able to save the posting.

Not that I would have changed any minds, mark you. But in US jurisisprudence it is important that those who wish to move a court to action have "clean hands". Crimes should not be set off by other crimes; but when an avowed pyromanic raises an outraged cry of arson he at the very least has lost the moral high ground. The US rejected the ruling of the World Court because it desired to play the same game as Nicaragua and its Warsaw Pact allies....and since there was such a Communist plan, and it was in action, any condemnation by the World Court of our interference with it has been justly consigned to the dustbin of history.

I am reluctant to post further because I am unsure if the board will accept even this submission. It is, however, unsettling that no one has dealt at length with the Muslim led mass killing of leftists in Indonesia. That was a slaughter only surpassed by what followed in Cambodia, and it left a fundamentalist Islamic regime in power that showed the same deference to US policy that similar governments display today. Yet the postings here have dealt with that matter only through commentary on the situation in East Timor.

[PumaClaw]

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021018.html
Interesting but the response leaves out the continued genocide in the US. I might also add that the philosophy behind the nazi regime was not developed by the NSDAP or Hitler but is by far older than that. Hitler was merely more efficient when he copied Jackson's Indian Policy. Incidentally, the exact number of people killed in the 3rd Reich's holocaust is not clear and varies between 6 million and 18 million, depending on whom you ask.
Since the white invasion in the Americas, 90% of the Indian population in the area of the US has been annihilated. For the US to view itself as a minor player when it comes to genocide is ludicrous.
"Neither Spain nor Britain should be models of the German expansion, but the Nordics of North America, who had ruthlessly pushed aside an inferior race to win for themselves soil and territory for the future." -Adolf Hitler

[MEBuckner]

While not denying the lengthy and depressing record of atrocities, imperialism, and double-dealing by Europeans in the Americas, the great bulk of the population decline of the native populations was the result of Old World diseases (to which the New World's populations had no natural resistance) that were accidentally introduced to the New World at a time when no one even understood the mechanism of infectious diseases.

[PumaClaw]

I know you want to believe that these diseases were introduced accidentally but unfortunately your belief is not based on fact. Smallpox was used as biological warfare.
http://www.mun.ca/sgs/science/april2381.html

[MEBuckner]

That despicable incident was one of the numerous atrocities I alluded to above. But the mass deaths from Old World diseases began occuring long before the 18th Century and Amherst's evil plot. Infectious diseases depopulated many areas long before the locals had ever seen a European or vice versa, which in part contributed to the Europeans' perception of the land as being largely "empty"--lots of places were a good bit emptier by the time Europeans got there than they had been when the first Europeans arrived in the Americas.

(Incidentally, it would kind of help if you read the entire thread before wading in; these points have already been kicked around in earlier posts. The thread's only a couple of pages long, so it really shouldn't take that much time.)

[PumaClaw]

I'm overwhelmed that the white folks here already hashed this minor incident out for us so I really don't need to bother my little red head with it, aaye MEB?
How exactly did you determine that the white people thought nobody was here? Does this suggest they thought they were on an empty continent?
http://www.ibiblio.org/nge/thanks/
http://www.tbwt.com/views/specialrpt/special%20report-1_11-22-00.asp
Or this:
http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.html
http://americanhistory.si.edu/paac/aquest/frontier.htm
http://www.dickshovel.com/500.html
http://www.worldfreeinternet.net/AmericanHolocaust/stealing.htm?
And one can only wonder what these poor blind people thought they were encountering here:
http://www.dickshovel.com/was.html
Or what they were mistaking my ancestors for:
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues97/dec97/bosque.html
Or what these apparitions were:
http://cca2000.4t.com/slaves.htm
Here is Jackson's removal act which was followed by every president after him:
http://la.essortment.com/whatisindianr_rhin.htm
Right into the 20th century:
http://www.dickshovel.com/IHSSterPol.html
http://www.isis.csuhayward.edu/ALSS/soc/NAN/dd/6800sj/slj.htm
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Reagan_Guatemala.html
http://hallsciences.com/technology/670.shtml
http://www.geocities.com/crazyoglala/Jankkklow95_Lurie.html
If you think your claim that people just didn't know we were/are here is correct, maybe Americans need to get their eyesight checked, aaye?
Well, have a nice read at any rate
http://www.petitiononline.com/2047/petition.html

[Arnold Winkelried]

Cecil Adams on the issue of purposely infecting Native Americans with smallpox:
Did whites ever give Native Americans blankets infected with smallpox? (24-Oct-1997) (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_066.html)We don't know if Bouquet actually put the plan into effect, or if so with what result. We do know that a supply of smallpox-infected blankets was available, since the disease had broken out at Fort Pitt some weeks previously. We also know that the following spring smallpox was reported to be raging among the Indians in the vicinity.
PumaClaw - my experience with message boards has been that people will be more inclined to address your points if you state them explicitly in your post (with sources at the end if needed), rather than just give a bunch of links and tell the readers "go extract the information from all these places."

[Arnold Winkelried]

Concerning this:
"the white folks here already hashed this minor incident out for us so I really don't need to bother my little red head with it"
How do you know that the posters in this thread are white? Making unwarranted assumptions is often the mark of a poor debater.

[PumaClaw]

Arnold, you can't tell that from the posts themselves? Any Indian knows that the Trail of Tears was not restricted to Cherokee removal and involved several other Indian tribes as well. Also, every Indian knows that The Long Walk involved Kit Carson and the Navajo Nation. Noticing this does not make me a poor debater but an observant reader. There's a difference between the two.
I don't see how this issue can even be debated. By the time you debate the pros and cons of the American holocaust, maybe we'll continue by also debating the upside of Hitler's holocaust or what? The suggestion that this subject even leaves room for debate is atrocious. This is why I posted the respective links. Read them and think about what you read. You see, due to the fact that the people who are now referred to as US citizens got away with this, they keep repeating their atrocities the world over, or do I have to mention Vietnam, Afganistan, the constant threats against Iraq, and everything else before and in between?

[Nametag]

No one is debating the "pros and cons of the American Holocaust," and no one is suggesting that there are any "pros." What is subject to debate is the accuracy of the "European settlers killed 90% of all Native Americans" theory as opposed to the "Disease killed 90% of all Native Americans, and Europeans killed half of who was left" theory. There's not a whole lot of difference, morally speaking, but if one insists on comparing numbers, the difference is important. Massive numbers were deliberately killed, including some by smallpox, but you can only get the "90% or more" figure by including the entire pre-1492 population of North America, much of which had been killed by accidental introduction of smallpox and other diseases by 1600. When English settlers landed in Virginia, Massachusetts, etc., they found what remained: mass graves, abandoned farmland, and small bands living in had once been large settlements. (It isn't to the settlers' credit that they interpreted this as a sign of divine favor: "Look, the Lord has cleared this land of hostile savages, just for us! Now, let's rob some graves...")

[Nametag]

Besides, the PROPER subject of this thread was Cecil's column, which answered a question asking for single malefactors. It gets a little sticky trying to apportion blame for the results of policies carried out by a succession of presidents, generals, governors, and independent agents.

[PumaClaw]

The problem is that Jackson initiated the Indian Policy. Let me point out here also that the preoccupation with numbers is a white folly. Look at it this way:
Some guy is in a room with 20 people and kills them all. Another guy is in a room with 80 people and kills them all. Basically, both of them killed everybody in sight, right? Should I consider the first guy a saint because he had fewer people around him he could kill? In both cases, 100% of those around the guys got killed.
I wonder how Americans today would react if a large group of illegal immigrants came over here from some filthy pigsty and spread diseases that wipe out at least half of the population here. You reckon they'd just stand there and say: Ah, that's too bad but it was an accident.
Since none of these people were asked to come here in the first place, there's no excuse for them having spread diseases here. It's as simple as that.
I'll also point out here that I responded to several posts on those two pages. One of them claimed that the people thought this country was empty. My links are showing that this is impossible. When you deliberately slaughter off several hundred people who are attending a religious ceremony, you can hardly claim you didn't know they were there. If there was so much empty space here, why did these illegal immigrants have to kill the indigenous population to begin with? Obviously it was not because there wasn't enough room for everybody.
Another person claimed that whites were justified to slaughter the indigenous population because they themselves occasionally went to war against each other. Well, so did the European nations throughout history which was no reason for us to run over there and try to annihilate them all, was it now? Furthermore, our armed conflicts were mere skirmishes. Think about this logically: Who in this world actually sat around and dreamed up better and better ways of killing other people? Sure wasn't us, we were satisfied to fire an arrow at someone. It's the white people who turned their entire technology toward improving the success in slaughtering people. Our technology went in a different direction. For example our healthcare was by far superior over that in Europe at that time. But instead of learning something here, these arrogant immigrants came here to kill us. Not much I can say for people like that, can you?
We've been on this continent for thousands of years (so far the oldest artifacts found are over 50,000 years old) and the continent was still in fine shape when y'awl got here. How long did it take whites to ruin this place? 200+ years. Every river and lake is polluted. Large tracts of land have been turned into dust bowls. The trees are dying. The air is no longer fit to breathe. Large areas are contaminated with nuclear radiation. The ground water is poisoned in many areas. More and more children are born with deformities. These immigrants even tried to copy the political system of the Haudenossaunee and couldn't even grasp the principle of it; by now they managed to turn it into a nazi-regime. Fine job you did on our land, that's for sure.

[Spoke]

Spare us the martyr routine, PumaClaw.

Holocaust was a two-way street. As I pointed out earlier (and you really should read the whole thread), the first recorded attempt at genocide in what became the US occurred in 1622, when the Powhatan Indians attempted to eradicate the English settlers at Jamestown. Cite (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/vcdh/jamestown/phatmass.html).

(Of course, the disappearance of the earlier Roanoake colony may have been the result of a similar slaughter, but no one was left to tell that tale.)

Slaughter and atrocities on both sides proceeded from that starting point, and continued right on through the 19th Century. It just turned out that the Europeans were better at slaughter than the Indians. It wasn't for lack of trying, though. Nor do the methods employed by the Indians lend themselves to any claim to the moral high ground.

The Indian propensity for making war not only against men but against women and children was shocking enough to the sensibilities of English settlers that it merited a mention in the Declaration of Independence (http://www.law.emory.edu/FEDERAL/independ/declar.html). One of the complaints against King George in that document:

HE has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.

(emphasis added)

In the early part of the 19th century, the Shawnee Indian Tecumseh dreamed of slaughter on a much larger scale, hoping to unite all tribes to eradicate white settlers west of the Appalachians. He encouraged his acolytes to butcher the settlers, specifically urging them, for example, to cut the unborn children from the bellies of pregnant women.

They listened.

In August, 1814, Creek adherents of Tecumseh's vision attacked Ft. Mims, Alabama, wiping out more than 400 settlers (man, woman, and child). As Tecumseh had suggested, fetuses were ripped from the wombs of pregnant mothers, and the bodies of victims were otherwise butchered. Description of the Ft. Mims massacre. (http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~cmamcrk4/pkt37.html#anchor723639)

As I pointed out in this thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=146129) the Ft. Mims massacre was the WTC bombing of its day, and it sent a similar shock through the American public. The Tennessee and Georgia militia (under Andrew Jackson) responded with a brutal war against the Creeks, and followed that up with a war against the Seminole.

(You see, Jackson's generalized wrath toward Indians may have been wrong-headed, but it did not come out of the clear blue sky. Ft. Mims, and the many bloody encounters which had come before it, colored his worldview.)

While we're at it, please spare me the hackneyed image of Indians living in harmony with nature until the arrival of the evil Europeans. Where are the giant ground sloth, the giant armadillo, the American mammoth (among others)? They were hunted to extinction by the Indians before the white man ever set foot in this hemisphere.

I say all of this not to demonize Native Americans of times past, but to humanize them. They were as capable of atrocities as the white man. They were as capable of environmental destruction as the white man. In short, like the white man, they were (and are) just good old homo sapiens sapiens, and heir to all the foibles of that species.

[PumaClaw]

Now here we are talking about poor debating skills. When I correct your revisionist version of history, aka US American propaganda, why am I in a martyr routine? The fact remains that the same people who passed down all these "historical facts" to you also accused the Indian people of being devil worshipers although there is no Indian religion which even makes reference to the xtian satan or devil. So maybe you might just take your "historical resources" with a pinch of salt.
Moreover, it seems to me that the people who haul into someone else's country to kill the indigenous population are the ones one can describe as savages. On what grounds exactly to you ascertain that the highly developed and civilized societies here were "savage" while your well-armed, greedy, fanatical, illegal immigrants constituted anything even remotely comparable to a civilized society? Keep in mind that the religious fanatics on the Mayflower and thereafter as well as the convicts in the prison colony Georgia got thrown out of Europe in the first place because both groups were social misfits. How our societies were expected to be better equipped to deal with this European riff-raff than their own is a mystery to me.
If the Indian people back then had been even half as savage as you want to believe, they would have simply killed all of these uncivilized, primitive, illegal immigrants upon arrival and been done with it. Obviously they didn't do that. Just what makes these arrogant whites think they need to populate every part of this earth and multiply like rabbits?
Why do you believe that history as invented by these white unasked immigrants and their offspring is to be believed? Has it ever occurred to you that it was in their own self-interest to falsify historical accounts to suit their own purposes? If you would take a swift crash course in history, you would discover that these Puritans, once over here, even traveled miles out of their way to kill Quakers? And yet you want to convince people that this brutal bunch didn't initiate the hostilities with the indigenous population who had a perfect right to defend their territory against foreign invasion?
Right about now, I would say that the whole world would be better off if the indigenous population here had had stricter immigration policies and had run off the entire lot, the religious fanatics as well as the convicts in Georgia, and sent them back to where they had come from.

[PumaClaw]

Frankly, Spoke, I take your sources with more than a pinch of salt, maybe more like a truckload of salt, because this description of the Ft. Mims massacre seems to be taken straight from the old testament of the bible. While I'm not xtian, I'm familiar enough with your scripture to recognize when certain passages are passed on as historical accounts describing events in other parts of the world. I'm also familiar enough with the traditions of the Eastern Indian nations to know when someone is trying to subplant their normal form of warfare with passages from your bible. This ripping of fetuses from wombs was just too much of a biblical touch for any of your sources to have credibility. I'm sure the Shawnee did all this fetus ripping right after they worshiped the devil and danced naked inside a pentagram no doubt. LMAO. BTW, your term "unborn children" is a dead give-away regarding your sources and agenda. Please refrain from proselytizing your born-again xtian views here and don't confuse your religious beliefs with historical fact.

[WWW]

Ah yes, the peaceful native Americans, living in blissful harmony with nature until corrupted by the invading Europeans. Two hundred years ago most Native American chieftans would have been mortally insulted by such a characterization, to judge by their surviving remarks. They were warriors and very proud of it, scorning most peaceful tasks as "women's work". They went to war frequently, and with methods that shocked the battle hardened Europeans. If they had been able to resist fighting each other and united against the newcomers they might have made a better try at shoving them back into the sea, but old habits died hard.

If some consider the description of atrocious conduct by Native Americans mere propaganda, consider the quaint habit of scalping. Some schoolchildren remember only the shocked commentary about this or that Colonial official who offered a bouty for each Native American scalp turned in to them...they may even been left with the impression that scalping was a English invention. Far from it. Few northen Native American lodges were without their banners of hair, trophies as grisly as shrunken heads. And the proud shining pyramids of the indigenous Southren cultures, what could anyone say about the torrents of blood that gushed down their gutters, the macabre and malodorus piles of stored carrion at their base? Ever wonder how Cortez and his small band of adventurers with matchlock muskets not only survived attacks by the milling Aztec multitudes but actually managed to conquer? With a lot of help from natives who had been victimized themselves by Aztecs, that's how. If the Priest of your conqueror kept popping into your village to sieze those most full of youth and promise so their hearts could be cut out and their bodies flung down Pyramid staircases like so much trash, even Cortez would look good to you.

And leads to a point I have attempted to make before; much commentary here is so dependent on agenda-driven sources with selectively spun facts that the individuals of the times would not recognize in themselves the people or circumstances described in the postings advocating revisionist world views. To give just one example, consider the biological warfare thing. Europeans considered themselves the victims of a biological plague from the new world...not tobacco, but syphillis. Present day researchers argue that syphillis was present in European populations prior to their recorded contact with New World peoples, but is is likely that a new and more virulent strain made its way back across the sea. The literature of the period makes clear an epidemic of veneral disease ripped through a Europe that had grown careless and complacent in its sexual habits. So while the Native Americans left few records to document their losses to smallpox the Europeans wrote reams on how they had been poxed.

[PumaClaw]

First of all, let me point out to you that I consider the term "noble savage" an oxymoron. This is a label invented by white people and none of us describe ourselves as such. We're neither collectively noble nor are we savages.
If you check into the history of scalping, you will discover that it was introduced in America by the Spanish, they're from Europe I believe. It was propogated by the US government which paid a bounty for every Indian scalp.
I might also point out to you that if the white people didn't like our customs here, they were free to go back to Europe and stay there. We neither forced them to come to this part of the world nor did we detain them here against their own wishes.
As for this propaganda you're trying to pass off as history, sorry, it won't wash.
As I said before, if the indigenous population was as brutal as you try to make us, how come your ancestors didn't take the first opportunity to go back to Europe? Moreover, it was the whites who tried to annihilate us and not the other way around. It was the whites who committed genocide against us and not the other way around. So your arguments don't hold up. Better luck next time.

[jac]

-Spare us the martyr routine, PumaClaw.

yeah puma. who do you think you is, mother teresa :)

-Holocaust was a two-way street.

as it turned out, in reality, not in some ethereal realm you superimposed onto that, it was only a one-way avenue here.

-As I pointed out earlier (and you really should read the whole thread), the first recorded attempt at genocide in what became the US occurred in 1622, when the Powhatan Indians attempted to eradicate the English settlers at Jamestown. Cite.

first of all, that ignores earlier genocidal inclinations and follow-throughs by europeans against native people (yes, even in the united states), but more importantly, you do not understand the word you are using here, said word being 'genocide,' nor, because of that, its applicability. the english SETTLERS (take note, 'settlers,' not innocent bystanders), being that as they were, were, passively as it may have been at times, engaging in acts of combat against the indigenous tidewater populations of virginia by definition of being invaders (calling them settlers is just a nice way of sprucing up their image) alone. therefor, that precludes the attempt to drive them off as being genocide in its nature.

-Slaughter and atrocities on both sides proceeded from that starting point

starting point? umm... you're leaving out a good bit of history there, including over 100 years in u.s. proper alone.

-and continued right on through the 19th Century. It just turned out that the Europeans were better at slaughter than the Indians.

better, if you count the myriad acts of subterfuge, many being the marks of incivility themselves, even in times of war, as being something worthy of the respect due a description of something said to have been 'better.'

-It wasn't for lack of trying, though. Nor do the methods employed by the Indians lend themselves to any claim to the moral high ground.

since i probably cannot break you of your apparent habit of generalizing, stereotypical contentions, and polarizing, for what it's worth, native people were only as brutal really as they felt they needed to be. native people were being hunted, and marked for extirpation. native people were losing lands and family, and believed if they did not fight back ferociously, they might lose it all. were native people not right right in that assumption?... their cultures, their lives, their lands... all of it was being attacked, so excuse the 'excuse' for brutality, spoke. i'd like to see you be backed into a corner and not respond accordingly. it's easy to try and be a moralist when you have not been placed in a position to know any better

-The Indian propensity for making war not only against men but against women and children was shocking enough to the sensibilities of English settlers that it merited a mention in the Declaration of Independence.

right... shocking to the same english settlers who set bounties on indians' scalps, even those of children? lofl, what are you talkin' about? hehe. god...


-HE has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.

a lot of the 'destruction' they spoke of against women and children was native peoples' habits of adopting as captives, of course men, as well as and especially women and children. funny how most of those didn't even want to go back to white 'civilization' after living with the 'savages' for a period of time.

-In the early part of the 19th century, the Shawnee Indian Tecumseh dreamed of slaughter on a much larger scale, hoping to unite all tribes to eradicate white settlers west of the Appalachians. He encouraged his acolytes to butcher the settlers, specifically urging them, for example, to cut the unborn children from the bellies of pregnant women.

you're talented to have managed to p*ss someone off and give them the chuckles at the same time...

even someone with cursory knowledge of tecumseh can counter that trash of a point you were trying to attribute to him. tecumseh's positions on such were actually well-documented. tecumseh, though he had good reason to burn about every captive he and his men caught, tought against even torturing them. it would only come back on his people, he believed. no captive in tecumseh's presence was ever treated poorly, let alone butchered. tecumseh upbraided so many about mistreating captives that it was common knowledge, even to people of other nations under his guidance, not to do it for fear of what he might do. once, at fort meigs, where in his absence many of the prisoners were being killed, upon arriving he immediately shouted down everyone acting against the prisoners, and it was reported he struck down, even perhaps killing two other badly needed warriors because they had engaged in the slaughter. to him, it was better to lose them than to have warriors who could not be as honorable as he wanted his people to be. they had defiled his and their own names, and he did not believe in it nor want any under his command to involve themselves in that kind of thing.

tecumseh did the opposite of advising anyone to butcher settlers or captives alike. such things he considered unnecessary and impediments to progress for his vision of winning back his peoples' homelands. every time settlers were attacked, it gave the u.s. and territorial militias reasons to incite further campaigns against the indians to break up the tribes. tecumseh knew that and that was the last thing he needed was to bring negative attention to them. the thing with ripping out fetuses... maybe you'll want to check out the cavalry in the sand creek massacre on that one. i really don't know how you people come up with this stuff. stop spewing vitriolic fairy tales around. you will get called on them.

-As I pointed out in this thread the Ft. Mims massacre was the WTC bombing of its day, and it sent a similar shock through the American public.

oh please... it's comparable in that the u.s. of that time and this thought they could do whatever they pleased without retribution, and no one could ever do any serious harm to them. that's about it, as well as that people then and now were generally ignorant of how u.s. policies were affecting other peoples.

-While we're at it, please spare me the hackneyed image of Indians living in harmony with nature until the arrival of the evil Europeans. Where are the giant ground sloth, the giant armadillo, the American mammoth (among others)? They were hunted to extinction by the Indians before the white man ever set foot in this hemisphere.

where is your proof of that? sorry, but conjecture doesn't make itself fact when it becomes convenient.

and please spare us the banal attempts at trying to make some semblance of a point with that imagining others are saying or even believe such an extreme position as that all natives were living in peace and harmony with mother earth and whatnot. i think what you'll find is actually being stated isn't so extreme, but not as dim a reality as you seem to want to paint it.

-I say all of this not to demonize Native Americans of times past, but to humanize them.

yet you demonize native people under the auspices of 'humanizing' indians all the same. you just pulled some garbage out of who knows where about tecumseh, effectively demonizing one of the most venerable men of his time, who was respected by even his enemies, even honored a great deal by some of them. you clearly have not done your research and it shows.

who do you think you are trying to humanize native people to a native person anyway? in that world, it's you who needs schooling a bit.

[PumaClaw]

It's really difficult to take anyone serious who thinks he needs to teach an Indian all about humanizing his own people or assumes that an Indian has some highflown images of himself and his own people which are way above superman and friends, aaye? It takes a whopper of arrogance to think one has to introduce real Indians to an Indian, that's for sure.
The fact remains that indigenous people have the right and justification to run off or kill any invader, and the white people here were the invaders. That they were run out of their own country constituted no obligation on our part to let them move in -- move in and take over, move in and move us out, move in and put us into concentration camps, move in and try to annihilate us.

[jtd]

I believe it was Gore Vidal who claimed that more people had been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other cause. Now it seems unlikely that this genocidal activity beats out Stalin, but does anybody have an estimate of the nunmber of people killed in the name of Christ? How about in the name of the other big religions?

[PumaClaw]

Hmmmmmmmmm, I dunno now, they might well beat out Stalin. Think about all the folks killed during the Spanish Inquisition, the European witchhunts, the Huguenots, all the Indian people killed in the Americas, many of the people killed in Africa, the Crusades, the xtian-islamic wars, Hitler was a good catholic boy too and didn't like Jews and other sinners (atheists, homosexuals, abortion doctors, et al.) very much, and then there were the wars between catholics and protestants...............

[WWW]

Islam with its allowance for spreading its faith by the sword may well be the bloodiest of the old world religions, but I do not recall any reference to Muslim warriors scalping their enemies. Nor do I recall ever reading of their Spanish oppenents engaging in such practices during the protracted and bloody struggles in the Iberian peninsula. Yet we are told the Spanish introduced that barbaric custom into the Americas. Could it be the Spanish merely bought scalping from North America, where according to most accounts it was nearly universal among native tribes, to a receptive auidence in the South? What reliable records exist to show when native North Americans began their enthusiastic infatuation with scalping?

Such cultural transfers have happened before. If you wandered down a street in 1930's Germany and did not respond with a stiff arm salute to a group of passing Hitler youth you might well find yourself surrounded by a ring of hostile faces and asked "Do you not know the German greeting"? Shaken, you might not think to point out it was not a German greeting after all. Italian fascists had revived a favorite salute of the Roman legions as part of their larger program of reviving the glories of the Caesars, and the salute followed fascism into Germany. Therefore in their efforts "to uncover their racial heritage beneath centuries of filth" the Nazis had inadvertently aped the salute of the deadliest enemies of their teutonic ancestors.

Authur M. Schlensinger, Jr., observed "Ideology is the curse of public affairs because it converts politics into a branch of theology and sacrifices human beings on the altar of dogma". Part of any ideology is a reinterpretation of history to support its dogma, and the more fanciful the dogma the less objective and the more...let us say "inventive"...this reinterpetation tends to be. Consider the constant harping of officials in the former Soviet Union on the intervention of the Western powers in their internal affairs during the final months of World War I. The Soviets by their abrogation of treaties with Russia's former Allies and abject surrender to Germany's demands for a unilateral peace treaty freed a tidal wave of Eastern front German divisons that nearly overwhelmed the Allies in the West. Yet the Soviets pretended to be unable to understand how their gambits might have provoked an Allied intervention.

The century that has just come to its close was the bloodiest humanity has ever known. Secular ideologies drove the slaughter, but did not in the last analysis justify a final Armageddon. Yet those who believe God has told them to do so might have no hesistation in "pressing the button". The blood toll of religious frenzy may easily reach its greatest peak in this new century. Native Americans may well find themselves equally impacted by a demand of "convert or die".

[jac]

-Islam with its allowance for spreading its faith by the sword may well be the bloodiest of the old world religions, but I do not recall any reference to Muslim warriors scalping their enemies. Nor do I recall ever reading of their Spanish oppenents engaging in such practices during the protracted and bloody struggles in the Iberian peninsula. Yet we are told the Spanish introduced that barbaric custom into the Americas.

in all likelihood, it was either the spaniards or earlier english settlers. in many parts of europe, it was common to either scalp or behead a felled enemy, for anything from purposes regarding counting the number dead to bringing home a 'trophy.' this practice was brought early on into what is now the united states and promulgated throughout the continents, mainly for bounty, either private or governmental, as well as for the aforementioned 'souvenirs' and tallies used to count the dead (ears and noses were also popular for the latter purpose).

-Could it be the Spanish merely bought scalping from North America, where according to most accounts it was nearly universal among native tribes, to a receptive auidence in the South? What reliable records exist to show when native North Americans began their enthusiastic infatuation with scalping?

here's what i don't get.... if there exists records to show that scalping was nearly universal among native tribes, as you say (there are actually accounts to the contrary, ones telling of it being introduced by the various colonial powers to tribes who'd never practiced it before), then there must also be 'reliable records' revolving around what you refer to as native peoples' 'enthusiastic infatuation' with scalping, because one would precede and play off the other to confirm or deny. so in the existence of one, so too does the converse become clarified.

so please explain your reasoning there.

there may have been some tribes, or more correctly, tribes in which there were few members who'd scalped on occasion before the practice became pervasive after european introduction, but i know of no people to whom scalping was part of traditional warfare. people only believe as much because of how indigenous people have been portrayed, where myth has become fact any counter or question to would be considered absurd.

[jac]

-Ah yes, the peaceful native Americans, living in blissful harmony with nature until corrupted by the invading Europeans.

oh god... why do you folks always whip this trite shite out of nowhere?

-Two hundred years ago most Native American chieftans would have been mortally insulted by such a characterization, to judge by their surviving remarks.

really?... by whose surviving remarks? i want to hear them, and better yet, i want to see how you've translated them for your purposes here.

-They were warriors and very proud of it, scorning most peaceful tasks as "women's work".

actually, chiefs were generally peaceable people. fierce warriors, but only fierce in heated situations, and not all the time as you seem to think. most chiefs had to be congenial, calm, fair, compassionate and the like for they had also to deal with the affairs of their people on a daily basis. that you ascribe a 'warrior' status to them as some kind of consistant attribute makes me think your opinion of them them as human beings is not as well intentioned as you'd like to make it seem. you are not humanizing them, rather, you are taking one aspect of their lives and packaging their very being as indicative of such in its entirety... those who did scorn "women's work" did so not because the tasks were peaceful, but because traditional roles were fairly rigid sometimes, and either sex would resent not being able to fulfill what they thought their gender should entail, much like most in our society today would, and do.

-They went to war frequently

not until the europeans invaded.

-and with methods that shocked the battle hardened Europeans.

right. i'm sure you believe that too, but excuse the rest of us for not. i think for that last sentence, the reciprocal holds truer.

-If some consider the description of atrocious conduct by Native Americans mere propaganda, consider the quaint habit of scalping. Some schoolchildren remember only the shocked commentary about this or that Colonial official who offered a bouty for each Native American scalp turned in to them...they may even been left with the impression that scalping was a English invention. Far from it. Few northen Native American lodges were without their banners of hair, trophies as grisly as shrunken heads.

i discussed this in the last post.... seems you have a little problem with cause and effect. sure there were scalp 'trophies.' but none cited upon first contact or shortly thereafter, nor references to such practices among the nations. seems to me, that would support the european introduction and promulgation theorem given how pervasive it became only later on.

-And the proud shining pyramids of the indigenous Southren cultures, what could anyone say about the torrents of blood that gushed down their gutters, the macabre and malodorus piles of stored carrion at their base? Ever wonder how Cortez and his small band of adventurers with matchlock muskets not only survived attacks by the milling Aztec multitudes but actually managed to conquer? With a lot of help from natives who had been victimized themselves by Aztecs, that's how.

actually they didn't require much assistance to seize tenochtitlan. the disease(s?) they left did much of the work on their own.... funny, the supposedly brutal aztec didn't even wipe out the spaniards when they had the chance, even after their lust for gold savagery wound up slaughtering many of their hosts who'd treated them as guests. they merely ran the remaining ones off after they'd believed they wouldn't be coming back. this they did because unlike the spaniards, they didn't believe in wars of extermination, as was the case with most other indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere.

reports of aztec sacrifice are also heavily exaggerated, and perhaps even false. it's another one of those ideas we've had drilled into our heads so much that's its become unquestionable truth, but it's funny how there has never been a valid report of even seeing such sacrificial ceremonies, as it were. the first so-called report i believe it was was proven to be a lie. i think it was bernal diaz del castillo who first wrote of it. only problem was, from the given site of his having supposedly seen this, outside of the lake at their campsite, he'd have needed binoculars. and, i don't think k-mart carried those then.

learn to scrutinize history better before you go spouting off about it. history in this part of the world is rife with myth generally believed to be anything but.

-And leads to a point I have attempted to make before; much commentary here is so dependent on agenda-driven sources with selectively spun facts that the individuals of the times would not recognize in themselves the people or circumstances described in the postings advocating revisionist world views.

uhm.... too easy.

-To give just one example, consider the biological warfare thing. Europeans considered themselves the victims of a biological plague from the new world...not tobacco, but syphillis. Present day researchers argue that syphillis was present in European populations prior to their recorded contact with New World peoples, but is is likely that a new and more virulent strain made its way back across the sea.

actually it's been proven syphilis was in europe before contact here and likely of european origin. i don't care what you think is 'likely.' there's no science to support your assertions, so do not try and manipulate the dialogue by, as the other guy was doing, treating personal conjecture as if it were worth anymore than that in a sound discussion.

-The literature of the period makes clear an epidemic of veneral disease ripped through a Europe that had grown careless and complacent in its sexual habits. So while the Native Americans left few records to document their losses to smallpox the Europeans wrote reams on how they had been poxed.

by themselves. you have somehow tried to lead us to a conclusion that was never justly accredited. your non-sequitured, underhanded attempt here to place blame where it cannot personally be shouldered is not appreciated. if i wanted to engage in debate where specious rhetoric was the weapon of choice, i'd go find a cult somewhere and pick a fight. let's raise the level of discussion around here some, okay?

[PumaClaw]

WWW:
I'm not aware of all Indian nations scalping anybody period, however, the fact remains that the practice was introduced by the Spaniards and was turned into a form of income by the US government. You really need to read up on history before you make a fool of yourself on this board. It was not the Indian nations who paid a bounty for Indian scalps, including the scalps of children; this is something the US government instituted. I'm tellin' ya, WWW, Hollywood does not exactly hand out PhDs in history, yanno; and neither do dime novels. I would also be cautious about the posting of factoids you find on David Duke's E.U.R.O website as scientifically proven facts here.

Let me enlighten you about a few things here: Whatever you have to say about WWI, keep in mind that the USSR was an ally in WWII as well. As for the 3rd Reich, you seem to overlook that concentration camps and death camps were waiting for those who publicly ignored Hitler's directives. Of course, you have now the chance to live through all this first hand, so you won't have to speculate further on how the Germans really perceived that dark era in their history. You might want to engage in a web search on Skulls and Bones to discover what you're faced with at this time.

Spain, mostly during the Spanish Inquisition but also prior to this era, had some of the most gruesome torture chambers ever known to man, so for them to scalp people as well seems almost like a reprieve by comparison. You seem to forget that the Conquistadors came to the Americas during the Spanish Inquisition, so you don't really expect these people to have been some sort of facsimile of Francis of Assissi, do ya now? You really need to keep facts within the context of the era they occurred in or supposedly occurred in.

While you seem to think that spreading religion with fire and sword is reserved for the Islam, let me enlighten you that it is also part of Christianity. In fact, didn't your Jesus himself state that he has not come to bring peace but to turn people against each other? Didn't he advocate for people to turn plow shears into swords? You might want to try reading the bible you claim to believe in.

The fact still remains that even in armed conflicts, the Indian nations were quite content to fire off a few arrows and send the adversary on the run. Weapons of mass destruction, such as the Gatlin Gun, smallpox infested blankets, shrapnel, all the way to nuclear bombs and depleted uranium ammunition were invented by whites. This speaks volumes for itself and can't be overlooked. It is really irrelevant how you tango and waltz around this issue by trying to blame the Indian people for this, that, and the other, the facts speak for themselves.

Not only were white invaders here the only savages in evidence, unfortunately, their offspring are no improvement judging from the US's propensity to get involved in every war there is, starting most of them in some form or other. Looking at the arsenal the US has at its disposal, it's absolutely ludicrous to even discuss bows and arrows or even a few human sacrifices. Even if the Spanish claims regarding human sacrifices were anywhere near the truth (although they are highly exaggerated from the start), the Aztecs would have to get quite busy if they wanted to catch up with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the human lives that are annually sacrificed to honor the great deity called Automobile.

You see, WWW, the problem with your argument against the Indian people is that it flies into the face of the demonstrated white mentality. I can stand beside the nearest artery of heavy traffic and watch white people demonstrating their traditional disrespect for the life of others as they deliberately try to run each other off the road, as they engage in the most dangerous maneuvers spawned by their egotistical desire to get somewhere a few minutes sooner. Just like all that matters to them are their own whims and desires now as evidenced by the tens of thousands of annual traffic fatalities and constant threats of nuclear bombs against anyone who opposes US greed, in the past, everybody who got into their way had to die. Nothing has changed, and the white mentality that reigned back then can still be observed today whenever you take the time to watch these people in action or listen to them talk.

Your claims that whites were the victims of Indian aggression rather than Indian self-defense are in complete opposition of the white mentality which has never changed. Just like the white invaders back then simply slaughtered off any Indians who happened to be in a location the whites wanted to occupy, today the offspring of the same people will bomb thousands of indigenous people who happen to be in an area the US wants to build a pipeline across or where large oil deposits happen to be located. Blaming the defensive indigenous population for hostility against greedy and kill-crazy invaders is an old white American tradition and can be clearly seen when looking at Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nicaragua, etc. etc. etc. It is a matter of mentality which proves your factoids wrong no matter how strongly you believe that mere repetition of a blatant lie somehow makes it true.

[WWW]

It appears I am challenged to cite my sources by those who seldom..if ever...cite theirs. Nor does it appear that I would find their source material authoriative, or free from ideological taint.
I spent considerable time on my World Court remarks and the board did not respond when I attempted to submit them, so I doubt I will go to that degree of detail again. I will take it as given that any source I cite would be rejected with contempt and that I and any who question the assertion that the United States is the greatest unpunished genocidal power will always be considered as fools by some who post here.

I do not cite examples of barbaric behavior by native peoples to justify the horrendous excesses of some who claimed Western European heritage. I do attempt to poke holes in some of the more sweeping assertions advanced by some...but you want detail, right? You might even enjoy an example of what I consider specious historical authority.

OK, let us consider for a moment a recent television series on cable's Discovery channel that puported to show how hard science was changing history. In one episode sweeping assertions were made about the progress of battle in Custer's last stand based largely on the discovery of shell casings and other artifacts unearthed with the aid of metal detectors after a recent fire cleared the undergrowth. It all appeared very scientific, with finds plotted on computers and cross referenced to each other. The only problem I had was the conclusions were presented in far too definite a form to have been drawn from physical evidence gleaned from a battlefield picked over by every one from official survey crews to souvenior hunters for considerably more than a hundred years. It may have been possible to trace some small units from point to point but to generalize entire troop movements thereby in what was an extremely fluid situation seemed unjustified...the old error of the blind men and the Elephant. But I would be willing to bet qualifications and reservations will soon be forgotten and we will soon be confidently informed of what "science" had to tell us about that battle. (One inconvenient detail for some posting here; fallen US troopers were cut into pieces by the victorious Native Americans, a process documented by Sioux paintings; must have been something else they learned from the nasty Spanish).

And then there was the absolutely hilarious attempt to prove Davy Crockett didn't die at the Alamo in the fashion presented in Hollywood movies, a proposition supported by a Mexican Officer's account that even its defenders admit a) was not written by the officer in question, and b) if true, expands on a existing account in the officer's own handwriting in which he did not comment on the extraordinary event in question. Scientific investigation of the papers being pointless, we were treated to a field trip to verify a crossroads north of a minor town which no longer existed, and whose location had been verified with satellite photography. The rediscovery of these previously mapped areas in Mexico was supposed to somehow help prove the unattributed document, but it seemed rather thin to me. If held to such standards of proof some who claim the holocaust did not happen might make a plausible case. No mention was made of the slaughter of the Texas rebels at Goliad or Santa Ana's ultimatium, which together might make surrender seem pointless. And if Crockett did surrender and then was killed, it seems likely the Texans of the time would have attempted to capitalize on that by elevating his martyrdom at the hands of the inhuman Mexicans; yet the female who was spared by Santa Ana's army mentioned only seeing Crockett's body as she left the Alamo. Yet the hour long television program did echo a theme often expressed on this board....a attempt to discredit and defame icons of the United States of America.

NASA abandoned its attempt to prove it landed men on the moon, convinced its revisionist critics would remain unconvinced by any proof it offered; I shall not even attempt to cite you sources many have seemingly already dismissed as worthless.
You are welcome to consider me a fool; merely remember that if I am a fool and the greatest #!!%*## in the world, I can still speak the truth.

[PumaClaw]

WWW:
I don't know which other board you're talking about and I couldn't care less anyway. If you scroll up on this board, you will discover that I posted numerous URLs so don't accuse me of not citing any sources just because you were too lazy to read them. The monitor of this board even chastised me for posting all these links but by now he probably sees that there was method to my madness. When you claim nobody posts any sources, you are clearly lying.
As to Custer, the guy was a war criminal by all accounts.
http://www.rootsweb.com/~vashenan/cem/davygetz.html
http://www.dickshovel.com/was.html
The Sioux knew he was coming, they let him ride into a trap, and Custer got what he had coming to him. Like so many others, he considered slaughtering Indians a way up the political ladder. Causes one to wonder about the voting public, aaye?
I visited the Alamo and was informed that the guys there died of influenza. Personally, I couldn't care less what they died from. Who cares?
Did men walk on the moon? Maybe, then again maybe not, and frankly, I don't give a damn one way or the other.
None of this changes the fact that the US has committed genocide and is one of the world's most aggressive, most murderous, and greediest nations. It also doesn't change the fact that this country is currently in the grips of people who should not be allowed in any government.
So, what exactly is your point, WWW? Or do you even have a point?

[Spoke]

Scalping a European invention? That is hilarious. Especially given the mountains of archaelogical evidence of pre-Columbian scalping among Native American tribes. Check it out. (http://www.dickshovel.com/scalp.html)

From that site:***The scalping victims considered in this study came from the Southeast, the Midwest, and the Southwest. The Midwest is by far the region with the largest sample, estimated at between 400 and 500 scalped individuals. However, most of these victims came from Crow Creek Canyon, the site of a large-scale massacre involving a minimum of 486 individuals (Gregg et al 1981). The excavators report that not only were almost every person scalped, but they also were mutilated and dismembered, and many of their hands and feet appear to have been removed and taken as trophies. This custom has been documented historically for certain Native American culture groups in the United States (Friederici 1907)***

***There appears to have been little sexual bias in choosing which individuals would be scalped. Sex could be determined for 33 of the scalping victims considered here, and of these, roughly 40% were female, while 60% were male.***

***Whatever the case, it seems clear that Native American groups who practiced the scalping custom during the prehistoric period had no proscription against scalping women, even women who were pregnant (Brooks 1994).***

***Just as being a woman was no protection from scalping, being a child also appears not to have always been a deterrent to becoming a victim of this custom. The youngest prehistoric victim of scalping found in this study was a child between the ages of five and seven years, and another was a subadult between 13 and 15 years old (Hollimon & Owsley 1994; Allen et al 1985). The five to seven year old from the Fay Tolton site in South Dakota may have provided trophies in two different raids. The presence on the cranium of a characteristic scalping lesion with some bone remodelling indicates that the child survived an intial scalping event by at least two weeks before being killed in yet another raid. Obviously there was no scalp left on this child to take as a trophy, but both hands appear to have been removed by breaking the radii and ulnae toward their distal ends, and these hands were probably kept as trophies, along with the head of another individual from the site who was quite obviously decapitated (Hollimon & Owsley 1994).***

More information here. (http://www.mze.com/sunshineparty/scalping.html)

And here. (http://earlyamerica.com/review/1998/scalping.html)

Of course, you two seem unconcerned with actual evidence. No doubt you will tell us that the dozens of reports of pre-Columbian scalping in the archaeological record are really just the product of some vast Caucasian conspiracy of misinformation.

[Spoke]

PumaClaw wrote:Please refrain from proselytizing your born-again xtian views here and don't confuse your religious beliefs with historical fact.

He don't know me very well, do he?

[Spoke]

Oh yes, and here is the requested information (http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/lec03/b65lec03.htm) on the extinction of large mammals caused by overhunting (by Paleo-Indians) in the Americas.

From that site:12,000 years ago, North America had an amazing Megafauna including condors with a sixteen-foot wingspan, ground sloths as big as hippos, three kinds of elephants, three kinds of cheetah and five other kinds of big cat, several kinds of pronghorn antelopes, long-legged, antelope-like pigs, an assortment of camel, llama, deer, horse, and bison species, giant wolves, giant bears and giant armadillos. North America has been called a "super-Serengeti" with more big animal species than you would find in Africa.

But 11,000 years ago, nearly all of these big animals - 70 species or 95% of the megafauna - disappeared completely. This is exactly the time when humans (Paleo-Indians) colonized North America, and their arrival and skill as hunters at that time is documented by the appearance of artifacts.

The disappearing mammals in North America included all of the following:

*Mammoths
*Mastodons
*Horses
*Tapirs
*Camels
*Four-horned antelopes
Ground sloths
Peccaries
Giant beaver
Dire wolves
Giant jaguar
Saber-tooth cat

*Some of these fossils are directly associated with human artifacts in archaeological sites.

The carnivores on the list were probably not hunted directly, but were dependent on the large herbivores for food, so soon followed them to extinction.

Now that can't be right. I thought Europeans invented environmental devastation...

[RiverRunner]

In fact, didn't your Jesus himself state that he has not come to bring peace but to turn people against each other? Didn't he advocate for people to turn plow shears into swords?
Actually, no, He didn't. He did say,
in Matthew 10:34-36, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn

" `a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law--

a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'

. . . the last part being a quotation of Micah7:6. I have never met anyone who believes that the verse(s) in question condone violence against anyone, but I'm sure such people do exist.

You might want to try reading the bible you claim to believe in. Advice you might do well to follow, since your "quote" does not exist. At least, I can't find it. I've been wrong before, though.

Hitler was a good catholic boy too . . .
Actually, no, again. As Cecil says (http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mhitlerchristian.html) in reply to "Was Hitler an honest-to-God Christian?": The short answer is a definite "maybe" or, more precisely, "probably neither." The looooong answer is somewhat more complicated. (I suggest you read the entire article; it's fascinating.)

Even if the "good Catholic boy" assertion were correct, it is irrelevant to this discussion, unless you are claiming that Hitler's actions somehow were a Christian crusade of some sort, and that would be absolutely ludicrous.

. . . and didn't like Jews and other sinners (atheists, homosexuals, abortion doctors, et al.) very much.
Abortion doctors? Didn't like Jews because they were sinners? Eh?


RR

[Spoke]

PumaClaw wrote:None of this changes the fact that the US has committed genocide...

Here are some factoids of note, when considering who was committing "genocide" against whom:

When the Red Sticks attacked Ft. Mims in 1813, they killed some 400 settlers, including the women and children taking shelter there, as documented in the sites I linked earlier.

When Andrew Jackson swooped into Alabama in his retaliative campaign, he wiped out the Red Sticks in the battle of Horseshoe Bend. Did he similarly slaughter women and children in that battle? No. Instead, he took some 350 women and children prisoner. And he himself adopted an orphaned Creek child after the battle, and raised that child as his own son.

Again, I do not mean to demonize the Indians of yore. They responded violently to incursions into their territory, and perhaps understandably so. But they were not saintly martyrs, and they were as capable of atrocities as anyone else.

Like I said before, they were (and are) just homo sapiens sapiens, like the rest of us. No better. No worse.

[PumaClaw]

Spoke:
Please activate the online dictionary and enlighten yourself about the exact meaning of the word "genocide." You really don't seem to have a clue what that words actually means. Killing a group of people is not genocide unless the intent is to annihilate an entire race of people. Taking people into custody sure as heck doesn't qualify as genocide since there's not even homicide involved here. You really need to learn English.
As for Tecumseh and his band, fercryinoutloud, the Shawnee were part of the Trail of Tears and he refused to be relocated. What did you expect them to do? Worship whites as some kind of deities? What Tecumseh did is normally known as self-defense. Are you familiar with that concept?

[jac]

first of all, spoke, it needs saying, you don't seem to possess much integrity. you did not even bother mentioning certain points you'd made prior after they were thrown back in your face, tecumseh being the main one here. you simply ignored them, picking and choosing as was convenient, and went on to points you apparently thought you'd do better in, never having bothered to acklowedge the others.

you are also apparently wont to create fact of speculation, as i'll get into, and you show no willingness to grasp comprehension of the words you use well enough for you to even be using them. i'll get into that as well...


so now....

-Here are some factoids of note, when considering who was committing "genocide" against whom:

When the Red Sticks attacked Ft. Mims in 1813, they killed some 400 settlers, including the women and children taking shelter there, as documented in the sites I linked earlier.


you still do not understand the applicability of the term genocide, and instead of reiterating what i'd stated prior, i would like for you to explain why you believe that incident falls within the definition of the word genocide. can you please do that for me?

-When Andrew Jackson swooped into Alabama in his retaliative campaign, he wiped out the Red Sticks in the battle of Horseshoe Bend. Did he similarly slaughter women and children in that battle? No. Instead, he took some 350 women and children prisoner. And he himself adopted an orphaned Creek child after the battle, and raised that child as his own son.

actually, yes, they did slaughter innocents, not just at horseshoe bend, but elsewhere among the upper creek towns and villages. there were only 150 left after the battle at horseshoe bend. so, please don't lie.

there were around 800 creek victims at horsehsoe bend; men, women, and children as well. not only were they killed, but also mutilated afterward, which jackson himself oversaw. a book "the knights of the horsehsoe" documents accounts of the slaughter, such as jackson's men shooting unarmed, noncombatant indians as they tried to swim for safety. they were just doing as instructed, by their commander(s), and their government(s), who wanted to see the "exterminating of the hostiles."

in one documented instance at a red stick town on tullussahatchee river on 5/3/13, the soldiers, after slaughtering indians who were trying to surrender, then mutilated them and later fried potatoes in the fat of the dead red stick muskogees. so, not only were they genocidal, but they were also cannibals.

[jac]

-Scalping a European invention? That is hilarious. Especially given the mountains of archaelogical evidence of pre-Columbian scalping among Native American tribes. Check it out.

Of course, you two seem unconcerned with actual evidence. No doubt you will tell us that the dozens of reports of pre-Columbian scalping in the archaeological record are really just the product of some vast Caucasian conspiracy of misinformation.

look here for a nice summation:

http://ct.essortment.com/historyscalpin_rdrp.htm

hmm... it appears the earl of wessex was scalping in th 11th century. well whadda ya know...

we can go back and forth all day with sources that say conflicting things. believe me, i've seen them. you will dig your heels in though. and you will refuse to understand the main points within the argument which you forgot to touch on.

no one really can know who scalped first, just as no one can know from the archeological evidence you presented whether or not such postulations are factual and not just theoretical. your problem with handling information is, as i mentioned earlier, your penchant for somehow turning conjecture into non-fiction. we'll go into that again later, as again, you made another post which relies on this fallacious way of handling information.

i thought it was strange they mentioned there was so much evidence, such as linguistic evidence, but yet i saw none presented. if i looked over it, please tell me. but i saw more allusions to contentions not directly validated than anything substantial. again, that will simply not do in civilized debate, and no one's going to be fooled by it either. don't insult peoples' intelligence by not employing your own.

the point about scalping you need to understand, which seems to have even been indicated in your sources, is that, though there probably were a few likely tribes who had done as much, it was not pervasive... not until the europeans came and started doing it themselves for bounties, which were then offered to tribes for those they'd killed as the colonial powers set out against each other for influence in the new world. only then did it become almost customary and attached to native peoples.

please get all this at some point.

[jac]

-Oh yes, and here is the requested information on the extinction of large mammals caused by overhunting (by Paleo-Indians) in the Americas.


spoke, i hope you realize at some point that speculation on cause and effect when advanced as theory is not a pretext for a factual argument. just because the indians supposedly were around at the time doesn't mean such things can reasonably be attributed to them. it's probably ridiculous even at that given how sparse the populations were then, and, ridiculous everything else considered. i understand it's a neat idea to some people, but either way, it's just that: an idea. seeing you try to present it as you have, which is to transition from theory to proven discovery is not only irresponsible on your part, but reprehensible as well. i don't really believe you're trying to humanize native people at all. you seem to be just trying to save face, for what reasons i do not know.

it would be akin to me arguing that the ancestors of modern europeans wiped out the neanderthals. well... there is decent evidence to present that case, but nothing to prove it. so it exists, for awhile, as a potential truth but nothing near an actual one. do you see the difference?

your sources are also highly suspect. i don't know where you got that thing about tecumseh, and apparently you were not forthright enough to state it, then you come on telling lies about andrew jackson, and now, the sources you want us to believe are credible pertaining to this issue actually state that it was only "11,000 years ago... when humans (Paleo-Indians) colonized North America." i'm sorry, but this is off by a good 20,000 years, and no credible source for such scientific and anthropological/ecological analysis would ever make such a glaring error, let alone have it for the public to see without at some point retracting it. they have exceedingly high standards, and very little is of trivial importance.

so, i suggest you start looking elsewhere aside from the places which only provide what you want to see.

[jac]

to www, what can i say... you just managed to say a whole lot without really having said much at all. congratulations. i guess that takes some kind of skill.

[Spoke]

Nice. I link scholarly articles with bibliographies, and you link anonymous, unfootnoted reports. (By whom?) (Is this a high school history report that you linked, or what?)

My cites provided information on primary sources which demonstrate that scalping was practiced by American Indians on a large scale, over a broad geographic area, and (more to the point) before Columbus was even a gleam in his Daddy's eye. And you still want to argue that the Europeans taught the Indians to scalp? Delusion.

I readily grant you that the Indians were no more "savage" than the Europeans, but they were certainly no less so. Make a list of atrocities by Europeans or Americanized Europeans against Indians, and I can match you atrocity-for-atrocity with massacres and mutilations committed by Indians.

As for the definition of genocide, I'm glad you brought that up. It is an attempt to wipe out a race, are we agreed on that? What was the attack on Ft. Mims but 19th century "ethnic cleansing"? What was the attack on the Jamestown colony but a 17th century version of the same thing? Why were women and children slaughtered indiscriminately in each of these instances, if not to wipe out the seed of the white man? Why were the fetuses cut from pregnant women except as a symbolic demonstration of that intent?

And turning the question around (and returning to the subject of the original column), we have to ask whether Andrew Jackson was genocidal. Did he intend to wipe out the Indians? Did he intend to eliminate them as a race? The answer, quite clearly, is "No." If you contend otherwise, you have to explain the following: Why did Andrew Jackson spare Creek (Muscogee) women and children at Horseshoe Bend? (I mean, if you want to wipe out the race, here's a chance, right?) Why did Andrew Jackson adopt an orphaned Creek child? Why did Andrew Jackson relocate the Southern tribes instead of just slaughtering them, as he could have done? Why did Andrew Jackson offer the Cherokee the option of remaining in the East and becoming citizens?

Were the Indians ripped off? Sure. Were they forced off their land? Yes. Were they wronged? Absolutely.

Were they the victims of "genocide"? No.

[Spoke]

By the way, here is one reference (http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~cmamcrk4/crkwr3.html) to Tecumseh's exhortation to his Creek followers to "open the wombs" of the white women.

[WWW]

Actually, when I think "sources" I think of books and articles in scholarly journals, not hyperlinks to poltically charged websites (although one will more quickly be able to evaluate the latter).
But it is probably impossible to find a written account of pre-Columbian Native American cultures satisfactorily unbiased to those posting here because no such cultures had written languages. A written account of a "first contact" situation would be to the eyes of some who post here doubly suspect because of the inherent European viewpoint of the witer and the self -evident contamination of the native culture by the mere presence of the writer and his cohorts. I had considered using Native American accounts of the battle of Little Big Horn as a cite for the warlike attitudes and speech of Native American chiefs (Stitting Bull was said to have lost much authority and prestige by his failure to participate in the battle). But these groups were better armed (with repeating rifles) than their opponents and by that fact alone were not free of the European taint, despite their rejection of the white man's reservations.

There is, however, a treasure trove of anti-US information available to those who hate this nation and have certain linguistic skills. There recognized academicians have prepared carefully compiled volumes detailing the rascism, opression and genocide of not only the United States goverment but also its Western European Allies. These works are cross-indexed and fully footnoted with references to enough questionable sources to satisfy even the most rabid US hater who posts to this board. I speak, of course, of the poltical sections in the libraries of the former Soviet Union. Alas for some these printed resources are now in a state of neglect and decay. Moreover, the Soviet Union collapsed before most of the material coud be transferred to digital media so there are no websites to click on (though if bought in bulk the books might be had very cheaply indeed). If some US hater...perhaps you?....could go there, withstand the difficult living conditions and stomach some of the more bizzare preversions of history (not to mention the glorification of Soviet superiority) you might have the satifaction of a lifetime quest as you transfer material to your laptop.

Of course, it is just possible through the cooperation of sympathetic computer hackers here one of our posters is actually a third level Iraqui bureaucrat shivering away at some library in Novorossiik, in which case he should be urged to get to the good stuff in that chilly basement before Saddam gets him.

[alewbail]

Here's a last bit of information before I depart this thread.


In the 29 November Cedar Rapids Gazette (http://www.gazetteonline.com) (page 8B, the article itself is not online), there's an article about Luther College anthropology professor Colin Betts (http://anthro.luther.edu/betts.html), who studied Native American cooking pots unearthed in northeast Iowa, dating to 1200-1700.

Betts took the size of cooking pots as an indicator of family size, and compared the sizes over the period. He found that they remained stable until about 1630-1650, when they quickly decreased in size. His conclusion: disease was devastating the Native American population of the upper Mississippi during that period.

However, the first European explorers to that area (Marquette and Joliet) didn't arrive until the 1670s. The decline also pre-dates the Lord Amherst (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_066.html) incident by a century. But there was a smallpox epidemic in the East during that same time period, and Betts' hypothesis is that the epidemic spread among the Native American population along trade routes to the interior of the continent.

A straightforward reading of the evidence suggests that most (if not all) Native American disease deaths were the result of accidental transmission. Sure, I guess the first Euro-to-Native transmission could've been from some really mean white guy who was doing it on purpose, but it's more likely that it was transmitted to the Native population multiple times (accidentally) during that time period.


One other tidbit, coming full circle to my first post here. In the Belgian Congo, the colonial forces beheaded and amputated their native victims, not for bounty or trophy, but to prove to their superiors that they had really killed somebody. See, the Belgian government didn't want its people wasting bullets, so the soldiers had to prove they'd killed someone. (Source: "King Leopold's Ghost", by Adam Hochschild)

In some areas, there were alot of amputees, because soldiers would cut off the "proof" they needed for their superiors without actually killing their victims. If that sounds familiar, think of the recent civil war in Sierra Leone. I don't know if there's a direct historical link between the two, but folks learn fast regardless of their skin color or geographic location.


Which just goes to show that there's nothing new under the sun. I'm sick of reading the posts of the last few days about how many scalps can fit on the head of a pin. Some of these posts are interesting, and some of them are even on-topic, but I think things have degenerated considerably. If you really want to hash and rehash the question "How bad do Europeans suck?," might I suggest you move it over to the Great Debates wing?

Bye-bye for now,
Al

[P.S. BTW, "swords and plowshares" appears thrice in the Bible (Isaiah 2:4, Joel 3:10, Micah 4:3). Once they're beating plowshares into swords (Joel), twice vice-versa (Isaiah, Micah). It's pretty clear from the context that swords bad, plowshares good. I may be an agnostic, but I know enough to have a searchable Bible on my computer.]

[jac]

-Nice. I link scholarly articles with bibliographies, and you link anonymous, unfootnoted reports. (By whom?) (Is this a high school history report that you linked, or what?)

if you want a specific reference, i'll get it for you. not everything i have i can link to. i don't get most of my info from internet sources.

-My cites provided information on primary sources which demonstrate that scalping was practiced by American Indians on a large scale, over a broad geographic area, and (more to the point) before Columbus was even a gleam in his Daddy's eye.

they did anything but. rather, they suggested, even outright stated in instances that the practice was begun over here, for what that's worth. they could not reasonably argue its reach however, so they more or less shied away from anything too definitive on that. you on the other hand didn't. they gave you 2 inches and you made a foot out of it.

-And you still want to argue that the Europeans taught the Indians to scalp? Delusion.

was i arguing that?... talk about delusional. i even stated it was likely some tribes developed the practice here, with a few lone warriors in others having taken it upon themselves to do as much, but just as you have sources saying this and that, i have some in books that tell of it having to be introduced to various tribes who'd never been involved in the practice. and either way, the main crux of what i was saying is that the colonial european powers, and later the u.s. government and its various state and territorial polities caused the practice to become widespread where prior it had not been.

-I readily grant you that the Indians were no more "savage" than the Europeans, but they were certainly no less so.

oh, so they were pretty much even then. let me tell you something... if native people were about the same, you and i wouldn't be having this conversation now because white people wouldn't be here.

-Make a list of atrocities by Europeans or Americanized Europeans against Indians, and I can match you atrocity-for-atrocity with massacres and mutilations committed by Indians.

and yet you fail to realize, or give much thought to what the brutality was for on either side, which is a key element in grasping the discussion thereof... native people were really only as brutal as they had to be. and because of being marked for extirpation, they had to be very brutal at times. what did the whites have to be brutal about? think about it before you give a knee-jerk response, or give one and then reflect on it. i don't care. the answer won't sound too good no matter how you spin it.

-As for the definition of genocide, I'm glad you brought that up. It is an attempt to wipe out a race, are we agreed on that?

no we are not. to have committed genocide, you don't even have to kill anyone. you may target their culture for annihilation. most people don't realize that because genocide's generally misunderstood. i hope you argue further with me on that because i'm being purposefully vague. i'd advise you to look into how the term came about and how it's defined now.

-What was the attack on Ft. Mims but 19th century "ethnic cleansing"? What was the attack on the Jamestown colony but a 17th century version of the same thing? Why were women and children slaughtered indiscriminately in each of these instances, if not to wipe out the seed of the white man? Why were the fetuses cut from pregnant women except as a symbolic demonstration of that intent?

i mentioned this prior and you seemed to have glossed over it... the reason why none of those occasions was genocidal is, one, because all of the above 'victims' were combatants. only the children i could say were innocents, but their parents should not have placed them in such situations. all others were not innocent bystanders. they were occupying muskogee (creek) and tsenacommacah (powhatan confederation) lands respectively. that, no matter what you think of it, is an act of war. as such, any response to that falls within the guidelines of war and not of a genocidal campaign. it isn't as if the creeks went to scotland or something and started trying to drive those people out. these people were on creek lands. what they got is what they got. that is the chance they took.

-And turning the question around (and returning to the subject of the original column), we have to ask whether Andrew Jackson was genocidal. Did he intend to wipe out the Indians? Did he intend to eliminate them as a race? The answer, quite clearly, is "No." If you contend otherwise, you have to explain the following:

it should be said again that you are basing your premise on a faulty understanding of the word you're using, so the argument has to reverse now. you have to understand the applicability of the word genocide before you can bat it around as such.

-Why did Andrew Jackson spare Creek (Muscogee) women and children at Horseshoe Bend? (I mean, if you want to wipe out the race, here's a chance, right?)

i believe i said they did in fact target woman and children at horseshoe bend, as well as throughout the upper creek towns. you need to get better sources if the ones you have are consistantly lying to you. it's no secret what happened there.

-Why did Andrew Jackson adopt an orphaned Creek child?

who knows... i'll just concede that point, not knowing whether it's true or not, but saying to that, who cares? so if i'm to believe that kind of argument is viable, then let's say hitler adopted a little jewish child during the european holocaust. does that mean there wasn't genocide committed against european jewry then? come on....

-Why did Andrew Jackson relocate the Southern tribes instead of just slaughtering them, as he could have done?

it was not so easy to just have slaughtered the tribes at that point, nor politically expedient, believe it or not... it should be pointed out that such a removal was a form of genocide in and of itself.

-Why did Andrew Jackson offer the Cherokee the option of remaining in the East and becoming citizens?

few ever got this. and, of course, it was because they'd done something in turn for him. more than he ever did for them.

-Were the Indians ripped off? Sure. Were they forced off their land? Yes. Were they wronged? Absolutely.

Were they the victims of "genocide"? No.

this is just getting downright stupid.... please, look up a guy named rafael lemkin, and see what he did. then, look into the u.n. genocide convention for more practical, yet scaled down definition. i can't stress enough the importance of knowing what you're talking about here.

to think though, you would call acts against those who are the aggressors 'genocidal,' while not considering the reciprocal as such, let alone worse, when the intent is not only for their territory, but for their lives, cultures, and very existence as peoples as well. it's f***ing preposterous. it's as if you can't understand the concept of self-defense.

[jac]

-By the way, here is one reference to Tecumseh's exhortation to his Creek followers to "open the wombs" of the white women.

any others? plain and simple, that's a blatant untruth. you should be more careful of what you read, and then of what you around spouting off as reality. it just isn't so in this instance.

i noticed they refer to seekabo on that site as 'the shawnee prophet.' the [shawnee] prophet was tecumseh's brother, tenskwatawa. seekabo wasn't even shawnee. he was creek, and a close friend of tecumseh's who acted as guide/interpreter for him among the southern tribes.

remember what i said about getting better sources? now might be the time to act on that. this crap is really going to come back at you hard one of these days.

[RiverRunner]

[P.S. BTW, "swords and plowshares" appears thrice in the Bible (Isaiah 2:4, Joel 3:10, Micah 4:3). Once they're beating plowshares into swords (Joel), twice vice-versa (Isaiah, Micah). It's pretty clear from the context that swords bad, plowshares good. I may be an agnostic, but I know enough to have a searchable Bible on my computer.]

So do I. The statement was that Jesus advocated turning plowshares into swords. As I pointed out, that was not correct. Were you agreeing or disagreeing? Or was your statement above in response to Puma_Claw?

I fear this thread may soon be on its way to GD or the Pit. It has nearly ceased to be informational.

RR

[alewbail]

RR, sorry for the confusion. I was trying to expand on, not disagree with, your reply to PumaClaw. Ineptly, it seems.

To summarize:
Old Testament sez: Plowshares good, swords bad.
Jesus sez: I bring a (clearly metaphorical) sword; nothing about plowshares.
Al

[Spoke]

Now you want to quibble over the definition of genocide? I am using the common English definition of the word.

Here are the two definitions of genocide that pop up at dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=genocide):

The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.

--from American Heritage Dictionary

n : systematic killing of a racial or cultural group [syn: race murder, racial extermination]

--from WordNet / Princeton University

(Which makes sense, if you note that the word derives from the roots "genos" (race) and "cide" (kill).)

Here are the words of Tecumseh (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?isbn=0142001287&displayonly=excerpt):

Burn their dwellings-destroy their stock-slay their wives and children, that the very breed may perish.

Sure sounds genocidal to me.

-Why did Andrew Jackson offer the Cherokee the option of remaining in the East and becoming citizens?

few ever got this. and, of course, it was because they'd done something in turn for him. more than he ever did for them.

Perhaps few took advantage of the offer, but the offer was there, spelled out in the Treaty of New Echota (http://www.guthriestudios.com/Treaty%20of%20New%20Echota.htm). The very fact that this option was available tends to disprove the idea that Jackson was genocidal. Why make Citizenship an option if you mean to wipe out the Cherokee?

[Spoke]

Women and children were most definitely not targeted by Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

This site (http://www.larkcom.com/ancestry/-home/history/war/war_of_1812/battle_of_horseshoe_bend.htm) confirms that Jackson's troops allowed the women and children to cross the river to safety before the battle began, and that between 300 and 500 women and children were taken prisoner (estimates varied). Some small number of women and children did die in the course of the battle (possibly in the shelling that preceded the assault), but it appears that the great bulk of them were spared.

If you have sources that say otherwise, please produce them.

[RiverRunner]

Originally posted by alewbail
RR, sorry for the confusion. I was trying to expand on, not disagree with, your reply to PumaClaw. Ineptly, it seems.
Al

No sweat. I was the one confused. I'm still learning that I have to do things differently on a message board than in a regular conversation.


RR

[PumaClaw]

Ah well, Spoke makes it up as he goes along.

[kimera]

Originally posted by alewbail
I may be an agnostic, but I know enough to have a searchable Bible on my computer.]

I am sorry to post this here, but I could not find a "private message" option.

Where did you get your searchable bible? I would love to have one for myself.

[jac]

-Women and children were most definitely not targeted by Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

This site confirms that Jackson's troops allowed the women and children to cross the river to safety before the battle began, and that between 300 and 500 women and children were taken prisoner (estimates varied). Some small number of women and children did die in the course of the battle (possibly in the shelling that preceded the assault), but it appears that the great bulk of them were spared.

If you have sources that say otherwise, please produce them.


i *did* produce one. it's a book. "the knights of the horseshoe," by william alexander caruthers. most likely you won't be able to find this accoutn since it was written about 1835 i believe, but it is nonetheless one used often in scholarly research you will find cited. it does not tell of the mutilations which occurred however.

i do not feel like going through google and picking out conflicting sites to fight with you about because i know you have seen them anyway as you've gone along in your search engine erudition and chose to ignore those over ones more favorable to your purposes. and you seem to move from one source to another after a part of one you held up was discredited. admit when your sources are a little less than reliable. you have not thus far.

that site you just showed looks like more of an andrew jackson groupie site. it does not "prove" anything and i found so much wrong in the first paragraph alone i could tell where it was going from there. they were wrong about the number of men jackson had, i think it conflicted even with a prior source you gave about the number of people killed at fort mims.... it's about disgusting given that it's supposed to pass as history. they actually (and this is why it appears to be no more than an andy jackson groupie site) make the reader believe he had little to work with on his 'adventures,' and 'led his troops by will.' heh... no mention of the $300,000 (a huge sum at the time) raised by the tennessee legislature for "exterminating the hostiles." kinda strange.

please stop picking whatever you find from the internet and injecting it into serious discussion. i can not take that very seriously after awhile.

[jac]

i don't think this sent, so i'll have to try again... anyway, it should also be noted again that jackson's troops stormed through the upper creek towns, destroying much of everything in their path, even people. davy crocket himself mentioned one particular instance where a 'squaw' was riddled with 20 musket balls; not atypical behavior of jackson's men in the upper creek towns. they also destroyed food sources, which affected not just the warriors but women and children as well in the hopes they all would perish, and generally layed waste to everything they could. sorry to squash your dreams spoke, but that's genocidal behavior. they were not the gentleman you want to believe they acted as. that's a sorry joke.

-Now you want to quibble over the definition of genocide? I am using the common English definition of the word.

yes, i want to "quibble." it appears i have to, since you didn't do anything with the sources i gave you. i'm not playing semantics here, you are, by continuing to refuse true understanding of the word you've chosen to misuse.

here is the word's true definition, as given by its neologist (get yer dictionary out again) rafael (raphael) lemkin, as stated in his book "axis rule of occupied europe": "Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destrcution of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves [even if all individuals within the dissolved group physically survive]. The objectives of such a plan would be a disintegration of political and social instutitions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belong to such groups. Genocide is directed at the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed at individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group."

let that sink in, read it over a few more times, and then understand why i stressed the importance of comprehending the word's true meaning )not its abridged version in the dictionary) and applicability.

following lemkin's league, the so-called u.n. genocide convention drafted its own definition, which is more succinct and doesn't leave all that much out from the original (re: lemkin's) version in its scope:

Article II. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on members of the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transfering children of the group to another group.


so those are the proper, accepted definitions of genocide you should have at least aware of considering you spoke so authoritatively on the matter. learn at some point that things like dictionary.com will not impress too much in an argument, let alone get you very far at times.

granted the first (lemkin's) doesn't bode well for a european apologist such as yourself, but even if you were to only look at the last one, native peoples in the u.s. have been victims of each, a through e, and certainly each that lemkin laid out... so you're still wondering where the genocide's at? i can't believe we're having a discussion about that, especially when you think it's europeans who've been victims of genocide here. that is woefully out of it.

as i explained to you before on that, for the instances you brought up, those settlers were just that; settlers. givent hat they were illegally occupying land, they were therefor not innocent, and the indians had every right and reason to defend themselves and their territroy. even if they had wiped every settler out at jamestown, and at plymotuh, and at roanoke, that does not constitute an act of genocide because even the u.n. recognizes the right of peoples and nations to defend themselves, and illegally settling on others' land is an act of war that the victims have every right to defend against, in any way they see fit to do (not that any way is ethical or moral or anything, as 'any way' certainly isn't to me. only, for the sake of discussion here, 'any way' in such instances does not count for being genocidal. it is still, agree or not, a legitimate act of war against aggressors).




-(Which makes sense, if you note that the word derives from the roots "genos" (race) and "cide" (kill).)


actually 'genos' is greek for 'type.' it can be understood to mean 'race,' or 'tribe' or something like that in a human context though, but it means 'type.'

-Here are the words of Tecumseh:

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Burn their dwellings-destroy their stock-slay their wives and children, that the very breed may perish.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i saw nothing of ripping 'unborn children' out of anyone's wombs. that's a complete prevarication. this one however may not be, but it nonetheless was completely out of tecumseh's character to have said. i wouldn't expect you to understand though, and i can't exactly explain if you haven't done any research on tecumseh, in which i wouldn't have to... you should pick up a book on tecumseh sometime. "tecumseh: a life" by john sugden is the best. you won't be sorry you bought it.

-Sure sounds genocidal to me.

it would. but again, you didn't exactly have a great handle on what genocide entails either.


-Perhaps few took advantage of the offer, but the offer was there, spelled out in the Treaty of New Echota. The very fact that this option was available tends to disprove the idea that Jackson was genocidal. Why make Citizenship an option if you mean to wipe out the Cherokee?

you mean the treaty he later ignored? c'mon now, let's think a little... and why would the cherokee want to become u.s. citizens at that point anyway? you forget they were their own sovereign nation, with their own territory at that point they believed they'd get to keep. why would you expect them to cede all that to another nation?

[alewbail]

ava;

Here's a direct link to the King James Bible utility I use:
http://download.com.com/3000-2135-10119390.html?tag=lst-0-1
If that doesn't work, just go to http://www.download.com, and search for "Bible". It should be the first item. It's freeware, and works pretty well for me.

Al

[alewbail]

ava;

Sorry, the link at download.com is broken. Instead, go to the horse's mouth:
http://www.bibkjv.com/
It's a huge page. Scroll down a few pages, and look for the screen capture of the program; the download is just below that.

Al

[Spoke]

Women and children were most definitely not targeted by Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.***

If you have sources that say otherwise, please produce them.

i *did* produce one. it's a book. "the knights of the horseshoe," by william alexander caruthers. most likely you won't be able to find this accoutn since it was written about 1835 i believe, but it is nonetheless one used often in scholarly research you will find cited. it does not tell of the mutilations which occurred however.

Uh, you mean the 1845 novel by William Scott Caruthers, the one you can find listed here (http://www.d.umn.edu/~sadams/Engl5572/5572bibl.htm) under the heading "Selected Novels, 1820-1865"?

Do you mean to say that this 1845 novel is the book "used in scholarly research" on the Battle of Horseshoe Bend? Do tell. Please favor us with a passage from this novel which supports your position. (I won't hold my breath while I wait.)

Thank you for exposing yourself jac.

jac also wrote:i do not feel like going through google and picking out conflicting sites to fight with you about because i know you have seen them anyway as you've gone along in your search engine erudition and chose to ignore those over ones more favorable to your purposes.

Translation (for those not fluent in doubletalk): "I have no sources to support my position."

jac, just admit your error. Admit that every available source says Jackson gave safe passage to over 300 women and children at Horseshoe Bend.

[Spoke]

-Perhaps few [Cherokee] took advantage of the offer [of US citizenship], but the offer was there, spelled out in the Treaty of New Echota. The very fact that this option was available tends to disprove the idea that Jackson was genocidal. Why make Citizenship an option if you mean to wipe out the Cherokee?

you mean the treaty he later ignored? c'mon now, let's think a little... and why would the cherokee want to become u.s. citizens at that point anyway? you forget they were their own sovereign nation, with their own territory at that point they believed they'd get to keep. why would you expect them to cede all that to another nation?[quote]

Did I say that the offer was a good deal? Did I say that it represented a fair return for the Cherokee land? It did not. But that's not the issue we're debating. We are debating whether Andrew Jackson was genocidal, not whether he ripped off the Cherokee. (He did rip them off, of course.)

The fact that he gave the Cherokee the option of citizenship shows that he was not intent on wiping them out. He wanted their land, not their lives.

(As for Jackson ignoring the Treaty of New Echota, do tell. How and when exactly did he ignore the provisions of that treaty? I linked the treaty earlier. Tell me which provision he breached.)

[Spoke]

Ah. Here we go.

The Knights of the Horseshoe (http://afplweb.af.public.lib.ga.us:80/cgi-bin/cw_cgi?fullRecord+23109+701+103616+1+-1): A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion (Author: William Alexander Caruthers)

Hell, the novel isn't even about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It's about colonial Virginia. More specifically, it's about the exploits of Alexander Spotswood (1676-1740).

Busted, jac.

[jac]

-Ah. Here we go.

The Knights of the Horseshoe: A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion (Author: William Alexander Caruthers)

Hell, the novel isn't even about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It's about colonial Virginia. More specifically, it's about the exploits of Alexander Spotswood (1676-1740).

Busted, jac.


lol, with as many lies as you've been caught telling, who do you imagine you are to be 'busting' anyone else? hehe....

i've never read the book, but seen the work cited, most prominently perhaps in ward churchill's 'a little matter of genocide' (pg 277, cit. 457).' it would be wise on both our parts to pick up the book and the particular passages relating to horseshoe bend, but you cannot discredit it at the same time, even if it doesn't revolve around horseshoe bend necessarily. it can still contain parts relating to that, and apparently it does. works like his are considered 'historical fiction,' in the vein of a james alexander thom. while they are 'fictional,' they are fictionalized accounts of real history. many parts of them can be cited in scholarly works, but most shy away from that sort of thing, given the number of legitimate, non-fictionalized sources there are likely to be.

however, the significance here in his work (which is cited as 1835, not 1845, and is simply 'knights of the horseshoe, not '... golden horseshoe') is, fictionalized or no, having gotten some of the earliest literary accounts by which to use. historical fiction writers may wrap their text up in fictionalized accounts, but it's all thoroughly researched. if you've ever read historical fiction, well, you'd get it.

i may have goofed though in calling 'knights of the horseshoe' a book. it may well have been an article of caruthers as, looking through sources on the internet on him, i can see he wrote for magazines then as well. either way, if it was indeed wrong (that's an 'if'), it wasn't on my account. check out stannard's work, 'american holocaust.'

[Arnold Winkelried]

The discussion is becoming too narrowly focussed on a single issue, in my opinion, to be continued in this forum.

Those who want to continue the discussion of the treatment of Native Americans by European colonists can start a thread in GD. I will leave this thread open another day to allow someone to post a link to a GD thread in here, and then I will close this thread.

Do not continue the discussion in this thread.

[jac]

-Thank you for exposing yourself jac.

i didn't know you were into that sort of thing. you're welcome though, ya know

-Translation (for those not fluent in doubletalk): "I have no sources to support my position."

jac, just admit your error. Admit that every available source says Jackson gave safe passage to over 300 women and children at Horseshoe Bend.


that'd be lying. that's your field, not mine.

so i ended up going through google anyway in the end. i shouldn't have had to though, but here you are:

-http://www.adena.com/adena/usa/im/im017.htm

this one'll do. it doesn't go much into the killing of noncombatants, but it does enough, i think. it tells of an instance where i child wandered outside and was killed, because he would've grown up to become a warrior. this was not a new sentiment nor one that would go away. 'nits make lice' is the justification they used for killing indian children often... it tells also of an old man at the battle, probably senile, seemingly unaware of the carnage around him, whom a soldier shot so he could brag back home how he'd killed an indian... it mentions that women and children were the only ones to be taken captive, but that's not to imply all of them were. it mentions the supposed 'accidental' killing of women and children, and also how the warriors shot and killed hundreds as they tried to swim across the river, as i'd said earlier. women, and likely some children and elderly were included in those trying to escape by river (many of their canoes had been taken, so they had to swim mainly).


-Did I say that the offer was a good deal? Did I say that it represented a fair return for the Cherokee land? It did not. But that's not the issue we're debating. We are debating whether Andrew Jackson was genocidal, not whether he ripped off the Cherokee. (He did rip them off, of course.)

given what andrew jackson engaged in, both militarily (trying to wipe the upper creeks out, as well as the seminole for that matter) and politically, yes, there is no question he was genocidal. you are still not grasping the terminology here and that's getting seriously old spoke.

-The fact that he gave the Cherokee the option of citizenship shows that he was not intent on wiping them out. He wanted their land, not their lives.

taking their lands was just a means to an end. that end was to wipe out the cherokee nation as it stood. in taking their lands, even wanting to assimilate them somewhat into american society, he was attempting to exterminate their national identity, in one way or another. please refer back to lemkin's definition, the u.n. definitions i listed and see what that activity qualifies as.

-(As for Jackson ignoring the Treaty of New Echota, do tell. How and when exactly did he ignore the provisions of that treaty? I linked the treaty earlier. Tell me which provision he breached.)

excuse me. that the u.s. later ignored. that treaty was illegal anyhow.


and it's hard to tell whether or not a dent has been made regarding certain points because you never respond to certain ones. do you concede that native americans were victims of genocide as defined by lemkin and/or the u.n. (hell, even dictionary.com, but for some reason you weren't seeing that)? that's all i want to know.

[Arnold Winkelried]

jac - did you not read my post immediately above yours? I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt, once.

This applies to everyone:
Do not continue the discussion in this thread.

[jac]

arnold, i posted that last one before i saw your comment on the matter.

i was also curious why this discussion, narrow as it may be, seems out of place to you. i was wondering i guess then what this particular forum was for.

[Arnold Winkelried]

This is for discussing the accuracy / inaccuracy / miscellaneous topics concering a Straight Dope Column. However, the discussion has now focussed exclusively on how the Native Americans were treated, which was not the subject of the column.

[jac]

what was the column about? i snuck in about mid-way and had no idea the board worked that way. i'm new

[Spoke]

The original column. (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021018.html)

Since you're new here, jac, let me give you a link to the Great Debates (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?daysprune=&forumid=7) forum. I gather Arnold is suggesting that our debate would be a better fit in that forum.

If you want to start a thread there, we can go at it some more. Your call, but I think we've (more than) exhausted the topic anyway. :cool:

[PumaClaw]

Of course, the real objection is that as long as white people toss this issue around, it's okay but don't let some NDN burst their bubble and question their pearls of wisdom, aaye? <g>

[Spoke]

PumaClaw, start a thread in Great Debates if you want to debate these issues further. No one is trying to muzzle you. We're just being directed to another forum on this message board. Try it; I guarantee you'll find vigorous debate there on any topic you wish to discuss.

[jac]

i think that'll be about it for now.

[Nigig]

Originally posted by MEBuckner
While not denying the lengthy and depressing record of atrocities, imperialism, and double-dealing by Europeans in the Americas, the great bulk of the population decline of the native populations was the result of Old World diseases (to which the New World's populations had no natural resistance) that were accidentally introduced to the New World at a time when no one even understood the mechanism of infectious diseases.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While some introduction of disease was accidental, there were instances of "intentional" germ warfare. Washingtons troops had been infected with smallpox and those infected blankets were shipped to reservation Indians during the winter.

You cannot convince me that that was accidental. They HAD to know that the Indians would be infected. Anyone that had seen the spread KNEW that clothing etc. MUST be burned and NOT reused.



Nigig

[Arnold Winkelried]

Once again I will invite people to continue the discussion in the Great Debates forum.