Here’s an interesting article from Atlantic Monthly 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.
Um, Adam? I think Cecil might have been referring to this quote
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
“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.
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.
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.
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.
If the slave trade killed large numbers of people (and, despite your a-priori appeal, it did), then it counts as genocide.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
The adaptation of Western civilization by the Cherokee–writing, cities, agriculture, constitutional government–for some of them also included the ownership of black slaves.
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.
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.
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:
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.
For those interested in facts, the slaughter in Timor came to an end after US and European pressure was applied to an elected government.
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.
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.
Addendum: It was Kissinger and Ford who gave Suharto the green light, not Kissinger and Nixon.
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.