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:
That quote makes the Sandinistas sound like minor league versions of Jackson, which is distinctly debatable. Hence, my statement that
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.
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.
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.
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:
Moynihan 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 - 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.”
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.
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?
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…”)
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.
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.
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.
(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. One of the complaints against King George in that document:
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.
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. 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.
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.