Why no Chechnya in US?

Great Debates
1

Most Americans might believe that Chechnya in America is impossible. But Americans were saved from having similar nationalistic problem but by a chance.

Theoretically, American Indians could be just as big problem for US, as Chechens are for Russia.

There are numerous historic similarities between Indians in America and Chechens in Russia. American-Indian wars and Russo-Caucasian wars were happening at the same time. Both parties, in America and in Caucasus respectively, fought each other tooth and nail, with numerous wholesale massacres (including women and children) perpetrated by both sides. In fact, American Indians might have suffered more then Chechens in XIX century.

If the spirit of American Indians were not completely broken in XIX century, the sequence of events parallel to emergence of Chechen nationalism in Russia would be quite easy to imagine. Possible scenario, Apachenia:

[ul]Apache tribe declares independence and claims significant chunk of Arizona as its own independent country.[/ul]

[ul]US bring in the military to subdue Apachean independence movement.[/ul]

[ul]Apaches fight bravely; US public doesn’t support the war, ashamed of multiple wrongs done to Indians in XIX century.[/ul]

[ul]US withdraw, leaving Apaches de-facto independent.[/ul]

[ul]Apaches fail to establish civil society. Their war heroes fight each other and terrorize civil population, organize and run criminal networks. Some sort of religious fundamentalism takes hold.[/ul]

[ul]Unruly bands of Apache militants, inflamed by religious doctrines, invade Colorado to “liberate” their Navajo “brethren”.[/ul]

[ul]US respond with overwhelming force.[/ul]

[ul]For years, US try to bring Apaches back into the fold. Apache extremists perpetrate stinging acts of outrageous slaughter…[/ul]

Why there is no problem with Indian nationalism in US?

Is it because US were brutally effective in breaking Indians in spirit and in numbers?

Is it because US were successful with accommodating the surviving Indians with some land and limited independence concessions?

Is it because of absence of potent religious force among Indians?

Or is it something else?

2

Back when Russia first conquered Chechnya , they left most Chechens alive, allowed Chechen culture and languageto survive, and didn’t displace the Chechens from Chechnya (although Stalin did move the Chechens for a time). When you do that, you keep alive nationhood.

When we conquered the Indian nations of North America, we killed off most of the Indians, did out best to destroy their cultures and languages, and moved the survivors far away to marginal land. In doing that, we did a lot to destroy their nationhoods. If the Russians had wiped out Chechen culture back in the 1860s, Russia probably wouldn’t have any problems with Chechnya today.

3

We did have an American Indian “Chechnya” (or quite a few of them) in the late 1800s. They didn’t get beaten without a good fight.

Perhaps if all the American Indians lived in one state, on the fringes of the US border, it might be revived today.

4

Maybe the Russians should let the Chechnyans build giant casinos?

5

I think you guys may be overlooking the obvious differences. There was a continental shift of people involved in bringing the American’s into contact with the Amerindians. This included diseases and technological exchanges which occured on a much shorter time frame than did in Chechnya. I’m not so sure it was any particular American policy that decimated the Amerindians as it was the simple clash of different peoples and cultures.

The simple fact that the Chechens and Russians were on the same continent for much longer means that the extra governmental sources of stress had much longer to play out.

Also, I think your comparison leaves out a more sophistocated comparison of the Chechen and Apache level of development. How many Chechens were there in 1800s? How many Apaches?

6

You’re going to hell for that one, and I’ll be right there with you for laughing so hard! :slight_smile:

7

Most Native Americans of the United States, aside from Pueblos Indians, were tribal peoples, and none had a state organization or literacy. Their numbers were small and scattered even before European contact. The Chechens are a long settled agricultural people. The Chechens also did not face the issue of lack of immunity to disease. It is debatable whether most Native Americans were killed by warfare or died as a result if disease, or even if “most” did die, as we have no records. Some tribes were wiped out, but others are quite successful from a demographic standpoint.
Now in Latin America, some of the Indians did resist, and continue to resist in a significant fashion. They have greater numbers and more community organization.

Even a group such as the “Apache” are subdivided into several highly scattered and mutually competative bands, the Jicarilla in Northern New Mexico, the Mescalero in Southeast New Mexico, and the Chiricahua in Eastern Arizona. In between them are the related Navajo and unrelated Pueblo peoples (who are not a single ‘tribe’ but a bunch of individual communities with a common settled way of life). How do these people, spread out over an area the size or Western Europe and holding less than half a million Native Americans coordinate if the only thing holding them together is this “Indian” label that the white man placed on them? By Contrast there are over a million Chechens (at least up through 1994) in a small oval of land in rough hilly territory.

8

I’m afraid that the only fact you got correct, here, is the point regarding literacy. The Iroquois Confederacy, the Natchez, the Navajo, and several other groups very much had state organizations (although different than European ones) and, prior to smallpox, measles, cholera, and several other nasty imports, many groups were large and collected. We are talking about multiples of millions of people living in close proximity under organized governments. When de Soto marched through what is now Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas, he moved through land that was nearly as heavily farmed as much of it is today. When the next Spanish adventurer wandered through a few years later, he then found small villages of often starving survivors since the diseases had wiped out most of the society that de Soto had plundered.

9

How many I don’t know. But regarding the “level of development” I think it was pretty close. Both Chechens and American Indians were tribal people, without an alphabet, with immemorial traditions of war pillage, caught in the way of expanding European civilization.

Were American Indians really physically deficient? I don’t think they all succumbed at the sight of Europeans. Indian warriors were much feared by frontier settlers through XVIII and XIX centuries.

10

Not at all. It was simply a matter that Europeans brought diseases that Indians had no built up immunity against. Smallpox was probably the worst. It worked both ways - a new strain of syphillis was a scourge in Europe until it was adapted to. Syphillis was just not as efficiently fatal as smallpox.

11

About 7,000 Apache around 1790, I believe. It is pretty likely that the entire population of “Plains Indians” at the turn of the 19th century ( estimated at ~200,000 ), not all of whom actively resisted the U.S., was smaller than the population of Chechnya at that time. A discrepancy that would only grow as Amerindians continued to die like flies from disease.

The Comanche probably dropped from ~20-30,000 in 1790, to fewer than 8,000 by 1870, to ~1,600 in 1875 when they had finally all surrendered and were censused at a reservation. Starvation and battle losses accounted for some of these, but major smallpox and cholera epidemics were the biggest killers. The 1848-1851 smallpox epidemic alone is thought to have cut their numbers nearly in half.

Actually the Chechens had apparently started adopting Arabic literature about a century or so earlier ( 17th-18th century as Islam began making serious inroads into the area ). In addition they were a bit more technologically advanced than most NA Amerindians, at least in terms of iron metallurgy, stone fortifications and the like ( probably made their own powder as well, though I don’t immediately have a cite for that ).

  • Tamerlane
12

…and alcoholism probably second.

13

Chechens have great ironworking and stoneworking skills, just like most other people from Caucasusian mountains. I don’t know about Arabian cultural influences, but there most certainly was Persian cultural influence via Dagestan, which is closer to Persia. Chechen first national resistance hero - Imam Shamil - was from Dagestan and a disciple of Dagestani Muslim clerics. Chechens speak their own language, but use Russian alphabet, unlike their neighbors Armenians and Georgians, which probably indicates that Chechens didn’t have a developed alphabet before Russian arrival.

Comparing to Chechens, stoneworking of American Indians looks extremely primitive indeed, and ironworking was probably non-existent in America before arrival of Europeans.

14

Actually, as Tamerlane alluded to, the Chechens used the Arabic alphabet before the switchover to Cyrillic in the 1920s. More info on the development of written Chechen and the use of other literary and contact languages in Chechnya:

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~chechen/Ch_writing.htm

http://ingush.narod.ru/chech/awde/preface.htm

http://home.swipnet.se/~w-10652/Chechen.html

15

But what about the indiscriminate massacres? What about forced resettlements?

If Russians wanted to take a lesson from Americans on how to prevent resurgence of militant separatism, what would it be? Hit them hard the first time, so there is no second time? Were Russian Tsars not ruthless enough at the outset?

16

Eva Luna,

Thanks for the cites, lots of good information.

Considering the written literacy issue, I think your cites mostly agree with what I said, with some important clarifications of course:

17

I know that nowadays they teach kids that Americans are the most evil people on Earth, but please.

You are really underestimating the effects that disease had on native americans. Not only did waves of disease drastically reduce populations, it also destroyed political organization. And the effects of disease on a naive population are even deadlier due to secondary effects. Lets say a smallpox epidemic was only 50% lethal on a naive population. But if everyone gets it, who is going to care for the sick people? In a population where smallpox is endemic people get sick in waves, but there are usually plenty of previously exposed people who can care for the sick. If everyone is sick mortality is much much worse, since the sick can’t even get food or water. And if everyone is sick for a few months it could mean death for everyone even if most people could recover, since they won’t have been able to store food for the winter.

In pre-Columbian times most native americans were farmers, not hunter-gatherers. Remember how the indians taught the pilgrims to grow corn? And remember how the pilgrims found a good place to start their colony? It was a great place because it was the site of an indian village that had been wiped out by disease a few years before and was abandoned.

Now, why weren’t the Chechens and other minority groups in northern Asia hit by disease? Well, they were. But no more than the other European and Asian groups they were in conflict with, since they had been exposed to the Eurasian disease pool since neolithic times. An epidemic in America might weaken European settlers but wipe out whole native American tribes. In the Caucasus or Siberia the invaders and the natives got sick at about the same rates.

If Europeans were especially ruthless in wiping out native Americans, why weren’t they equally ruthless in China, India, Africa, or the Middle East? Why didn’t the British just kill everyone in India like they supposedly did in America? Why were small groups of Europeans able to conquer vast nations in the Americas but not in other parts of the world? Why did the British conquer India, but not replace the population there? What was different?

The other mistake you make is the idea of an “Indian” identity. If all the indians had put aside their differences and fought against the Europeans they might have made colonizing the Americas impossible. But why would they do that? Until the Europeans arrived there was no such concept as “Indian”. Why would a Cherokee care if the people who moved into the land next door came from England or from the Americas? They were foreign people who spoke a differnt language and weren’t very friendly either way. Even today most Indians wouldn’t primarily identify as “Indian” but rather their tribal or ethnic group, just like most Europeans consider themselves Danish, German, or Spanish first.

As for ruthlessness, Stalin deported every last Chechen man woman and child to Siberia, they were only allowed to return decades after he died. I don’t think the Russians suffered from any ruthlessness deficit, from the Tsars to the Commisars and up to Putin. If you’ve paid any attention to the Chechen conflict, you’ll see that Russian policies there today skirt very close to genocide.

Native americans today are not facing genocide. Native american populations are rising, many groups are starting to seize back political and economic independence. It is pretty easy to convince people to fight if they are facing death. It is much harder if they are facing a potentially better future.

18

I’m not getting at how bad Americans are, but at whether are they all that good and innocent.

Sure, there was little difference between treatment of minorities in American West and Russian East. The following picture must look familiar to every American:

The white man’s conquest of the Russian North, Siberia and the Far East does not stand far behind the attrocities known from other parts of the world.

True, epidemics played a big role in European conquests of Eurasian East and American West. But I’m not convinced that their role was the most important one. I suspect that may be physical clashes between people, with all the subsequent horrors, were more important.

So Russian and American policies in relation to indigenous population had many things in common. Here we come upon the issue of race. The fate of American Indians and Siberian tribes was identical: both were destroyed. But is it a coincidence that they were closely related?

As you noted yourself, Chechens come from another part of the world and are better prepared by history to resist European culture in forms of ideas, technology or diseases.

So your statement that “In the Caucasus or Siberia the invaders and the natives got sick at about the same rates” is incorrect.

True enough, but my question was, Why is there no resurgence of militant separatism in US on the part of indigenous people? Why is US so blessed? It is a huge blessing, because otherwise we’d be living in a very different country, because Americans take any challenge to Federal authority very seriously, as demonstrated by events of Civil war on a large scale, but also by the treatment of Davidians in Waco, TX. I’ m afraid that if US was facing similar problems as Russia does, many horrible acts would take place.

Could there be a hidden threat in that rosy picture? Remember, Chechens were no threat to Russians as long as they were oppressed. The threat started gathering when they were allowed back into Chechnya and prosper in limited autonomy. Grozny was vibrant and happy city through 1970-s and 80-s.

19

Yes, but what convinced the Chechens that they had a realistic chance to achieve real autonomy or even formal independence wasn’t their improving economy or their return to Chechnya, but the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. With dozens of eastern european countries escaping Soviet dominiaiton, with dozens of Soviet republics escaping Russian domination, it didn’t seem unreasonable for Chechnya to follow. What made Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan candidates for independence but not Chechnya?

I’ll concede that if the United States implodes and various regions and ethnic minorities are declaring independence willy-nilly, many native american groups would assert their autonomy, and some might go so far as to declare formal independence. But that would take a political upheaval that we haven’t seen since the Civil War. When the US starts to break apart, then look for Navajo and Cheyenne to declare independence. Not before.

20

Lemur866,

I agree with your last post absolutely. And once we are on a subject of Soviet Union, I’d like to kick that putrid corpse one more time: Russia and the whole World would be a whole lot better without Soviet Communist experiment.