[toeslist] 'Cowboys and Indians' -- Part II
 
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 02:06:26 -0500 (CDT)

 
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This is the continuation of the second of two articles, the first
a recent writing about Hurricane Katrina's aftermath and the squalor
and injustice that she exposed, and the second a fascinating analysis
of western white supremacy.

<...>

[Begin Part II of Two Parts]

Ireland and the English Inquisition

During the early 1600s, the English conquered Northern Ireland, and
declared a half-million acres of land open to settlement; the
settlers who contracted with the devil of early colonialism came
mostly from western Scotland.  England had previously conquered
Wales and southern and eastern Ireland, but had never previously
attempted on such a scale to remove the indigenous population and
plant settlers.  The English policy of exterminating Indians in
North America was foreshadowed by this English colonization of
Northern Ireland.  The ancient Irish social system was systematically
attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans
exterminated and the remainder brutalized.  A wild Irish reservation
was even attempted.{8}  The planted settlers were Calvinist
Protestants, assured by their divines that they had been chosen by
God for salvation (and title to the lands of Ulster).  The native
(and Papist) Irish were definitely not destined for salvation, but
rather t!

he rev erse, both in the present and hereafter.

The plantation of Ulster followed centuries of intermittent warfare
in Ireland, and was as much the culmination of a process as a
departure.  In the sixteenth century, the official in charge of the
Irish province of Munster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, ordered that:

"The heads of all those (of what sort soever they were) which were
killed in the day, should be cut off from their bodies and brought
to the place where he encamped at night, and should there be laid
on the ground by each side of the way leading into his own tent,
so that none could come into his tent for any cause but commonly
he must pass through a lane of heads which he used 'ad terrorem'
.. [It brought] great terror to the people when they saw the heads
of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinfolk, and friends
.." {9}

Bounties were paid for the Irish heads brought in, and later only
the scalp or ears were required.  A century later, in North America,
Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same
manner.  Native Americans picked up the practice from the colonizers.
The first English colonial settlement in North America had been
planted in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583, by Sir Humphrey
Gilbert.

During the mid-nineteenth century, influenced by Social Darwinism,
some English scientists peddled the theory that the Irish (and of
course all people of color) had descended from apes, while the
English were descendants of man who had been created by God in His
image.  Thus the English were angels and the Irish (and other
colonized peoples) were a lower species, what today U.S. white
supremacists call mud people -- products of the process of evolution.
{10}  It is the seventeenth century Ulster Calvinist ideology in
late nineteenth century modern guise.

White Supremacy, the U.S. Origin Myth, and U.S. Imperialism

Two paragraphs, rarely cited, from the Declaration of Independence
raise thorny questions about Anglo-American imperialist roots in
forming the breakaway United States of America.  This was not simply
the founding of a republic for propertied, mostly slave-owning,
white males, but more importantly a settler-colonialist and
imperialist-aggressor state.

"He [King George] has endeavored to prevent the population of these
States; for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization
of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration
hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands."
[The treaty ending the French and Indian War made British settlement
over the Allegheny/Appalachian line into Indian country illegal and
ordered the return of those tens of thousand settlers who had already
squatted there, demanding land rights.]

"He [King George] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us,
and has endeavored 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."

Not only did founding father Thomas Jefferson pen those words, he
was also the real architect of the genocide and confiscation of the
land of settled indigenous peoples -- later termed the Jacksonian
policy of Indian removal.

Reconciling empire and liberty was a historic obsession of U.S.
political thinkers and historians, in the twenty-first century
openly being debated once again.  Thomas Jefferson had hailed the
United States as an empire for liberty.  Andrew Jackson coined the
phrase, extending the area of freedom to describe the process in
which slavery had been introduced into Texas in violation of governing
Mexican laws, to be quickly followed by a slaveholders rebellion
and U.S. annexation.  The term freedom became a euphemism for the
continental and worldwide expansion of the worlds leading slave
power.  The contradictions, particularly since the initial
rationalization for U.S. independence was anti-empire, are multiple.

It is easy to date U.S. imperialism to Andrew Jackson, but he only
carried out the original plan, initially as an army general who led
three genocidal wars against the Muskogee in Georgia/Florida, then
as the most popular president ever, and the organizer of the expulsion
of all native peoples east of the Mississippi to the Oklahoma
Territory.

Although white supremacy was the working rationalization and ideology
of English theft of Native American lands, and especially the
justification for African slavery, the independence bid by what
became the United States of America is more problematic, in that
democracy/equality and supremacy/dominance/empire do not make an
easy fit.  It was during the 1820s, the era of Jacksonian Democracy,
that the unique U.S. origin myth was created, James Fenimore Cooper
the initial scribe.  James Fenimore Coopers re-invention of America
in The Last of the Mohicans has become the official U.S. origin
story.  Herman Melville called Cooper our national novelist, and,
of course, he was the great hero of Walt Whitman, who sang the song
of manhood and the American super-race through empire.  As an
enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war against Mexico, 18461848,
Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand U.S. troops in
Mexico in order to establish a regime change there, stating, wh!

ose ef ficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United
States.  This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers
and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country
will find its way.{11}

Whitmans sentiment (and he was the most beloved writer of his time,
and still beloved by contemporary U.S. poets, particularly the
Beats) followed the already established U.S. origin myth that had
the frontier settlers replacing the native peoples, similar to the
parallel Afrikaner origin myth in South Africa.

To the extent that African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos,
Puerto Ricans, and non-European immigrants are allowed (and are
willing) to embrace and embody U.S. patriotism, they may be accepted
as conversos, as the Spanish Inquisition termed those who professed
Christianity despite their unclean blood.  Yet in the end, only the
Old Settlers are true Americans.

This white supremacist ideology formed the core of U.S. foreign
policy as well, from its origins to the present.  As Samir Amin
pointed out: During this entire phase [the Cold War] the East-West
conflict was presented as a struggle between socialism and capitalism,
although it was never anything other than the conflict between the
periphery and the center, manifested in its most radical form.{12}

Why Do We Date U.S. Imperialism Only to 1898, and as an Aberration?

American supremacy and populist imperialism are inseparable from
the content of the U.S. origin story and the definition of patriotism
in the United States today.  And it began at the beginning, even
before the founding of the United States, not as an accident or
aberration in the progression of democracy.  The founding of the
United States marked a split in the British Empire, not an anti-colonial
liberation movement.

The very term, frontier, used to define the border between independent
Native American nations and the United States, implies a foreign
country on the other side of a demarcation line -- a country to be
invaded, its inhabitants controlled and then expelled, while settlers
move in protected by the army.  Everything accounted for in the
first hundred years plus as movement of the frontier was plain and
simple imperialism, fitting all the definitions thereof.

During this new phase of U.S. imperialism following 9/11, accelerating
with the invasion, occupation, and administration of Iraq, commentators
and historians -- left and right -- but mostly liberal Democrats,
observe that the United States is not very good at imperialism,
with vague references to the Spanish-American War.  Actually, the
United States has not become the most powerful military machine and
dominant power on earth and in history by accident or by staying
home and minding the cows and banks -- like the Swiss, who are
capitalist and rich, but not imperialists.

Well, so what? many of my antiwar and social-justice friends ask
me, asserting that the truth would alienate ordinary people, whoever
they are.  Who would know since it has never been tried?  Besides,
I have my doubts that most of my leftist friends are themselves
prepared to accept that the very origin of the United States is
fundamentally imperialist, rather than imperialism being a divergence
from a well-intentioned path.  The public acceptance of media
propaganda justifying U.S. government aggression falls into the
pattern of a belief system based on the origin story that is
uninterrupted and uninterrogated by us, the left.

Of course, there are many leftist and social democratic thinkers
and scholars who challenge the 1898 age of imperialism myth.  Most
notably, Monthly Review has never strayed from understanding the
long history of U.S. imperialism, particularly in Latin America..
Also, William Appleman Williams and a whole generation of radical
U.S. historians acknowledge empire as a way of life, the title of
Williams 1980 book of essays (New York: Oxford University Press)
that includes an exhaustive list of overseas interventions dating
back to day one, giving substance to the U.S. Marine theme, the
shores of Tripoli.  And with the Iraq intervention, many antiwar
critics have compiled such lists.

The expansion of the United States from sea to shining sea is coming
under reexamination, even from bourgeois historians, with the sudden
unabashed assertion of U.S. imperialism.  Warren Zimmermann, in his
recent book on the frankly imperial aims of the Teddy Roosevelt
administration, First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar Straus and
Geroux, 2002), introduces his material with words rarely found in
mainstream literature:

"Americans like to pretend that they have no imperial past.  Yet
they have shown expansionist tendencies since colonial days ...
Overland expansion, often at the expense of Mexicans and Indians,
was a marked feature of American history right through the period
of the Civil War, by which time the United States had reached its
continental proportions.

"The War for American Independence, which created most of the
founding myths of the Republic, was itself a war for expansion ...
Thomas Jefferson nursed even grander plans for empire."{13}

Warren Zimmermann himself knows something of the practical side of
imperialism.  He was the last U.S. ambassador to pre-civil war
Yugoslavia.  Surely it is past time for leftists to abandon the
Whitmanesque celebratory myths of a democratic American manifest
destiny.

Conclusion

As a graduate student in Latin American History at UCLA in the
mid-1960s, I first learned about imperialism, and it was my good
fortune to have access to Marxist analysis.  However, it was not
until the early 1970s when I became involved as an expert witness
in Native American court cases regarding U.S.-Indian treaties, that
I came to grasp the true nature and development of U.S. imperialism.
At that same time, a now deceased mentor, Canadian Native leader
and Marxist historian, Howard Adams, gave me a book that had a great
influence on me.{14}  That book was Pierre Jalies Imperialism in
the Seventies (New York: The Third Press, 1973) which contained a
brilliant introduction by Harry Magdoff.  Harrys cautionary words
three decades ago resonate even more loudly today:

"The major obstacle to such enlightenment is the pervasiveness of
the ideological rationalization for imperialism.  The extent of
this pervasiveness is not easy, to perceive because such rationalization
is deep-seated.  Its roots are intertwined with the accepted,
conventional modes of thought and the consciousness of a people.
Thus, they are located in the false patriotism and racism that sink
deeply and imperceptibly into the individuals sub-conscious; in the
traditions, values, and even aesthetics of the cultural environment
-- an environment evolved over centuries during which self-designated
superior cultures assumed the right to penetrate and dominate
inferior cultures.  These roots are also buried in the sophisticated
theorems of both liberal and conservative economics, sociology,
political science, anthropology, and history.  For these reasons,
citizens of an imperialist country who wish to understand imperialism
must first emancipate themselves from the seemin!

gly en dless web of threads that bind them emotionally and
intellectually to the imperialist condition."{15}

This, I believe, is the most important task for the antiwar and
social justice movements in the United States today -- to assume
the responsibility of being citizens of an empire that must be
dismantled.

Notes

Peter Baker, Wrong Turn in Nasiriyah Led to Soldiers Capture
Maintenance Company Drove Into Waiting Ambush, Washington Post,
April 13, 2003.

Edward Said, Give Us Back Our Democracy: Americans Have Been Cheated
and Lied To, (www. CounterPunch.org, 4/21/03).

Perry Miller, 'Errand in the Wilderness' (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1956), 114.

Henry Kamen, 'The Spanish Inquisition' (New York: New American
Library, 1965), 2.

Norman Roth, 'Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews
from Spain' (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 229.

Kamen, 'Inquisition', 117118.

Claudio Sanchez Albornoz, 'Espaqa, Un Enigma Histsrico' (2 vols.)(Buenos
Aires, 1962), I, 677.

Richard Slotkin, 'Regeneration through Violence' (Middletown,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 42.

Francis Jennings, 'The Invasion of America' (New York: W. W. Norton,
1975), 168.

L. Perry Curtis, Jr., ed., 'Apes and Angels' (Washington D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution, 1971).

Walter A. McDougall, 'Promised Land, Crusader State' (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Co, 1997), 95.

Samir Amin, 'Empire of Chaos' (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1992), 9.

Zimmermann, 'First Great Triumph' (New York: Farrar Straus and
Giroux, 2002), 17.

Howard Adams, 'Prison of Grass' (Toronto: Free Press, 1974).

Pierre Jalie, 'Imperialism in the Seventies' (New York: Third Press,
1973), xviixviii.

========================================= COLLEGIUM IUSTITIF FQUITATEM
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