Columns Point of View Historys course in America Monday January 22 2007 14:08 IST
T J S George The Arawaks of Bahamas whom Columbus called Indians were described by him as well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, do not know them with fifty men, we could subjugate them all. He did. The Arawaks were ordered to bring gold from the riverbeds. Those who brought any were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Later those found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Bahamas were not gold country and the Europeans soon tired of killing the locals. The Arawaks were then taken as slaves to work on new estates. They were driven so hard that thousands died. By 1515 there were perhaps 50,000 Indians left. By 1550 there were 500. A report of the year 1650 showed none of the original Arawaks or their descendents were left in the Bahamas. These and other blood curdling facts are chronicled by historian, playwright and social activist Howard Zinn in his A Peoples History of the United States, a 1980 book re-issued in 2005 as a classic. With extensive research, it tells the story of the systematic decimation of Americas native populations. How did the story develop after the blood and gore of the early explorers? Thomas Jefferson who wrote the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal) was the owner of several hundred slaves. Andrew Jackson who later became President was a major beneficiary of a policy called removal of Indians which helped him acquire thousands of acres of land. Has the story been any different in our own times? In 1969 when Americas war in Vietnam was already looking like a lost cause, Henry Kissinger had an original brainwave. He ordered carpet-bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country. The indiscriminate bombing went on for 14 months, resulting in 600,000 recorded deaths. But Kissinger kept it a secret from the American Congress and the American people. That explains the title of another 2005 book Lying for Empire: How to commit war crimes with a straight face by David Model. Despite that last-minute murder spree, Kissinger lost Vietnam. He also lost Cambodia by driving hundreds of peasants to join the underground Khmer Rouge who defeated a puppet government America had put in place in Cambodia. Sounds familiar? Isnt what we see today an unchanging continuation of what Columbus started, and was then car ried on by the Founding Fathers of America, then by the Presidents of America who attacked Korea, attacked Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, arranged assassinations (example, Allendes Chile) and military coups (example, Indonesia) and modern high-tech wars (example, Iraq)? When Saddam Hussain was hanged and his corpse desecrated, the world thought that the most unjustified war of modern times would at last end. But Mr Bush is sending 20,000 more American soldiers to Iraq to join the 130,000 already there in a policy called Surge. Violation of a corpse is against the religion of the man who was hanged and the man who engineered the hanging. Mr Bush thus defied religion, then defied world opinion, defied American public opinion, and defied the advice of several American military experts and Republican party leaders in intensifying the Iraq war. Mr Bush may be off his rocker. But he remains in sync with American history. Thats the danger. For our todays and tomorrows. --------------------------------- No need to miss a message. Get email on-the-go with Yahoo! Mail for Mobile. Get started.
