>From time to time, we have emails concerning the colonial treatment of Native >Americans on this list. A recent edition of Monthly Review contains an >article by Naom Chomsky that comments on the matter. Here are some excerpts:
Settler colonialism, commonly the most vicious form of imperial conquest, provides striking illustrations. The English colonists in North America had no doubts about what they were doing. Revolutionary War hero General Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War in the newly liberated American colonies, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by means "more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru," which would have been no small achievement. In his later years, President John Quincy Adams recognized the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty, [to be] among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement." Contemporary commentators see the matter differently. The prominent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis hails Adams as the grand strategist who laid the foundations for the Bush Doctrine that "expansion is the path to security." Plausibly, and with evident appreciation, Gaddis takes the doctrine to be routinely applicable throughout the history of the "infant empire," as George Washington termed the new Republic. Gaddis passes in silence over Adams's gory contributions to the "heinous sins of this nation" as he established the doctrine, along with the doctrine of executive war in violation of the Constitution, in a famous State paper justifying the conquest of Florida on utterly fraudulent pretexts of self-defense. The conquest was part of Adams's project of "removing or eliminating native Americans from the southeast," in the words of William Earl Weeks, the leading historian of the massacre, who provides a lurid account of the "exhibition of murder and plunder" targeting Indians and runaway slaves. To mention another example, in the June 11, 2009, issue of one the world's leading liberal intellectual journals, The New York Review of Books, political analyst Russell Baker records what he learned from the work of the "heroic historian" Edmund Morgan: namely, that Columbus and the early explorers "found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and hunting people..In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants." The calculation is off by many tens of millions, and the "vastness" included advanced civilizations, but no matter. The exercise of genocide denial with a vengeance merits little notice, presumably because it is so unremarkable and in a good cause. The whole article can be found at http://www.monthlyreview.org/100901chomsky.php Ed
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