The assault on American Indian tribal relationships…

The assault on American Indian tribal relationships

Whilst United States policy very early showed a disregard for the rights of Indian tribes, the avowed determination to destroy Indian tribal relations did not become the dominant theme until after the Civil War. Prior to that time, “Indian policy” moved in a three-phase cycle — massive treaty-breaking incursions by Americans on Indian lands; war; and then another “treaty” involving “cessions” of Indian lands — systematically repeated, until finally the Indians had been “ceded” into the confines of “reservations”.

The direct assault on tribal relations had been anticipated by half a century; in 1830 the Georgia state legislature nullified Indian tribal laws within the state’s boundaries. This legislation was condemned by its critics as an attack against “the entire social existence of the [Cherokee] tribe”. The exiling of thousands of the Cherokee people over the Trail of Tears in 1838 was justified on the grounds that “Common property and civilization cannot coexist”. In 1854 (the year of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska “squatter sovereignty” law) the Omaha Indians “ceded” 10,000,000 acres of land to the United States in a “treaty” which, for the first time, provided for the breaking up of the tribe’s remaining lands into individual allotments. The treaty was hailed as giving hope that soon all Indian lands would be “thrown open to the Anglo-Saxon plough”.

To the extent that they were consulted in the matter, the Indians overwhelmingly rejected the “severalty” (individual ownership) option for cancelling tribal land rights. If, in the end, their wishes were ignored, it was not because the Indian point of view was not understood. As the ethnologist J.W. Powell of the Smithsonian Institution informed the United States Congress:

In Indian tribes individual or personal rights and clan rights are very carefully differentiated. The right to the soil, with many other rights, inheres in the clan. Indian morality consists chiefly in the recognition of clan rights; and crime in Indian society consists in the violation of these clan rights. In Indian society the greatest crime is the claim of an individual to land, and it is also a heinous sin against religion.

“Citizenship”, he concluded, “is incompatible with kinship society”.

By 1859, a general assault on tribal ownership of land was under way, which would become the central feature of United States “Indian policy” and its “civilizing mission”. The legislative culmination of that assault came with Congressional passage in 1887 of the Dawes General Allotment Act. Its purpose and rationale were articulated with drumfire consistency and remarkable clarity. In his 1859 annual report to Congress, US Indian Affairs Commissioner Charles E. Mix advocated converting reservation lands to individual allotments. Indian “possession of large bodies of land in common”, was the root of what Mix saw as “habits of indolence and profligacy”. A Congressman cited Mix’s report in arguing that “the first step to be taken” in the execution of Indian policy was in “uprooting the community of property system [and] … extinguishing or modifying the tribal relation”. In the course of the 1866 debate on relations with the Sioux, Representative Burleigh of Dakota recalled that, as United States Indian Agent there in 1862, he “did advocate the removal of the [Sioux] women and children with a view to wiping out the tribe”.

While the Paris Commune [1871] was yet within living memory, in the era of Haymarket [1886] and the robber barons, the destruction of tribal relations was polemically associated with the threat of socialism and communism. In the year the Second Socialist International was formed, Indian Commissioner T.J. Morgan showed, more than most socialists did, an instinctual grasp of the vital link between white supremacy and anti-socialism. “The Indians”, Morgan said, “must conform to ‘the white man’s ways’, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted”. The year before, Commissioner Oberly had pointed out the great moral gulf fixed between the two societies, where “neither can say of all the acres of the tribe. ‘This is mine'”. With the allotment to individuals of Indian tribal lands, he theorized, the Indian would be able to emulate “the exalting egotism of American civilization, so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We’, and ‘This is mine’, instead of ‘This is ours'”. If the Indians rejected this tutelage, he concluded, it should be forced on them, as it were, for their own good.

~ Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume One: ‘Racial Oppression and Social Control’, Verso, 1994, pp.36–38.

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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15 Responses to The assault on American Indian tribal relationships…

  1. English N-A sympathiser says:

    Hold on a minute, so now are you implying that you DO support the idea of “kinship society”?

    Would you please make your position clear?

    Are you saying that kinship based communities are good for Amerindians, but not for Europeans?

  2. @ndy says:

    Huh?

    I’m quoting a US historian. Feel free to address the post’s contents.

  3. English N-A sympathiser says:

    No, I want to know about YOUR opinion, not that of the academic.

    Do you support “kinship based society” for Amerindians?

    If so, why not for Europeans?

  4. renee caubisens says:

    As I was reading your entry, I was reminded of the policy of placing the children in boarding schools. It seems that the US government was incredibly adept at genocide against Native Americans. The government policies attacked the core values of native life…tribalism and family…perhaps basically the same thing.

    As time went on, they learned how to destroy native communities without leaving a trail of tears. I sometimes wonder if all the alcohol and drugs on the reservations is placed there intentionally…but then again, I have been accused of paranoia.

    Never saw your blog before. This was an excellent entry. Keep up the good work.

    Renee

  5. @ndy says:

    G’day Renee,

    The process of European empire-building proceeded along fairly similar lines, whether in the Americas or Australasia — in essence, it was a territorial expansion based upon the genocidal conquest of indigenous peoples (and cultures). The Australian case is somewhat exceptional, in that — unlike say, North America — no formal treaties were entered into between the Crown and indigenous peoples / nations. Indeed, until 1992, and the conclusion of a case brought to the Australian High Court by Eddie Mabo, the dispossession of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders was predicated on a legal fiction known as ‘terra nullius’ (from the Latin terra, earth, ground, land, and nullius, no-one’s). Terra Nullius is also the title of a book by Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, whose other title, Exterminate All the Brutes, is also a worthwhile read:

    Exterminate All the Brutes is a searching examination of Europe’s dark history in Africa and the origins of genocide. Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his point of departure, Sven Lindqvist takes us on a haunting tour through the colonial past, interwoven with a modern-day travelogue. Retracing the steps of European explorers, missionaries, politicians, and historians in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward, the author exposes the roots of genocide in Africa via his own journey through the Saharan desert. As Lindqvist shows, fantasies not merely of white superiority but of actual extermination—“cleansing” the earth of the so-called lesser races—deeply informed European colonialism and racist ideology that ultimately culminated in Europe’s own Holocaust.

    Chosen as one of the Best Books of 1998 by the New Internationalist, which called it “a beautifully written integration of criticism, cultural history, and travel writing, underpinned by a passion for social justice,” Exterminate All the Brutes is a powerful reckoning with the past and an indispensable contribution to the literature of colonial Africa and European genocide.

    Sven also gives good speech. See : ‘The Power of Truth’, Lettre Ulysses Award Keynote Speech 2005 (English):

    …The power of truth is such that it will always produce denial. After Sjöblom’s appearance in London, King Leopold himself took the matter in hand. In June and July 1897 he went on a journey of denial to London and Stockholm, reassuring Queen Victoria and King Oscar II that Sjöblom’s accusations were unfounded.

    In Brussels he created a monument of denial: The Tervuren Museum of Central Africa. The old exhibition from 1900 continued to be shown decade after decade. When Congo achieved independence in 1960 the word “belge”, “belgian”, in the expression “Congo belge”, was blotted out with black ink. Otherwise everything remained the same. Denial rained sublime. Tervuren was standing there in Belgian consciousness as a huge dinosaur, surrounded by fossilised colonial thinking.

    Today, 2005, the Tervuren Museum claims to have made a fresh start. A modernised museum wants to become a “center for the study of Central Africa”. A new exhibition depicts “the memory of colonial times in the Congo”. This would have been a splendid occasion for Belgium to face the crimes of the past and admit what they have been denying for more than a century.

    But old habits are hard to break.

    The museum now admits that murders and mass-murders did happen, but emphasises that they never were sanctioned by the highest Belgian authorities. No, of course not. The highest authorities in every country always prefer to look the other way.

    The number of deaths has been wildly exaggerated, claims the Museum. It cannot be proved that ten million Africans met a violent death under King Leopold’s rule. Perhaps it was a mere 2 million. And all of them were not murdered outright. Some of them might have been worked to death, others starved to death, when the colonial regime requisitioned their food-stores and their labour. But since they were not actually murdered, there was, according to the Museum, no genocide.

    Evasions and excuses abound. The terrible truth disappears among extenuating circumstances. The murderers are never accused, the accused are those like myself who have collected the evidence and put it before the public. My book Exterminate All the Brutes is held up in the exhibition as the shameful example.

    “The story of inhuman cruelties in the Congo has given rise to its own genre”, says the catalogue. “Prominent writers” are serving us a tall tale of European brutality. “The most daring and extreme of these writers even try to insert the Congo into a great story of the barbarities of the 20th century, especially the history of mass murders.” This, according to the catalogue, is creating a new legenda negra, a false black tale of atrocities that never, in fact, occurred.

    I must confess that I am proud to have been singled out as the whipping-boy of the Museum Tervoren.

    I am proud to have brought Sjöblom’s testimony once more before international public opinion and to have placed the Congo atrocities in the context of 20th century European barbarism.

    I am especially proud to-night, in your company dear fellow reporters. We are all practising an art of truth, ein Wahrheitskunst, that even after a hundred years will still have the power to produce vigorous denial.

    Note that, in Australia, the term legenda negra has its local equivalent in the term ‘black armband’, coined (by reactionary historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1993) to describe those who examine Australia’s history of genocide critically. The term was adopted by former PM John HoWARd as a means of excusing his Government’s active complicity in the continuing dispossession of Australia’s indigenous peoples.

  6. @ndy says:

    On a related note, and with a shake of the balaclava in the direction of Aristarchus:

    The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia
    Noam Chomsky
    The Nation
    May 19, 2009

    The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

    For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantánamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law–a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration’s “black sites,” or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.

    More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the “infant empire”–as George Washington called the new republic–extended to the Philippines, Haiti and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion and economic strangulation that have darkened US history, much as in the case of other great powers.

    Accordingly, what’s surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be “a nation of moral ideals” and never before Bush “have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for.” To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history.

    Occasionally the conflict between “what we stand for” and “what we do” has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the US has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since “the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide.” But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with that “transcendent purpose.”

    We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.” What actually happened was merely the “abuse of reality.”

    The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the US is “just one great, but imperfect, country among others.” Cohen agrees that the evidence supports Hodgson’s judgment, but nonetheless regards as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson’s failure to understand that “America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward.” The American idea is revealed in the country’s birth as a “city on a hill,” an “inspirational notion” that resides “deep in the American psyche,” and by “the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise” demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson’s error, it seems, is that he is keeping to “the distortions of the American idea,” “the abuse of reality.”

    Let us then turn to “reality itself”: the “idea” of America from its earliest days.

    “Come Over and Help Us”

    The inspirational phrase “city on a hill” was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation “ordained by God.” One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words “Come over and help us.” The British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

    The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of “the idea of America,” from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a “shining city on the hill,” while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

    The Great Seal was an early proclamation of “humanitarian intervention,” to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the “humanitarian intervention” led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, 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.”

    Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John Quincy Adams deplored the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement.” The “merciless and perfidious cruelty” continued until “the West was won.” Instead of God’s judgment, the heinous sins today bring only praise for the fulfillment of the American “idea.”

    The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed that “individualism and enterprise,” so praised by Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results were hailed by the respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record “of conquest, colonization and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century,” and urged that it is “not to be curbed now,” as the Cubans too were pleading, in the Great Seal’s words, “come over and help us.”

    Their plea was answered. The US sent troops, thereby preventing Cuba’s liberation from Spain and turning it into a virtual colony, as it remained until 1959.

    The “American idea” was illustrated further by the remarkable campaign initiated by the Eisenhower administration virtually at once to restore Cuba to its proper place, after Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959, finally liberating the island from foreign domination, with enormous popular support, as Washington ruefully conceded. What followed was economic warfare, with the clearly articulated aim of punishing the Cuban population so that they would overthrow the disobedient Castro government; invasion; the dedication of the Kennedy brothers to bringing “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba (the phrase of historian Arthur Schlesinger in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who considered that task one of his highest priorities); and other crimes continuing to the present, in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.

    American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hawaii in 1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialism Bernard Porter calls “the saltwater fallacy,” the idea that conquest only becomes imperialism when it crosses saltwater. Thus, if the Mississippi had resembled the Irish Sea, Western expansion would have been imperialism. From George Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge, those engaged in the enterprise had a clearer grasp of just what they were doing.

    After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the next step in the mission assigned by Providence was to confer “the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples” of the Philippines (in the words of the platform of Lodge’s Republican party)–at least those who survived the murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture and other atrocities that accompanied it. These fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the US-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model of colonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped for sophisticated modes of surveillance, intimidation and violence. Similar models would be adopted in many other areas where the US imposed brutal National Guards and other client forces.

    The Torture Paradigm

    Over the past sixty years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA’s “torture paradigm,” developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury’s penetrating study of the US torture record: Truth, Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang’s descent into the global sewers lament that “in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way.”

    None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: “What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.”

    Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it,” restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. “His is a return to the status quo ante,” writes Nairn, “the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.”

    Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that US aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens…to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.” Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, US aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.

    These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth studying because the correlations were so clear.

    Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward–a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

    Adopting Bush’s Positions

    An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA’s “torture paradigm” never violated the 1984 Torture Convention, at least as Washington interpreted it. McCoy points out that the highly sophisticated CIA paradigm developed at enormous cost in the 1950s and 1960s, based on the “KGB’s most devastating torture technique,” kept primarily to mental torture, not crude physical torture, which was considered less effective in turning people into pliant vegetables.

    McCoy writes that the Reagan administration then carefully revised the International Torture Convention “with four detailed diplomatic ‘reservations’ focused on just one word in the convention’s twenty-six printed pages,” the word “mental.” He continues: “These intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain–the very techniques the CIA had refined at such great cost.”

    When Clinton sent the UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included the Reagan reservations. The president and Congress therefore exempted the core of the CIA torture paradigm from the US interpretation of the Torture Convention; and those reservations, McCoy observes, were “reproduced verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention.” That is the “political land mine” that “detonated with such phenomenal force” in the Abu Ghraib scandal and in the shameful Military Commissions Act that was passed with bipartisan support in 2006.

    Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima facie violations of international law, and several of his extremist innovations were struck down by the courts. While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush administration claim that prisoners in Guantánamo are not entitled to the right of habeas corpus.

    Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to “preserve the power to abduct people from around the world” and imprison them without due process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the US prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, treating “the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game–fly your abducted prisoners to Guantánamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process.”

    Obama adopted the Bush position, “filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue,” arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) “can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind–as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantánamo.”

    In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge “rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantánamo.” The Obama administration announced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama’s Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, “squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions,” in radical violation of Obama’s campaign promises and earlier stands.

    The case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld appears to be following a similar trajectory. The plaintiffs charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials were responsible for their torture in Guantánamo, where they were sent after being captured by Uzbeki warlord Rashid Dostum. The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to Afghanistan to offer humanitarian relief. Dostum, a notorious thug, was then a leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction supported by Russia, Iran, India, Turkey and the Central Asian states, and the US as it attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.

    Dostum turned them over to US custody, allegedly for bounty money. The Bush administration sought to have the case dismissed. Recently, Obama’s Department of Justice filed a brief supporting the Bush position that government officials are not liable for torture and other violations of due process, on the grounds that the courts had not yet clearly established the rights that prisoners enjoy.

    It is also reported that the Obama administration intends to revive military commissions, one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the Bush years. There is a reason, according to William Glaberson of the New York Times: “Officials who work on the Guantánamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.” A serious flaw in the criminal justice system, it appears.

    Creating Terrorists

    There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information–the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured US pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his plane delivering aid to US-supported Contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty and then sent him back to the US, as they did. Instead, they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, no small matter for a tiny, impoverished country under terrorist attack by the global superpower.

    By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then US ambassador in Honduras (later appointed as the first Director of National Intelligence, essentially counterterrorism czar, without eliciting a murmur), they should have done the same. Cuba would have been justified in acting similarly, had the Castro government been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what their victims should have done to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave Al Qaeda in the dust, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further “ticking bomb” attacks.

    Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion.

    There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, even if surely terrorism, is benign, deriving as it does from the city on the hill.

    Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if it were discovered that Bush administration torture had cost American lives. That is, in fact, the conclusion drawn by Major Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym], one of the most seasoned US interrogators in Iraq, who elicited “the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq,” correspondent Patrick Cockburn reports.

    Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation methods: “The use of torture by the US,” he believes, not only elicits no useful information but “has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11.” From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.

    There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantánamo on the charge of “engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance.” He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians.

    After four years of brutal treatment in Guantánamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and thirteen soldiers–“the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantánamo detainee,” according to the Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment.

    All much as a reasonable person would expect.

    Unexceptional Americans

    Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the “war on terror” that Bush declared after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional international law “quaint” and “obsolete”–so George W. Bush was advised by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, later appointed Attorney General. The doctrine has been widely reiterated in one form or another in commentary and analysis.

    The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many respects. One is where the guns were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact, it was the first attack of any consequence on the national territory of the United States since the British burned down Washington in 1814.

    Another unique feature was the scale of terror perpetrated by a non-state actor.

    Horrifying as it was, however, it could have been worse. Suppose that the perpetrators had bombed the White House, killed the president and established a vicious military dictatorship that killed 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured 700,000, set up a huge international terror center that carried out assassinations and helped impose comparable military dictatorships elsewhere, and implemented economic doctrines that so radically dismantled the economy that the state had to virtually take it over a few years later.

    That would indeed have been far worse than September 11, 2001. And it happened in Salvador Allende’s Chile in what Latin Americans often call “the first 9/11” in 1973. (The numbers above were changed to per-capita US equivalents, a realistic way of measuring crimes.) Responsibility for the military coup against Allende can be traced straight back to Washington. Accordingly, the otherwise quite appropriate analogy is out of consciousness here in the US, while the facts are consigned to the “abuse of reality” that the naive call “history.”

    It should also be recalled that Bush did not declare the “war on terror,” he re-declared it. Twenty years earlier, President Reagan’s administration came into office declaring that a centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war on terror, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time”–to sample the fevered rhetoric of the day.

    That first US war on terror has also been deleted from historical consciousness, because the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the canon: hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the ruined countries of Central America and many more elsewhere, among them an estimated 1.5 million dead in the terrorist wars sponsored in neighboring countries by Reagan’s favored ally, apartheid South Africa, which had to defend itself from Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” as Washington determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be added that, twenty years later, Congress voted to remove the ANC from the list of terrorist organizations, so that Mandela is now, at last, able to enter the US without obtaining a waiver from the government.

    The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes called “American exceptionalism.” It is nothing of the sort. It is probably close to a universal habit among imperial powers. France was hailing its “civilizing mission” in its colonies, while the French Minister of War called for “exterminating the indigenous population” of Algeria. Britain’s nobility was a “novelty in the world,” John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power delay no longer in completing its liberation of India.

    Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists in the 1930s, who were bringing an “earthly paradise” to China under benign Japanese tutelage, as they carried out the rape of Nanking and their “burn all, loot all, kill all” campaigns in rural North China. History is replete with similar glorious episodes.

    As long as such “exceptionalist” theses remain firmly implanted, however, the occasional revelations of the “abuse of history” often backfire, serving only to efface terrible crimes. The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly greater atrocities of the post-Tet pacification programs, ignored while indignation in this country was largely focused on this single crime.

    Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably worse crimes at home and abroad, including the FBI-organized assassination of black organizer Fred Hampton as part of the infamous COINTELPRO repression, or the bombing of Cambodia, to mention just two egregious examples. Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq was a far worse crime. Quite commonly, selective atrocities have this function.

    Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

  7. English N-A sympathiser says:

    Aha, so you refuse to reply.

    There are two possible conclusions, then.

    Either you support kinship-based societies for Amerindians, but not for Europeans, making you a racist.

    Or you’re against kinship-based societies for anyone, meaning you’re against indigenous self-determination.

    Try and help me understand which it is.

  8. @ndy says:

    Aha, so you’re not only a racist, but presumptuous.

    ‘kin’ is ‘kind’. What constitutes one’s family and relations varies. We already live in a ‘kinship-based society’. As it happens, ‘society’ is structured along numerous lines. The issue is power, and authority. The ‘Amerindians’ (American Indians) are a diverse mob. Some are angry.

    So what?

    It remains the case that a little bunch of white racists wanting to construct a Pioneer Little Europe has nothing to do with anarchism.

  9. Tony Whitemore says:

    According to ‘AngryIndian’, every group has issues except for whites.

  10. @ndy says:

    Personally, I’m disgusted that the AFL website only discusses football. Apparently the AFL has embarked on a campaign to destroy all other sports — the racists.

  11. Tony Whitemore says:

    Of course, Andy, how stupid of myself, we now live in a world where White Europeans no longer matter. We simply do not have a voice nor an opinion!

  12. @ndy says:

    I knew we’d find some common ground eventually Tony: you’re stupid.

  13. ali says:

    whites are a dying breed and fucking idiots like you who think ur trendy and forward looking are what is the cause.ur ethnic friends will kill u as soon as look at u when the power passes and they make the rules.y can’t a non muslim lad have a relationship with a muslim without her being honour killed or as in scotland the lad kidnapped and murdered.u are ensuring that white people and culture end up on the endangered species list.when we take back what is ours i will vote to have ur pale skinned type killed

  14. Pingback: The Invention of the White Race Slide Presentation/Talk by Jeffrey B. Perry | slackbastard

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