Unity

From Unity, 30 January 2010

Holocaust in the Americas

by Ernest Walker

In a recent column in the Guardian George Monbiot, who specialises in environmental questions, turned his attention to the recent film Avatar, which has just won an award. The subject of the film is the “European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas”; and whilst Monbiot describes it as “profound” he also thinks the ending in the film is “profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film.”
     Having said that, he still makes the point that this “blockbuster offers a chilling metaphor for European butchery of the Americas,” adding: “no wonder the US right hates it.”
     He relates to another film called The Road, where “the fate of the native Americans is much closer told, a remnant population fleeing in terror as it is hunted to extinction.” He then goes on to claim that it is a story no-one wants to hear, “because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves.”
     He argues that Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas, and that the American states were founded on them.
     He quotes a book written by the American scholar David Stannard, entitled American Holocaust, which documents the “greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced.”
     In 1492 some 100 million native people lived in the Americas, but by the end of the nineteenth century almost all of them had been exterminated; and whilst many had died of disease, Monbiot makes the claim that the mass extinction was also engineered. He writes that when the Spanish arrived in the Americas they found and described a world far different from Europe, which was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease, and starvation. The populations they found, on the other hand, were healthy, well nourished, and mostly peaceable, democratic, and egalitarian, “with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas.”
     The Europeans, including Columbus, remarked on the natives’ “extraordinary hospitality.” The Conquistadores “marvelled” at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, “which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home.”
     Having said that, none of this stopped them destroying everything and everyone they encountered.
     The finger is pointed at Columbus, who started the butchery with the slaughter of the native people of Hispaniola (now Haïti and the Dominican Republic) by “unimaginably brutal means.” Monbiot writes that babies were torn from the mothers and their heads bashed against rocks. Dogs were fed on living children, and on one occasion thirteen Indians were hung in honour of Christ and the twelve disciples, “on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled and burnt them alive.”
     It is claimed that Columbus demanded that the native peoples deliver a certain amount of gold every three months. Failure resulted in hands being cut off.
     By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8 million to zero, due to disease, murder, overwork, and starvation.
     The Conquistadores then spread their “civilising mission” across Central and South America, where they demanded to know where “mythical treasures” were hidden. Failure to reveal this information led to the indigenous people being flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive, or burnt.
     Most of the people, though, were killed by enslavement and disease. As far as the Spanish were concerned, it was cheaper to work the natives to death and replace them than to keep them alive.
     The life expectancy for those forced to work in the mines and plantations was three to four months.
     Within a century of the Spanish arrival, 95 per cent of the population of Central and South America were dead.
     In the eighteenth century the Spanish were in California, where they “systematised” this extermination under the guidance of a Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra. He set up a series of “missions,” which were in reality concentration camps, using slave labour. The native people were herded under force of arms to work in the fields on one-fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, they died at “astonishing rates” and were continually replaced, leading to the wiping out of the indigenous people.
     Monbiot, with justification, describes Junipero Serra as the Eichmann of California, pointing out that he was beatified by the Vatican in 1988 and that he now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint.
     Of course the Spanish were not on their own, and whilst they were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. Monbiot writes of New England, where they surrounded the villages of native Americans and murdered them as they slept. He claims that as the genocide spread westwards it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington, the father of the American nation, ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson said that war against the Indians should lead to their extermination or their being driven beyond the Mississippi.
     In 1864 in Sand Creek, Colorado, US troops slaughtered and mutilated native Americans who had gathered under a flag of peace. Theodore Roosevelt described this event as being “as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”
     But, as Monbiot points out, even today the butchery hasn’t ended, with a report in the Guardian last month revealing that Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe.
     Monbiot then quotes a reaction from John Podhoretz of the neo-con Weekly Standard, who complains that the Avatar film resembles a “revisionist western,” in which “the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys.” The audiences are asked “to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.”
     As Monbiot writes, “insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion.
     L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s newspaper, condemned the film as “just an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable.”

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