Was There an Indian Genocide?
By • 5/7/08 |
The American Indians knew no law of war. |
When I was writing my response to Roger Cohen’s proposal for a museum dedicated to slavery and segregation, I read the comments on Cohen’s article at his blog. Not a single commenter pointed out the absurdity of Cohen’s belief that whites had not sufficiently recognized their historical mistreatment of blacks. However, a number of them did write that another monument to white guilt was needed: a museum memorializing the “genocide” of American Indians. This alleged genocide is a mainstay of leukophobic anti-Americanism. Fortunately, Guenter Lewy, the historian who also debunked false stories of Vietnam War atrocities, examined the question in a 2004 Commentary article, and found claims of genocide to be groundless.
That the Indian population of the United States was almost entirely wiped out after European settlement is an established fact. At the end of the 19th century, there were 250,000 Indians in America. Anthropologists have estimated that between one and 12 million Indians lived in the territory north of Mexico before Europeans arrived.
Does this loss of life constitute genocide? The contemporary definition of genocide is acts of war undertaken with the purpose of eradicating a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. By this standard, Lewy concludes, although there were isolated acts of genocide against the Indians, genocide was never the policy of the United States government or army.
Seventy-five to 90 percent of Indian deaths were the result of disease, mostly smallpox, not warfare. While “scholars” like the notorious Ward Churchill have claimed that whites deliberately spread diseases like smallpox among Indians, there is only one instance in which plausible documentation of deliberate infection exists. In 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, after whom my alma mater Amherst College is named, advised one of his officers to give blankets infected with smallpox to Indians, and the officer seems to have acted on the idea. Other allegations of biological warfare do not stand up to scrutiny.
Since the Amherst atrocity occurred during in the colonial period, it cannot be blamed on the American government, of course. Indeed, it was American policy starting in 1796 to vaccinate Indians against small pox. It would be odd if Ameicans tried to kill off Indians by means of a disease they were trying to prevent!
Genocide of the Indians was never the policy of the US army or government. The army was under orders to spare women, children, and men who surrendered or were too severely wounded to fight. Although some non-combatants were killed during army attacks, any deliberate killing of a non-combatant was punishable by law. In fact, after the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1889, President Harrison investigated killings of non-combatants and found that the army did everything in its power to avoid them. The army also provided first aid and hospital care for wounded Indians.
Whites did not always adhere to such high ethical standards, however. In the colonial era, the British army conducted some genocidal campaigns against Indians. After independence, the unofficial posses of white settlers who did battle with Indians were also barbaric at times. The American government considered such acts criminal and prosecuted them.
While the policy of the American government was never genocide, that of the Indians certainly was. The Indians were never inhibited by any of the scruples that restrained the US army. The history abounds with accounts of “acts of devilish cruelty” that had “no parallel in savage warfare,” in the words of one army officer quoted by Lewy. Rape and the slaughter of non-combatants was common during Indian raids, as was torture of prisoners. Lewy writes:
The torture of prisoners was indeed routine practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Valuing bravery above all things, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners unable to withstand the rigor of wilderness travel were usually killed on the spot… [Other prisoners would be] subjected to a ritual of torture designed to humiliate them and exact atonement for the tribe’s losses. Afterward the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it in a ceremonial meal, and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory.
The concepts of human rights and the ethical conduct of warfare are inventions of the white race. No other race invented them independently, and certainly, the Indians knew nothing of them. Far from being proof of the barbarism of the white race, then, the wars against the Indians testify to the unique compassion of Western culture.
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“We invaded their nation, wiped out their culture, destroyed their country and murdered most of their people.”
They had no “nation” or “country,” merely a collection of stone-age tribes. Nor were “most” of them “murdered.” If genocide had been the goal there would be no Indians today.
“I imagine you could produce an extremely glib, seemingly erudite piece praising, justifying and glorifying the bold attempt of Adolf Hitler to elevate the noble “white race” to its rightful place of supremacy.”
I think we’ve had it now; Hitler has been invoked! Why should anyone care what you can imagine? If you find anything along the lines of a paean to Hitler in these pages, let’s see it.
“There is NO white race. There are no other races.”
Race is a genetic and biological reality.
“All other distinctions are minor ethnic variations dictated by adaption to differing environments”
The adaptation are not “minor,” as they involve many measurable differences in intelligence, impulsivity, time horizons, proneness to crime, and many other variables.
“People like you make me ashamed of the color of my skin.”
That was accomplished by your teachers and television shows long before you chanced across this website. Are you going to visit the NAACP and La Raza websites and explain to them why there’s no such thing as race? Or is that somehow different?
By on 5/7/08 at 8:35 pm
murdered most of their people
For the commenter above, there is no moral distinction between murder, warfare, and unintentionally causing death through disease, or between Hitler’s planned eradication of Jews and a smallpox epidemic. Talk about a leap into absurdity.
By on 5/7/08 at 8:38 pm
There’s some question out there in regards to whether or not Indians were even the first peoples here. Check out this Patrick Stewart look-alike: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/kennewick.html
It raises the question of who was here first & how the Kennewick Man’s people disappeared.
By on 5/7/08 at 8:45 pm
By You couldn’t be trusted with it on 5/7/08 at 8:04 pm
Bud, I don’t consider you white. Please do us all a favor and go marry one of your precious little fellow humans of the black or brown variety. Go live in your illusional bliss and leave us the heck alone. You still have to learn what we already know.
By on 5/7/08 at 10:29 pm
This Kennewick Man was White or Caucasian is the biggest bunch of doodoo around. It is utterly embarrassing that so many WN’s are continuing to spout this drivel. Though not surprising!
Read up on the scientific literature. Kennewick Man was an ancient member of a race that no longer exists. The closest living races that resemble Kennewick Man are the Ainu and various Polynesian races. Kennewick Man, if anything, was an Ainu-Polynesian type. Such types were generalized across all of NE Asia at the time when Kennewick Man was discovered, so he came from Asia, like the rest of the Amerindians.
Ainus are genetically Asian and anthropomorphically Australoid. They only seem White because many Australoids look kind of Caucasian. Caucasoid is merely one of the possible end-types in human facial evolution. It’s convergent evolution and parallel development and that’s all there is to it.
You guys are making yourselves look like morons with this Kennewick Man was White insanity. That’s typical, but I still say the sooner you quit saying it, the better.
I’m going to do a post on this idiocy soon cuz it’s really starting to annoy me.
By on 5/8/08 at 6:27 am
To Cassiodorus,
Excellent job dissecting and debunking all the leftist cliches put forth by the brainwashed student of cultural-Marxism.
Btw — “You couldn’t be trusted with,” exemplifies the leftists who invariably fall back on Godwin’s Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law
By on 5/8/08 at 9:43 am
Taryton,
Any time you see “Hitler” in a post like this, you can predict with about 98% certainty what will follow. This poster followed the script down to the last jot and tittle.
By on 5/8/08 at 2:23 pm
This article misses the big picture, which is that genocide or no genocide, there was a European conquest of the Americas, and that that conquest was extremely immoral (by our standards today). Yes, everybody else did it too, but so what?
White racialists, who are so strongly in favor of group identity (and rightly so), need to accept the idea of group responsibility as well. This does not entail a “whites as cancer” mentality, but it does entail a rejection of modern individualism. It means that if we identify with the group called “European-Americans”, then whenever our particular ancestors happened to show up, before or after the conquest, we have to take collective (not individual) responsibility for the crimes that were committed by our group and in the name of our group.
The flip side, by the way, is that we get to take collective credit for the good things. And besides being the right thing to do, if white racialists talk about taking responsibility for past crimes committed by whites collectively, as whites against other races, that might make us look a little bit less monstrous than we currently appear.
For their part, Indians or African-Americans or others with a historical grievance against whites as a group have to accept this basic axiom: group responsibility presupposes group identity. We are collectively responsible for past deeds because we identify with a certain group that has a certain past and a future, not because someone in our family tree killed an Indian or enslaved a black. So if someone has a claim against whites as a group, then he’s logically obliged to recognize whites’ right to associate with other whites, to pursue white interests, etc.—in other words, to identify as whites. Otherwise the group “European-Americans” doesn’t even exist.
By on 5/8/08 at 2:32 pm
Let’s start with the term ‘genocide.’ That word did not exist in the English language until the mid-20th century, and I don’t think that our colonist or settler ancestors, being few in number, hardly could have had any intention to kill all the Indians on this vast continent. And genocide, in its strict sense, means to wipe out a people, render them extinct. Nowadays, it’s one of those terms that is used wildly, just like ‘racism’, for effect.
And if we are to indict our ancestors for having an intent to commit ‘genocide’, as the politically correct believe we should, then what about the obvious intent of the Indians to commit genocide against our few and rather vulnerable colonist forefathers? Their actions towards the early colonists certainly seemed genocidal in many cases.
I think it’s pointless to go back in history and try to convict earlier generations of ‘crimes’ which are only crimes by our present-day rather prissy definitions. In past eras, when survival was at stake, people tended not to be as squeamish about using force to conquer or to survive or to protect their own. If our ancestors had had our delicate sensibilities, they would have been wiped out and we would not be here having this discussion.
Were the methods of conquest by our ancestors ‘criminal’? Again, whose definitions and standards are we going by? Certainly, if we think our colonist ancestors were criminals in the way they settled and conquered this land, then we have to say the same about the way the Indian tribes waged their frequent wars against each other. In fact, they were not usually troubled by compunctions about sparing the weak or the old or women or children; that was a European hang-up. Indian tribes, before the whites came, were in constant conflict with each other and they also practiced slavery and other such politically incorrect customs.
By on 5/10/08 at 10:32 pm
As in the US, most Aborigines and Maoris in Australian and New Zealand were also killed by disease rather than war, and genocide was never an officially sanctioned policy.
Furthermore, most of these diseases were not spread intentionally (as you point out) and most originated in Asia, not Europe.
A reasonable argument can be made that indigenous people deserve some compensation for losing their lands, but trying to claim special privileges based on claims of deliberate genocide is just another example of cultural self-loathing.
However, I’m happy to consider compensation taxes to be paid for by affluent white liberals who wish to lead by example.
As for Hitler, I think he should be re-marketed as a hero of the left - surely a vegetarian animal lover who killed 20 million white people can’t be all bad.
By on 5/11/08 at 12:55 am
Mr. Lindsay, that Kennewick Man was not Caucasian is true. He belonged to a racial group that not longer exists. Kennewick Man had a spear point in his pelvis, a fractured skull, and several broken ribs. Anthropologists theorize this was the result of warfare; 10,000 years ago. Yes its true, Europeans weren’t the first to “exterminate.” DNA alaysis has revealed he is genetically closer to Caucasians than Asiatic Mongoloid’s (the ancestors of American Indians). Later migrations of these Indian ancestors displaced the Kennewick people, as well as other groups that were genetically different. Notice how pre-columbian people “migrate” as opposed to the European “invasion.” It is a testament to Western values that we are capable of critical self-analysis and see that perhaps what our ancestors did was not entirely beneficent. The history of pre-columbian natives, and practically every other culture in the world, reveals no such compunction.
By on 5/11/08 at 1:37 am
I never said that the Kennewick Man was necessarily White. The artist’s depiction does make him look like Patrick Stewart though. I mean, look at him.
Regardless of what he is, I think it’s clear that the Indians were not necessarily here first. But they have been here a long time, no doubt about that. Some anthropological curators at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, the largest of its type, have even made strong argument that the first peoples came here from France, if you can believe that! Much evidence however suggests that many of the first peoples came from Siberia, so they’re essentially Eurasian with different gradients of Caucasoid and Mongoloid. There has been a move away from the Bering Strait only theory to one that also includes marine migration.
I rarely agree with John McCain, but I think the amendment he introduced to NAGPRA was pretty solid (the Department of the Interior shot it down); it would have changed the definition of “Native American” to “is or was indigenous to the United States,” from, “is indigenous to the United States.” The proposed definition fits in line with the anthropological consensus that different Indian groups became extinct in North America, as well as leaves open the possibility that Europeans could have been here first.
By on 5/11/08 at 2:14 pm
“In 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, after whom my alma mater Amherst College is named, advised one of his officers to give blankets infected with smallpox to Indians, and the officer seems to have acted on the idea. Other allegations of biological warfare do not stand up to scrutiny.”
I think even this is BS. It’s never been proven that you can spread smallpox by blankets. There’s quite a lot of evidence against it.
This link:
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox/overview/disease-facts.asp
doesn’t mention blankets as a means of transmission. You need prolonged face-to-face transmission.
By on 5/13/08 at 9:11 pm
The nation changed hands in the 19th century and it signaled the demise of a culture. The same changing of the guard may be occuring now and, for those of us who feel the loss of American culture and the expectancy that that culture endure, it should inform our empathy for those that have come before. The future is unwritten, however, and we ought learn from the past and wise up quick.
By on 5/13/08 at 10:48 pm
“We invaded their nation, wiped out their culture, destroyed their country and murdered most of their people. End of story.”
Pretty much what most of them did on a regular basis to each other.
Really, the idea that European conquest is the “end of the story” is precisely the problem here. There is one historical standard of Europeans, and no standard for everyone else. How did the Mongols conquer China? How did Islam conquer North Africa? How did the Zulu empire expand? Through brutal conquest and displacement.
And, as the article clearly points out, most Indians died of disease and a disease the took many whites with it.
By on 5/14/08 at 3:28 pm
You sound to me rather like a white supremacist, American nationalist, fundamentalist, Eminent Domain spouting Libertarian. Your nit-picking over the semantics of definitions and your gushing praise for the compassion of the invading armies of white occupiers is a breathtaking leap of absurdity. We invaded their nation, wiped out their culture, destroyed their country and murdered most of their people. End of story. I imagine you could produce an extremely glib, seemingly erudite piece praising, justifying and glorifying the bold attempt of Adolf Hitler to elevate the noble “white race” to its rightful place of supremacy. American Renaissance, New Century Foundation. What a surprise! There is NO white race. There are no other races. There is only the HUMAN RACE. All other distinctions are minor ethnic variations dictated by adaption to differing environments. I am caucasion. People like you make me ashamed of the color of my skin.
By on 5/7/08 at 8:04 pm