[IPSM] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Dismantling Empire

[Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movment - Montreal]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a longtime activist, university professor, and
writer, spoke last night at Concordia University .  Her talk, entitled
"Cowboys and Indians: A Historical Perspective on US Imperialism", was
based on the first of the two essays found below, and was originally
published in the Monthly Review.  Her overarching message to social
justice and anti-war activists was to "assume the responsibility of being
citizens of an empire that must be dismantled".  Tonight, November 2nd,
she will be reading from her book at an event entitled "An Affair to
Remember: Miskitos, Contras, Sandinistas in Reagan's Imperial War". 
Information on this event follows:

November 2nd, 2004,
doors 7:30, reading starts 8pm sharp
Cafe La Petite Gaulle,
2525 rue Centre
(metro Charlevoix)
With guests, e.may and efm: poetry and prowess, and Trish Salah
The venue is wheelchair accessible (the entrance has a 2 inch step).

For more accessibility and other information:
tel: (514) 848-7585 or qpirgevents at yahoo.com


Below are two articles by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the first, as previously
mentioned, was presented at a talk last night.  The second, entitled
"Indian Country", was recently published at www.counterpunch.org.

In Solidarity,
the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement
ipsm at resist dot ca

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The Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"We were like Custer. We were surrounded."
—Sgt. James J. Riley explaining why he ordered surrender
 in an engagement in Nasiriyah, Iraq on March 23, 2003.1


At the onset of the U.S. military invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd
emotionally queried: “What is happening to this country? When did we
become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide
to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and
doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we
abandon diplomacy when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?”


As a historian, I would have to respond to Senator Byrd that 1776 or
thereabouts was when. Many admirable U.S. anti-imperialists have been
making the same point as Senator Byrd. An erasure of history is at the
heart of some of the most anti-imperialist critiques of the Bush
administration’s foreign policy. Continuity is hidden, and a small
departure is exaggerated. From Gore Vidal to Manning Marable to Michael
Moore “lost democracy” is a refrain. Edward Said writes: “The doctrine of
military pre-emption was never voted on by the American people or their
representatives
 It seems so monumentally criminal that important words
like democracy and freedom have been hijacked, used as a mask for pillage,
taking over territory and settling scores.” Said ends his essay by,
correctly, stating: “Bush looks like a cowboy.”2


That observation is also common to critics of the war around the world.
Although it is meant to be understood as a bad thing, in fact, the cowboy
is not a negative metaphor for many U.S. citizens, particularly those who
are descendants of the old settler class, as are the majority of the
ruling class and officers of the military. How many generations of
children now have grown up gleefully playing cowboys and Indians?


Perhaps the fact that I grew up as a child of a cowboy father and Indian
mother narrows my view of this metaphor, making it loom too large and out
of perspective. Then again, maybe that experience brings with it some
insider knowledge.


The Rise of White Supremacy and Imperialism/Capitalism

To allow no dissent from the truth was exactly the reason they had come to
America.3

Are your garments spotless?

Are they white as snow?

Are they washed in the blood of the lamb?


As this traditional evangelical Christian hymn suggests, whiteness as an
ideology is far more complex than mere skin color, although skin color has
been and continues to be a key component of racism within the United
States. The origins of white supremacy as it is now experienced and
institutionalized—and denied—in the United States (and, due to colonialism
and imperialism, throughout the world) can be traced to the prior
colonizing ventures of Christian Crusades into Muslim-controlled
territories, and to the Calvinist Protestant colonization of Ireland.
These were the models for the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, and
are the two strands that merge in the genetic makeup of U.S. society.


The Christian Crusades against Islam/Africa gave birth to the law of
limpieza de sangre, cleanliness of blood, which the Spanish Inquisition
was mandated to investigate and determine. The Christian Crusades,
particularly the Castilian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and expulsion
of Jews and Muslims, created the seed ideology and institutions for modern
colonialism with its necessary tools—racist ideology and justification for
genocide. The law of limpieza de sangre was perhaps the most important
cargo on the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus, sailing under the flag
of Spain.


Great Britain emerged as an overseas colonial power a century later than
Spain, and absorbed aspects of the Spanish caste system into its
colonialist rationalizations, particularly regarding African slavery,
within the context of chosen people/New Jerusalem Calvinism and
Puritanism.


In the pre-formation of the United States, Puritanism and Calvinist
Protestantism uniquely refined white supremacy as a political/religious
ideology (a covenant with God) requiring the shedding of white blood for
purification. The Ulster-Scots Calvinists were the settler/colonizers of
Northern Ireland and constituted a majority of settlers in the western
lands over the Appalachian/Allegheny spine of English North America. Their
origin story became the origin story of the United States. It tells of
pilgrim/settlers doing God’s will and forging into the promised land,
being surrounded by savages, and killing the heathen (first the Irish in
Ulster, then the Native Americans in North America). Thereby, the
sacrifice and blood shed is perceived as proof of the sanctity and purity
of the nation itself. All the descendants of those who made such
sacrifices are the true inheritors of the land.


The Crusades and Purity of Blood


In the eighth century, Muslims came to power in all but the northern
fringe of the Iberian Peninsula and ruled for centuries. However, by the
end of the fifteenth century, the last Muslim state held only a foothold
in Granada, an enclave on the southeastern coast surrounded by the
expansionist Christian monarchies of Castile and Aragon. During those
intervening seven hundred years, various Christian kingdoms based in the
north of the peninsula attacked Moorish territory, seizing their lands and
properties. The Christian crusaders named this process La Reconquista, the
reconquest. This military/religious project created the institutions and
practices later established in Spanish America, especially the encomienda
(conquered land granted to the conquistador along with the people on it,
with the conquistador earning the noble title of hidalgo).

The Reconquest meant the slow and systematic extension of Christian power
over all those lands that had been Muslim since the eighth century, and so
involved the clash of Christian and Muslim armies and societies. What the
Reconquest destroyed, however, was the racial and religious coexistence,
which despite incessant armed conflict had distinguished the society of
mediaeval Spain. It was claimed by a contemporary that when the Christians
went to war against the Moors, it was ‘neither because of the law (of
Mahommed) nor because of the sect that they hold to’, but because of the
lands they occupied and for this reason alone.4


Before Christian aggression and eventual expulsion of the Moors from the
Iberian Peninsula, Christians, Jews, and Muslims had enjoyed a mutual
tolerance so the question of racial or religious conflict had not existed.


The Vatican created the original institution of the Inquisition in 1179
for routing out Christian heretics, the original mandate being free of
racialization. However, the 1400s in Spain saw increasing Inquisition
investigations of conversos, that is, Christian converted Jews, and of
moriscos, Christian converted Muslims. Jews and Muslims who refused to
convert were finally deported en masse from the Iberian Peninsula at the
end of the fifteenth century. (It is said that Columbus watched the people
being loaded on to ships for deportation as he set sail in 1492).


Before this time the concept of biological race based on “blood” is not
known to have existed as law or taboo in Christian Europe or anywhere else
in the world.5 As scapegoating and suspicion of conversos and moriscos
intensified in Christian Spain, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre,
“purity of blood,” was popularized and had the effect of granting
psychological, and increasingly legal, privileges to “Old Christians”
thereby obscuring the class differences between the poor and the rich,
i.e. between the landed aristocracy and the land-poor peasants and
shepherds. In Cervantes’ Don Quixote the impoverished Sancho Panza says,
“I am an Old Christian, and to become an earl that is sufficient,” to
which Don Quixote replies, “And more than sufficient.” And Cervantes’
contemporary, Lope de Vega, wrote in his PeribE1F1ez: “soy un hombre,
/aunque de villana casta, /limpio de sangre y jam /de hebrea o mora
manchada” (I am a man, although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and
with no mixture of Jewish or Moorish blood.)


What we witness in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Spain is the
first instance of class leveling based on imagined biological racial
differences, indeed the origin of white supremacy, the necessary ideology
of colonial projects in America and Africa. We see here the beginnings of
the “thousand year Reich” of settler capitalism/colonialism, and its
characteristic tug of war over the hearts and minds of the majority of the
settlers—the yeomanry, and later the “white” working classes. Historian
David Stannard, in his American Holocaust, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992) adds to Elie Wiesel’s famous observation, that the road to
Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom, the caveat that
on the way to Auschwitz the road led straight through the heart of
America. The ideology of white supremacy was paramount in neutralizing the
class antagonisms of the landless against the landed, and in the
distribution of the confiscated lands and properties of Moors, Jews, and
of Irish, Native Americans and Africans. Kamen describes the process in
fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain:

a situation in which the highest and lowest classes could maintain social
mobility without great fear of social distinction...as with the genuine
aristocracy, the concepts of honour, pride and hidalguEDa become the very
foundations of action...In so far as this concept of honour was identified
with the virtues of the Old Christian nobility, deference to honour became
deference to the nobility...the Castilian nobility continued to regard
their functions as essentially the same that they had always been. Their
task was to fight and not to labour. HidalguEDa would not permit a
nobleman, even the lowest rank of nobleman, to labour or to trade...6


The “Old Christian” Spanish, whatever their economic situation, were
allowed to identify with the worldview of the nobility. As one Spanish
historian puts it, “the common people looked upwards, wishing and hoping
to climb, and let themselves be seduced by chivalric ideals: honour,
dignity, glory, and the noble life.”7


We can also locate the origin of genocide and its linkage to colonialism
in the late 1400s in Spain. Two punishments were devised to root out
uncertain Christians deemed to have unclean blood: the extermination of
many burned at the stake and the social isolation and persecution of the
rest.


Ireland and the English Inquisition


During the early 1600s the English conquered Northern Ireland, and
declared a half-million acres of land open to settlement; the settlers who
contracted with the devil of early colonialism came mostly from western
Scotland. England had previously conquered Wales and southern and eastern
Ireland, but had never previously attempted on such a scale to remove the
indigenous population and “plant” settlers. The English policy of
exterminating Indians in North America was foreshadowed by this English
colonization of Northern Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was
systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole
clans exterminated and the remainder brutalized. A “wild Irish”
reservation was even attempted.8 The planted settlers were Calvinist
Protestants, assured by their divines that they had been chosen by God for
salvation (and title to the lands of Ulster). The native (and Papist)
Irish were definitely not destined for salvation, but rather the reverse,
both in the present and hereafter.


The “plantation” of Ulster followed centuries of intermittent warfare in
Ireland, and was as much the culmination of a process as a departure. In
the sixteenth century, the official in charge of the Irish province of
Munster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, ordered that:

The heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed
in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the
place where he incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground
by eche side of the waie ledying into his owne tente so that none could
come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a
lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem...[It brought] greate terrour to
the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers,
children, kindsfolke, and freinds...9


Bounties were paid for the Irish heads brought in and later only the scalp
or ears were required. A century later, in North America, Indian heads and
scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Native Americans
picked up the practice from the colonizers. The first English colonial
settlement in North America had been planted in Newfoundland in the summer
of 1583, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert.


During the mid-nineteenth century, influenced by Social Darwinism, some
English scientists peddled the theory that the Irish (and of course all
people of color) had descended from apes, while the English were
descendants of man who had been created by God in His image. Thus the
English were “angels” and the Irish (and other colonized peoples) were a
lower species, what today U.S. white supremacists call “mud people,”
products of the process of evolution.10 It is the seventeenth century
Ulster Calvinist ideology in late nineteenth century modern guise.


White Supremacy, the U.S. Origin Myth, and U.S. Imperialism


Two paragraphs, rarely cited, from the Declaration of Independence raise
thorny questions about Anglo-American imperialist roots in forming the
breakaway United States of America. This was not simply the founding of a
republic for propertied, mostly slave-owning, white males, but more
importantly a settler-colonialist and imperialist-aggressor state.

He [King George] has endeavored to prevent the population of these States;
for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners,
refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising
the conditions of new appropriations of lands. [The treaty ending the
French and Indian War made British settlement over the
Allegheny/Appalachian line into Indian country illegal and ordered the
return of those tens of thousand settlers who had already squatted there,
demanding land rights.]

He [King George] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has
endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless
Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished
destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.


Not only did founding father Thomas Jefferson pen those words, he was also
the real architect of the genocide and confiscation of the land of settled
indigenous peoples later termed the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal.


Reconciling empire and liberty was a historic obsession of U.S. political
thinkers and historians, in the twenty-first century openly being debated
once again. Thomas Jefferson had hailed the United States as an “empire
for liberty.” Andrew Jackson coined the phrase, “extending the area of
freedom” to describe the process in which slavery had been introduced into
Texas in violation of governing Mexican laws, to be quickly followed by a
slaveholder’s rebellion and U.S. annexation. The term “freedom” became a
euphemism for the continental and worldwide expansion of the world’s
leading slave power. The contradictions, particularly since the initial
rationalization for U.S. independence was anti-empire, are multiple.


It is easy to date U.S. imperialism to Andrew Jackson, but he only carried
out the original plan, initially as an army general who led three
genocidal wars against the Muskogee in Georgia/Florida, then as the most
popular president ever, and the organizer of the expulsion of all native
peoples east of the Mississippi to the Oklahoma Territory.


Although white supremacy was the working rationalization and ideology of
English theft of Native American lands, and especially the justification
for African slavery, the independence bid by what became the United States
of America is more problematic, in that democracy/equality and
supremacy/dominance/empire do not make an easy fit. It was during the
1820s, the era of Jacksonian Democracy, that the unique U.S. origin myth
was created, James Fenimore Cooper the initial scribe. James Fenimore
Cooper’s re-invention of America in The Last of the Mohicans has become
the official U.S. origin story. Herman Melville called Cooper “our
national novelist,” and, of course, he was the great hero of Walt Whitman
who sang the song of manhood and the American super-race through empire.
As an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war against Mexico, 1846–1848,
Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand U.S. troops in Mexico in
order to establish a regime change there, stating, “whose efficiency and
permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out
enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the
immense dead capital of the country will find its way.”11


Whitman’s sentiment (and he was the most beloved writer of his time, and
still beloved by contemporary U.S. poets, particularly the Beats) followed
the already established U.S. origin myth that had the frontier settlers
replacing the native peoples, similar to the parallel Afrikaner origin
myth in South Africa.


To the extent that African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto
Ricans, and non-European immigrants are allowed (and are willing) to
embrace and embody U.S. patriotism, they may be accepted as conversos, as
the Spanish Inquisition termed those who professed Christianity despite
their “unclean” blood. Yet in the end, only the Old Settlers are true
Americans.


This white supremacist ideology formed the core of U.S. foreign policy as
well, from its origins to the present. As Samir Amin pointed out: “During
this entire phase [the Cold War] the East-West conflict was presented as a
struggle between socialism and capitalism, although it was never anything
other than the conflict between the periphery and the center, manifested
in its most radical form.”12


Why Do We Date U.S. Imperialism Only to 1898, and as an Aberration?


“American” supremacy and populist imperialism are inseparable from the
content of the U.S. origin story and the definition of patriotism in the
United States today. And it began at the beginning, even before the
founding of the United States, not as an accident or aberration in the
progression of democracy. The founding of the United States marked a split
in the British Empire, not an anticolonial liberation movement.


The very term, “frontier,” used to define the border between independent
Native American nations and the United States, implies a foreign country
on the other side of a demarcation line—a country to be invaded, its
inhabitants controlled and then expelled, while settlers move in protected
by the army. Everything accounted for in the first hundred years plus as
“movement of the frontier” was plain and simple imperialism, fitting all
the definitions thereof.


During this new phase of U.S. imperialism following 9/11, accelerating
with the invasion, occupation, and administration of Iraq, commentators
and historians—left and right—but mostly liberal Democrats, observe that
the United States is not very good at imperialism, with vague references
to the Spanish-American War. Actually, the United States has not become
the most powerful military machine and dominant power on earth and in
history by accident or by staying home and minding the cows and banks like
the Swiss, who are capitalist and rich, but not imperialists.


“Well, so what?” many of my antiwar and social-justice friends ask me,
asserting that the truth would alienate “ordinary people,” whoever they
are. Who would know since it has never been tried? Besides, I have my
doubts that most of my leftist friends are themselves prepared to accept
that the very origin of the United States is fundamentally imperialist,
rather than imperialism being a divergence from a well-intentioned path.
The public acceptance of media propaganda justifying U.S. government
aggression falls into the pattern of a belief system based on the origin
story that is uninterrupted and uninterrogated by us, the left.


Of course, there are many leftist and social democratic thinkers and
scholars who challenge the 1898 age of imperialism myth. Most notably,
Monthly Review has never strayed from understanding the long history of
U.S. imperialism, particularly in Latin America. Also, William Appleman
Williams and a whole generation of radical U.S. historians acknowledge
“empire as a way of life” the title of Williams’ 1980 book of essays (New
York: Oxford University Press) that includes an exhaustive list of
overseas interventions dating back to day one, giving substance to the
U.S. Marine theme, “the shores of Tripoli.” And with the Iraq
intervention, many antiwar critics have compiled such lists.


The expansion of the United States from sea to shining sea is coming under
reexamination, even from bourgeois historians, with the sudden unabashed
assertion of U.S. imperialism. Warren Zimmermann, in his recent book on
the frankly imperial aims of the Teddy Roosevelt administration, First
Great Triumph (New York: Farrar Straus and Geroux, 2002), introduces his
material with words rarely found in mainstream literature:

Americans like to pretend that they have no imperial past. Yet they have
shown expansionist tendencies since colonial days...Overland expansion,
often at the expense of Mexicans and Indians, was a marked feature of
American history right through the period of the Civil War, by which time
the United States had reached its continental proportions.

The War for American Independence, which created most of the founding
myths of the Republic, was itself a war for expansion...Thomas Jefferson
nursed even grander plans for empire.13


Warren Zimmermann himself knows something of the practical side of
imperialism. He was the last U.S. ambassador to pre-civil war Yugoslavia.
Surely it is past time for leftists to abandon the Whitmanesque
celebratory myths of a democratic American manifest destiny.


Conclusion


As a graduate student in Latin American History at UCLA in the mid-1960s,
I first learned about imperialism, and it was my good fortune to have
access to Marxist analysis. However, it was not until the early 1970s when
I became involved as an expert witness in Native American court cases
regarding U.S.-Indian treaties, that I came to grasp the true nature and
development of U.S. imperialism. At that same time, a now deceased mentor,
Canadian Native leader and Marxist historian, Howard Adams, gave me a book
that had a great influence on me.14 That book was Pierre JalE9e’s
Imperialism in the Seventies (New York: The Third Press, 1973) which
contained a brilliant introduction by Harry Magdoff. Harry’s cautionary
words three decades ago resonate even more loudly today:

The major obstacle to such enlightenment is the pervasiveness of the
ideological rationalization for imperialism. The extent of this
pervasiveness is not easy to perceive because such rationalization is
deep-seated. Its roots are intertwined with the accepted, conventional
modes of thought and the consciousness of a people. Thus, they are located
in the false patriotism and racism that sink deeply and imperceptibly into
the individual’s sub-conscious; in the traditions, values, and even
aesthetics of the cultural environment—an environment evolved over
centuries during which self-designated “superior” cultures assumed the
right to penetrate and dominate “inferior” cultures. These roots are also
buried in the sophisticated theorems of both liberal and conservative
economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and history. For
these reasons, citizens of an imperialist country who wish to understand
imperialism must first emancipate themselves from the seemingly endless
web of threads that bind them emotionally and intellectually to the
imperialist condition.15


This, I believe, is the most important task for the antiwar and social
justice movements in the United States today—to assume the responsibility
of being citizens of an empire that must be dismantled.


Notes

1 Peter Baker, “Wrong Turn in Nasiriyah Led to Soldiers’ Capture
Maintenance Company Drove Into Waiting Ambush,” Washington Post, April 13,
2003.

2 Edward Said, “Give Us Back Our Democracy: Americans Have Been Cheated
and Lied To,” (www. CounterPunch.org, 4/21/03).

3 Perry Miller, Errand in the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1956), 114.

4 Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (New York: New American Library,
1965), 2.

5 Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from
Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 229.

6 Kamen, Inquisition, 117–118.

7 Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, España, un enimgma histórico (2 vols.)(Buenos
Aires, 1962), I, 677.

8 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middletown, Connecticut:
Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 42.

9 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America (New York: W. W. Norton,
1975), 168.

10 L. Perry Curtis, Jr., ed., Apes and Angels (Washington D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution, 1971).

11 Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (New York: Houghton
Mifflin Co, 1997), 95.

12 Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992), 9.

13 Zimmermann, First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux,
2002), 17.

14 Howard Adams, Prison of Grass (Toronto: Free Press, 1974).

15 Pierre Jalée, Imperialism in the Seventies (New York: Third Press,
1973), xvii–xviii.

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"Indian  Country"
By  ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ
October 11, 2004
(http://www.counterpunch.org/ortiz10122004.html)

"at least ten Indians  are (to be) killed for each white life lost.You
should not allow  the troops to settle down on the defensive but carry the
war  to the Indian camps, where the women and children arethe truth 
should be ascertained and reported, but should not delay the  punishment
of the Indians as a people. It is not necessary to  find the very men who
committed the acts, but destroy all of  the same breed."

-U.S. Major General William T. Sherman, 1866


27 February 1991: Oxford,  Ohio.

This morning I woke to a winter  wonderland, nice clean snow, and that
silence that snow seems  to effect. Now, a few hours later, the
temperature has risen,  and a steady rain is coming down. The snow is
nearly all gone  -- just a few patches here and there. The sky is stern,
but the  air is cold and clean.


I heard on the news that the  smoke from the oil fires in Kuwait was
seeding clouds and bringing  down torrential rain -- black rain. The smell
of oil. I smiled  when I heard the description. I never knew the smell of
air without  oil until I left Oklahoma when I was 21. For a long time I
missed  the odor. Even now when I drive by Hercules, outside San
Francisco,  or down through Bakersfield or Long Beach, or through Houston 
or Lake Charles, as I just did in January, I catch a waft of  oil in the
air and feel a warm fluid flow through me, followed  instantly by a sharp
pain. Memories of childhood are like that,  especially a childhood such as
mine in rural western Oklahoma,  my dad driving a Mobil truck. The SOHIO
oil pipeline was our  main diversion as children; I think we believed it
had been put  there for children to play on.


This morning, I thought about  the children of the Persian Gulf, of Arab
children, the poor  ones, and the children of those scared-looking
Filipina servants.  I suppose the smell of oil seems like a natural
phenomenon to  them, too, and the pipeline is about their only diversion.
Unless  you count war, and the smell of gunpowder.


William Appleman Williams,  the late historian, described American
imperialism as "a  strategy of annihilation unto unconditional surrender."
 Some of us used to know that, during the Vietnam War. Did we  think it
had gone away, evaporated? Maybe we bought into the  "superpower" myth,
which reasoned that once one "empire"  collapsed or cried Uncle, the other
would follow suit. Maybe  we forgot what we should have known: that the
United States of  America has been imperialistic from its founding, and is
the  principal heir to the historical legacy of imperialism. "We 
Americans," said Williams, "have produced very, very  few
anti-imperialists. Out idiom has been empire, and so the  primary division
was and remains between the soft and the hard."


SMART BOMBS: I have been reading  more than I ever thought possible about
the machinery of war.  One commentary in particular struck me: "It is
difficult  to imagine the scale of the air war because it is unprecedented
 in human history... Not only is the air war distant and remote,  and much
of it secret, but we have neither the experience nor  the language to
grasp it... Since the technology of the air war  is always developing and
since much of it is covered with secrecy,  the public is never aware of
the newest lethal systems being  prepared or used... The importance of
reducing American ground  casualties is one of the key arguments used to
support the electronic  battlefield... [that] even further depersonalizes
a depersonalized  war."


This may sound like a recent  report, but it is not, It is about the war
in Southeast Asia,  circa 1971, from Tom Hayden's The Love of Possession
is a  Disease with Them. Depressingly, the secrecy surrounding  such
bombing 20 years ago was not present in the Gulf war. Rather,  during the
six weeks of nonstop bombing of Iraq, each day in  press briefings U.S.
military commanders reported, openly and  without embarrassment, and
without challenge from the press corps  or negative public reaction, on
the use of napalm and fragmentation  bombs, on B-52 carpet-bombing, day
after day, week after week.


In interviews after the war,  B-52 pilots were excited by their success.
"We rediscovered  high-level bombing," Col. Randall E. Wooten told the New
 York Times. In 19 days, the 70 B-52s dropped more than 1,158  tons of
bombs, including anti-personnel cluster bomb units. "Rolling Thunder" is
what they called B-52 carpet-bombing  in Vietnam. And, after two weeks of
delivering "smart"  bombs and cruise missiles, the military turned to
Rolling Thunder  in Iraq. They did it to create terror. It was the
Americans,  in front of their televisions, who were impressed with "smart"
 bombs, not the Iraqis. Terror, extreme exemplary violence, was  necessary
to annihilate unto unconditional surrender.


INDIAN COUNTRY: On February  19, Brigadier General Richard Neal, briefing
reporters in Riyadh,  Saudi Arabia, stated that the U.S. military wanted
to be certain  of speedy victory once they committed land forces to
"Indian  Country." The following day, in a little-publicized statement  of
protest, the National Congress of American Indians pointed  out that
15,000 Native Americans were serving as combat troops  in the Gulf.


But the term "Indian Country"  is not merely an insensitive racial slur to
indicate the enemy,  tastelessly employed by accident. (Neither Neal nor
any other  military authority has apologized for the statement.). "Indian 
Country" is a military term of trade, a technical term,  such as
"collateral damage" and "ordnance," which appears in military training
manuals and is used on a regular  basis. "Indian Country" is the military
term for "behind enemy lines." Its current use should serve to remind us 
of the origins and development of the U.S. military, as well  as the
nature of our political and social history: annihilation  unto
unconditional surrender. The historical context is, I think, essential to
understanding the present war, and the love of the war we are witnessing.


When the redundant "ground  war" against Iraq was begun, at the front of
the miles of  heavy metal killing machines were armored scouting vehicles
of  the Second Armored Calvary Regiment (ACR), a self-contained elite 
unit that was made famous by being at the head of Patton's Third  Army
when it crossed Europe during World War II. In the Gulf  war, the ACR
played the role of chief scouts for the U.S. Seventh  Corps. A retired
commander of the ACR proudly told his TV interviewer  that the Second ACR
was formed in the 1830s to fight the Seminoles,  and that it had its first
great victory when it finally defeated  the Seminoles in the Florida
Everglades in 1836. I do not think  putting the Second ACR in front of the
ground assault on Iraq  was an accident. It was just another Indian war in
the U.S. military  tradition of annihilation unto unconditional surrender.


The Ohio Valley is a strange  place to be during the Gulf war and the orgy
of patriotism. As  an historian, I feel I am almost reliving that period
two centuries  ago when U.S. imperialism was cast in blood, and when
annihilation  unto unconditional surrender was first employed by the
U.S.A.,  just down the road from where I am, at the Battle of Fallen
Timbers.


In the late 1780s, Native Nations,  led by Joseph Brant (Mohawk), Little
Turtle (of the Miami Nation,  after which this university is named), Blue
Jacket (Shawnee)  and others, had launched a series of attacks against
encroaching  Euroamerican settlers across Indiana, Ohio, and western
Pennsylvania.  In September, 1790, a force of 1,500 soldiers was sent by
President/General Washington to silence Native resistance to occupation
and colonization,  but the Native guerrilla fighters ambushed them in
northwestern  Ohio, killing two hundred soldiers. The following year,
Washington  sent six thousand troops who met a similar fate.


The Native alliance was able  to clear the entire Ohio area of the
colonizers. But Washington  was determined to crush Native resistance. In
the autumn of 1793,  General Anthony Wayne led a third army of conquest
into Ohio.  Using a scorched-earth strategy, the U.S. forces overwhelmed 
the two thousand resistance fighters and forced the signing of  an
agreement ceding the entire southern two-thirds of Ohio.


Subsequently, the U.S. military  hammered away, leveling Native towns,
burning crops, reducing  the Shawnee and the Delaware, the Miami and the
Wyandotte. In  1809 (Everything at Miami University dates back to 1809,
when  the university was founded), under the Treaty of Fort Wayne,  the
U.S. opened three million acres of Delaware and Pottawatomie  land in
Indiana to settlement. (If you identify the names of  these Native Nations
with Oklahoma, you are correct; the war  refugees were forcibly deported
to Oklahoma territory).


Out of the carnage and ruins  was born an incomparable liberation
movement, led by Tecumseh,  the Ho Chi Minh of North America. In 1809,
Tecumseh, and his  brother, Elskwatawa, of the Shawnee Nation, began to
travel among  the Native villages of all the Nations. They warned of their
 common threat and called for an alliance against the invaders.  Their
headquarters became the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico,  from the
Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi. Tecumseh denounced  the United
States as wicked and corrupt, a source of evil.


In 1811, William Henry Harrison,  governor of the U.S.-claimed "Indiana
Territory," organized  a thousand mercenaries with full authority from the
Secretary  of War to do whatever was necessary to wipe out the movement. 
The mercenaries attacked the Native headquarters and burned  it to the
ground, but most escaped and set the region on fire  for several months.
At a fierce engagement near Detroit, at  the "Battle of the Thames," as it
is called in U.S.  military annals, Tecumseh fell.


The Native alliance shifted  its theater of operation to the Southeast,
under Creek Nation  leadership. General Andrew Jackson headed the
Tennessee militia,  another mercenary outfit, "panting for the orders of
our  government to punish a ruthless foe," as Jackson put it  in 1808.
(One of his officers, Davy Crockett, would later be  a mercenary on behalf
of imperialism in Mexico and die at the  Alamo.) By 1814, Jackson's
scorched-earth campaigns and cannon  had destroyed the southeast nations'
farmlands and food supplies  and reduced their numbers by slaughtering
women and children  in the villages. Jackson seized 22 million acres of
Creek land,  nearly two-thirds of their nation.


The warriors from all the nations  allied in resistance, along with
thousands of Africans who had  escaped slavery, moved into the Florida
Everglades, then Spanish  territory. The First Seminole War began in 1818.
The following  year, the U.S. annexed Spanish Florida and claimed to be
fighting  terrorists. The Seminole Nation is a nation born in struggle. 
"Seminole" means rebel in the Creek (Muskogee) language,  which was the
common language of that new people. The Seminoles  were never defeated and
never signed a treaty, but after the  third war, in 1836, the U.S. stopped
fighting them. By then,  Jackson was president and had dissolved Native
title in the Southeast  and overridden the Supreme Court's decision to
prohibit U.S. settlement in Cherokee territory. The Nations east of the
Mississippi  were forced to relocate to Oklahoma.


It was here--in the Ohio Valley,  the "old Northwest"--that the U.S.
military was formed,  in five decades of unrelenting war, of annihilation
unto unconditional  surrender. It was here that U.S. imperialism was born
and its  ideology fixed, and that U.S. nationalism was defined,
inseparable  from imperialism.


TOUGH LOVE: I kept hoping  we would lose the war. Of course, it was only a
far-fetched  dream, the possibility of losing the war in the Gulf. I never
 really had any confidence in that result. Yet, I kept hoping  that Allah,
or God, or Fate, or the Goddess, or the Force, maybe  Martians, maybe even
Soviets, would intervene and make the impossible,  possible. David and
Goliath, something definitive to prove that  might does not make right, to
prove that the only solution to  conflict is dialog and cooperation, to
put a brake on this tendency  to annihilate unto unconditional surrender.


Even if my dream of losing  had come true, it would have come late, maybe
too late. Our last  opportunity to have changed course, perhaps, was the
1979 Iranian  hostage crisis. The Iranians were demanding an international
 tribunal to investigate U.S. war crimes related to the CIA role  in
forming and maintaining SAVAK, the Shah of Iran's murderous  secret
police. Of course, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were  wrong to occupy
an embassy and seize diplomats, and the U.S.  took Iran to the World Court
and won the case. Yet, just imagine,  what if President Carter had gone on
television in 1980, preempting Gorbachev's call to a new order of
cooperation, disarmament and international law, to tell us the truth: that
the Iranians did  not lie in their accusations, that we apologize, that it
was  wrong to overthrow their government, that it was wrong to prop  up a
decadent monarch and train his secret police, that our government 
renounced past invasions, interventions, toppling leaders, not  only in
Iran, but in North American Native Nations, in Mexico  over and over,
taking half the country, Guatemala, El Salvador,  Nicaragua, Chile,
Uruguay, Argentina, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,  Greece, Cuba, and
practically every other nook and cranny of  the world, that we would never
behave that way again, that we  would lift strangling embargoes against
Vietnam and Cuba. What  if? Instead, from the Carter era, we have the
neutron bomb,  the Stealth bomber, the Cruise missile, and smarter weapons
than  ever before. Just consider that fateful second half of 1980.  In
August, at the U.N. Special Session on Development, the Carter 
administration sent a low level delegation to announce that the  New
International Economic Order was dead in the water. In October,  Iraq,
acting as a U.S. client, attacked Iran, initiating eight  years of war,
leaving millions dead and maimed. In November,  Reagan was elected. In
December, the entire Salvadoran democratic  opposition leadership was
assassinated and four U.S. churchwomen  were brutally murdered.


A strategy of annihilation  unto unconditional surrender." So, the
imperial policy  of the U.S. continues in the present situation. Extreme
exemplary  violence was the rationale behind the cruel aerial bombing of 
Iraq every minute, twenty-four hours a day, for six weeks. How  many times
did we hear authority figures (mostly old white men)  tell us that we
would not have to act as world policeman and  do future wars, that the
treatment of Iraq would show other would-be  wrong-doers the price of
errant behavior. Is not that the philosophy  behind "tough love?"


In Iraqi officers' quarters  in Kuwait City, the U.S. Special Forces found
pigeons in cages  and notes in Arabic strewn over a desk, which they
interpreted  to mean that the Iraqi commanders were communicating with
their  troops, and even with Baghdad, by carrier pigeons.


Now we are at the heroic stage  -- welcome the warriors home, honor them,
not like Vietnam. High tech soldiers fighting an army that communicated by
carrier  pigeons. Something to be proud of.


In December, I heard a Vietnam  vet (a peace activist) say that only
permanent peace could vindicate  58,000 dead American soldiers in Vietnam,
and all the misery  suffered by those who returned; only if Vietnam was
truly the  war to end all wars, revealing as it did the brutality and
senselessness  of war in general, and the wrongness of U.S. imperialism;
only  permanent peace, he said, could allow the Vietnam vet
self-forgiveness  and significance; that another genocidal war against a
brown  people would make him and other Vietnam vets murderers, not fallen
innocents, victims of history. There was a plea in his voice,  a
heartbreaking crack. I thought of what he had said when I  heard a soldier
say to a reporter on National Public Radio, regarding waiting in the
desert for the ground war to begin: "I'm  so tired of just sitting around
here that if I don't get to kill  somebody soon, I'm going to kill
somebody." [Published  in CrossRoads, March 1991]


**************



Fast forward to March 2003.  A rare and little read report from Associated
Press correspondent,  Ellen Nickmeyer, is telling. Once again we find the
armored  scouting vehicles and their troops, reenacting its bloody and 
imperialist history:


March 19, 2003: NEAR THE IRAQI  DESERT, KUWAIT (AP)


Tank crews from the Alpha Company  4th Battalion 64 Armor Regiment perform
a "Seminole Indian  war dance" before convoying to a position near the
Iraqi  border Wednesday, March 19, 2003.


Capt. Phillip Wolford's men  leaped into the air and waved empty rifles in
an impromptu desert  war dance. Troops of the 101st Airborne Division ate
a special  pre-combat meal of lobster and steak. Soldiers sent e-mails  to
loved ones and savored what could be a last good shower for  a long while.


To the ever-louder drone of  warplanes, American soldiers in the northern
desert that will  serve as a launch pad for attacking Iraq engaged
Wednesday in  some final rituals before a war that seemed inevitable


Upon hearing of the attack,  Marine Lance Cpl. Chad Borgmann, 23, of
Sydney, Neb., said: "It's about time. Today we've been here a month and a
week.  We're ready to go."


"It's the right thing  to do. We are going to be part of the liberation of
Iraq,"  said a fellow member of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, Lance 
Cpl Daymond Geer, 20, of Sacramento, Calif.


With no sign that Saddam and  his sons would heed Bush's order to go into
exile, the 20,000  men of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division had received
some of  the first orders Wednesday to line up near Iraq.


With thousands of M1A1 Abrams  tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees
and trucks, the mechanized  infantry unit known as the "Iron Fist" would
be the  only U.S. armored division in the fight, and would likely meet 
any Iraqi defenses head on.


"We will be entering Iraq  as an army of liberation, not domination," said
Wolford  [the commander], of Marysville, Ohio, directing the men of his 
4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment to take down the U.S. flags  fluttering
from their sand-colored tanks.


After a brief prayer, Wolford  leaped into an impromptu desert war dance.
Camouflaged soldiers  joined him, jumping up and down in the sand,
chanting and brandishing  rifles carefully emptied of their rounds


About 300,000 troops--most  of them from the United States, about 40,000
from Britain--were  waiting Wednesday within striking distance of Iraq.
Backing  them were scores of attack helicopters and more than 1,000
airplanes.


Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor, and
writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles she has
published two historical memoirs, Red  Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso,
1997), and Outlaw  Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960­1975 (City 
Lights, 2002), and is working on a third, Norther: Re-Covering  Nicaragua,
about the 1980s contra war against the Sandinistas.