Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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whole civilizations and killed off millions of Native<br />
Amerikans to get the land and profits they wanted. We all<br />
know that when the English arrived in Virginia, for example,<br />
they encountered an urban, village-dwelling society far<br />
more skilled than they in the arts of medicine, agriculture,<br />
fishing-and government.*(lO) This civilization was<br />
reflected in a chain of three hundred Indian nations and<br />
peoples stretched from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South<br />
America, many of whom had highly developed societies.<br />
There was, in fact, a greater population in these Indian nations<br />
in 1492 than in all of Western Europe. Recent<br />
scholarly estimates indicate that at the time of Columbus<br />
there were 100 million Indians in the Hemisphere: ten<br />
million in North America, twenty-five million in Central<br />
Mexico, with an additional sixty-five million elsewhere in<br />
Central and Southern America.(l 1)<br />
These numbers have long been concealed, since they give<br />
rise to the logical question of what happened to this great<br />
mass of people. The European invaders-Spanish, Dutch,<br />
English, Portuguese, and French-simply killed off<br />
millions and millions to safeguard their conquest of the<br />
land and provide the disposable slave labor they needed to<br />
launch their "New World". Conservative Western<br />
historical estimates show that the Spanish "reduced" the<br />
Indian population of their colonies from some 50 million<br />
to only 4 million by the end of the 17th Century.(l2)<br />
And from the 10 million Indians that once inhabited<br />
North America, after four centuries of settler invasion<br />
and rule there were in 1900 perhaps 200,000-300,000<br />
surviving descendants in the U.S.A.(13) That was the very<br />
substantial down-payment towards the continuing blood<br />
price that Third-World nations have to pay to sustain the<br />
Euro-Arnerikan way of life.<br />
So when we hear that the settlers "pushed out the<br />
Indians" or "forced the Indians to leave their traditional<br />
hunting grounds", we know that these are just codephrases<br />
to refer politely to the most barbaric genocide imaginable.<br />
It could well be the greatest crime in all of human<br />
history. Only here the Adolph Eichmanns and Heinrich<br />
Himmlers had names like Benjamin Franklin and Andrew<br />
Jackson.<br />
The point is that genocide was not an accident,<br />
not an "excess", not the unintended side-effect of virile<br />
European growth. Genocide was the necessary and<br />
deliberate act of the capitalists and their settler shocktroops.<br />
The "Final Solution" to the "Indian Problem"<br />
was so widely expected by whites that it was openly spoken<br />
of as a commonplace thing. At the turn of the century a<br />
newspaper as "respectable" as the New York Times could<br />
editorially threaten that those peoples who opposed the<br />
new world capitalist order would "be extinguished like the<br />
North American Indian."(l4) Only a relative handful of<br />
Indians survived the time of the great extermination campaigns.<br />
You see, the land wasn't "empty" after all-and<br />
for Arnerika to exist the settlers had to deliberately make<br />
the land "empty".<br />
The second aspect of Colonial Amerika's foundation<br />
was, of course, slavery. It is hardly necessary to reDeat<br />
here the well-known history of that exploitation. What is<br />
necessary is to underline how universally European<br />
capitalist life was dependent upon slavery, and how this exploitation<br />
dictated the very structure of Euro-Amerikan<br />
society.<br />
The mythology of the white masses pretends that<br />
* The first government of the new U.S.A., that of the Articles<br />
of Confederation, was totally unlike any in<br />
autocratic Europe, and had been influenced by the<br />
Government of the Six-Nation Iroquois Confederation.