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