Excusing or justifying genocide

The end of “The British Rule in India” (NYDT, 25 June 1853) seems to me to fit your description a bit better than the later article, “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” (NYDT 8 August 1853): did you get them muddled up, or would you say the same about both pieces?

Are we supposed to guess?
Kissinger, surely is a possibility (he surely thought it if he didn’t say it).

Your ommission of Trotsky from the list of people who didn’t say it is suspicious, but I can’t believe it of the Old Man.

Hitchens, of course, I’d believe it of — he says the same about the Roman and Norman invasions of Britain somewhere (quite right too in those cases).

It’s that Ha’aretz interview with Benny Morris, isn’t it?

It is Morris, and Harry is right that Hitchens has said basically the same thing.

It always amazes me how otherwise sane people manage to ‘bracket’ the American Holocaust as being something of no relevance to the rest of history …

My impression is that the “Indian problem” was more acute just about everywhere south of the Rio Grande, and the genocide much less. If so, there must be books laying out why Protestant Anglos felt the need to exterminate the indigenous peoples, and Catholic Latinos didn’t. I myself have no idea.
Topography varies, of course, but chunks of South America are similar to the Midwest: Argentina, for instance. I believe the Spanish Crown was bigger on conversion that genocide, and they were more structured.
By odd coincidence, I’m wearing a “Running Strong For American Indian Youth” t-shirt today. Also, more Americans have Indian blood than many people know. I’m blond.

My impression is that the “Indian problem” was more acute just about everywhere south of the Rio Grande, and the genocide much less

You don’t see many Aztecs or Incas these days … not sure about this one.

I still at a loss for about about that interview (read it a few days ago) and not just because of Godwin’s Law.

I don’t know about the second, so I won’t comment, but your first is included in my caveat ” … who won’t fit in”, and I disagree that your third goes through.

I don’t even need to appeal to historical materialism or inevitability to point out that my statement about how capitalism develops has something of the character of an evolutionary argument; I’m suggesting that if this had not happened, then that would not have happened. Compare “You can’t make a civilised society out of a bunch of apes unless they start walking upright and using tools”. I’m not here saying that there was a coherent plan to leave the trees; just that there is a causal and necessary connection between one historical episode and another.

Does co-existence qualify as “not fitting in”? And how can driving someone off their land, or killing them, in order to exploit their national resources be described as “laying down the foundations of common law and private property”? Seems less like nation building than simple murder and theft. Prettify it all you want as material dialectism, it’s still just an ugly way to access wealth.

And, as I said, unnecessary. Canadian capitalism successfully integrated the native populations as part of our nation building. Read up on the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company.

John,

The force of empire was working just as hard in the Southwest. The attempts by the invading Spanish to sublimate the native Americans led the indigenous people to armed struggle for liberation. The Pueblo Revolt in 1680 saw the Indians take Sante Fe, only to see the Spanish return 13 years later. There was enslavement, starvation, and many executions on both sides. This was part of a larger pattern that had been underway since the Spanish arrived in what is now New Mexico in 1598.

Of course, when the Anglos arrived in the American Southwest, the Spanish, originally the sublimators, became the sublimatees. The cycle just repeats: the force of empire is seen as stimuli of conquest and encroachment by the indigenous people; When they resist, they are consider to be barbarians, savages, or in contemporary terms, terrorists; in the struggle for superiority, the bloodshed begins. See my essay here: The Invisible Gun. It is not definitive or comprehensive by any stretch, just food for thought.

Re: dsquared’s comments

I have heard that in the decade or two prior to the Trail of Tears, most Cherokee lived in towns that were market capitalist and about as “industrial” as any small white town in Appalacia or the eventual Confederacy. I have heard this, but not really studied it, so I do not know if it is true. Can anyone here confirm or deny this?

stu, I disagree with the implication of your statements that Canadian capitalism has integrated the native populations as part of our nation building. Different native groups have had very different experiences of integration, the Haida in BC have a very different story than the Natives of Saskatchewan. Pushing people onto reserves removed them from the land and allowed capitalism to thrive almost as effectively as genocide would.

As to how native Canadians can be better integrated into the economic structures of Canada – that’s one of the biggest and most longstanding questions in Canadian politics. We shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back and claiming we’ve all got it figured out.

My knowledge of early European-indigenous relations in the Americas is woefully lacking. But I was under the impression that “ethnic cleansing” (1) was already not an uncommon practice in the Western hemisphere when Europeans first arrived, (2) was routinely attempted against Europeans, when the opportunity arose, and (3) when used by one group against another, was often highly effective at securing the territory necessary for survival and population growth.

If I’m correct on these points (and I welcome correction from the better informed), then it would appear that the chief sin of European-descended inhabitants of the Americas was either (1) not unilaterally disarming themselves of this brutal tactic at the beginning, when their survival on the continent was in jeopardy, or (2) persisting in it long after it had been abandoned (or perhaps eliminated as a viable option, if not as an intention) by everyone else.

I consider (2) a reasonable criticism, if correct, but I’m much less certain that (1) carries serious weight. And, of course, the implications for the original analogy should be obvious.

Jeez Dan, that’s a long way to go in a leaky boat. Maybe you should check out the shaky basis of your argument before starting out on that logic trip.

“Note that the American Indians tend to be of the opinion that the Trail of Tears was rather toward the genocidal end of relocation exercises.“—dsquared

As you admit, in fact the Trail of Tears is not an example of genocide, repugnant as it is.

I have no wish to defend the US’s treatment of its aborigines, only to characterize it in the most truthful manner possible. It is false to characterize it as a policy of genocide from start to finish. It is more correct to characterize it as general intolerance with occasional peaceful coexistence though more frequent “ethnic cleansing” and occasional full-blown genocide. It was many things, in both theory and practice.

The native population of the continental US at Columbus’s arrival can fairly be estimated at around 10 million; the 2000 census puts the aboriginal population at around 3 million. (I wouldn’t be surprised if this current number is significantly greater than its historical low.) A few tribal populations are almost certainly larger today than they ever have been in the past.

Indeed, the Cowboys vs. Indians view of the American west, Kit Carson, the Indian Wars, etc. present a limited view of the US’s treatment of its aboriginals. The greatest reduction of aboriginal populations occured in the northeast and upper midwest prior to the settlement of the US “West”, and hardly a trace of those large populations remain. Much of this occured prior to the American Revolution.

None of this is to say that, in general, the US’s past (and, in many cases, present) treatment of its aboriginal population is anything less than deeply shameful.

Stu–okay, I’m all ears. Which of my premises is mistaken? I’m fairly confident in points (1) and (3), and assumed point (2) because (apart from the fact that it’s embedded in the culture) I couldn’t think of a reason why indigenous American groups would treat the descendants of Europeans better than they would other indigenous American groups. If I’m off-base, though, please correct me.

Stu–that’s an excellent point. There were many different nations/tribes/ethnic groups in the Americas when Europeans arrived, and they were treated–and treated each other–in many different ways. In those cases where my assumptions hold, my general point stands (and likewise for my reference to the original analogy). But I’ll freely concede that the history of interaction between any particular indigenous group and Europeans may as likely be 180 degrees off from my assumptions as in accord with them.

That whole article on Totten’s blog was just creepy. Morally justifying ethnic cleansing is just a step away from justifying genocide. It’s a thinly-concealed argument that it’s okay to kill a lot of innocents if you think that it’s necessary for your own survival.

The difference is, with an exchange of population, the population (or most of it) gets to be alive at the end of the process: with genocide, not so much.

Exchanges of population happened, for example, between Greece and Turkey after the Greeks’ idiotic invasion of Turkey in the early Twenties. The East Prussians and Sudeten Germans were kicked out of their lands after WW2.

Not pleasant, sometimes the best of bad choices. But don’t confuse moving people with killing people: two completely different operations.

And on British India: compare the population stats with American Indians! There was no white settlement of India to speak of, so no need to move (let alone kill) any natives to make room. There was (by today’s standards) a generally doctrinaire, Iaisser-faire attitude to famines; but the deaths, on the whole, neither helped nor hindered the imperial cause, and certainly weren’t desired by the British authorities.

Just some facts about the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears.

The Cherokees of Georgia who were re-located to Oklahoma on the trail of tears had previously made a conscious decision to take on the “white man’s ways” in a deliberate attempt to assimilate. They thought this would lead to their acceptance as full-fledged Americans.

This effort included establishment of a written language, individual land ownership, and European American agricultural models including (to a surprisingly large and unappreciated extent) African slave ownership.

The white Georgians weren’t buying it, though. The expulsion of the Cherokees and their slaves was solely based upon racism, not conflicting economic models.

If you go to Oklahoma today, you will find several towns made up of descendants of the Cherokees sent west on the Trail of Tears. If you go to Tahlequah, OK and look up, you will see “N*gger Hill,” inhabited by the “Freedman”, the descendants of the Cherokee’s black slaves.

The Freedmen are still, to this day, fighting to be considered members of the Cherokee tribe, which would grant them certain entitlements that Native American tribe members receive today.

And the trickle down theory of racism continues . . .

“There are also more Jews alive today than there were in 1933. What happened to the American Indians was genocide if anything was.“—dsquared

No. I referred to aboriginal Americans in the continental US, past and present. A similar comparison concering the Jews would be their numbers in Germany and Poland and nearby countries, past and present. Poland, in particular. I suggest you revisit your analogy.

If one needs not an official policy of genocide, but only its effects, then I turn your attention to Ireland circa 1848.

From its formation, US policy regarding aboriginals was sproadically genocidal but largely not; comparing it to the Holocaust is specious. A better comparison would be the czarist pogroms and Stalin’s purges—policies in their formulation not explicitly genocidal but, in many instances, genocidal in practice.

I do not see the necessity of making a moral equivalency between US aboriginal policy and the Holocaust, as the former is horrific in its own right while the latter quite justifiably stands alone in the history of institutionalized human evil. The SS-Einsatzgruppen killed almost 1.5 million Jews in eastern Europe, deliberately and systematically, by hand.

Dsquared–I actually haven’t said a word (yet) about “ethnic cleansing” in Europe, but since you bring it up….

(1) If anything, the advent of the nation-state made “ethnic cleansing” more likely, not less. Local feudal lords tend not to care much about the ethnicity of the serfs who enrich them.

(2) I gather your definition of “white” in this context means, “Christian”. I’m sort of skeptical of the claim that pre-1492 Christian European groups didn’t occasionally “etnhically cleanse” each other, but in any event, I don’t see how the replacement of ethnic solidarity with its religious counterpart was somehow a tremendous improvement.

It always amazes me how otherwise sane people manage to ‘bracket’ the American Holocaust as being something of no relevance to the rest of history

It’s linked to the appropriation of the Jewish Holocaust as a somehow profoundly American event: let’s call it a case of mass transference.

This kind of thinking is quite disturbing, but it is not that new, generally speaking it comes in most cases I can remember from various parts of the hyper-nationalist Right and their adherents who feel the need to posit some kind of TINA argument about how it is either “Us or Them”. One should usually read it as an attempt to prepare the ground for some profoundly illiberal and/or violent policies in the present that would otherwise be popular.

As a general note on the question of different treatments of Amerindian populations I would have thought that at least part of the reason was due to religion and method of incorporation within a specific political economy. The Spanish, being Catholics wanted to save souls and so were as interested in converting Indians as exploiting them; also being classic colonists, their interests in the New World lay very much in wealth and resource extraction – as all that gold and silver wasn’t going to mine itself and labour needs were large, it made more sense to coerce local Amerindian populations into sweated mine/plantation labour than kill them off. I assume that being relatively settled agrarian civilisations there was a much greater mass of people to deal with, so physical elimination on such a level wasn’t so easy to practise, not to mention the legal incorporation of Indians as Spanish subjects with some (very limited and periodic) legal rights and protection of the monarchy. Some of this policy spills over into the different attitude, displayed at least partially by the French in Canada and North America; in the former I believe the colonial enterprise was effectively a triumvirate effort between the French state, local trapper/trading interests and the missionaries (mainly Jesuits, I seem to recall) who for a number of reasons enjoyed somewhat better relations with Amerindian populations than Anglo-Saxon settler communities. The latter, being basically settlers and wanting land, needed to remove pesky nomadic/semi-nomadic people from the scene and having won their independence relatively early on; saw the development primarily for their own benefit than for the colonist motherland (in the US at least). No doubt, this is gross simplification but captures, at least some of the factors at work.

Without wanting to enter into some mega-debate about genocide and nation-state formation; I remain a bit aghast at some of the things that have been said. I can only echo the recommendation of Samantha Power’s excellent book “A problem from Hell” it is odd how many times the same themes seem to crop up again over and over in this issue. It would be good to bear in mind that according to the 1948 Genocide Convention, a genocide need to not be total or complete (even near complete) to be considered a genocide; one would think that after Armenia and Cambodia this would have sunk in but apparently not. It should also be remembered that states and regimes do have a historical memory and to some extent observe what kind of international sanctions or reactions towards mass killings are like – Hitler’s statement that “who remembers the Armenians” before sanctioning off on his own mittel-europa project of extermination wouldn’t otherwise be possible. The lesson I draw from this is that ‘mini-genocides’ that are tolerated will encourage later genocidal regimes to push the envelope. Even the most exhaustive genocides need to build in some sense on earlier ones to be successful, what the Nazis did in Eastern Europe can trace some of its origins back to their early exterminatory campaigns and use of detainment camps in the Herera genocide in SW Africa right up to Fischer’s bizarre racist theories and medical experiments; ideas which were institutionalised under the Third Reich and whose students went on to fully flesh out the implications of their consequent notions of eugenics, racial classification and ‘hygiene’. A process illustrated very well by Arendt, the Nazi genocides, in Cesaire’s words “turned Europe into a colony”. Rather an unpleasant experience for what hitherto was meant to be the centre of civilisation at the time for its inhabitants. In addition, I don’t see how pre-colonial intra-Amerindian conflicts somehow legitimate later use of mass violence against these peoples; a little bit like saying the rather savage Russo-Polish war of the 1920s and nationalist conflicts on this frontier would somehow later “place into context” Nazi genocidal slaughter of the Slavs. The uses of violence is both qualitatively and quantitatively different in the different scenarios; actually evicting, limiting and confining an entire group of people frequently by unrestrained use of violence based on a superior military technology, impact of disease and weight of numbers to replace them with a different culture and socio-political system can’t be considered on the same level as the occasional conflict with a neighbouring tribe. I am not sure on the specifics of this, but I also thought that one of the reasons why Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, thought the ‘noble savage, was so, well, ‘noble’ was precisely because of the roaming, nomadic life they followed they didn’t have the same investment in a particular attachment to a specific piece of land or claim ownership in the same way but instead tended to avoid excessively intensive conflicts by migrating to another open area, rather than risking a costly escalation of tension (different notions of sexual jealousy also play a bit of a role here but that is a different matter).

Lastly, the foundational moment is generally one which is always a violent one; the process of state-formation especially so. It is no use pretending otherwise; in this sense colonialism definitely becomes at home; the reconquista set the stage for later colonising, domineering and racialist policies in the New World; I am sure the basically apartheid-like legal system that the English put in place in Ireland, which really devalued the worth of an Irish life compared to an English one or redrew land rights and relegated the Irish to an inferior status, paved the way in an important sense for later colonial practises. The same thing could be said of most such later developments like slavery (white slavery in Elizabethan England and later use of white indentured labour) and the process of internal ‘othering’ and so on. The point is that none of these were really palatable and why someone would want to defend it on the grounds of later democratic functioning in the manner of Totten, seems highly immoral. The problem is that when one embarks on these kinds of justifications, where exactly is the line going to be drawn; it is not that hard to convince oneself of the utter need to wipe out the enemy and how that if any quarter is shown of given that it will be exploited and that what one is engaged in is really a war unto the death. I hate to recycle a cliché, but this is exactly what the Nazis thought they (or at least sought to convince themselves of) that they were engaged in; the Jew for them in his various guises of Bolshevik, enemy within who gives the ‘stab in the back’, corrupter of ‘German’ values, and contaminator of the Volk; posed a complete and implacable existential threat to their conception of the Nation. Force of circumstances and history demanded that for the German people to survive, no mercy should be shown and the unimaginable be imagined (hence no ‘good Jew’ arguments here) to win this racial war all previous boundaries had to be violated and crossed, as it was a question of survival. Which is why these kind of arguments, make me a little paranoid and suspicious that retrospective justifications for genocides are going to be re-warmed and served up as some bitter dish to instil the need for a kinder, gentler and reluctant but no less necessary stern steps that need to be taken in the present.

Keith-
This subject is so saturated in grief, and irrational hatred, it seems impossible to progress past the shock and horror. Are you throwing the image of eastern Eurpoean Jews up in order to establish the superiority of your sorrow? Are you saying war is never murder? I would contend that too often war, and whatever “conquest” is, is exactly murder, on a scale that too easily becomes abstract. Nothing “equivocates” with the Holocaust. Nothing equivocates with the Clear Lake Massacre, or Wounded Knee. And if saying that is a kind of equalling, so be it. Are you going to suggest the methodology, the technique is really that important? Maybe most people can easily distinguish between the grief of a thousand mothers and the grief of a million. I can’t.
What I meant was the personal transcends the theoretical, terminology can’t hold what’s in the heart in these circumstances. The precise technical description of disaster and catastrophe is meaningless in the immediacy of loss. To individuals. And as groups too many of us pretend to an innocence we can’t legitimately claim.
Too much current belligerence is defended by just such imagery.
My point was more we’re all descended from such acts. This does not in any way excuse or justify them. What it does is defy anyone to remove themselves from the guilt and accusation.
There may be innocence, certainly there is, in the immediate and personal sense. Perhaps you feel that for the Jews there is a special exemption owing to their being so clearly the victims.
There is a precedent in Jewish history that proves my point, which is, again, not that any one people are guilty, whatever their ethnicity, but that we all are.
__

Exodus Chapter 23 –
27. I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.
28. And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee.
29. I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee.
30. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land.
31. And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.

I also thought that one of the reasons why Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, thought the ‘noble savage, was so, well, ‘noble’ was precisely because of the roaming, nomadic life they followed they didn’t have the same investment in a particular attachment to a specific piece of land or claim ownership in the same way but instead tended to avoid excessively intensive conflicts by migrating to another open area, rather than risking a costly escalation of tension

That’s not an accurate description of most Native American relationships to their land (or of that of the Australian Aborigines, whose treatment by the British was similar in tactics and philosophical justifications). Even nomadic Native Americans did have important connections to particular pieces of land. It was just a different type of connection — based more on religious/cultural significance and ethnoscientific knowledge of the utility of different places than on private property regimes and investment in landesque capital.

Dsquared: “There are also more Jews alive today than there were in 1933. What happened to the American Indians was genocide if anything was.”

Huh? By most accounts the world Jewish population in 1939 was approximately 16.5 million. Sixty-four years later it is under 13.5 million.

Jeremy: you misunderstand me. I was distinguishing the Holocaust, from common genocide, from ethnic cleansing. I think the Holocaust stands alone and that equivocations such as “American Holocaust” are deeply false. You’ll notice that I’ve characterized the US’s treatment of aboriginal populations in several cases as “genocidal”; what I’ve disputed was that it can fairly and accurately be characterized as a policy of genocide as a whole—I don’t think it can.

That’s not an accurate description of most Native American relationships to their land (or of that of the Australian Aborigines, whose treatment by the British was similar in tactics and philosophical justifications). Even nomadic Native Americans did have important connections to particular pieces of land. It was just a different type of connection — based more on religious/cultural significance and ethnoscientific knowledge of the utility of different places than on private property regimes and investment in landesque capital.

I accept the correction; obviously Rousseau and most philosophers of his time had only very ‘ideal-tpye” views of what they saw as primitive peoples and some of the rather odd views he had on language or Kant on different capabilities across ethnic groups can only be seen in this light – apart from anything else this kind of idealisation rests on a conception of ‘noble savages’ existing primarily as relatively isolated individuals as opposed to in collective groups with some social life. However, it does indicate that there was an awareness of the fact that different peoples, particularly non-settled, non-European ones did not have the same relationship to land that existed for European and several other ‘Old World’ civilisations at the time. Hence the introduction of private property rights and the changes in ecology brought about by establishing settled agrarian communities on this scale in the New World was going to be profoundly disruptive and replace one way of life, indeed one people quite literally in most cases, with another.

On a more general note, I found this essay on the “Colonial Darkside of Democracy” by Michael Mann to be an excellent summary and analysis of several case studies of ethnic cleansing and genocide from the US, Mexico, SW Africa and Austrialia. Bit of a long read but worth it in my opinion.

http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/103mann.pdf

“Europe in 1492 was beginning to develop the nation state. It’s
simply not the case that it was considered A-OK to wipe out
whole white populations or forcibly relocate them.”

Jesus, Daniel, I thought you knew more about Irish hisory than that!
But hey, it’s OK. I got used to the idea that we’re only physically
“white” a long time ago.