What remains at the forefront of each new generation’s imagination are the First and Second World Wars, and specifically Germany’s attempts to gain what other European nations had already acquired. The evil madness of the Holocaust, and the attempt to exstinguish one human race from the face of the earth, has allowed other nations to hide their attrocities behind this all-encompassing morality tale. Consequently, they feel they are thereby able to blot out the genocidal imperialism of their own histories. It is only fair and relevant to examine the brutality of these imperial adventures — from the rape of the Americas by the Spanish, Portuguese and British (and the nations that replaced them) to Russian expansion in Asia and the multiple European genocides caused in Africa and Australasia — and the mindsets that created them, before returning to the sins of German militarism and imperialism.
THE AMERICAS: INDIAN WARS IN THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM
Since the early 1500s, the native populations of the Americas were enslaved. Europeans regarded the indigenous inhabitants as ‘godless’ and treated them not as humans, but as animals.(7) Genocide is usually predicated on the dehumanising of the enemy. By the time of the American War of Independence, Native American ‘Indians’ had suffered at the hands of the colonists for nearly three centuries. They had been chained, branded, sold at auctions and worked to death in their millions; their culture had been demolished; their religion had been eroded by Christian Churches; the ancient burial sites of their ancestors had been dug up and planted with crops; their hunting grounds had been decimated and their buffalo hunted to near extinction; they had lost countless lives to European diseases; and they had been rounded up, driven from their land and made to live on barren desolate reservations, where they were given meagre rations and plied with drink. As late as 1730, a quarter of the slaves sold alongside livestock at southern auctions in North America were native Indians.(8)
Thankfully historians, scientists, archaeologists, researchers and writers such as John Hemming, Jared Diamond, Ward Churchill, Jack Leustig and Lee Miller to name a few that I have referenced in this section of the book have sought to remind the world of the most prolonged and profoundly devastating genocides in human history during the colonisation of the so called ‘New World’. These authors remain among the few who have examined in detail the archaeological and historical fragments that remain after the systematic extermination of hundreds of indigenous tribes, communities and cultures across the Americas. As one of my former professors professed, this perhaps remains the most profound gaping hole in humanity’s consciousness and understanding of its own collective history, one that is particularly difficult to appreciate the sheer scale and murderous nature of if you haven’t travelled extensively through the ruins of their civilisations in the Americas.
The settlement of the ‘New World’ by Europeans from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century by some estimates led to the eradication of up to 95 per cent of the indigenous populations of the Americas, and resulted in the disappearance of most groups of Native Americans (American Indians) across both North and South America,(9) a genocide which took place both before, during and after the great age of imperialism during the nineteenth century, and a genocide which still remains the largest and the most overlooked replacement of population through colonisation in the history of human kind.
Columbus’s discovery of the Americas primarily meant the discovery of the Caribbean, which was the first part of the New World to be colonised by European settlers. The indigenous inhabitants of islands such as Hispaniola (the modern day divided island of Haiti and the Domican Republic) and Cuba initially welcomed and aided Columbus’s ships as they had been battered by heavy storms. Their reward was utter extermination within one generation. Columbus’s hidalgos who settled on Hispaniola created a new sport, in which an unarmed Indian, often a child, was held captive. The challenge was then for a Spaniard to wager how much damage he could inflict with a single sword stroke.(10) An estimated population of 2 million native Caribs were hunted and slaved to death within thirty years of Columbus’s arrival. This was one of the largest genocides in history up to this point in time.
On the mainland, the bloody butchery began in 1519 with the arrival of Hernán Cortés. The Aztec Emperor, Montezuma, welcomed Cortés and his men into his inner sanctum. The Emperor believed Cortés was the returning feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl, of ancient Aztec legend. Cortés’s men, spellbound by the wealth and splendour of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), immediately began a rampage of willful plunder and destruction; 12,000 non-combatants were murdered in a single afternoon and a further 40,000 the next day.(11) Those not murdered soon fell victim to their lack of immunity against disease brought by the Europeans. It was most likely smallpox that killed Montezuma’s designated successor, Cuitlahuac, thus decapitating the leadership strata of Aztec society.(12) Cortés named the colony ‘New Spain’ and proceeded to make the surviving locals slaves in their own land, rapidly working them to death in appalling conditions in the mines and on the land. The Spanish chronicler, Domingo de Santo Tomas, called the silver mines the very ‘mouth of hell’. Another chronicler, Rodrigo de Loaisa, wrote, ‘If twenty healthy Indians enter a mine on Monday, half may emerge crippled on Saturday.’ That is if they emerged at all… ‘For as long as there appeared to be an unending supply of brute labour it was cheaper to work an Indian to death, and replace him or her with another native, than it was to feed and care for them properly. It is probable, in fact, that the life expectancy of an Indian engaged in forced labour in a mine or plantation during these early years of Spanish terror… was not much more than three or four months.’(13) In 1519, the Mexica kingdom was estimated to have a population somewhere between 11 and 25 million. By 1595, according to the Spanish census of that year, barely 1.3 million remained.(14) Pedro de Alvarado’s conquest of the lands of the Maya was no less savage. The Catholic Priest Las Casas writes, ‘the tyrant (Alvarado) wrote that it was more populous than the kingdom of Mexico; and he told the truth. He and his brothers, together with others, have killed more than four or five million in fifteen to sixteen years, from the year 1525 until 1540, and they continue to kill and destroy those who are still left; and so they will kill the remainder.’(15)
Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire was made all the easier by the introduction of European diseases, like smallpox, which spread south to Peru from earlier Spanish settlements in Panama and Colombia. Disease decimated native populations who had no resistance or immunity to strains brought by European settlers. In the case of the Inca, smallpox had spread down from the north, scything through the population. In 1526, it killed the Inca Emperor Huayan Cupac and most of his court, including his heir Ninan Cuyuchi. This led to a civil war between Atahualpa and his half brother, Huascar, for control of the empire. Had it not been for the epidemic brought by the Spaniards, Pizarro would have faced a much stronger and united Inca people in the battles of the Peruvian highlands between 1532 and 1533. Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire (in modern day Peru and Chile), was through a combination of spreading ‘disease, depredation, enslavement and outright massacres, (which) combined to extinguish the entire Indian culture there…’(16). Within two generations the Spaniards had destroyed the most advanced civilisation in the Americas, looting and melting down its treasures to be sent back to Madrid. In towns such as Quinche all the women and children were slaughtered whilst their men were away fighting and in countless others such as Sarapoto, Manta Puerto Viejo they were sacked with the men, women and children terrorised and enslaved. There was no act or barbarism the Spanish conquistadors would not employ in their war of conquest and extermination. Hernando Pizarro (Francisco’s brother) regularly ordered his men to kill any women caught in the fight or as part of the Indians’ baggage trains. Juan de Turuegano also reported the common use of mutilations employed against the Indians, writing in a letter to a friend in Seville, ‘The Christians… cut the arms off some of those they captured, and the nose
s from others and the breasts of women. They then sent them back to the enemy, so that they could see that they too might have to submit to the knife.’ Diego de Vara reported of the raids on Indian towns, ‘Some were killed by sword thrusts, others by stabbing and others from the loads they were carrying… many more died of exposure on the snowbound passes… The Indians who Alvarado took with him almost all perished, even though there had been many of them.’ The population of the Andes region, estimated to have been as high as 14 million, was barely 1 million by the end of the 1500s.(17)
Portugal’s Vasco de Gama discovered Brazil in 1500. The initial period of trade and exploration turned ugly from 1549 under Pedro Alvars Cabral, in Bahia. Entire villages were torched to the ground, and the land converted into huge sugar plantations. The Indians who survived were forced to flee into the Amazonian interior. In the sixteenth century, Brazil had somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million native Indians; less than 10 per cent of them survived into the seventeenth century. However, they were soon supplemented with over 3.5 million African slaves.(18)
In other parts of the Americas, dogs were trained and used to hunt Indians: ‘Vicious mastiffs and wolfhounds — raised on a diet of human flesh, trained to disembowel upon command and often equipped with special armour — (were set) loose on hapless natives.’(19) One of the most infamous colonists was Vasco Nunez de Balboa, whose dog was reputed to have ripped the head off the leader of a tribe in Panama. It is also recorded that Balboa gave orders for forty of his victims to be fed to his dogs. As one contemporary wrote, ‘In Peru, this practice was so common that Cieza de Leon found it not particularly remarkable that a Portuguese named Roque Martin had quarters of Indians hanging on his porch to feed his dogs with.’(20) The role of the Catholic missions, as the ‘death mills of slavery’, should also not be underestimated in the Americas. African slaves were expensive, and the local seemingly inexhaustible supply of Indian labour was cheap. From the Rio Grande to southern Chile it is estimated that up to 80 million native inhabitants died as a direct result of Spanish/Portuguese colonisation.(21) They were butchered in campaigns of brutal slaughter, driven from their towns and cities, enslaved and worked to death on the land, and in the mines. The few who escaped into the interior left everything behind but the place names they had given their lands and rivers. The crushing weight of European colonisation raised their cities and their culture, and then built over them. Many other cities became overgrown and forgotten for lack of a surviving population, left for archeologists to uncover.
The English soon added to the ceaseless human misery of the indigenous peoples of the Americas when they began their conquest of North America. The myth that they found only ‘vacant land’cxxvii accompanied the settlement of all of England’s colonies, from North America, to Australasia and South Africa. Just two years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed in America, the local Tsenacommacah Indians rose up against the colonists. Sir Francis Wyatt, the governor of the English colony, instructed his military commanders to ‘root them out from being longer a people upon the face of the earth… by force, by surprise, by famine in burning their corne…by pursuing and chasing them with blood hounds, draw after them, and Mastiffs to seize them… by driving them (when they flye) upon their enemies, who are around them and by animating and abetting their enemies against them.’(23)
By 1637, the English colony was expanding and needed more land. Captain Mason’s militiamen were sent out to eradicate the natives. They set fire to the main settlement of the Pequot Indians ‘burning alive as many as 900 women, children and helpless old men’. Those who tried to escape the blaze were cut down with swords and axes. The Plymouth governor, William Bradford, later described the scene, paraphrasing Mason’s own exultant account. He said, ‘It was a fearful site to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and the scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.’(24) The Pequots, like hundreds of other native tribes, were exterminated by the English settlers. As one noted expert on native Indian history has written of the Pequots, ‘After the war, the General Assembly of Connecticut declared their name extinct. No survivors could be called Pequots. The Pequot river became the Thames, and the village known as the Pequot became New London.’(25)
By 1763, the English victory on the eastern seaboard was so complete that George III was content to issue a royal proclamation repudiating claims to Indian lands west of the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains, in exchange for the indigenous nations’ pledge of loyalty to the English crown, and no other European nations. The treaty did nothing to benefit the remaining Indian tribes who lived west of this arbitrary line. It was ignored by governors and settlers alike; the slaughter and expropriation of their land continued regardless. One war after another, most of whose names are now long forgotten, destroyed one tribe after another. Whether they were hostile or friendly, heathen or Christian, it made no difference.
The notion that disease alone killed many of the Native Americans, or that disease was a mere accidental byproduct of Europeans arriving in the New World, is one of the greatest fabrications in history. Since the Middle Ages, Europeans were familiar with plagues and disease, and with the practice of quarantine. When great outbreaks of plague occurred, restrictions on travel were imposed, and cities pulled up their drawbridges. During the Black Death, Europe’s populations knew the plague was spread via dead bodies and items of clothing from those infected. During warfare, from the time of Tamerlane in the late fourteenth century, bodies of those who had died of disease were catapulted into cities under siege to spread an epidemic and weaken the opponents. The consequences were known, and yet when Europeans saw native Indians start to die in their droves of disease, far from restricting their movements and contacts with the native populations, they did the exact opposite. The falling away by diseases such as smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid and measles were often exultantly explained away as the ‘hand of God’, clearing a path for the ‘righteous Christian white man’.cxxviii (26) Although the spread of diseases like smallpox did scythe their way through vast swathes of pre-Colombian Native America and accounts for the overwhelming majority of the deaths of native Americans, it was not only accidental infection that was to blame.
Following the conclusion of the French Indian Wars (1756–63), the British commander, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, turned his full attention to the Indian Confederacy — enlisting all means at his disposal, including germ warfare. Blankets that had been wrapped around smallpox victims were then distributed to the natives from Fort Pitt. There is written evidence of this in correspondence between Amherst and one of his commanders, Colonel Henry Bouquet. Bouquet said, ‘I will try to contaminate them with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to catch the disease myself.’ Amherst replied, ‘You will do well to (infect) the Indians by means of blankets as well as try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.’ Captain Ecuyer, of the Royal Americans, wrote in his journal, ‘We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.’(28) It did. In what became the North West territory, the disease spread like a brushfire, killing at least 100,000 Indians and totally breaking their resistance.(29) And it was not a one-time policy. What the English began, the Americans continued.
Once the United States had won its independence, the pressure on the Indians became relentless. In thirty years they were driven from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes and beyond the Appalachian mountains. Seeing the Americans move west, and witnessing their insatiable appetite for Indian land, some Indian tribes began to see the Americans as an even greater threat than the British. The Jeffersonian presidential preference for assimilation of the friendly southern tribes was rapidly being replaced with Jacksonian forced
expulsion and annihilation. The 1830 Indian Removal Treaty completely betrayed the previous treaty commitments, which had promised the Cherokee Indians that ‘this land is yours forever (or until we find gold or something else of value we initially overlooked)’. This treaty gave the Cherokeecxxix two years to vacate all the land east of the Miscopy and move to a dustbowl in Oklahoma. These were the fruits of collaboration and integration with the white man. Inevitably there were forced evictions in which a great many of the old, sick and the very young perished. Of the first to be driven from their lands were the Choctaw in 1832. Of the 13,000 who were moved, 2,000 died on the trek. Next came the Creek people who lost a third of their tribe on the journey west in 1836. The turn of the Cherokee came in 1838, when 16,000 of their tribe died en route to Oklahoma. A quarter of the entire tribe. This forced relocation is remembered in Indian folklore as the ‘trail of tears’.(30)
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