Death of a Nation
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Life on barren reservations was no better. Conditions on reservations like those at San Carlos in Arizona, ‘were so grotesque that federal officials referred to them as amounting to an ‘extermination programme’… spiralling death rates resulted technically from ‘disease’ — always in combination with deliberately induced malnutrition, sustained exposure to the elements, and other physically debilitating circumstances.’(32)
Settlers or the military nevertheless murdered those Indians who were not dispatched by European microbes and who survived the ravages of European diseases, wherever they remained alive on a useful patch of land. As Jared Diamond described in his Pulitzer-winning work Guns, Germs and Steel, ‘Small native societies were destroyed casually by small scale raids and murders carried out by private citizens. For instance, although California’s native hunter gatherers numbered around 200,000 in aggregate, they were splintered among hundreds of tribelets so a war was not required to defeat them; most of them were killed off or dispossessed during or after the California gold rush of 1848 to 1852, when large numbers of immigrants flooded the state. The Yahi tribelet of northern California, for example, which numbered about 2,000 and lacked any firearms, was destroyed in four raids by armed white settlers.’(33) In 1850, whilst the rest of the Union continued to argue for and against the continuation of the slavery of African Americans, the California State legislature legalised Indian slavery.
But the greatest example of ethnic cleansing in modern North American history came with the Indian Nations of the Plains. These have furnished the post-war movie industry with their greatest Indian villains; the Cheyenne, Crow, Apache, Sioux, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Comanche and Pawnee. Their fate was also decided by the discovery of gold, at Pikes Peak, Colorado in 1858. The Homestead Act opened up the Plains with 100,000 new settlers arriving in the first year alone. New forts, which specialised in training troops to fight Indian wars, sprang up along their trails to protect the routes of the settlers. The army began to confine Indians to restricted areas that became their reservations. After the betrayal of countless treaties, and having witnessed the treatment of the loyal and peaceful Cherokee, Indian chiefs were faced with a stark choice: give up their ancestral homelands and with it their way of life and take their chances on whatever scraps of land and government handouts they received, or fight the American army and face near certain extinction. It was not much of a choice. The military commander of Colorado, John Shivington, was mobilised against a non-existent Cheyenne ‘rising’ and is quoted as saying, ‘Damn any man who sympathises with Indians. I have come here to kill Indians and believe it is right to use any means under God’s heaven to kill them.’(34)
The US government, its army and settlers, knew another means with which to accelerate the demise of the Indians: the slaughter of buffalo. The buffalo was a potent symbol of the North American Plains and was the lifeblood of the Indian nations, and not just because it provided the meat they ate. Buffalo hides made the tepees in which they lived, the moccasins that shod their feet and the clothes that they wore. Without the buffalo, Indians would have no choice but to remain on the reservations and rely on government handouts. Hunters were called in to the Great Plains from across the continent to hunt buffalo. Thousands were killed per day, more often than not being left to rot where they fell without the meat or hides ever being used. General Sheridan of the US Army was quoted as saying, ‘The buffalo killers have done more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army. Let them kill, skin and sell till the entire buffalo herd is exterminated, for the sake of a lasting peace.’(35) By 1890, of the 50 million buffalo that had once walked the Great Plains, there were no more than 1,000 remaining.(36)
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe was a man of great wisdom and tolerance. One of his final recorded quotes reads:
If whites want to live in peace with Indians, [they must] treat all men alike and give them all a chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backwards as [expect] any man who was born a free man to be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. Let me be a free man. Free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself.(37)
It was a forelorn hope to think that the white settlers had peaceful co-existence with any Native Americans on their minds.
The last of the great Native American leaders to put up a fight was the Apache Chief Geronimo. The Apache tribe was based largely in what is now central and northern California. They had successfully fought off and survived both Spanish and Mexican encroachment, but they were no match for the sheer volume of white settlers that overwhelmed them in little over a decade, again streaming in on the promise of gold and free land. Geronimo promised those that fought with him nothing more than a short life but a free one; promoting that it was better to die a free man than have a long drawn-out death through slavery. Their hopeless struggle ended on 3rd September 1886. The survivors, including Geronimo, were all shipped to POW camps in California where they were initially told they would spend two years. In fact, they were incarcerated there for up to twenty-eight years. Geronimo died in captivity in 1909, after twenty-three years of incarceration. With his death in prison the Indian struggle ended. This took place not in some far off distant century, but in the twentieth, a mere five years before the outbreak of the First World War.cxxx
At the conclusion of the Indian wars, their epitaph was written by non other than the future author of the Wizard of Oz. The quote by L. Frank Baum, published in the Aberdeen Sunday Pioneer on 20th December 1890 reads, ‘The nobility of the Redskin is extinguished… The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilisation, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they should die than live the miserable wretches that they are.’cxxxi (38)
The final act in the tortuous history of the Native Indians in North America has been one of ‘assimilation’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Commissioner for Indian Affairs, Francis Leupp, described it as a policy of ‘kill the Indian, spare the man’. In 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act unilaterally declared all Indians US citizens. There had once been 500 Indian nations. In the four centuries spanning the time between 1492, when Columbus first set foot in the ‘New World’, and 1892, when the US census bureau concluded that there were fewer than a quarter of a million indigenous people living in the boundaries of the United States, a hemispheric genocide of unparallel dimensions had taken place. Modern archaeological evidence suggests that well over one hundred million people inhabited the western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans. Over 90 per cent of the indigenous populations of the Americas and the Caribbean had been wiped out.(43) For North America (including Canada) the native population is estimated to have been between 10 and 18 million before the arrival of Europeans. As one historian put it, ‘The genocide inflicted upon the American Indians over the past five centuries is unparalleled in human history, both in terms of its sheer magnitude and in its duration.’(44)
There can be no question that the intent and the actions of European settlers against the indigenous populations of the Americas were not only murderous but genocidal. To deny this one has to twist the moral bounds of human understanding beyond the realms of pure reason. The United States has long clothed itself in an anti-imperialist mantle, yet its post-independence conquest of Indian lands, Spanish colonial possessions, and its continuation of the slave trade sit uncomfortably with this notion. Within the space of a century the US moved from being a small parochial power confined to the eastern seaboard of North America to a continental powerhouse stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. She became the third largest nation on earth, with the second largest economy and the second largest merchant fleet, second only to that of
Great Britain. Her population had swelled from a mere 4.5 million inhabitants at the time of her independence, to over 80 million at the start of the twentieth century. Her military had increased from a paltry 10,000 regulars at arms in 1776, to a draft of 3 million men into the military and a further 2 million auxiliaries during the First World War.cxxxii (45) A great achievement but at a monumental human cost.
RUSSIA: RULER OF THE EAST
In the latter part of the fifteenth century, the lands of Rus — sandwiched between the Tartar dominions from Kazan in the east, and Swedish, German and Polish competing interests on the Baltic — were a tiny fraction of the size Russia would attain by the nineteenth century. Her ruler at this time, Ivan III, began a process of westward, eastward and southward expansion, freeing Russia from Tartar tutelage. Building upon this, Ivan IV (the Terrible) smashed Tartar power in Russia for good and opened up more possibilities for eastward expansion. In a battle of attrition with Poland in the Ukraine and Byelorussia that lasted from 1300–1600, Russia wrested control of many of these territories from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as seizing the lands of the Cossacks. Peter the Great defeated Sweden in 1710 in the Great Northern War, gaining Estonia, part of Latvia, the north-eastern Baltic and the Finnish hinterland up to the Barents Sea. He went on to build his great European capital, St Petersburg, on the land he had conquered. Catherine the Greatcxxxiii undertook the greatest expansion of territory of them all, through to the Black Sea, the Caucasus and well into Central Asia. As previously described, three partitions of Poland, in alliance with Prussia and Austria, saw the lion’s share of Poland and all of Lithuania fall to Russia by 1795. And Stalin’s homeland of Georgia in the southern Caucasus was invaded in 1801 and consolidated into Russia by 1866.
During the Great Game between Great Britain and Russia, which started in 1813, these imperial adversaries battled it out across a 2,500 mile — largely uncharted — frontier, from Persia to India. Russia took vast tracts of Central Asia, exporting millions of settlers to colonise these newly conquered regions, and implementing a harsh policy of Russification in terms of language, religion and culture. The Russians also made gains at the expense of the declining Ottoman Empire, taking advantage of her chaos in defeat after the First World War, with the Bolsheviks invading the former Ottoman province of Azerbaijan in 1922.
Niall Ferguson in his The War of the World — History’s Age of Hatred epic global history, which covers an unbelievable span of the political, economic and cultural past of the major powers over a fifty-year period, summarised Russian colonisation in the context of its particular experience and opportunities by saying:
We tend to think of nineteenth century empires as primarily seaborne. But they could cross vast expanses of land with equal, if not greater, ease. By the end of the nineteenth century, Tsarist Russia had acquired not only a substantial Western Empire in Europe, extending into Finland, Poland and the Ukraine, but also a string of Caucasian colonies stretching from the borders of Persia, and a vast Central Asian empire that reached across Kazakhstancxxxiv and through Manchuria as far as the border of Korea and the Sea of Japan. One after another the peoples of Eurasia were subjugated, indeed by 1900 non-Russians accounted for more than half the population of the Tsar’s domains.(48)
The Russians often harboured an utter contempt for the Asiatic people they conquered, as Nikolai Gondatti, the Governor of Tomsk, explained in 1911, ‘My task is to make sure that there are lots of Russians and few yellows here.’(49) But they overreached themselves when it came to Japan. The expansion of Russia into the Sea of Japan and the founding of Vladivostok — which translates as ‘ruler of the east’(50) — as well as further expansion into Manchuria, led to a conflict of interest with imperial Japan. During the ensuing Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, Japan gave Russia a bloody nose, for the first time checking the Russian advance in the east. Japan would soon be on the offensive herself, seeking to reverse all European colonial conquests in the east and replacing them with her own.
Yet overall, Russia’s expansion was truly remarkable. Within two centuries Russia had become by far the largest contiguous nation on earth, larger than Canada and the United States combined. This is the history that President Putin wants the world to respect, rather than focusing only on the darker side of Soviet history and Stalin’s Gulags. Under Stalin, Soviet Russia gained a vast new empire in Europe, stretching through to Vienna, Prague and Berlin. And during the Cold War, Russia sought to expand its sphere of influence in Asia and Africa, and from the Caribbean to Central America.
Of all the great powers, Russia’s imperial ambitions have perhaps changed the least. Despite remaining the largest nation on earth, by a factor of more than two, Putin’s Russia recently planted flags on the seabed of the North Pole in an attempt to lay claim to the northern Polar regions. Incursions into Eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea at the barrel of a gun has seen President Putin try to reverse past losses and act as protector of all Russians, no matter where they live. Some habits die hard!cxxxv
BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND THE ‘WHITE MAN’S BURDEN’
In a letter to David Lloyd George in January 1914, Winston Churchill wrote, ‘We have engrossed to ourselves an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the World. We have got all we wanted in territory, and our claim to be left in unmolested enjoyment of our vast and splendid possession, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.’(1)
The nineteenth century was the zenith of the age of imperialism. At no point in the past had the pace of change been so significant, or had the nations of Europe been so self-assured of their own purpose and superiority. And no nation personified that sense of purpose with a greater missionary zeal than Great Britain. Nor would any nation ever come to rival the power that the British Empire — able to fight wars on three continents at any one time and keep a navy up to five times the size of its nearest rival — amassed in this century; its global reach was to be unprecedented. When one looks at the catalogue of wars fought to expand the empire, it is hard to fall back into the favourite axioms of berating Prussian militarism and German imperialism. Before the ink had even dried on the Treaty of Vienna, or the lead paint had dried on Napoleon’s anterooms,cxxxvi Britain was again at war on virtually every continent of the globe. From the time of Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in India, and Great Britain’s defeat of France in 1759 (removing its only major rival in North America and Canada) the British Empire would see an unprecedented expansion of its great colonial project. British imperialism did not run out of steam until the 1920s.
The imperial project did not always run parallel to the established myth that British rule was practiced by the greatest and most benevolent people ever to bring their dominion upon a conquered race In his book, The Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany — a 100 Years of Truth and Lies, Richard Milton has researched the true nature of that dominion, its consequences in human lives and the pseudo-scientific philosophies it produced to justify further conquest. An imperial project far less benevolent than it has all too often been portrayed. He writes:
The English governing classes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries not only proved themselves to be expert in running a global mercantile empire with ruthless efficiency, they also proved adept at convincing the world that they were the best people to run such an empire, and that their chief motive was the altruism of enlightened self-interest… (when in fact we)… were keeping a quarter of the world’s population in subjugation by means of the threat of violent military reprisals against anyone who questioned or rebelled against that rule… Even more disturbing is the fact that countless hundreds of thousands of foreign people had, over a period of two hundred years or more, been slaughtered by decent, moderate British soldiers… only because they attempted to challenge Britain’s right to rule over them.(2)
Contrary to popular belief, the Dutch reached Australasia before Capt
ain Cook, founding Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1643. Cook planted the Union Flag well to the north of Botany Bay in 1770. Cook had not thought highly enough of Australia to colonise it (describing it as a barren rock only good for rearing sheep!). Returning in 1788 however, the British did come to find uses both for Australia and Tasmania — to replace the penal colonies they had lost in the southern states of America during the American War of Independence. Australasia became part of Britain’s draconian judicial and penal system (which executed a staggering sixty times more of its subjects than did Prussia’s), turning Australia into the largest penitentiary in the history of mankind. The English still never miss an opportunity to remind their Antipodean cousins of the origin of their settlement of the most southerly continent.(3)