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CounterPunch
November
26, 2002
Celebrating Genocide!
by DAN BROOK
Many people annually get as stuffed as their turkeys
in celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday. Thanksgiving is a
quintessentially American holiday, so much so that it is not
just a holiday, but really is (as the etymology implies) one
of our Holy Days, almost universally celebrated by Americans.
In its sacredness, families get together to (unintentionally?)
celebrate one genocide (against Native Americans) by committing
another (against turkeys). Can we celebrate in good faith and
conscience?
On Thanksgiving Day, we give thanks.
We give thanks for being the invader, the exploiter, the dominator,
the greedy, the gluttonous, the colonizer, the thief, indeed
the genocidaire, rather than on the other side of imperialism's
zero-sum murderous game. As Mark Twain points out in his War
Prayer, wishing and being thankful for one's own success and
victory is, at the very same time, wishing and being thankful
for another's defeat and destruction. Do we want to make these
kinds of wishes and give these kinds of thanks?
The Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran declared
that "it is the honor of the murdered that they are not
the murderers". Perhaps, but it is a very difficult honor
to uphold. Native Americans, at least those who have survived
the over 500 year genocidal project, are the poorest ethnic group
in the richest country of the world. Each year, a group of Native
Americans gather at Plymouth Rock on Thanksgiving Day to mourn
and fast in honor of their people and in memory of what is lost.
What do we want to be honored for? What honors are Americans
thankful for?
It was once earnestly asked by Native
Americans, "Why do you take by force what you can have by
love?" Christopher Columbus reports in his personal diary
that when he arrived in the Americas he was amazed. The Taino,
with curiosity and joy, came to greet the people coming off the
ships from Europe. The Taino (whom Columbus mistakenly thought
were Indians) were a peaceful people, by all accounts, willing
to share anything they had, offering both emotional kindness
and their physical objects. Columbus describes how remarkable
these people were. So innocent of weapons and violence, Taino
people would initially reach out their hands to feel the strange,
shiny objects called swords. The Taino would only "work"
for a few hours a day, "spending" the rest of their
time relaxing, socializing, and creating their culture in the
ways that people most enjoy. Columbus also tells of how the Taino
had no "shame", being able to walk around naked or
make love whenever they pleased. With the tiny amount of gold
on their island, they fashioned jewelry to adorn themselves.
As with many other pre-contact indigenous groups, the Taino essentially
lived in Utopia. Can Americans be thankful for living in a utopian
society? Are we thankful for having destroyed one? Should we
be grateful for having so many deadly weapons? For being so greedy
for gold, both actual and metaphorical?
As Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange is
fond of pointing out, Columbus could have done one of a few different
things after encountering the Taino of whom he was so impressed:
(1) Columbus could have quit his travels and lived the rest of
his days amongst this remarkable people. In fact, millions of
people today spend thousands of dollars and their precious couple
of weeks of vacation trying to experience modern conditions resembling
these ancient ones. (2) Columbus could also have continued on
his journeys, exploring other islands, encountering new peoples,
and searching for India and elsewhere with which to trade. While
doing so, he could have expanded and developed his writings,
perhaps doing valuable ethnographic and comparative sociological
research. (3) Another possibility is that Columbus could have
rushed back to Europe, declaring the wonders of Taino society
and urging that the best minds of Europe go to visit and study
the Taino. As a result of doing so, Europeans could have incorporated
aspects of Taino society into their own, if not emulating it
altogether. Are we proud of and thankful for our hubris and ethnocentrism?
Of course, Columbus did none of these.
Apparently, there was a fourth possibility. With grave implications,
Columbus wrote in his diary that with fifty men he could enslave
the entire population and capture all their gold. This was no
empty boast. The "savage" Taino were enslaved, many
were tortured, their labor exploited, and their wealth stolen
and shipped off to Europe. During this process of imperialist
super-exploitation, men had their hands chopped off, women had
their breasts sliced and their pregnant bellies cut open, babies
were thrown into the air, sometimes crashing to the ground and
other times being impaled on those strange, shiny swords, presumably
all in the name of Christianity, Civilization, and, eventually,
Capitalism. The Taino were literally exploited to death and were
brought to the brink of extinction, most of them having been
killed off through virulent brutality, overwork, and disease.
Are Americans thankful they weren't Taino? Are we thankful for
not being the dehumanized "Other"?
The Pilgrims later came to America to
escape religious persecution from the British, apparently in
order to commit ethnic and religious persecution against the
Native Americans and, later on, others. And this they did, and
we in fact continue to do, effectively and mercilessly. At the
time of the first Thanksgiving in the 1620s, it was also the
dawn of another type of genocide. 1619 marks the first year that
human beings were brutally "imported" from Africa to
become slaves in America, if they happened to survive the cruel
capture and horrific Atlantic crossing. So while Africans were
being heartlessly torn away from their homes and families, viciously
enslaved and dehumanized, tortured and killed, Native Americans
were being attacked and annihilated. By the time that President
Lincoln re-invented and instituted the Thanksgiving Day tradition
in the early 1860s, the US was fighting its civil war. The US
Civil War may have been fought over slavery (and labor more generally),
though it was certainly not fought for the slaves (or for laborers).
Sadly, there is much, much more to the tragic history of genocide
and US complicity. Is it for this legacy that Americans give
thanks? Are Americans thankful for the results of racism, sexism,
and classism?
In Europe, during the 1930s and 1940s,
various demographic groups were being systematically targeted
by the Nazis: Jews especially, but also leftists and unionists,
people with physical and mental disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses,
gays and lesbians, the Roma (so-called Gypsies) and the small
number of Blacks, as well as other misfortunate minorities. Although
we now know that the US had accurate aerial photographs of the
rail lines leading to and from the death camps since 1941, among
other pertinent information obtained even earlier, the US did
not enter the war against fascist Germany until almost 1942,
only after the US was physically attacked by Japan. Even then,
however, the US neither bombed the rail lines or the death camps
themselves, nor allowed in large numbers of refugees from fascism.
Indeed, just like Haitians in the 1990s and Afghans in 2001,
Jews in the 1940s were sometimes turned back to their respective
Hell. Millions and millions of people died unnecessarily. Adding
insult to injury, the US government even paid war reparations
to US corporations, including General Motors, which were supplying
the Nazi military with much-needed machinery and vehicles, for
the damage done to their German factories due to the Allied bombing
campaign. (The US government went further by guaranteeing safe
passage for many Nazi officers and even employing a number of
them, some of whom helped advance biological and chemical weaponry
as well as death penalty technology in the US. Other Nazi officers
were supported, especially in Europe and Latin America, as an
oppositional force against real or suspected communism.) Likewise,
the US was seemingly uninterested in Japan's genocide against
the Chinese in Nanking, and then did (and does) little to stop
China's genocide of the Tibetans since the 1950s. The US has
also never been interested in the genocide against the Kurds
or Armenians. The US was interested, however, in setting up detention
camps in 1942 for Japanese-Americans and, to a much lesser extent,
Germans and Italians. Are Americans thankful for our hypocrisy
and selective democracy?
In 1965, the US supported and facilitated
genocide in Indonesia. Under the US-supported military dictatorship,
half a million to a million communist-sympathizing peasants were
killed in Indonesia. Their lives are considered so worthless
that a more accurate number of those killed is nearly impossible.
(A more recent example of this mentality is from the Gulf War,
during which US bulldozing tanks buried an unknown number of
slaughtered Iraqis in the desert. When asked how many were killed
and buried in these mass unmarked graves, General Colin Powell
coldly replied that he wasn't interested and didn't care. Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright followed up that mentality by stating
on TV that the hundreds of thousands of additional kids who have
died since the war, due to sanctions, are a worthwhile price
to pay. For whom?) The US supplied some 90% of the weapons and
training to the Indonesian military, in addition to favorable
trade and investment, but also provided logistics and specific
names of Indonesian activists to be targeted for death. The Indonesian
military gladly obliged, taking the US hit list and then accomplishing
their task as best as possible.
Since 1975, similarly, the US has sponsored
and abetted genocide in Indonesian-occupied East Timor, culminating
in the latest round of "newsworthy" massacres at the
end of 1999. Nearly the same time that the modern Indonesian/East
Timorese tragedy began, the US condoned genocide in Cambodia,
after committing acts of genocide throughout South East Asia
in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, the US supported vicious
and murderous wars in Central America, central Asia, and southern
Africa, in which hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, were
killed, with many more disabled, displaced, and disappeared.
The US also sat idly by during the genocide in Rwanda in the
1990s, while almost totally ignoring slavery and genocide in
Sudan throughout that entire decade. Furthermore, the US persists
in continuously building, vigorously marketing, and violently
employing chemical, biological, nuclear and other weapons of
mass destruction, some of which was sold to both Iran and Iraq
during their war against each other. Further, the US continues
to use deadly depleted uranium, which has caused the deaths of
thousands of innocent civilians in southern Iraq since the last
Gulf War, while we ignore the actions of NATO ally Turkey as
it persecutes, tortures, bombs, and kills Kurds in its continuing
genocide against them. The US also refuses to sign a treaty banning
anti-personnel land mines. Are Americans proud of US foreign
policy? Of supporting murderous dictators and regimes? Of maintaining
deadly double standards?
At the same time that the US has, by
far, the most expensive and powerful military on Earth, it also
has a high poverty rate, the largest prison population, a relatively
high infant mortality rate, tremendous over-consumption and waste,
a stingy and demeaning welfare program, an active capital punishment
program, and almost as many privately-owned guns as people. Are
Americans proud of US domestic policy? Of supporting murderous
policies and programs? Of maintaining deadly discriminatory standards?
There are many reasons to celebrate and
Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Genocide should not
be one of those things. What are we doing on Thanksgiving Day?
We would be appropriately appalled if Germany or Austria were
celebrating a Holocaust Memorial Day, where Germans and Austrians
got together with their families for dinner on their official
day off, joyously remembering the things that are important to
them, just as American families get together for Thanksgiving
Day and think of things to be thankful for. (Similar scenarios,
just as ugly, could be constructed for white supremacists, rapists,
and murderers.) Some activities and events are inappropriate
just because of the context in which they occur and the history
of suffering they represent. Thanksgiving Day is clearly part
of that history. Are Americans thankful for forgetting their
own history, for having collective cultural and political amnesia?
We do not have to feel guilty, but we
do need to feel something. At the very least, we need to reflect
on how and what we feel. We should also review our history and
what it means to us and others, while we must rethink our adopted
traditions, including our Thanksgiving High Holy Day. My personal
(and therefore political!) resolution for the new year is to
stop celebrating genocide. American Thanksgiving may be sacred
to some, but it's utterly profane to me.
Dan Brook
teaches sociology at the University of California at Berkeley
and can be contacted via Brook@california.com.
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November 23,
2002
Susan Davis
Now About
That Big Stick
Caoimhe Butterly
I Was
Shot While Escorting Jenin's School Children
Kurt Nimmo
Bush &
the Canadians
Chris Floyd
Rough Beast
Slouching
Francis Boyle
On Behalf
of Iraq's 4.5 Million Children
Dave Marsh
Spirit
in the Light
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Rebirth
of Student Protest in Iran
Mark Hand
Dr. Alterman,
I Presume
Ralph Nader
Back Alley
Loan Sharks
Elaine Cassel
The Shameful
Treatment of John Malvo
Adam Engel
& Ian Harvey
Poets'
Basement
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