I find this writing so interesting and right about the world superpower!! JD -------------------------- Celebrating Genocide! Dan Brook Many people (though not Native Americans!) recently were as stuffed as their turkeys (though not vegetarians!) 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, in fact (and 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). On Thanksgiving Day, we give thanks. We give thanks for being the exploiter, the dominator, the greedy, the gluttonous, the colonizer, indeed the genocidaire, rather than on the other side of imperialism’s zero-sum murderous game. As Mark Twain says 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. 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 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 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 Arawaks, with curiosity and joy, came to greet the people coming off the ships from Europe. The Arawaks were a peaceful people, willing to share anything they had, offering both emotional kindness and their physical objects. Columbus describes how remarkable they were. So innocent of violence, Arawak people would initially reach out their hands to feel the strange, shiny objects called swords. The Arawaks 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 Arawaks 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 Arawaks essentially lived in Utopia. Are Americans thankful for living in a utopian society? For destroying one? As Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange is fond of pointing out, Columbus could have done one of a few different things after encountering the Arawaks of which 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. While doing so, he could have expanded his writings, perhaps doing valuable ethnographic and sociological research. (3) Another possibility is that Columbus could have rushed back to Europe, declaring the wonders of Arawak society and urging that the best minds of Europe go to visit and study the Arawaks. As a result of doing so, Europeans could have incorporated aspects of Arawak society into their own, if not emulating it altogether. 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” Arawaks were enslaved, many were tortured, their labor exploited, and their wealth stolen and shipped to Europe. During this process of imperialist superexploitation, 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 and civilization. The Arawaks were literally exploited to death and they are now extinct, all of them having been killed off through virulent brutality, overwork, and disease. Are Americans thankful they weren ’t Arawaks? For not being the dehumanized “other”? The Pilgrims later came to this country to escape religious persecution from the British, apparently in order to commit ethnic persecution against the Native Americans. 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 to horrific Atlantic crossing. So while Africans were being torn away from their homelands and families, 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, the US was fighting its civil war. The US Civil War may have been fought over slavery, though it was certainly not fought for the slaves. Sadly, there is much more to the tragic history of genocide and US complicity. Is it for this that Americans give thanks? In Europe, various demographic groups were being targeted by the Nazis, including leftists and unionists, people with physical and mental disabilities, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays and lesbians, the Roma (so-called Gypsies) and a small number of Blacks, and 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, the US did not enter the war against Germany until almost 1942, only after it was physically attacked by Japan. Even then, however, the US neither bombed the rail lines or the death camps themselves, or allowed in large numbers of refugees from fascism. 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 factories due to the Allied bombing campaign. Likewise, the US was seemingly uninterested in Japan’s genocide of the Chinese in Nanking, and then did (and does) little to stop China’s genocide of the Tibetans since the late 1950s. Are Americans thankful for our 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 when 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.) 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. Since 1975, similarly, the US has sponsored and abetted genocide in Indonesian-occupied East Timor, culminating in the latest round of “newsworthy” massacres this year. Nearly the same time, 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 murderous wars in Central America, central Asia, and southern Africa, in which tens, or perhaps hundreds, of thousands were killed and many more injured. The US also sat idly by during the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, while almost totally ignoring genocide in Sudan throughout the current decade. The US persists in continuously building, vigorously marketing, and violently employing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Are Americans proud of US foreign policy? Of maintaining deadly double standards? There are many reasons to celebrate and Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Genocide should not be one of those things. We would be appropriately appalled if Germans in Germany were celebrating Holocaust Memorial Day by getting together with their families for dinner and joyously remembering the things that mean something important to them, just as American families get together for Thanksgiving Day and think of things to be thankful for. Some activities are inappropriate just because of the context in which they occur. Are Americans thankful for forgetting their own history? 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, and we must rethink our traditions, including our Thanksgiving Holy Day. My personal (and therefore political!) resolution for the millennial new year will be to stop celebrating genocide. Thanksgiving may be sacred to some, but it’s profane to me.
