The US government is so determined to 'rebuild' Iraq after 'human rights violations' in Iraq perpetrated by Saddam Hussein.

Why won't this same government release the Indian Trust monies to the Tribes?

Are there different types of 'human rights violations?

Is what haapened to the Tribes at the hands of the US government not the same 'human rights violations' as those in Iraq?

We have pictures of bodies frozen in the snow. Women's, infant's, children's and Elder's bodies dumped into mass graves at Wounded Knee.

The Sand Creek Massacre. :no:

The US government had a campaign, just as Saddam Hussein did, to eliminate a population.

Aren't small pox laden blankets a form of germ warfare?


Just wondering

And, with a 95-98% rate of extermination, the US campaign was the most "successful" genocide in history.


http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/Epilogue_AH.html


Epilogue
excerpted from the book
American Holocaust
by David E. Stannard
Oxford University Press, 1992



p247
... one of the preconditions for the Spanish and Anglo-American genocides
against the native peoples of the Americas was a public definition of the
natives as inherently and permanently-that is, as racially-inferior beings.
To the conquering Spanish, the Indians more specifically were defined as
natural slaves, as subhuman beasts of burden, because that fit the use to
which the Spanish wished to put them, and because such a definition was
explicable by appeal to ancient Christian and European truths-through
Aquinas and on back to Aristotle. Since the colonizing British, and
subsequently the Americans, had little use for Indian servitude, but only
wanted Indian land, they appealed to other Christian and European sources
of wisdom to justify their genocide: the Indians were Satan's helpers, they
were lascivious and murderous wild men of the forest, they were bears, they
were wolves, they were vermin. Allegedly having shown themselves to be
beyond conversion to Christian or to civil life-and with little British or
American need for them as slaves-in this case, straightforward mass killing
of the Indians was deemed the only thing to do.

***

p251
"Well, you know, that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being
inhuman"-for surely the purpose of this passage is to demonstrate as
powerfully as possible just how absolutely inhuman the Africans truly
seemed, and how close to the murky borderland of the animal world they
really were; thus the impact of the European's haunting sense "that there
was in you just the faintest trace of a response" to-and a "remote kinship
with"-such brutal, monstrous beings. As Achebe says in a different essay:
"In confronting the black man, the white man has a simple choice: either to
accept the black man's humanity and the equality that flows from it, or to
reject it and see him as a beast of burden. No middle course ,exists except
as an intellectual quibble." In fact, however, it is precisely that
"intellectual quibble" that has poisoned Western thought, not only about
Africans, but about all peoples of non-European ancestry, for centuries
long past and likely for a good while yet to come. And therein lies the
true heart of Western darkness. For the line that separates Martin Luther's
anti-Jewish fulminations from those of Adolf Hitler is a line of great
importance, but ~t also ~s a line that is frighteningly thin. And once
crossed, as ~t was not only m Germany in the early twentieth century, but
in the Indies and the Americas four centuries before, genocide is but a
step away.

From time to time during the past half-century Americans have edged across
that line, if only temporarily, under conditions of foreign war. Thus, as
John W. Dower has demonstrated, the eruption of war in the Pacific in the
1940s caused a crucial shift in American perceptions of the Japanese from a
prewar attitude of racial disdain and dismissiveness (the curator of the
Smithsonian Institution's Division of Anthropology had advised the
President that the Japanese skull was "some 2,000 years less developed than
ours, ' while it was widely believed by Western military experts that the
Japanese were incompetent pilots who "could not shoot straight because
their eyes were slanted") to a wartime view of them as super-competent
warriors, but morally subhuman beasts. This transformation became a license
for American military men to torture and mutilate Japanese troops with
impunity-just as the Japanese did to Americans, but in their own ways,
following the cultural reshaping of their own racial images of Americans.
As one American war correspondent in the Pacific recalled in an Atlantic
Monthly article:

We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats,
killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded,
tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the
flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved
their bones into letter openers.

Dower provides other examples of what he calls the "fetish" of "collecting
grisly battlefield trophies from the Japanese dead or near dead, in the
form of gold teeth, ears, bones, scalps, and skulls"-practices receiving
sufficient approval on the home front that in 1944 Life magazine published
a "human interest" story along with "a full-page photograph of an
attractive blonde posing with a Japanese skull she had been sent by her
fiancée in the Pacific." (Following the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend in 1814,
Andrew Jackson oversaw not only the stripping away of dead Indians' flesh
for manufacture into bridle reins, but he saw to it that souvenirs from the
corpses were distributed "to the ladies of Tennessee.")

A little more than two decades after that Life photograph and article
appeared, General William C. Westmoreland was describing the people of
Vietnam as "termites," as he explained the need to limit the number of
American troops in that country:

If you crowd in too many termite killers, each using a screwdriver to kill
the termites, you risk collapsing the floors or the foundation. In this war
we're using screwdrivers to kill termites because it's a guerrilla war and
we cannot use bigger weapons. We have to get the right balance of termite
killers to get rid of the termites without wrecking the house.

Taking their cue from the general's dehumanization of the Southeast Asian
"gooks" and "slopes" and "dinks," in a war that reduced the human dead on
the enemy side to "body counts," American troops in Vietnam removed and
saved Vietnamese body parts as keepsakes of their tours of duty, just as
their fathers had done in World War Two. Vietnam, the soldiers said, was
"Indian Country" (General Maxwell Taylor himself referred to the Vietnamese
opposition as "Indians" in his Congressional testimony on the war), and the
people who lived in Indian country "infested" it, according to official
government language. The Vietnamese may have been human, but as the U.S.
Embassy's Public Affairs Officer, John Mecklin, put it, their minds were
the equivalent of "the shriveled leg of a polio victim," their "power of
reason . . . only slightly beyond the level of an American six-year-old."

p253
... During the brief duration of the [Gulf] war itself, American pilots
referred to the killing of unarmed, retreating enemy soldiers as a "turkey
shoot," and compared the Iraqi people- otherwise known as "ragheads"-to
"cockroaches" running for cover when allied planes appeared overhead.
Graffiti on bombs slung under the wings of American aircraft labeled them
as "Mrs. Saddam's sex toy" and "a suppository for Saddam," while the
American field commander subsequently admitted in a television interview
that he wished he had been able to complete his job: "We could have
completely closed the door and made it a battle of annihilation," he said;
it was "literally about to become the battle of Cannae, a battle of
annihilation" before-to his disappointment-the general was called off.

It should be noted that the third century B.C. battle of Cannae, during
which Carthaginian troops under the command of Hannibal almost completely
exterminated a group of 80,000 to 90,000 Romans, is still regarded as an
exemplar of total destructiveness to military historians. Even today,
Italians living in the region where the attack took place refer to the site
of the massacre as Campo di Sangue, or "Field of Blood." In his own words,
this is what General Norman Schwarzkopf had hoped to create in Iraq. And
when confronted by the press with evidence that appeared to demonstrate the
American government's lack of concern for innocent civilians (including as
many as 55,000 children) who died as a direct consequence of the war-and
with a United States medical team's estimate that hundreds of thousands
more Iraqi children were likely to die of disease and starvation caused by
the bombing of civilian facilities-the Pentagon's response either was
silence, evasion, or a curt "war is hell."

***

p255
To some, the question now is: Can it happen again? To others, as we said in
this book's opening pages, the question is, now as always: Can it be
stopped? For in the time it has taken to read these pages, throughout
Central and South America Indian men and women and children have been
murdered by agents of the government that controls them, simply because
they were Indians; native girls and boys have been sold on open slave
markets; whole families have died in forced labor, while others have
starved to death in concentration camps. More will be enslaved and more
will die in the same brutal ways that their ancestors did, tomorrow, and
every day for the foreseeable future. The killers, meanwhile, will continue
to receive aid and comfort and support from the United States government,
the same government that oversees and encourages the ongoing dissolution of
Native American families within its own political purview- itself a
violation of the U.N. Genocide Convention-through its willful refusal to
deal adequately with the life-destroying poverty, ill health, malnutrition,
inadequate housing, and despair that is imposed upon most American Indians
who survive today.

That is why, when the press reported in 1988 that the United States Senate
finally had ratified the United Nations Genocide Convention-after forty
years of inaction, while more than a hundred other nations had long since
agreed to its terms-Leo Kuper, one of the world's foremost experts on
genocide wondered in print whether the long delay, and the obvious
reluctance of the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention", derived
from "fear that it might be held responsible, retrospectively, for the
annihilation of Indians in the United States, or its role in the slave
trade, or its contemporary support for tyrannical governments engaging in
mass murder." Still, Kuper said he was delighted that at last the Americans
had agreed to the terms of the Convention.

Others were less pleased-including the governments of Denmark, Finland,
Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United
Kingdom, who filed formal objections with the United Nations regarding the
U.S. action. For what the United States had done, unlike the other nations
of the world, was approve and file with the U.N. a self-servingly
conditional instrument of ratification. Whatever the objections of the rest
of the world's nations, however, it now seems clear that the United States
is unlikely ever to do what those other countries have done-ratify
unconditionally the Genocide Convention.

***

Greatly varied though the specific details of individual cases may be,
throughout the Americas today indigenous peoples continue to be faced with
one form or another of a five-centuries-old dilemma. At the dawn of the
fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the Indians
they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion and culture
and land and independence, swearing allegiance "as vassals" to the Catholic
Church and the Spanish Crown, or suffer "all the mischief and damage" that
the European invaders choose to inflict upon you. It was called the
requerimiento. The deadly predicament that now confronts native peoples is
simply a modern requerimiento: surrender all hope of continued cultural
integrity and effectively cease to exist as autonomous peoples, or endure
as independent peoples the torment and deprivation we select as your fate.

In Guatemala, where Indians constitute about 60 percent of the
population-as elsewhere in Central and South America-the modern
requerimiento calls upon native peoples either to accept governmental
expropriation of their lands and the consignment of their families to
forced labor under criollo and ladino overlords, or be subjected to the
violence of military death squads. In South Dakota, where Indians
constitute about 6 percent of the population-as elsewhere in North
America-the effort to destroy what remains of indigenous cultural life
involves a greater degree of what Alexis de Tocqueville described as
America's "chaste affection for legal formalities." Here, the modern
requerimiento pressures Indians either to leave the reservation and enter
an American society where they will be bereft and cultureless people in a
land where poor people of color suffer systematic oppression and an
ever-worsening condition of merciless inequality, or remain on the
reservation and attempt to preserve their culture amidst the wreckage of
governmentally imposed poverty, hunger, ill health, despondency, and the
endless attempts of the federal and state governments at land and resource
usurpation.

The Columbian Quincentennial celebrations have encouraged scholars
worldwide to pore over the Admiral's life and work, to investigate every
rumor about his ancestry and to analyze every jotting in the margins of his
books. Perhaps the most revealing insight into the man, as into the
enduring Western civilization that he represented, however, is a bland and
simple sentence that rarely is noticed in his letter to the Spanish
sovereigns, written on *he way home from his initial voyage to the Indies.
After searching the coasts of all the islands he had encountered for signs
of wealth and princes and great cities, Columbus says he decided to send
"two men upcountry" to see what they could see. "They traveled for three
days," he wrote, "and found an infinite number of small villages and people
without number, but nothing of importance."

People without number-but nothing of importance. It would become a motto
for the ages.

Apparently. It's an NDN issue, not a human issue. However, this Stannard guy (who is not NDN) does not seem to think so. He's done some very good work. If I were king of the forest, I'd make his work required reading in high school.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/Pestilence_AH.html


p57
The Spain that Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind before dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos and out into the Atlantic, was for most of its people a land of violence, squalor, treachery, and intolerance. In this respect Spain was no different from the rest of Europe.

Epidemic outbreaks of plague and smallpox, along with routine attacks of measles, influenza, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid fever, and more, frequently swept European cities and towns clean of 10 to 20 percent of their populations at a single stroke. As late as the mid-seventeenth century more than 80,000 Londoners-one out of every six residents in the city-died from plague in a matter of months. And again and again, as with its companion diseases, the pestilence they called the Black Death returned. Like most of the other urban centers in Europe, says one historian who has specialized in the subject, "every twenty-five or thirty years-sometimes more frequently-the city was convulsed by a great epidemic." Indeed, for centuries an individual's life chances in Europe's pesthouse cities were so poor that the natural populations of the towns were in perpetual decline that was offset only by in-migration from the countryside-in-migration, says one historian, that was "vital if [the cities] were to be preserved from extinction."

Famine, too, was common. What J. H. Elliott has said of sixteenth century Spain had held true throughout the Continent for generations beyond memory: "The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of the population starved." This was in normal times. The slightest fluctuation in food prices could cause the sudden deaths of additional tens of thousands who lived on the margins of perpetual hunger. So precarious was the existence of these multitudes in France that as late as the seventeenth century each "average" increase in the price of wheat or millet directly killed a proportion of the French population equal to nearly twice the percentage of Americans who died in the Civil War.

That was the seventeenth century, when times were getting better. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries prices fluctuated constantly, leading people to complain as a Spanish agriculturalist did in 1513 that "today a pound of mutton costs as much as a whole sheep used to, a loaf as much as a fanega [a bushel and a half] of wheat, a pound of wax or oil as much as an arroba [25 Spanish pounds]." The result of this, as one French historian has observed, was that "the epidemic that raged in Paris in 1482 fits the classic pattern: famine in the countryside, flight of the poor in search of help, then outbreak of disease in the city following upon the malnutrition." And in Spain the threat of famine in the countryside was especially omnipresent. Areas such as Castile and Andalusia were wracked with harvest failures that brought on mass death repeatedly during the fifteenth century. But since both causes of death, disease and famine, were so common throughout Europe, many surviving records did not bother (or were unable) to make distinctions between them. Consequently, even today historians find it difficult or impossible to distinguish between those of the citizenry who died of disease and those who merely starved to death.

Roadside ditches, filled with stagnant water, served as public latrines in the cities of the fifteenth century, and they would continue to do so for centuries to follow. So too would other noxious habits and public health hazards of the time persist on into the future-from the practice of leaving the decomposing offal of butchered animals to fester in the streets, to London's "special problem," as historian Lawrence Stone puts it, of "poor's holes." These were "large, deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row upon row. Only when the pit was filled with bodies was it finally covered over with earth." As one contemporary, quoted by Stone, delicately observed: "How noisome the stench is that arises from these holes so stowed with dead bodies, especially in sultry seasons and after rain."

Along with the stench and repulsive appearance of the openly displayed dead, human and animal alike, a modern visitor to a European city in this era would be repelled by the appearance and the vile aromas given off by the living as well. Most people never bathed, not once in an entire lifetime. Almost everyone had his or her brush with smallpox and other deforming diseases that left survivors partially blinded, pock-marked, or crippled, while it was the norm for men and women to have "bad breath from the rotting teeth and constant stomach disorders which can be documented from many sources, while suppurating ulcers, eczema, scabs, running sores and other nauseating skin diseases were extremely common, and often lasted for years."

Street crime in most cities lurked around every corner. One especially popular technique for robbing someone was to drop a heavy rock or chunk of masonry on his head from an upper-story window and then to rifle the body for jewelry and money. This was a time, observes Norbert Elias, when "it was one of the festive pleasures of Midsummer Day to burn alive one or two dozen cats," and when, as Johan Huizinga once put it, "the continuous disruption of town and country by every kind of dangerous rabble [and] the permanent threat of harsh and unreliable law enforcement nourished a feeling of universal uncertainty." With neither culturally developed systems of social obligation and restraint in place, nor effective police forces in their stead, the cities of Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were little more than chaotic population agglomerates with entire sections serving as the residential turf of thieves and brigands, and where the wealthy were forced to hire torch-bearing bodyguards to accompany them out at night. In times of famine, cities and towns became the setting for food riots. And the largest riot of all, of course-though the word hardly does it justice-was the Peasants' War, which broke out in 1S24 following a series of local revolts that had been occurring repeatedly since the previous century. The Peasants' War killed over 100,000 people.

As for rural life in calmer moments, Jean de La Bruyere's seventeenth century description of human existence in the French countryside gives an apt summary of what historians for the past several decades have been uncovering in their research on rustic communities in Europe at large during the entire late medieval to early modern epoch: "sullen animals, male and female [are] scattered over the country, dark, livid, scorched by the sun, attached to the earth they dig up and turn over with invincible persistence; they have a kind of articulate speech, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face, and, indeed, they are men. At night they retire to dens where they live on black bread, water, and roots."

To be sure, La Bruyere was a satirist and although, in the manner of all caricaturists, his portrait contains key elements of truth, it also is cruel in what it omits. And what it omits is the fact that these wretchedly poor country folk, for all their life-threatening deprivations, were not "sullen animals." They were, in fact, people quite capable of experiencing the same feelings of tenderness and love and fear and sadness, however constricted by the limitations of their existence, as did, and do, all human beings in every corner of the globe.

But what Lawrence Stone has said about the typical English village also was likely true throughout Europe at this time-that is, that because of the dismal social conditions and prevailing social values, it "was a place filled with malice and hatred, its only unifying bond being the occasional episode of mass hysteria, which temporarily bound together the majority in order to harry and persecute the local witch." Indeed, as in England, there were towns on the Continent where as many as a third of the population were accused of witchcraft and where ten out of every hundred people were executed for it in a single year. In one small, remote locale within reputedly peaceful Switzerland, more than 3300 people were killed in the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century for allegedly Satanic activities. The tiny village of Wiesensteig saw sixty-three women burned to death in one year alone, while in Obermarchtal fifty-four people-out of a total population of barely 700-died at the stake during a three-year period. Thus, while it is true that the Europeans of those days possessed the same range of emotions that we do, as Stone puts it, "it is noticeable that hate seems to have been more prominent an emotion than love."

good posts

Stannard has done some absolutely amazing work, truly.