to the sword—in what has been described as the longest-running genocide in the world. No longer in the United States, where Amerindians were long ago wiped out with a few remnants held on “reservations,” but throughout Central and South America the slaughter of indigenous peoples continues apace. In Guatemala the renewed attacks coincided with a US-supported coup in 1953. For the next fifty years, hundreds of thousands of Amerindians were killed in generalized anticommunist warfare. During the great Spanish-imposed holocaust of the 1500s and immediately afterward, local populations were more than decimated (to 5 percent or fewer of their original numbers) due to both introduced diseases and genocidal behavior on a large scale.
An important difference between what became the United States and countries north and south of it is that the pre–United States consisted of prime temperate-zone land, with neither the cold of the Arctic nor the overwhelming biological competition in the tropics, which chiefly comes from antagonistic life forms such as diseases, both human and crop. Thus removal of the original population from this space resulted in huge opportunities for rapid growth of the new powerful European industrial system. Stealing nearly half of Mexico greatly increased the available space.
And the rationale for the genocide? Manifest destiny. Very simple. A religious and racial concept: you were destined by God to do exactly what you did. “Might makes right,” but with a more exalted ring. And the value of the rationale? Keep on doing what you are doing. Today the intellectuals rationalizing American misbehavior along these lines are fond of speaking about “American exceptionalism.” Somehow America is exempt from the usual laws of history and reality. We are the exceptional case and permitted—no, required—to act appropriately. We are the new chosen people of the Bible, as we have seen ourselves now for more than two hundred years (see the following section “Christian Zionism”).
How many of us Americans know that the Founding Fathers we venerate explicitly urged the eradication of Amerindians—genocide—by any means necessary: terror, starvation, inebriation, deliberate infection with smallpox, and outright slaughter?• President George Washington (stated at the time of open warfare): The immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more.
• President Thomas Jefferson: This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.
• President Andrew Jackson: They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.
• Chief Justice John Marshall: The tribes of Indians inhabiting the country were savages.... Discovery [of America by Europeans] gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest.
• President William Henry Harrison: Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization?
• President Theodore Roosevelt: The settler and pioneer have at bottom, had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.
No one seems self-conscious in the slightest about the links between explicit racism, claims of divine design, and calls for “extirpation” of entire peoples—all to the advantage of one’s own people.
CONTROL THROUGH SMALL WARS AND INSTALLED PROXIES
Most Americans have no idea how often the United States has gone to war, that is, invaded another country with its troops. For nearby countries, such visits are a regular occurrence. To take but World War I, when the United States was engaged in a major war against Germany and its allies in Europe, it still managed to invade the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Panama, and Mexico (multiple times) while permanently stationing troops in Nicaragua. Surely this is an admirable achievement. The usual rationale was instability threatening Americans and American property, but the actual function was typically to subvert local democracy in favor of American business interests. Presidents were replaced, assemblies dissolved, new and biased constitutions rushed through rigged