The Folly of Fools (34 page)

Make no mistake about it. People feel strongly about these matters. One person’s false historical narrative is another’s deeply personal group identity—and what right do you have commenting on my identity in the first place? Many Turkish people may well feel that I have slandered their country regarding its Armenian genocide, while I believe I have merely told the truth. The same may be true (though less strongly) for some Japanese people regarding their country’s practice of sexual slavery during World War II. Most Americans could hardly care less. So we wiped out the Amerindians—so what? So we repeatedly waged aggressive war on Mexico and stole nearly half their country. They probably deserved it. And, yes, since then we have fought a staggering series of wars ourselves and by proxies—even recently supporting genocide in such diverse places as Central America, Vietnam, Cambodia, and even East Timor, while blocking international action against it in Rwanda—but so the hell what? Only a left-wing nutcase would dwell on such minor details. Isn’t that what great powers do, and aren’t we the greatest?

Israel is no different from any other country or group in having its own false historical narrative, and Israel’s is especially important because it exacerbates a set of troubled international and intergroup relations. The narrative is also one that is accepted almost wholesale in the United States, the most powerful military nation in the world. As the old joke goes, why doesn’t Israel become the fifty-first state? Because then it would have only two senators. Again, feelings run high. Some regard as anti-Semitic any attack on the behavior of Israel (or its underlying narrative). I regard this as nonsense and follow instead what seem to me to be the best Israeli (and Arab) historians—and their (largely Jewish) American counterparts—in describing a false historical narrative used to expand Israel at a cost to its neighbors by waging regular war on them to seize land and water (with near-constant US support), all in the name of fighting terrorism, while using state terrorism as the chief weapon. The narrative inverts reality: Israel wants only peace with its Arab neighbors (from as early as 1928), who to this very day reject peace at every turn and seek the total destruction of Israel and its Jewish population.

But what are we to do? Yes, feelings run high, but false historical narratives are a critical part of self-deception at the group level, often with horrendous effects on others—if not on those practicing them. To discuss the subject, we need examples. Are we to leave out this important topic because on any given example feelings are easily bruised and controversy aroused? I see no sense in this. A theory of self-deception is not of much use if it can’t be applied to cases of actual human importance. Of course, I am more likely to be personally biased on these topics than on, say, the immunology of self-deception, but for me the risk of appearing foolish, indeed self-deluded, is preferable to the cowardice of not taking a position.

The point of this chapter is to paint a few false historical narratives in enough detail to see clearly some of the lies we tell about our histories, how they were constructed and maintained, and the purposes they may serve. We will also consider the costs. It has famously been said that those who do not know history are destined to repeat it, or as Harry Truman put it: “The only thing new under the sun is the history you do not know.”

THE US FALSE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

The false US narrative can be summarized with a few key facts, their rationalization, and the function of the rationalizations. The key fact is the slaughter and dispossession of an entire people (or set of peoples) to make room for Europeans (and their African slaves), a feat also accomplished by treaties not kept. Too late did Amerindians learn never to sign a treaty with a white man. For the latter, treaties were merely temporary agreements to be abrogated as soon as it was advantageous to do so.

It is fully apt that Christopher Columbus should have been elevated to historical status for discovering the Americas. On the one hand, he did no such thing. There were more than 100 million people awaiting him when he arrived. And ships had also recently arrived from Africa, Polynesia, Phoenicia, and even other European countries. On the other hand, Columbus was unique in that he combined exploration with an explicit plan for subjugating the locals and extracting their wealth and labor. This of course is not what he is celebrated for.

His first visit in 1492 merely allowed him to look around, and this is the one preserved in historical memory. The arrival of his three cute little ships—the
Nina
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa Maria
—connoted a naive, peaceful arrival to “discover” a brand-new land. The second time (in 1493), he arrived more fully prepared: seventeen ships, at least twelve hundred men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs trained to rend human flesh. Yet this second visit is lost from historical memory entirely. It is the key visit, but no one mentions it.

In Hispaniola, he and his men immediately demanded food, gold, spun cotton, and access to the local women. Indians were put to work mining gold, raising Spanish food, and even carrying the Spaniards around wherever they went. Minor offenses by Indians were punished by mutilation—an ear, a nose, both hands. Failing to find gold, Columbus started slave capture and transmission on a large scale, returning to Spain with five hundred Indians (almost half dying on the way) and leaving five hundred slaves behind. He launched a reign of sadistic terror: newborns given to dogs as food or smashed against rocks in front of their screaming mothers, twenty thousand killed in Hispaniola alone, with more to come on nearby islands. Mass suicide and regular infanticide were common responses by the Indians to the horrors they were experiencing. To make a long story shorter, a mere twenty-five years later when Columbus and his immediate heirs were done with Hispaniola, its Indian population had been reduced from an estimated five million people to fewer than fifty thousand. This was a story to be repeated in North, Central, and South America except that in the mainland tropics you could never exterminate everyone, especially those living deeper or higher in the forest. Neither the invention of ships nor means of navigation allowed this conquest and holocaust to take place; it was the invention of large guns, which could be attached to sturdy ships and supported by an array of smaller guns and aggressive weapons. It was the invention of high-tech war across the sea that brought about the new wave of colonization and genocide.

The point is that our retrospective re-creation of the “founding of the Americas” minimizes the sordid details of murder, slavery, sexual exploitation, and degradation with which it began. Instead it exalts simple exploration and discovery. Thus do we deny the motives and the reality of the territorial takeover. The benefit is self-glorification and continuation of the same kind of behavior; the cost is much more long-term, depending partly on the reaction of the survivors to this kind of behavior.

The holocaust was repeated up and down the Americas: one part introduced diseases to which the local people had little or no resistance, and one part heartless slaughter—women, children, the elderly, all members of village after village after village put 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 plebiscites, and so on.

After World War I, in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Panama, the Monroe Doctrine—the notion that the United States reigns supreme in the New World—was enforced (or, in Cuba’s case, was attempted) through armed invasions, local militias, and internal subversion. Most invasions set the stage for a series of dictators serving US interests: Batista, Trujillo, Duvalier, and Samosa. In Franklin Roosevelt’s famous words (about Samosa), “He maybe a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Of course, such a person is much more useful to you (in the short term) than someone trying to serve his own people’s interests. The long term is another matter. The replacement of Mossadegh, the Iranian nationalist, in 1953 with a puppet, the shah, may have given temporary economic benefit to the United States, but certainly it helped produce a long-term disaster.

The United States invaded Nicaragua thirteen times in the twentieth century before turning the murderous Contras loose on them in the 1980s, when the Nicaraguans finally voted for socialism. The country remains the second-poorest in the Americas, second only to Haiti, another country that has enjoyed frequent US invasions (including a twenty-year occupation). The Brazilian adventure was typical. A US-supported military coup in 1965 overthrew the democratically elected and mildly socialist government, instituting a reign of terror and laying the groundwork for similar events in Argentina and Chile, with combined mortality running into the hundreds of thousands. The US ambassador to Brazil at the time put the matter succinctly, in the best tradition of false historical narratives: The coup was “the most decisive victory for freedom in the mid twentieth century.” The “democratic forces” now in power would “create a greatly improved climate for private investment.” Thus is a false historical narrative maintained and embroidered. We start with the notion that it is our right—nay, our duty—to intervene in the internal affairs of our neighbors because we thereby create freedom, democracy, and (most important) improved investment opportunities for ourselves that we then imagine benefit the Brazilians apace. In fact, it is only now, after the military dictatorships have long withered away, that under a fully democratic (and mildly socialist) government, Brazil is making rapid economic strides in the world, much more so than is the United States.