Lies I Was Raised With

[publius2k]

Lies I Was Raised With

By Wade Frazier

Introduction

Big Lies: The News

More Big Lies: History

Colonialism, the First Stage of Global Capitalism

Objectivity, Sources and the Historian's Ideal

Footnotes

Introduction

Although I began questioning my indoctrination when I left college, it
took brutal experiences with Dennis Lee to “radicalize” me. As far as
“radical” goes, that means uncovering the unquestioned assumptions of
my society. I eventually realized I had been sold a set of lies. It
was not that everybody was in on the joke except me. The lies I
discovered are those nearly universally believed. When my accounting
professor told me about why auditors make so much money, he believed
it. In the wake of the Savings and Loan Scandal, he may have changed
his mind, or as the burgeoning Enron scandal has been heating up.

Since 1990, all of my spare time, and five years of full-time work,
has been devoted to researching what I was taught, comparing it to my
adult research, and creating this web site. What follows is some of
what I discovered.

I was lied to, in many ways. The lies I was sold were sometimes
different lies than others were sold. Americans growing up in regions
dominated by English settlers, such as the Eastern United States, were
probably not taught much about Junípero Serra, as I was. They were
probably taught about Columbus, however. Although I cannot get my
money back, I have discarded much of what I was taught, from
kindergarten through my college diploma and beyond.

Big Lies: The News

Soon after graduating from college I began questioning my
indoctrination, and eventually realized that my profession was
worthless. Just before moving to Ohio, I heard of a new magazine that
analyzed the New York Times’ content. It was Lies of Our Times. It
was my first exposure to the alternative media. In Los Angeles,
before I met Dennis, I subscribed to the Christian Science Monitor,
thinking I was getting alternative news. When Dennis was in jail, I
had a roommate who talked about Noam Chomsky, and told me Chomsky's
work would be educational. I had never heard of him.

Reading my first issue of Lies of Our Times (LOOT) is a vivid memory.
It was the November 1990 issue, which came out as George Bush was
whipping America into a frenzy to attack Iraq. I got LOOT until they
went out of business in late 1994, but my first issue's first page is
still the one I remember best. That page produced a small article
titled "More Translation Problems." The Bank of Kuwait's logo
accompanied the article. The logo had a camel in its center, and was
ringed with Arabic script. Here is the article.

"Back in March (p.19) we ran a letter Nabeel Abraham sent to the New
York Times complaining about a mistranslation of the Arabic in the
photo caption. Lebanese journalists were shown carrying a sign which
actually read 'Freedom of the press. Yes to the printed word, no to
terror.' The Times said the sign said 'In Allah’s hands we are safe.'
The letter, of course, was not published by the Times.

"Now they are at it again.

"The first page of the business section on September 12 (p.C1)
presented a piece about the Bank of Kuwait. Illustrating it was the
logo of the bank, shown below, with this caption: 'The logotype of the
National Bank of Kuwait proclaims, "There is no deity but Allah."

“Abraham sent off another letter, which reads in part: ‘The logotype
says no such thing. The Arabic inscription merely says, “National
Bank of Kuwait, Kuwait, 1952.”

"He concluded: 'These glaring errors leave me wondering how the Times
goes about translating Arabic language materials into English. Surely,
you did not consult someone who actually reads the language, for those
errors are so wide off the mark that they are laughable. I must
conclude that either the Times is paying good money for bogus
translations, or that the reporters and/or editors are making up the
translations as they go along. Either way the "translators" are not
drawing on their knowledge of the language, but on their storehouse of
racist and demeaning stereotypes which "perceive" religious fatalism,
zealotry, fanaticism every time they see an Arabic inscription. In
this way the ‘translators’ say more about themselves than about the
material they are purportedly translating.'

"We are not holding our breath while waiting to see if the Times
prints Abraham’s letter."[1]

That opened my eyes. The world's most influential publication could
stoop below the journalistic integrity of the National Enquirer when
the need suited them. The New York Times' effort on "translating"
Arabic script, especially as George Bush and company were whipping up
a murderous anti-Arab fervor in America, may have made Goebbels beam
with approval, if he did not think it a little heavy-handed. Below
are the photographs in question.

nyt.jpg (171853 bytes)Click on image to
enlarge

Soon after that, I subscribed to the Covert Action Information
Bulletin, now called Covert Action Quarterly. I subscribed to the
Christic Institute's Journal of Emergence before they were legally
raped, similar to how Mr. Big Time Attorney was dealt with by the
federal courts in California, but much worse.[2]

I began reading Chomsky's work. I read Manufacturing Consent and
Unreliable Sources. LOOT went out of business in 1994, as all
alternative media organizations operate on a shoestring. Challenging
the official version of reality does not pay well. Chomsky calls the
New York Times a leader in the “agenda setting media,” which means
that most mainstream American newspapers follow the Times’ lead in
deciding what is newsworthy, and the Times’ reporting also dominates
the tenor that other papers give to their reporting. I have
subscribed to Z Magazine for many years, and other "alternative"
periodicals. I have studied the far right, subscribing to The
Spotlight for years, and have read plenty of conspiratorial
scholarship. During the past twelve years I studied the media far
more than I ever studied accounting or chemistry.

The fact that the media presents a highly slanted view of the world is
not the result of one big conspiracy. Media defenders have often
stated, "How can all reporters get their orders from the same place?"
It is not that simple.

In the first chapter of Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman (the LOOT
editor) and Chomsky present their Propaganda Model and discuss the
various "news filters" that determine what news is printed. The first
filter is called the "size, ownership, and profit orientation of the
mass media." Because media organizations are profit-making
corporations, and are increasingly large corporations that are part of
even larger corporate conglomerates, the economic interests of the
ownership impacts the news process significantly. The authors show
how market forces have driven alternative viewpoints from the media.
They present the example of the British working-class media. The
government tried wiping them out with punitive laws, but in the end,
the sheer market forces of advertising revenues, affluent audiences
and economy-of-scale factors drove the working-class press out of
business.

In America, there has never been anything resembling a working-class
press. The situation today is far less favorable toward establishing
a working-class press than it was early in the 20th century. The
ultra-rich own the media, and it is nonsensical to think that their
interests would not be attended to by the organizations they own.

During the Gulf War of 1991, General Electric owned NBC. General
Electric was one of the world's largest defense contractors,
contributing to nearly every weapons system deployed in the Gulf War.
The gushing coverage given to America's "smart bombs," Patriot
Missiles, Tomahawks and the like, when presented on NBC, was admiring
its owner's handiwork. The NBC president killed a story that even Tom
Brokaw wanted aired about the "collateral" damage that the U.S.
bombing inflicted onto Iraq's civilian population. Those conflicts of
interest pervade America’s mainstream media.

Because of the global economy that has been developing for centuries,
we now have a global media. The owners’ interests are greatly
attended to by the companies they own. As Ben Bagdikian demonstrated
in his Media Monopoly, the trend is toward increasing concentration of
ownership, with fewer and larger corporations owning the mainstream
media, a trend that has been dramatic during the past generation. That
is normal capitalism at work. Capitalism always tends toward
monopoly. How much media diversity can there be when a few rich
interests own it all? How can news be aired that challenges the
powerful, when the powerful own the media? Capitalism has little or
nothing to do with democracy. The rich run capitalism, by definition.
They own the capital. Corporations operate in a top-down fashion,
with orders coming from the top, being carried out by those down
below. They are economic dictatorships. CBS Evening News Executive
Director Tom Bettag was fired the day he tried running the clip about
Iraqi civilian devastation that the NBC president killed.

The second news filter presented by Herman and Chomsky is advertising.
The media serves not only the owners' interests. Because the media is
commercial, the advertisers' interests are also attended to. For many
years cigarette advertising had a significant influence over editorial
policies. Magazines such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World
Report derived substantial revenues from cigarette companies.
"Coincidentally," they never went on editorial crusades against
smoking, although Reader’s Digest had been doing so for
generations.[3] In 1980, Mother Jones ran a series of articles
regarding cigarettes being a major cause of cancer and heart disease.
Immediately, the tobacco companies pulled their advertising from
Mother Jones.

The tobacco companies marshal their clout against media organizations
that step out of line. They are looking after their interests and
selling as much of their product as possible and making money, not
caring how many millions of people their product kills. It is the
very reason corporations exist: making money any way they can. One
undeniable consequence is that biased news is produced. Knowledge is
power.

The third news filter presented is the source of mass media news. In
the corporate media, news is a product sold like anything else. Just
as coffee grows on bushes in Central America and oil is found under
the Middle East sand, "news" is usually found in a few choice
locations. Newspaper reporters do not canvass Creation everyday,
looking for a story. Reporters are assigned to places such as the
White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the county
courthouse, City Hall, etc. Consequently, news organizations come to
rely upon those sources of information. A few things happen because
of those relationships. One is that the media gets cozy with power.
The temptation is to abandon the adversarial or independent stance the
media ideally takes. It happens all the time, and it becomes a
working relationship instead. If reporters assigned to City Hall
talks to the same people every day to get their news, how cooperative
will those news sources be with the reporter who prints unflattering
news? Not very. A cub reporter can end his career by reporting the
wrong story, or reporting it the "wrong" way.

The media have largely become stenographers to power. With increasing
regularity, powerful news sources produce the news itself. The
Pentagon and large corporations have public relations departments that
often dwarf the media that covers them. They produce "news"
regularly, which they disseminate to news organizations. It used to
be called a press release, and today extends to slickly produced
videos. Downsized news organizations are handed a video of commercial
quality, ready to air, presenting corporate or governmental
pre-packaged news.

When Mr. Deputy orchestrated his spectacular arrest of Dennis, a video
was given to the Los Angeles TV stations at the same time. A friend
called me the day after Dennis was arrested, saying he saw a video of
Dennis on the evening news, slanted to make Dennis look like the crook
of the century. Perhaps Mr. Deputy's video was slightly edited by the
TV station, and perhaps not. Viewers are rarely informed that a
corporation or government agency, not the news organization, produced
the "news" they just saw.

The fourth filter Herman and Chomsky present is called "flak and the
enforcers." The first three filters act as coercive forces, ensuring
that powerful interests are served. However, sometimes the media
begins publishing stories that the powerful would rather keep quiet,
or it presents the "wrong" side of the story. There is an array of
punitive strategies to corral rogue newsmen or news agencies.
Affiliated with powerful corporations and often bankrolled directly by
them are media "watchdog" organizations that "police" the media. When
the media runs a story that gores an ox that the powerful own, such as
reporting corporate or governmental malfeasance, the "flak" and
"enforcer" organizations pounce on them. Often the powerful groups
provide their flak directly. A recent and spectacular instance was
when CNN's April Oliver and Jack Smith reported on the alleged use of
Sarin nerve gas by the United States in Laos in 1970, during a secret
mission known as Operation Tailwind.

The reporters worked on the story for several months, interviewing
people involved in the operation and Major General John Singlaub and
Admiral Thomas Moorer, who were privy to operations such as Tailwind
during those days. A story accusing the United States of using nerve
gas would obviously be big news, and it was no surprise that CNN ran
it rather than the big three: NBC, CBS and ABC, who did not touch the
story. CNN's Peter Arnett also helped report the story. It was aired
on June 7 and June 14, 1998, and Time ran it in its June 15, 1998
edition.

CNN was prepared to support its reporters, but did not anticipate how
bad the flak would get. Flak organizations such as Accuracy in Media
(AIM - a far right media watchdog group that has a cozy relationship
to power) went on the attack. The big heat came from the Pentagon and
Henry Kissinger. CNN was quickly brought to its knees and it served
up Oliver and Smith as sacrificial lambs. CNN hired two attorneys to
"critique" Oliver and Smith's report. It was a slanted effort that
appeared to be a hack job to justify what happened next: CNN retracted
the story and Oliver and Smith were fired. The establishment press
accounts of the Tailwind flap made it appear as if CNN responsibly
retracted a story that its loose cannon reporters snuck through.

Whatever inaccuracies there may have been in their story, they were
fired because of whom they offended. Peter Arnett's career with CNN
ended in April 1999 because of the flap. He was one of America's
finest mainstream reporters, but his continual reporting of the
"wrong" story, such as his uncensored reports from Baghdad in 1991,
won him the enmity of many powerful people.

Reed Irvine, who runs AIM, publicly called for the firing of those
responsible for that story airing, and he got his wish. Oliver and
her colleagues were eventually vindicated. Singlaub sued Oliver to
clear his name, besmirched in the Tailwind flap. On January 17, 2000,
Thomas Moorer, in the presence of Oliver and Singlaub, was deposed as
part of the lawsuit. The transcript of that deposition has been
posted to the Internet, and Moorer confirmed all the essentials of
what Oliver reported, including:

* Sarin gas (also known as "BG" and "CBU-15") was stockpiled at
the Nakhorn Phanom base in Thailand, where the Tailwind mission was
launched;
* The mission was seeking to find U.S. "defectors," and that
killing them would have been a mission option;
* Sarin was regularly used on the secret missions, the pilots knew
they carried it and knew how, when and why to deploy it; Moorer
justified its deployment if it would save American lives, and admitted
that the Montagnards had gas masks that were too large to fit
properly, which allowed the nerve gas to kill them, prompting the U.S.
to begin making smaller gas masks;
* He believed that Sarin was used on the mission and that it was
successful.

In essence, Oliver's reporting was accurate. Although the Tailwind
flap was huge news when it happened, the revelations of Moorer's
testimony failed to receive mainstream media coverage. Singlaub's
lawsuit was quietly settled, with Oliver getting a substantial
settlement, although the nature of those kinds of settlements are that
Oliver cannot publicly say that she was vindicated, but the silence of
Singlaub and others speaks volumes, and Oliver still stands by her
story. The career of Oliver and others was ruined, but not a hint of
"sorry" can be heard from Irvine or the others who attacked Oliver and
her colleagues.

Similarly, reporter Gary Webb ran a series of reports in the San Jose
Mercury News in 1996 regarding the issue of Contra complicity in the
drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. They
were the same stories that came out during the Iran-Contra scandal,
and it put the powerful in a bad light. There was no substantive
objection to Webb's powerfully supported story, and the CIA and
Justice Department confirmed key elements in his story, but
nevertheless, Webb lost his job.[4]

New York Times reporter Ray Bonner was another famous sacrificial
lamb. In 1982, he accurately reported on the El Mozote massacre,
committed by the U.S.-trained El Salvadoran forces. Several hundred
people were murdered, mainly women and children. That was a mass
murder committed by Reagan's "fledgling democracy," and reporting the
truth cost Bonner his job.[5]

Immediately after the public professional executions of Oliver and
Smith came the story of Mike Gallagher of the Cincinnati Inquirer, who
published a series of articles about Chiquita Brand International in
May 1998. Chiquita used to be known as United Fruit. The United
States overthrew the Guatemalan government in 1954 so United Fruit
could continue to "own" the country.[6] Gallagher reported that what
goes on today in Central America was merely more of the same, and he
found himself legally attacked by Chiquita, accusing him of illegally
accessing their voicemail system.

The attacks on those who tell the wrong story are not limited to the
news. All across America, college professors who fail to toe the
establishment line, and lean in any way toward the “left,” often have
a hard time keeping their jobs and careers, and are often fired
outright and then blackballed from the profession.[7]

In the case of Ralph McGehee and the CIA, there are structural
controls in place, such as how the CIA psychologically screens
candidates in order to select people who blindly follow orders. The
CIA almost did not hire Ralph because he did not think in the
simplistic black/white way the CIA preferred its “mesomorphs” to
think. Even so, it took Ralph a major intelligence breakthrough in
Thailand and 16 years to finally figure out what the CIA was all
about. Other structural controls existed. By the time Ralph figured
it out, he was trapped in the CIA, with no other career options.
Others like him lived lives of quiet desperation, counting their days
to retirement.

Those constraints made it highly unlikely that a Ralph McGehee would
ever figure it out and go public with what he knew. When Ralph tried
going public, the CIA abused the national security laws to try
preventing publication of his work, even going to the absurd extent
that they tried reclassifying public domain material in his book. Even
so, after a monumental legal battle, his final book was riddled with
censorship deletions, the mainstream media has ignored him when they
have not smeared him, and the CIA even went to the extent of buying
his Deadly Deceits off bookstore shelves to limit its circulation.
Then Ralph created his CIABASE web site, using public domain material
to tell what the CIA was up to. Ralph was then subjected to having
his home bugged, and he would be followed to the grocery store, and
they tried framing him for crimes such as shoplifting. The local
police (near Washington D.C.) worked with the CIA and FBI in harassing
Ralph, to the point of threatening his family. That not being enough
to silence Ralph, they would periodically escalate the intimidation
and dirty tricks, and spiked his food on more than one occasion, which
damaged his mouth. Their efforts finally succeeded in silencing Ralph
in the year 2000. Even when he moved away and stopped his CIABASE
efforts, the FBI went to his new town of residence, telling local
merchants to be on the lookout for Ralph, as he was a dangerous
“national security threat.” Those who think America has free speech
should ponder Ralph’s case.

When Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman tried publishing their book on
U.S. international fascism and how the American establishment is a
vital part of how that system works, a member of America’s media
oligarchy destroyed his own publishing company to try preventing the
book’s publication. That not being enough (the book was finally
published), the media (even Chomsky and Herman’s “friends” in the left
and academia) have misrepresented their work ever since, while calling
Chomsky a supporter of the Khmer Rouge, which is in the Big Lie
category.

The Savings and Loan Scandal had a few genuinely good investigative
reporting efforts on how America was defrauded by people such as
George Bush and friends. The two best efforts are probably Inside Job
by Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo and The Mafia, CIA and George Bush by Pete
Brewton of the Houston Post. Although those reporters did not end up
as Danny Casolaro and Paul Wilcher did, Brewton had the publication of
his book essentially blocked by his publishing company until after the
1992 presidential election.[8] During the summer of 2002, a friend
co-wrote a book by an Enron whistleblower, and the major book company
pulled the same stunt that Brewton’s publisher did. My friend is now
trying to get it published through other channels.

That is not a new phenomenon in America, of silencing reporters and
others who try speaking out. The powerful do not want the public
knowing of their dark acts, and skewering reporters and media
organizations that have the audacity to report on it is standard
operating practice. There is no "free press" in America. Those kinds
of factors led to Project Censored. Establishment hacks can be
vicious. If they ever get into a public debate with people such as
Noam Chomsky, they quickly stoop to calling them names and even
yelling at them and lying, as John Silber, the president of Boston
College, did during a 1985 debate with Chomsky over the Contra
situation.[9]

The real reasons for dropping atom bombs on Japan had little or
nothing to do with saving American lives. It was mainly a
demonstration of power to the Soviet Union, and can be considered the
Cold War’s first salvo. Leslie Groves, who ran the Manhattan Project,
candidly admitted as much in the presence of Nobel (Peace Prize, 1995)
Laureate Joseph Rotblat, who then quit the Manhattan Project and asked
to return home to Britain. Rotblat attended a 1986 debate between
then-vice president George Bush, American defense establishment pundit
Richard Perle, and a Soviet representative regarding the beginnings of
the Cold War. The debate was heated, with the Soviet debater claiming
that the United States was intending to threaten the Soviet Union with
atomic weapons as early as 1944. Bush and Perle hotly contested the
Soviet debater's assertion. Then Rotblat stood and related the
conversation that Groves had in his presence. Rotblat had already
published that conversation with Groves. Perle then rushed off the
debating platform and shook his fist furiously in Rotblat's face,
saying, "You have no right to be saying anything like that!"[10]

The final filter presented by Herman and Chomsky is an ideological
one. Chomsky today says he thought the description of the filter in
Manufacturing Consent was too narrow.[11] It was called
anticommunism. The anticommunist mentality became an ideological
rallying point through which communism was seen as a great and evil
threat to rich property owners. It shaded many areas of American
discourse, and anticommunist dogma was as deeply ingrained into the
American psyche as any catechism ever was. Today Chomsky says the
ideological filter is broader than that - mainly the portrayal of a
malevolent external threat to make people submit to state power, to
"protect" them. With the communist bogeyman gone, America has had to
stoop lower and lower to conjure malevolent external threats, such as
Noriega, Hussein, and drug dealers. Maybe it will be
extraterrestrials next year. The media portrays the bad guy of the
hour as we attack him, vanquishing a "great threat" to our nation.
Sometimes it gets ludicrous, such as saying that Grenada was a threat
to U.S. shipping lanes.

In late 2001, the World Trade Center attacks answered the warmongers’
prayers, and as if the script was taken directly from George Orwell’s
1984, George Bush the Second declared a virtually perpetual war on
“terror.” Finally, a real threat may exist beyond all the paper
tigers that were paraded in front of Americans during the 1990s. Even
though the United States government has been the world’s leading
terror organization for the past fifty years,[12] the current “war on
terror” will become the new Cold War, lining the pockets of the
“defense” establishment and further securing U.S. global hegemony.

In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky present a concept known
as worthy and unworthy victims. Worthy victims are victims of our
enemies. Unworthy victims are victims of our friends or of us. The
authors analyzed the American media's treatment of Central American
murders of Catholic priests and nuns by the security forces of
national governments. The repeated murders of priests and nuns in El
Salvador and Guatemala seemed a sport of their police forces. When a
priest would speak out against the government's murder of its
citizens, he could be expected to get it next, as Archbishop Romero
did. El Salvador and Guatemala were favored client states of the
United States while those murders were taking place, with American
officials covering for them. At the same time, Poland was undergoing
its own struggles against its oppressive Soviet influence (those
events were from the 1980s, when Manufacturing Consent was first
published). In Poland, members of the Catholic Church spoke out in
favor of human rights. In 1984, one Polish priest was murdered by the
Polish secret police.

Herman and Chomsky compared the media's coverage of the murder of one
Polish priest (a victim of our enemy, hence a worthy victim) to its
coverage of the murder of 100 priests and nuns in Central America
(victims of our friends, hence unworthy victims). Herman and Chomsky
merely added up the amount of coverage the murders received in the
mainstream American press. Their sample was the New York Times, Time,
Newsweek, and CBS News. They added up column-inches and prominence of
stories (front page or not) in the printed material, and airtime and
prominence (lead story or not) for TV news. The murder of the Polish
priest elicited outrage in the American press, garnering headlines and
top-of-the-hour coverage. The priest was eulogized as a victim of the
evil empire, and the American press pointed its finger straight at the
Kremlin.

The cumulative coverage of the murders of 100 priests and nuns in
Central America did not exceed the coverage of that Polish priest's
murder. There were no eulogies or humanizing coverage for the priests
and nuns murdered in our client states, and the American media could
never seem to identify the murderers. According to our media and
government, they were anonymous death squad members, murdering for the
hell of it, not connected to our client governments in any way. When
four American nuns were murdered (when it could not be denied that the
El Salvadoran National Guard did the deed, after raping the women),
Alexander Haig and Jean Kirkpatrick went so far as to say the women
deserved it, that they were working with El Salvadoran guerillas.
Those statements by our government officials have since been proven
bold-faced lies. Herman and Chomsky dryly presented their data and
concluded that a dead Polish priest was more than 100 times as
media-worthy in America as a dead Central American priest or American
nun murdered by our friends.

The media bias presents itself in many other ways. David Croteau and
William Hoynes performed an analysis on what many regarded as the best
news show on television, Nightline with Ted Koppel. Their analysis
was published in By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political
Debate. Croteau and Hoynes stated that analyzing debate content was
subject to a wide range of interpretation. They focused on something
not subject to interpretation: their race, gender, occupation,
nationality, if they appeared in the program alone or with somebody
else, how long were they on, etc.

The results’ publication created a stir in media circles. Their study
of several hundred Nightlines showed that of Nightline's guests, 82%
were male, 89% were white and 78% were government officials,
professionals and corporate representatives.[13] They also presented
the same data taken from another highly respected news show, The
MacNeil/Lehrer Hour. Those numbers were even more skewed, at 87%
male, 90% white, and 89% government officials, professionals and
corporate representatives. From that data, a strong case was made for
the shows' biases. In nutshell, those "news shows" were little more
than platforms for the rich and powerful to air their views. The
study was far ranging, and something this essay cannot do justice to.
It was a sophisticated piece of analysis and difficult to deny.

When confronted with the study's results, Ted Koppel came up with a
number of rationales for the show's bias. The main defense was that
the rich and powerful men who ran the country were invited to the
show, and when White House administrations changed, those new powerful
people would be interviewed. Koppel handled his interviewees with kid
gloves, and was even buddies with some of them, such as Henry
Kissinger, one of his most frequent guests. Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting's (FAIR) Jeff Cohen said their response,

"…could have been uttered by a Soviet TV news programmer -
pre-glasnost. American television news is not supposed to be strictly
a forum for representatives of the state. FAIR does not criticize
Nightline for inviting policy makers to appear on the show, but for
its exclusion of forceful American critics of the policy. Critics,
and critical sources, are part of a news story."[14]

In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky found a tripled example,
not merely a paired one, which aptly demonstrated the situation. In
Central America, the nations of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua
are neighbors, lined up along the narrow strip of land that joins the
continents. Guatemala and El Salvador were favored client states of
the United States during the 1980s, El Salvador receiving six billion
dollars in military and other aid from the United States, while Ronald
Reagan called it a "fledgling democracy." By almost any standard
applied to Guatemala and El Salvador during those years, they had two
of the 20th century’s most brutal and murderous regimes. The only
reason the leaders of those governments did not attain the bloody
stature of Hitler, Stalin and other despots was because their nations
were relatively small.

Guatemala and El Salvador were terror states that butchered their
populations. The butchers that ran them were U.S. puppets, and the
leaders of their "security forces" were largely trained in the United
States at the School of the Americas and other facilities. When they
graduated from their American schools, their first acts upon returning
home were often killing women and children in sadistic fashion. Here
is an example of the kinds of activities engaged in by America-trained
El Salvadoran soldiers, used to keep the population terrorized,
written by human rights activist and Catholic priest Daniel Santiago,

"People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador - they are
decapitated and their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the
landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury
Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths.
Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs
are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not
enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the
flesh falls from their bones and their parents are forced to watch…The
aesthetics of terror in El Salvador is religious."[15]

Santiago reported the story of a peasant woman returning home to find
her family seated around the kitchen table. Sitting around the table
was her mother, sister and three children. Placed on the table in
front of each of them were their decapitated heads. Their hands were
placed on their heads, as if each body was stroking its own head. The
El Salvadoran National Guardsmen who created that artistic tableau
found it difficult for the youngest actor in the scene, an
eighteen-month-old baby, to keep its hands on its head, so they nailed
its hands onto its head. Completing the scene, in the center of the
table was a large plastic bowl, filled with blood.[16] Many Americans
wonder how people such as Jeffrey Dahmer walk the earth. America
trains them.

Dan Mitrione, a CIA man and boyhood friend of James Jones of Jonestown
fame, was a torture specialist. He considered torture an art form.
Mitrione's motto was "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the
precise amount, for the desired effect." Mitrione was a true torture
professional, stating, "A premature death means a failure by the
technician…It's important to know in advance if we can permit
ourselves the luxury of the subject's death." Mitrione taught his
Uruguayan pupils how to refine the art of torture. Mitrione had
slender wires brought in by diplomatic pouch. The wires were used for
one of Mitrione's specialties, inserting the wires between an
interrogation victim's teeth, to administer an electric shock, which
produced exquisite pain. A Uruguayan commission looked into the use
of torture by the government against its own citizens. Among the
tortures the commission discovered were electric shocks administered
to genitals, needles under fingernails, putting testicles in vices,
and using torture on pregnant women and women nursing infants.
Mitrione built a soundproof torture chamber in the cellar of his home
in Uruguay. In 1970, a group whose members he was torturing kidnapped
Mitrione. They held him for ransom: the return of 150 of their
people. When Uruguay refused, with the firm backing of the United
States, they killed Mitrione. Mitrione was eulogized in America by
the White House (the Secretary of State attended his funeral) as a
devoted servant of "peaceful progress." His daughter called him "a
great humanitarian."[17]

The satanic atrocities committed against its citizens were merely days
at the office for the El Salvadoran security forces. Father Ignacio
Martín-Baró was one of six Jesuit priests murdered in an El Salvadoran
massacre in 1989, which finally spurred the U.S. media to take a
deeper look into El Salvador’s "fledgling democracy," after nearly a
decade of Reagan-inspired butchery. A few months before he was
murdered, Martín-Baró gave a talk in California regarding "The
Psychological Consequences of Political Terrorism." His first point
was that the most significant terrorism is that inflicted by the state
onto its domestic population. His second point was that terror's
purpose was serving the elite needs of that nation, as the terror is
part of a "government-imposed sociopolitical project." His third
point was briefly addressed, but Chomsky said it was the most
important one for his Californian audience, which was:

"The sociopolitical project and the state terrorism that helps to
implement it are not specific to El Salvador, but are common features
of the Third World domains of the United States, for reasons deeply
rooted in Western culture, institutions, and policy planning, and
fully in accord with the values of enlightened opinion. These crucial
factors explain much more than the fate of El Salvador."[18]

About 75,000 civilians died during El Salvador’s reign of terror. In
Guatemala, the reign of terror began in 1954 when the U.S. and CIA
overthrew their democratic government on behalf of the company that
brings us Chiquita bananas. The Guatemalan death toll is about
200,000 people, and the killing escalated in the 1980s. The same
kinds of atrocities found in El Salvador could be seen in Guatemala,
with the soldiers being trained in the United States, using U.S.
weapons, with money and arms flowing from U.S. coffers.

While the butchery was happening in El Salvador and Guatemala, one
Central American nation finally overthrew the U.S.-sponsored butchers.
In 1979 in Nicaragua, the Sandinista revolution overthrew the Somoza
regime, which was a brutal dictatorship that the United States propped
up for generations. As with any military revolution, there are no
choirboys on either side. What happened in Nicaragua was the closest
that any Central American nation had ever come to democracy. The
Sandinistas have some things to answer for, such as their treatment of
the natives of the Miskitia region, but the Sandinistas' great crime
was the same crime Castro committed. It was the same crime that
Arbenz of Guatemala, Allende of Chile and Torrijos of Panama
committed. Their crime was that committing themselves to the welfare
of their nation's average people. They committed themselves to
succoring the poor. They embarked on creating a society that took
care of everybody, where the people would share and share alike. They
took the rhetoric of America’s Founding Fathers seriously, and
believed that all people were created equal and deserved equal
opportunity and a minimum standard of comfort.

Those who wish to challenge that characterization of those Latin
American leaders are encouraged to study the parallels of those
leaders, what they strove for, what they succeeded at, and what the
U.S. position was towards them. U.S. rhetoric always accused them of
being communist and inferred they were Soviet pawns, but in looking at
the early days of each movement, they obviously had no relationship to
the Soviet Union, and even their ideological links were tenuous.
Arbenz was a fan of Franklin Roosevelt and consciously tried
structuring a New Deal-style economy. With that fifth media filter
mentioned by Herman and Chomsky working, any notion a nation had of
shedding the United States’ neocolonial yoke was rubber-stamped
"communist," setting the stage for attacking and destroying the social
movement. The U.S. goal was always putting the plutocratic elite back
in charge in those nations, while the American business interests
raped them, although the anticommunist "religion" sometimes even took
precedence over that.

Allende was a committed Marxist, yet had no allegiance to the Soviet
Union. As with virtually every other case of American hysteria over
the Soviet threat, there is no credible evidence that the Soviet Union
had anything to do with Allende's rise in Chile. The Soviet Union
even cautioned Chile that with its commitments to Cuba, it really
could not spare Chile much time or effort. The evidence shows that
while Allende's program would "hurt" American mining and other
interests in Chile, the real reason that Henry Kissinger went on the
warpath to overthrow Allende was not because his policies would hurt
U.S. business interests. Kissinger's real passion was the "ideology"
of it.[19] An elected Marxist in the Western Hemisphere was
intolerable. A generation of the bloody Pinochet dictatorship left
Chile in ruins, with the seventh greatest national income disparity on
earth, tied with Kenya and Zimbabwe.[20] The plutocratic elite thinks
that life there is great, but do not ask the average Chilean citizen
how great it is.

Herman and Chomsky compared the nature of Guatemalan, El Salvadoran
and Nicaraguan (Sandinista) elections and how free they really were,
based upon independent observation. They then compared that reality
to how the American mainstream media portrayed them. In Guatemala and
El Salvador, the elections were frauds. One reason was because the
U.S.-backed dictatorships slaughtered the political opposition.
Anybody who thought of running for office on any kind of humanitarian
platform could expect a death squad visitation. Any media
organization that dared criticize the dictatorships was wiped out.
Blowing up their headquarters and murdering the editor were handy ways
to do it. On Election Day, peasants could vote for the dictatorship
of their choice. It was a one party system. In El Salvador, voting
was mandatory. They could vote for their candidate if he/she was
still alive. Guatemala had a similar situation. Nicaragua, on the
other hand, was a nation under siege from the U.S.-financed Contra
terror war. The CIA engaged in its standard activities of paying off
anybody in Nicaragua who could help destabilize the government,
running its own candidates in the elections, etc. In light of the
outside pressure that Nicaragua was under, its elections were arguably
fairer than any elections the United States has ever held.

Herman and Chomsky painstakingly analyzed the mainstream media's
accounts of those elections. The media continually painted the El
Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections as paragons of fairness, and
constantly attacked the Nicaraguan elections as shams. For three
nations sitting along the same strip of land, with the situations so
starkly different, the hypocrisy of the American press was
spectacularly laid bare.

In Manufacturing Consent, the media's performance in covering the
Southeast Asian wars was also analyzed. In any war, the first
casualty is the truth. Noam Chomsky, among others, makes very
impressive arguments that the so-called war in Vietnam to "save them"
from communism was anything but that. It was an invasion designed to
keep them enslaved to a neocolonial system. There is such large body
of impressive literature on that subject that cannot be rationally
denied, although it has never been admitted or even discussed in the
American mainstream media before. America has not admitted that it
invaded Vietnam. Similarly, the Soviet Union did not admit that it
invaded Afghanistan. We were "saving" those invaded countries,
although the Soviet Union had much more excuse than the United States
had, and a key U.S. official recently bragged that he helped lure the
Soviet Union into the “Afghan trap.”

Some "side effects" of bludgeoning Vietnam were the secret wars
carried out in Laos and Cambodia by the United States. Laos and
Cambodia were two sleepy nations, among the poorest on earth, wanting
to be left alone. The United States could not allow that, in its
noble fight against communism. It began secretly carpet-bombing
Cambodia in 1969. It was not a secret to the Cambodians, but the
American press kept it secret from the American people. The five-year
"war" killed about 600,000 people in a nation with a population less
than eight million. Two million were made refugees, with about a
million of those predicted to die in the war's aftermath due to
disease, starvation, etc.[21]

While the United States was fighting communism and bludgeoning
Southeast Asia, there were also victories. In 1965, the United States
assisted a military coup in nearby Indonesia. The military strongman
Suharto came to power. Communism was a "threat" in that region. The
peasants thought that communism was a great improvement over the
colonial oppression they received at Europe's hands. The United
States hired death camp Nazis after World War II. America would
embrace anybody as long as they were "anticommunist." Suharto's rise
is an excellent case in point.

Before Suharto seized power, there was a large peasant-based communist
party in Indonesia, largely composed of ethnic Chinese. "Communist"
has the same root as the word community, and community was the
operative word for those communists. Suharto's plan to consolidate
his power was eliminating the political competition. The Mafia was
gentler. Suharto had CIA help in executing his plan: murder every
communist in Indonesia. The CIA used its intelligence methods to draw
lists of communists for Suharto's troops to roundup. Then the
slaughter commenced. It is estimated that between 500,000 and
1,000,000 people were wiped out by Suharto's armed forces.[22] It was
more than just a slaughter. It was an ideological and instructive
one. A New York Times account said:

"Nearly 100 Communists, or suspected Communists, were herded into the
town's botanical garden and mowed down with a machine gun…the head
that had belonged to the school principal, a P.K.I. (Communist Party)
member, was stuck on a pole and paraded among his former pupils,
convened in special assembly."[23]

The postwar collapse of Europe's empires lasted for many years. The
Portuguese were able to hold onto East Timor until the 1970s, partly
because the East Timorese were so tame and easygoing. In the late
colonial year of 1975 there was a popular revolution, and the winner
was a peasant-based leftist party named FRETILIN. East Timor was on
the east end of an island a few hundred miles north of Australia. The
west end was part of Indonesia, a Dutch colony that gained its
independence in 1949. Indonesia was a neocolonial nation, although
the generals who skimmed the economy’s cream were excessively greedy
even for the foreign investors, demanding steep bribes and
kickbacks.[24]

The dust had barely settled on the East Timorese revolution when
Indonesia invaded on December 7, 1975. As fate would have it, U.S.
President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were visiting with Suharto
when the invasion was mounted, so Indonesia put off its invasion until
Ford and Kissinger left the country, apparently to prevent
embarrassment for the United States. Within a few hours after Ford
and Kissinger's departure, the invasion began. Nearly as many
soldiers invaded Dili, the capital city, as there were residents of
the city. The soldiers killed everything that moved. Indonesia
admitted that it had no legal claim on East Timor, but was taking it
anyway. The United States and other nations such as Australia not
only stood by and watched, but actively assisted Indonesia's effort.
During those years, Daniel P. Moynihan was the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, and he actively stifled any U.N. response to the
Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Moynihan would later write in his
memoirs,

"The United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to
bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United
Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it took. This
task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable
success."[25]

The same year that East Timor was invaded, Pol Pot came to power in
Cambodia. The United States' "secret war" in Cambodia created the
devastation that brought Pol Pot to power. If not for the
exploitation and violence of the French, followed by the violence of
the Americans, Cambodia would have stayed a sleepy nation of several
million people, mostly living in the jungle. France and America
caused the tragedy of Cambodia.

When Pol Pot came to power, the American media immediately began a
drumbeat of genocide, pinning all those American-caused deaths from
the bombings, and deaths to come from the aftermath, onto Pol Pot's
tally sheet. Many Cambodians did die in Pol Pot's programs, but in the
American media nobody heard a whisper about the Cambodian blood on
America's hands.

Meanwhile, the slaughter in East Timor progressed. Indonesia was
using American weapons. Although the American media gave substantial
coverage of East Timor's political ferment that led to the revolution,
Indonesia's invasion and resultant genocide was not covered at all. In
a few months, 60,000 of the original 690,000 inhabitants of East Timor
were dead. It reached genocidal proportions after that, and as the
carnage became the worst, the American media was the most silent.
Indonesia began running out of bullets a couple years into their
invasion, and that human rights saint, Jimmy Carter, hastily signed a
bill to give Indonesia more arms. As Noam Chomsky says, in the case
of East Timor the American media was not only guilty of distorting
reality (or hiding it), they were actually complicit in genocide.[26]

If the American people had known what happened in East Timor, maybe
they would not have supported it, but the Iraqi death toll is far less
secret than the death toll in East Timor. It would have been more
difficult to portray East Timor as a threat to American security, but
Iraq, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Nicaragua and Vietnam possessed no
threat either. Although the death toll is generally considered about
200,000 people, the death toll in East Timor may have reached over
300,000, for the greatest proportional genocide of an ethnic group in
the 20th century.[27]

There are "gentler" paired examples to demonstrate the dynamics at
work. One was a pair of military missile attacks on commercial
airliners. The Soviet Union shot down one, and the United States shot
down another. In 1983, a South Korean passenger jet flew hundreds of
miles off its course, flying over sensitive Soviet airspace at night.
The Soviet Union shot it down. Five years later, an Iranian airliner
took off from Tehran in broad daylight, flying over the Persian Gulf.
The United States shot down that airliner. They make an instructive
paired example. The Soviet shooting was far more understandable than
the United States'. Soon after the Soviet attack, the United States
had intelligence showing that the Soviet Union thought it was shooting
down a spy plane.

How did the American media respond to those tragedies? The U.S.
media's condemnation of the Soviet shoot down was universal. Dan
Rather called it a "barbaric act." Nightline devoted eight
consecutive shows to the event. Koppel had viewers call in, asking
whether the Reagan Administration "should take strong action against
the Soviets." More than 90 percent said yes. The portrayal of the
Soviets as inhuman monsters fit perfectly with Reagan's propaganda
objectives, whipping up support for his Star Wars plan. On Nightline,
right wing hawks dominated the guest list - George Will, William F.
Buckley, William Safire, Jesse Helms and others. Condemnation was
nearly universal, and Koppel himself chimed in, stating there was not
"any question that the Soviet Union deserves to be accused of murder,
it's only a question of whether it's first degree or second degree."
Right-winger Terry Dolan even stated, "anyone who would suggest the
U.S. would ever consider shooting down an unarmed civilian plane is
downright foolish and irresponsible."

Five years later, America was faced with exactly that. In what was an
obvious prelude to the Gulf War, the USS Vincennes had been playing
bully of the Gulf, trying to provoke Iran into military action. When
an airliner flew over the Persian Gulf, the trigger-happy captain of
the Vincennes blew it out of the sky. What the Soviet Union did was a
hundred times more justifiable than what the United States did, but
the American media went into overdrive as it explained away the
Iranian airliner's downing, which killed 290 people. It was a tragic
accident in the American media. Nobody in the mainstream media could
see any parallel between the downings of the Korean and Iranian
airliners. It was as if the Korean Airliner tragedy never happened,
flushed down Orwell's memory hole. In Unreliable Sources they laid
the editorials of the New York Times side-by-side.[28] It was not
even enough to call it a tragic accident. The New York Times
editorial, as with the media frenzy the day after the U.S. bombed the
Baghdad bomb shelter, killing hundreds of women and children, tried
spinning the blame onto Iran. To wit,

"The episode also raises stern questions for Iran. If the Navy's
version of events is largely correct, blame may lie with the Iran Air
pilot for failing to acknowledge the ship's warnings and flying
outside the civilian corridor. Iran, too may bear responsibility for
failing to warn civilian planes away from the combat zone of an action
it had initiated."[29]

There were a few big lies in that editorial, such as the airliner had
strayed from its legal route (it had not) and that Iran was mainly
responsible for the Gulf hostilities, with the U.S. playing selfless
cop (a laughable notion).

The sorry state of the American media has never been more apparent
than the years between 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Right wing
attack dogs such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Bill
O’Reilly had free reign to attack anybody who did not wave their flags
fervently enough. A right-wing campaign got Peter Arnett fired from
the job he obtained after he lost his job at CNN over the Tailwind
flap, because he had the audacity to speak some truth about current
events. Many other journalists lost their jobs for daring to
contradict the right wing propaganda barrage. People such as New York
Times reporter Judith Miller became White House mouthpieces, spraying
Bush administration disinformation across America’s media as if it
were fact, to conjure American support for the invasion of Iraq. When
some people could no longer keep quiet about the Bush administration’s
daily lies, Miller and other journalists were accomplices to the crime
of exposing Valerie Plame, the CIA employee and wife of Joseph Wilson,
as vengeance for Wilson’s exposure of the Bush administration’s lies
about Iraq trying to procure uranium from Africa. The American media
has descended to around the level of the Soviet media, pre-Glasnost,
except the American people largely still drink from that poisoned
well, thinking it provides the “news.”[30]

The structural analysis of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting, Michael Albert, Michael Parenti and many others
of their stature is compelling. Structural analysis probably explains
more facets of the dynamic than anything else, although the
“conspiratorial” perspective (conscious manipulation toward a desired
end) can also bring important dynamics into view.

Our media, as with our government, is owned by the rich and powerful.
Their primary mission is manipulating the public, not informing them.
They exist to make money for their owners and serve their interests.
How could it be any other way?

Although an American president will probably never don clothing as an
Indy Car driver does, covered with patches announcing his corporate
sponsors, most Americans realize that the rich run Washington D.C.,
which is the main reason why Americans have the “free world’s” lowest
voter turnout. They realize it does not matter whom they vote for, as
the same people own them all, something that Chomsky has observed. The
same corporations that run the government legally own the media. Ben
Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly has been prescient in predicting the
current trend towards a media monopoly. It is largely here already,
and is the logical conclusion for any capitalistic society. That is
the nature of capitalism, and the rapidly evolving global media
monopoly is merely one feature of global capitalism.

Probably the most widely read political book of the 20th century was
George Orwell's Animal Farm. I had to read it in eighth grade, as
have many millions of American schoolchildren. Animal Farm was an
allegory on the Russian Revolution and how the Soviet Union performed
its mind control and social control of the masses. Some animals being
“more equal than others” is an immortal example of how nonsense is
presented as accepted fact. Orwell began writing Animal Farm in 1943,
when the Soviet Union was the ally of Great Britain and the United
States in the war against Nazi Germany. Animal Farm originally had a
hostile reception among the British intelligentsia because it made fun
of the British ally of the moment, Uncle Joe’s Soviet Union. Orwell
had difficulty finding a publisher. Orwell wrote a preface to Animal
Farm. In it, he wrote about how the Soviet Union suppressed dissent
and silenced unpopular ideas by direct government intervention, but
the West produced the same outcome by different means. In the West,
dissident writing is censored not by the government, but by the
commercial interests, voluntarily. Orwell noted that genuine but
dogma-contradicting news is silenced by the British press not through
government intervention but a “general tacit agreement” in the press
that “’it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.”[31] Orwell
wrote in his preface that the “patent medicine racket” was a pressure
group that could censor unflattering news about itself, as could the
Catholic Church. Orwell wrote regarding dogmatism,

“To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance.
The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the
record that is being played at the moment.”[32]

Orwell wrote that freedom of the press was almost non-existent in the
British press of his day, and was not due to outside pressure, but the
press themselves, censoring that which they did not see fit to print.
As A.J. Liebling wrote in 1960, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed to
those who own one.”[33]

As if to demonstrate the truth of Orwell’s preface, the publishers of
Animal Farm completely censored it. Orwell’s preface was completely
missing in the original edition, and was not discovered and published
until 1972. The censorship exists to this day. I have picked up
several editions of Animal Farm, and the only version that even
produces Orwell’s original preface is the Everyman’s Library edition,
and even then it is not restored to its rightful place, but put in an
appendix. In the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, Orwell’s
1984 makes for timely reading.

There are other examples of the totalitarian nature of the Western
press, although it calls itself free. Mark Twain is known for his
fiction such as Tom Sawyer and The Jumping Frog of Calavaras County.
Virtually unknown are the many anti-imperialist writings of the last
fifteen years of his life, which gave the ruling class in Europe and
America a black eye. Twain probably thought it was his most important
work, but it was completely censored in the West for eighty years,
until an obscure book reproduced them in the 1990s, to quickly
disappear from circulation. I have tried obtaining that book for
years, and have never been successful. That level of suppression was
probably not even possible in Stalin’s Soviet Union. When Twain wrote
King Leopold’s Soliloquy in 1905, which outlined the genocide taking
place in the Belgian Congo, with American industrialists eagerly
sidling up to the trough as investors, the suppression was so complete
by the American media establishment that it was never published in the
United States, except as a pamphlet issued by some Congo reform
groups.[34] I have tried getting my hands on it for years, and have
never been successful. The “free market” censorship of Zora Neale
Hurston’s work is one of countless instances of how lesser-known
authors have been regularly censored in the West.

The notion of a "free press" is one the biggest fabrications in
American history - a myth concocted by the media itself. The biggest
lie that our media serves up is the self-serving pretense that it is
objective, merely seeking the truth. All the first amendment says is
that the government cannot tell the media what to write or not write.
America has never really had true freedom of speech. It is the
world's freest in significant ways, but it still is not that free, as
Mumia Abu Jamal, a journalist who has spent many years on death row,
knows well. The American media is also the most manipulative of its
consumers. We may have relative freedom to speak, but it does not
mean that anybody will hear us. Ever since the Sedition Act was
passed in the 1700's, free speech has had a rough ride in America.
During World War I, the Espionage Act was passed, making it illegal to
speak out against the war, and the U.S. imprisoned hundreds of
Americans for the crime of speaking out.

If the same interests that run the government also own the media, how
free can the media truly be? They are stenographers to power.[35] On
a lighter side, the funniest and perhaps the best political cartoonist
I have ever seen, Tom Tomorrow, summarizes the American news process
in a hilarious cartoon, below.

Click on image to enlarge

More Big Lies: History

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past. - George Orwell, 1984.

As Orwell said, whoever writes the news also writes the history. My
historical investigations, which have taken several years, were to see
if anything I had been taught as a student was true. My media studies
were necessarily complemented with studying history and politics. They
cannot be effectively separated. If you are an American and more than
forty years old, compare this site’s essay on Columbus to the tales
you were told in school. The man who initiated history’s first
complete genocide of millions of people became an American national
hero.

As James Loewen stated in his best-selling Lies My Teacher Told Me,
the hero in American high school textbooks is America. American
history is designed to make unthinking patriots, ready to march off to
war and otherwise defend our great nation. It is an exercise in
nationalism. Those history lessons in school are warm ups for the
continual stream of what the media produces for our consumption each
day.

I was raised in Ventura, California, and attended Junípero Serra
elementary school in grades four through six. Serra founded the
California mission system, and is credited with bringing
"civilization" to California, a land of triple heritage. The names of
the towns reflected that heritage. Ventura was named after the
Spanish mission founded there in 1782. A couple miles from my home
was the town of Saticoy, named after an extinct local Indian tribe. A
couple miles in another direction was Oxnard, named after white
settlers who built a beet-processing factory. The Chumash tribe
occupied the coastline from Ventura to San Luis Obispo, and in fourth
grade, our teacher read to us Island of the Blue Dolphins, a story of
the Chumash and their life, which included settling the islands off
the coast, now known as the Channel Islands.

That same year we watched a film of Junípero Serra's life, the man who
established the mission system. The film depicted Serra as a gentle
man, tirelessly “civilizing” the poor natives of California, bringing
them God's Word. We also took field trips to the Ventura and Santa
Barbara missions. That same year we performed a play for our parents
about the Gold Rush. My role was a prospector’s mule, and I enjoyed
running around on all fours, braying loudly.

When I was in college, I attended Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo, another
mission town founded by Serra. During my last year of college, I
worked as a graveyard shift cook at a restaurant a couple blocks from
that mission in the center of town. After graduation, I ended up
living and working in Los Angeles, another mission town. For a couple
years, I audited the city of Santa Barbara, another mission town. In
Santa Barbara there is a large, preserved religious facility next to
city hall, and the Spanish heritage is evident everywhere. Serra and
his missions were very ubiquitous aspects of my early years. The
schools in Ventura were mainly named after other Spaniards. Half of
my Serra school chums attended Balboa junior high school, named after
the conquistador who “discovered” the Pacific Ocean. Another junior
high school was named after Cabrillo, the first Spaniard to “discover”
the California coast. The two public high schools were Buena and
Ventura, the two halves of Ventura’s legal name San Buenaventura
(literally, the saint of good venture). I attended the latter school.

I always heard what a great man Serra was, and how he pioneered
“civilization” in California. The tales of Serra and those pioneering
49ers were part of a general trend of celebrating the "pioneers" all
over the Western United States. I lived in Houston for a year when my
father worked for NASA. Texas also had a triple heritage, but just as
in California, I recall little mention of the natives. In Texas, the
exploits of Sam Houston and the Alamo story were the standard
schoolboy fare. I visited the monument at San Jacinto, which
memorialized Houston’s great feat of slaughtering nearly a thousand
sleeping Mexican soldiers in less than twenty minutes, winning Texas’
battle for “independence” in 1836.

While I grew up in Ventura, I took three years of California history.
Other than Island of the Blue Dolphins, the natives were rarely
mentioned, and how they passed from the scene was never discussed. The
wresting of California and the entire American Southwest from Spain
and Mexico was also lightly covered. The emphasis was usually on the
49ers, the pioneers, the tragedy of the Donner party, and the Spanish
mission heritage. My historical investigations have researched just
how Ventura came to have a triple heritage, comparing what I learned
through research to what I was taught in school.

The coming of the Spanish was a horror without precedent in world
history. Spanish disease, greed, slavery, violence and famine
depopulated entire regions. After a century of uninterrupted plunder,
the New World's natives were reduced to about 10% of their
"prediscovery" population.

When the English realized there was no easy gold in North America,
they came to settle the land, bringing their women with them. Although
raping the native women was not the pastime for the English that it
was for the Spanish, it also reflected a difference in attitude. The
Spanish were extremely racist, and the lighter a mestizo's skin, the
better off he/she was. The Spanish generally saw the natives as
human, but inferior. The English usually saw the natives as inhuman
savages.

I found that there really was an original Thanksgiving, where the
Pilgrims feasted with the Wampanoag who helped them survive. The
feast, with sports and games being played, lasted a few days. It
really happened.

What did not make my grade school history books was that the armed
Pilgrims had already chased local Indians, stolen their corn and
robbed their graves before they settled at what is now called
Plymouth. Plymouth was the site of the Pawtuxet Wampanoag tribe that
Captain John Smith’s men plundered. As with Columbus, the English had
a practice of kidnapping natives to establish themselves in the New
World. The strategy was to kidnap natives, enslave them, teach them
English in Europe, and then return with a native interpreter to help
pave the way for invasion a little more gently than simply using arms.
The Portuguese used that strategy in the African slave trade. Squanto,
the man who taught the Pilgrims survival skills, was a Pawtuxet
Wampanoag captured by one of Smith’s men in 1614 and was scheduled for
slavery in Spain along with dozens of his tribesmen. Selling the
natives into slavery was a favorite moneymaker for the European
invaders for centuries.

When Smith left for Europe, his men left behind a calling card (it
also may have been shipwrecked French sailors who left it). A
European-introduced disease killed ninety percent of the Wampanoag
tribe. It may have been an intentional introduction of disease.[36]
Squanto arrived back at his tribal grounds in 1619 as an English
expedition's interpreter, and found that nearly his entire village had
died from the epidemic. When the Pilgrims invaded in 1620, they
"settled" where Squanto’s tribe had lived. The Wampanoag were rivals
of the neighboring Narragansett tribe. When the Pilgrims arrived, the
regional balance of power had been drastically altered, since the
Narragansett had not suffered a European-introduced plague quite yet,
they were trading with the Dutch, and Massasoit (the Wampanoag chief)
saw a potential beneficial alliance for the remnant of his tribe.

For ten years, the settlers (about 300 of them) and Wampanoag lived in
peace. When word got out about the paradisiacal life of the settlers
and their benefactors, Puritans began coming by the boatload.[37] The
original Pilgrims, to their credit, respected their benefactor, and in
later years as the new settlers took more and more land that was
Wampanoag, the original Pilgrims protested that violation of their
relationship with Massasoit. Those protesting Pilgrims soon found
themselves expelled from their church.

Although the Pilgrims got along with the Wampanoag, by instigation of
Massasoit, Miles Standish and friends murdered a number of chiefs of
the neighboring Massachusetts tribe. Around New England, the natives
were finding out about European benevolence. In 1641, the Dutch
governor of Manhattan offered the first scalp bounty.

Eventually, Thanksgiving took on a more macabre meaning. The white
invaders would have a Thanksgiving celebration each time they wiped
out a native tribe. Europeans introduced a new tactic to the annals
of invasion. They would surround a village at night, burn it and kill
every man, woman, and child in it. At other times, the women and
children of a working age (over 14 generally) would be sold into
slavery and the rest slaughtered. An early and notorious instance of
that tactic was the burning of the fortified Pequot village on the
Mystic River in 1637, by English soldiers and their Narragansett and
Mohegan native allies. They surprised the sleeping village of several
hundred, burned the village to the ground and killed the fleeing
natives. Neither women nor children were spared in the massacre.
Native allies who had not already fled (not really having the stomach
for war) were horrified at the English savagery. Captain John
Underhill, who led the slaughter, would later find justification for
killing those women and children by citing Kind David's Old Testament
genocidal slaughters.[38]

Manhattan's churches declared the second Thanksgiving after a
successful raid against the natives in what is now Stamford,
Connecticut, where Underhill wiped out another sleeping village,
killing about 500 people. Thanksgiving celebrations, given when
natives were wiped out, were getting out of hand around the colonies,
and eventually George Washington tried to bring some order to the
affair, and named one day a year as Thanksgiving. Abe Lincoln
declared the official Thanksgiving Day that we celebrate today. The
day Lincoln declared the national holiday he sent troops against the
Sioux in Minnesota.

Massasoit helped the Pilgrims stay alive. It was not because he was a
great humanitarian, although kindness was evident at times. He
thought the white people would make good allies in the region's tribal
struggles. Massasoit had considerable diplomatic skill, and there was
relative peace during the last forty years of his life. Although the
natives were being decimated across what is now called New England,
Massasoit and the Pilgrims forged a relatively peaceful and mutually
beneficial arrangement.

When Massasoit died in 1661 however, his tribe was doomed, and the
insatiable European greed for land initiated a war with his successor
son, Metacom, called King Philip by the Europeans. One reason for the
war was the native suspicion that the Puritans were intentionally
introducing European disease amongst them to further clear the land.
Germ warfare is an integral part of European history, and it not
farfetched to think that the English began that practice in their
earliest days of invading North America.[39] King Philip’s war in
1675 was one the few instances of a relatively successful war carried
out by New World natives. It ended in about a year with the
destruction of nearly the entire Wampanoag tribe, and Metacom’s head
was displayed on a pike at Plymouth for 24 years. Thus ended the
tribe that welcomed the Pilgrims to America,[40] also ending of one of
the most peaceful relationships that the European invaders and natives
had: complete genocide was staved off for more than fifty years.
Elsewhere genocide came much more swiftly, and befell all native
tribes that the European invaders encountered on today's United States
East Coast.

The genocide of the natives of eastern North America is a horrific
tale. When America won its independence, it continued marching across
the continent, with its deceptive treaties used as a means of
swindling the natives out of their land, using a strategy that George
Washington originally proposed.[41] Washington’s profession was a
surveyor, but surveying native lands for acquisition was really
Washington’s profession. Washington is far from the only murderous
thief glorified in American myth. Daniel Boone, that grand pioneer of
Kentucky, was a land speculator, just like Washington. Also, as with
Washington, Boone specialized in killing natives and taking their
land. Boone participated in intrusive military campaigns against
natives, such as George Rogers Clark’s genocidal invasions.[42]
Whether the natives were “friendly” or “hostile” often made no
difference to the marauding white men.

In great irony, the Iroquois Confederacy inspired the American
Constitution in no small measure, and George Washington initiated
exterminatory campaigns against them. Washington’s armies were
particularly brutal. Scalping living natives was some of the fun that
Washington’s men enjoyed, but skinning natives from the hips downward
procured the ultimate frontiersman’s apparel: native-skin
trousers.[43] Later, Andrew Jackson, another American President-hero,
had his troops cut off several hundred native noses (men, women and
children) to commemorate the body count of a successful “battle.”
Jackson supervised his men as they stripped native skins to make into
bridle reins, and Jackson even saw that trophies cut from native
corpses were given to the “ladies of Tennessee” as souvenirs.[44] The
issue of dispossessing the natives of their land was the leading issue
of Jackson’s presidency, but a modern historian such as Arthur
Schlesinger could write a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book about Jackson
(The Age of Jackson) without mentioning one word about Jackson’s
Indian policy.[45]

Similar to the Spanish soldiers, the favorite quarry of the American
frontiersman was human. Boone’s mythmaking biographer, John Filson,
once wrote that Boone killed two Indians with one bullet. Frontiersman
Adam Poe was said to have relished hunting “Injins” as the best
“game,” more satisfying than hunting bears and cougars.[46] America's
greed for land and gold propelled the empire across the continent,
wiping out the natives in its way, and was not much different than the
Romans' modus operandi. Concocting Ideology to turn the natives into
subhumans was an essential and time-honored tactic.

I eventually discovered there was more to the Padre Serra story than I
was taught in grade school. Serra was beatified in 1988, and is up
for sainthood today. He was the chief inquisitor in northern Mexico,
called New Spain in those days. Among his duties was supervising the
torture of confessions out of witches. Historians consider the
mission system Serra founded the first prison system established on
what became American soil. Those lovingly preserved missions were the
first institutions of the genocide of California's natives.

The gentle climate of California's coast made for easy living. The
natives did not need clothes for half the year, and life was easy.
They were a gentle people, and among them violence was rare. The
missions were their "first introduction to civilization." They had
already been treated to the white man's diseases. California, as with
the rest of the New World, is a source of controversy regarding its
pre-Columbian population. Some scholars think it was as high as a
million people. When Cabrillo "discovered" the California coast in
1542, his welcome was not always warm, as natives attacked him. The
reason for the harsh welcome was that Spaniards had already been
marauding through the area, killing the natives. Spaniards pillaged
the land, raped the women and killed the men, spreading disease
wherever they went in the New World. Cabrillo wrote of how thickly
populated the islands off the coast were (the Channel Islands, right
off Ventura where I was raised, now uninhabited), and other early
explorers remarked on how thickly the land was settled with natives.

When Serra showed up in San Diego in 1769, the native Californian
population had likely already been severely decimated by European
disease. The explorers of California in the 1700s found old smallpox
scars on the natives. Was the pre-Columbian population of California
a million? Who knows? The prevailing estimate is that 300,000
natives lived in California in 1769, but estimates go as high as
600,000 to one million. New Spain's northern periphery was considered
largely as a defensive bulwark against the intrusions of its European
rivals, protecting its silver mines in Mexico. When the Russians
began colonizing the California Coast, Serra made his move.

The Jesuit mission system of Baja California had reduced the natives
from a "pre-mission" population of about 60,000, to 5000 in 1770. The
Spanish mission system in Florida, begun as an adjunct to protecting
Spain’s plunder route from South America and Mesoamerica, had long ago
decimated the natives through slave labor and disease. By 1700, the
pre-Columbian Timucuan population of Florida had declined from perhaps
200,000 to 1000. The priests were in one way much like their soldier
counterparts. The Spanish mines and plantations were instruments of
genocide, and when the natives were "used up," the soldiers moved on
to find more natives to rape, murder and enslave. The missions were
really prisons, with the natives being penned into them, treated like
slaves and animals, and dying of disease, etc, and when the natives of
Baja California got used up, the priests moved on to find more natives
to "save." A child's life expectancy if he/she was born in the
mission could be as many as ten years. In some missions, their life
expectancy was two years. I have not heard of such a low life
expectancy, anywhere else in history. The largest disease vector was
the syphilis that the Spanish rapists injected into the native
populations.[47] The missions were death camps, and Serra could not
have been happier.[48] He wrote, "In San Antonio [one of his missions
- Ed.] they are faced with two harvests, that is, of the wheat, and of
a plague among the children, who are dying."[49] The children's
deaths were a "harvest" for the pious padre, just like the Grim
Reaper.

The Spanish missionizing process obviously would never have succeeded
without brute force. Spanish soldiers were required for the mission
system to function. In California and elsewhere, it took few soldiers
because the natives were so gentle, but they were required. The
"deal" the natives entered into was not something they chose freely.
If they had known that they punched a one-way ticket at the missions
when accepting baptism, none would have come. The priests lured them
in with trinkets, food and other goodies, and many natives eventually
submitted to baptism, not knowing what it implied. Once they did, it
was like joining a Mafia family: there was no escape.

There were many instances of soldiers "recruiting" neophytes by
scouring the countryside for them. Once a neophyte had "signed on,"
they were essentially mission prisoners. The padres did not always
lock everybody up. They found that locking up the women usually
worked fine. There were women's dormitories in the missions, where
they slept locked up every night. Those dorms were hellholes,
breeding disease. The children died off at incredible rates. Governor
Diego de Borica identified poor sanitation as a reason for the
missions' high death rates, advice the Franciscans ignored. De Borica
wrote of visiting one dorm, where he was driven from it by the
overpowering stench of feces.[50] The missions had “living quarters”
for a captive native that measured seven feet by two feet. It was
about the size of a cattle pen…or a coffin.[51]

The rapist lifestyle that the Spanish mission soldiers enjoyed in
California enraged the native men (and women), leading to their few
instances of violent resistance. In 1772, immediately after the
Spaniards established the mission at San Gabriel, a soldier raped the
local Indian chief's wife. The chief gathered some warriors and
confronted the rapist. The rapist's response was to kill the chief
with his musket. The warriors fled at that act. The Spanish corporal
in charge had the chief's head cut off and mounted on a pole at the
mission, as a lesson to the natives.[52]

After that episode, gangs of mission soldiers, emboldened by the
mission's approval of rape and murder, marauded through the
countryside each morning, hunting for native women. When they found
them, they lassoed them like cattle and raped them on the spot.
Resisting native men were shot with muskets. That was the
"civilization" that Serra brought to California. The most common form
of native resistance was flight. Some escaped numerous times, even
chopping off parts of their bodies to escape their shackles.

Priestly concern for the natives' earthly welfare was practically
nowhere in evidence. The game was baptizing them before they died in
captivity. The priests often tried to become martyrs. Since
martyrdom was the coveted way for a priest to die, the first step to
sainthood, Serra eagerly sought opportunities to martyr himself, but
never found one, mainly because the natives were not violent.

Drinking urine, and burning and beating one's self was normal priestly
behavior in those days. Serra wore coarse clothing that scratched his
flesh. That not being enough, he inserted broken wire into his
clothing, constantly gouging himself. He burned his chest with
candles and hot coals. For years, he beat his chest with heavy rocks
while preaching, leading to shortness of breath in later life. His
church superiors disapproved of Serra's activities, as they were more
fanatical than most priests' practices. Serra may have been the New
World's most fanatical priest at that time, a fanaticism that served
him well in building the California mission system.

While preaching in Mexico City, Serra shouted for his flock to
renounce their sins. As he shouted, he produced a chain that he kept
for just such occasions, and began beating himself. The crowd was
swept up into the spectacle, sobbing at the display of such a
righteous man beating himself for his god. A man leapt to the pulpit,
seized Serra's chain and declared, "I am the sinner who is ungrateful
to god who ought to do penance for my many sins, not the padre, who is
a saint." The man beat himself until he collapsed. After being
revived and given his last rites, he died.[53]

Serra was not that kind toward the natives he was "saving." When some
of his captive natives escaped and took supplies to aid their escape,
Serra had to be restrained by his fellow priests from hanging them.
Serra shouted that "such a race of people deserved to be put to the
knife."[54] A mission Indian never smiled, but instead manifested
symptoms of chronic depression. When America stole California in
1846, the native population of California was about 150,000. Serra's
legacy was the death of at least half of California's native
population, and a much greater extermination rate in mission country,
of around 90%.

The authors of Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization stated,

“Indian demographic collapse in the missions was not intended but
intentional, since Franciscan congregación [forcing the Indians into
the missions and keeping them there under force - Ed.] continued
despite the negative impacts on Indians even though one civil
official, governor Diego de Borica in the 1790s, identified the
problem and suggested solutions never implemented by the
Franciscans.”[55]

Those missions were the professional ancestors of Dachau. If Hitler
had prevailed in World War II, the Auschwitz death camp would probably
be a museum today, and would have exhibits describing Hitler's
attempts to rescue the Jews from their self-imposed ignorance.
Auschwitz would have been described as a place where the Nazis tried
saving the Jews through honest work, reforming their lazy and greedy
tendencies. Unmentioned would be their fate. They were just gone.
The town would have been renamed Hitlerville, or something similar.
Down the street would have been Adolf Hitler grammar school, a statue
of der Führer would have been erected, and the children would have
learned what a great man he was, bringing the light of Aryan
civilization to the region. Is that going too far? I attended the
California equivalent of Adolf Hitler grammar school, and it was not
fun to discover it.

If I had lived a few blocks further north than I had, I would have
attended Balboa Junior High School. Balboa, the first European to see
the Pacific Ocean, specialized in feeding natives to his dogs and
attacking sleeping villages, seizing women for concubines and
torturing chiefs to death to tell them where their gold was hidden,
gold they did not have.

Sir Francis Drake was another hero of California history, the first
Englishman to see California and the first to sail around the world. I
have now discovered that his epic voyage was a pirate expedition taken
on behalf of Queen Elizabeth, to plunder the Spanish Empire's Pacific
Coast. They reasoned that the Spanish would never suspect an attack
from that side. They were right. The plundering of the Spanish
Empire's Pacific ports was easy. Drake was a slave runner and pirate,
but that expedition put him in the history books. The ship was
leaking because it was so heavily weighted down with stolen silver.
After seeking a way back to England (the elusive Northwest Passage),
sailing as far north as Puget Sound, they stopped on the West Coast to
repair the ship's seams, with the natives hosting them in style while
they repaired their ship. They went home the only way that they
could. Drake sailed back to England across the Pacific Ocean,
becoming the first Englishman to sail around the world. Drake's haul
was so lucrative that Queen Elizabeth knighted him ("Sir" Francis),
and Drake's share made him England's richest private citizen. Serra,
Drake, Columbus and Washington, those were the heroes I was raised to
admire.

Although Serra's mission system initiated the native genocide, there
was worse to come. When California was stolen in the fabricated
Mexican-American war, and gold discovered soon thereafter, the
"settlers" came in a rush of greed, as in all gold rushes, at which
time the natives were actively exterminated.

The miners and ranchers of Northern California had a hunting season on
California's natives that lasted for a generation. California's first
governor declared an open season on natives, and the white settlers
hunted Indians every weekend. Those mass murderers became local
heroes. Hunting expeditions sought out native villages, usually
finding encampments of fifty to sixty people. They slaughtered them
all. It was during the 1850s and 1860s that the slaughter took place
in earnest. When California was admitted to the Union, it was a "free
state." That meant that African slaves were outlawed. Native slaves
were fine, and made more docile slaves than the Africans, who often
lacked the humility required for slaves. When the 49ers annihilated a
camp of natives, they often spared the children and sold them into
slavery, a long-standing New World practice by the white man. There
were many eager buyers in Sacramento and San Francisco. A native girl
cost nearly double the price of a native boy because, as the
Marysville Appeal phrased it, the native girls served the double duty
of "labor and of lust."[56]

Similar to the Spanish rapists, American “settlers” also raped the
native women as a favorite pastime. Richard Drinnon was raised in
Oregon by immigrant homesteaders. His father was a rancher-immigrant
in the late 19th century, and a pleasant rancher pastime was riding
out on horseback, hunting for native women to lasso and rape.
Drinnon’s father enjoyed telling the story of a “squaw chase” where
the prey thought quickly, squatted down and threw sand into her
“privates,” thwarting the ranchers’ ardor. Drinnon grew up hearing
that story many times, and everybody had a good belly laugh when
hearing it. Drinnon thought the tale immensely humorous, and later
admitted that his youthful appreciation of it showed how stunted his
sensitivity was toward the native peoples.[57]

By 1900, the California native population was about 15,000. I never
read or heard about the California genocide until these past several
years. The only native reference I remember was reading a brief
mention that Ventura's last Indian lived in the river bottom near my
house, dying around 1900.

The nineteenth century was the American century of genocide, and the
most assured way of getting votes was running for office as an "Indian
fighter." Custer's famous "last stand" was apparently a failed
presidential campaign. Custer was an extremely vain soldier who had
been hobnobbing with New York's elite during the winter of 1875-76,
and they saw in him presidential material. He had just turned
thirty-five, the minimum presidential age.[58] The morning of the
Little Big Horn Battle, Custer told two of his scouts, "If we beat the
Sioux, I will be President of the United States - the Grandfather. If
you Arikaras do as well as I tell you and kill enough Sioux for me and
capture many Sioux ponies, I will take care of you when I come into my
power!"[59] Indian killers becoming presidents was as American as
apple pie, and the apparent plan (more like a conspiracy at that
stage) was for Custer to find glory on the battlefield that summer,
sweeping him to the presidency that autumn.

Custer originally made a name for himself as an Indian fighter by
sneaking up on a friendly Indian camp on the Washita River in the
winter of 1868, where a dawn attack killed scores of women and
children, sleeping in their teepees. That attack killed Black Kettle,
the Cheyenne chief and one of history's most tragic Indians. Black
Kettle made peace with the invading white men from the moment they
came marching across the plains in search of gold.[60] No matter how
friendly the natives were to the invaders, Custer's boss General
Sheridan soon articulated the American mentality when he said the only
good Indians he ever saw were dead.

Black Kettle even went to Denver with other chiefs, smoking their
peace pipes, trying to forestall the genocidal violence, violence the
belligerent "settlers" took delight in. Colorado's governor was
embarrassed by the chiefs’ overture, as he had asked the federal
government for authorization to raise an Indian-killing militia. Black
Kettle and the chiefs thought they made peace, and Black Kettle took
his people in sight of a fort on their reservation land, turned in all
their weapons except the ones they used for hunting, and considered
themselves charges of the government. It was far more than any
government could ask for. Soon after, the tribe was ordered to move
away from the fort, and they moved off to Sand Creek, still on their
reservation. While the men were away on a buffalo hunt, an
ex-minister, Colonel John Chivington, marched that militia to Sand
Creek. There were truly hostile Indians in the vicinity, braves not
taking kindly to the white man's invasion. They were carefully
avoided while Chivington led his troops to Sand Creek.

When told of the peaceful camp of Black Kettle, Chivington said, "I
long to be wading in gore." They surrounded the camp at night,
attacking at dawn. Chivington ordered his eager volunteers to "Kill
and scalp all. Nits make lice." They were spotted before attacking,
and Black Kettle came out of his teepee to see soldiers ringing his
camp. He raised a white flag and an American flag on a pole outside
his tent, and stood there with his family, trying to keep his people
calm. Then the attack began, which was one of the most brutal and
cowardly attacks at anytime and anywhere. They killed women, children
and the elderly, carving the genitals off women and men, making
tobacco pouches and other fashionable items from them. They raped
dying women before finishing them off, scalping them and cutting off
their genitalia and other body parts as "souvenirs." They even carved
open pregnant women to liberate their prized fetuses, treating their
bodies like Cracker Jack boxes.

Sand Creek was one of the more egregious massacres in American
history, but it also reflected typical American sentiments of the day.
Attacking sleeping encampments while the men were away hunting,
especially while the men were away hunting, was standard frontier
practice. When the women, children and elderly were finally
dispatched, the glowing reports from the "battlefield" almost
invariably told of daringly fighting hordes of bloodthirsty braves.
Those heroes at Sand Creek became the toast of Denver, proudly showing
off women's genitalia they had cut from their victims, and parading
around the few children they had "taken prisoner." The frontier
press, whether it was in California or Colorado, exulted at each
massacre. Those events were taking place while the Union was
"heroically" fighting a war to free the slaves of the South. Even
today, numerous streets in Denver are named after participants in the
Sand Creek Massacre, there is a monument at the state capital in honor
of their volunteer regiment, and a town near the "battleground" at
Sand Creek bears Chivington's hallowed name. Colorado generally still
beams with pride over Sand Creek.[61]

In February 1871, a band of Apaches arrived at Camp Grant, near
Tucson, Arizona. The Apaches today have the reputation of being one
of the most militant and savage of the Native American tribes. Apaches
had alternately resisted and accepted the Spanish Invasion for
centuries, at times fighting back, at others allowing themselves to be
herded onto Spanish reservations and into missions. After centuries
of genocide, as European disease epidemics regularly swept through
their ranks, with periodic violence from the "settlers," the Apache
fought back, led in their twilight years by Geronimo, who began
fighting after Mexicans had slaughtered his entire family.

Those Apaches in 1871 were in the surrender mode, asking to live on
the reservation land, as they had been rendered nomadic by the
marauding U.S. cavalry. They voluntarily disarmed themselves and
settled down to farming and working on the local ranches. They were
under the care of Lieutenant Royal Whitman, an anomaly among American
military men, one who conscientiously tried executing the U.S.' duty
to those dispossessed natives. The word got out about a sanctuary at
Camp Grant, and within weeks, more than five hundred Apaches had come
to live there. They came and went under a pass system that Whitman
used, and began their spring plantings in April. One camp on the
reservation had a couple hundred people living there. The residents
of nearby Tucson heard of those Apaches who had retired to reservation
life. On April 28th, a group of prominent Tucson citizens left
Tucson, led by the ex-mayor, William Oury. They armed themselves from
the Arizona armory and marched to Camp Grant. On the morning of April
30th, Whitman heard of the vigilante band from Tucson and immediately
sent word to the natives to flee to the fort, under his protection. He
was too late. The vigilantes came upon the encampment, which was
populated at the time by about 150 women and children, and less than
ten men, as the others were gone, performing their springtime chores.

Those prominent Tucson residents proceeded to slaughter nearly all the
women and children, gang-raping the women before killing them, then
mutilating their bodies. They spared about thirty children and sold
them into slavery in Mexico. It was one of countless massacres of
peaceful natives that the white men inflicted on Native Americans
during the previous four centuries, and that would be one of the last,
because the Native Americans were nearly all dead by that time. What
was the reaction of the "noble pioneers" who were "settling" the West?
One Denver newspaper openly cheered the massacre. Under the headline
"Victory for Peace," the newspaper stated,

"We give this act of the citizens of Arizona most hearty and
unqualified endorsement. We congratulate them on the fact that
permanent peace negotiations have been made with so many, and we only
regret that the number was not double. Camp Grant is the last of
those victories for civilization which have made Sand Creek,
Washita…and other similar occurrences famous in western history. It
is just and right and fully demanded by the circumstances of the
times."

A Tucson paper noted, "The California papers quite generally approve
of the Camp Grant massacres." A San Francisco newspaper went to
lengths to justify such "self-defense." A Sacramento newspaper
"heartily endorsed the slaughter," and the San Diego newspapers called
it "joyful news."[62]

Such cheering of genocidal slaughter continued right up until the last
one, at Wounded Knee in 1890. About a week before the Wounded Knee
massacre, one of America's most celebrated authors, L. Frank Baum, who
wrote that children's tale The Wizard of Oz, and who was at the time
the editor of South Dakota's Aberdeen Sunday Pioneer, wrote the
following.

"The nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left
are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The
Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of
the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier
settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few
remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their
spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they should die than
live the miserable wretches that they are."[63]

When Baum wrote those words, in Austria a child was waddling around in
his diapers, a child who would take the name Adolf Hitler. What is
the difference between what the Nazis did to the Jews, Gypsies and
Slavs in World War II, and what America did to its natives? The only
significant difference appears to be the level of technology and
sophistication the Nazis employed. Also, while Hitler’s boys tried
hiding their Final Solution, America openly cheered its Final
Solution. Hitler took inspiration from America's genocide of its
natives, to give them "living space."[64] Both the Nazis and
Americans were "clearing the land" of undesirable races in order to
provide land for their "settlers." The Jews cleared Israel of
Palestinians by slightly more genteel methods, giving them their
living space. They secured their Promised Land slightly more gently
than their ancestor Joshua did. Only after the land has been cleansed
of the native taint do those invaders begin developing consciences and
settle into their comfortable lives, reveling in what providence and
"Manifest Destiny" brought them.

If the Nazis had succeeded, Eastern Europe today would be populated
with German "settlers," and they would be living lives probably not
much different today than people in America's Midwest. By about now,
German historians might be questioning the nature of the Holocaust, a
subject that received scant mention when those years of Reich-building
glory were retold, and Hitler's heroic image as the father of the
Reich might finally be getting questioned in "radical" corners. They
would still celebrate Hitler Day, but there might be an increasing
swell of discontent with the facts versus the myths in Hitler's image.
It has taken far longer for Americans to begin questioning the saintly
qualities of George Washington and Christopher Columbus, fathers of
different kinds of Reichs.

In the Eastern Establishment, with their natives long ago
exterminated, they had the opportunity to develop consciences, and a
congressional inquiry was convened to look into Sand Creek. As with
many "Indian fighters," Chivington was planning to capitalize on his
new fame, running for Congress after his glorious victory. His fame
was short lived, when even the American people were shocked by what
happened there. Even so, for years he worked the talk circuit
throughout America, basking in his fame. He eventually came to an
obscure end in Ohio.

David Stannard nearly dedicated his American Holocaust to the memory
of a native boy who died at Sand Creek. His death was described by
Major Scott J. Anthony, First Colorado Cavalry, in testimony before
the United States Congress in 1865 on the massacre at Sand Creek.

"There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough
to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little
child was behind following after them. The little fellow was
perfectly naked, travelling on the sand. I saw one man get off his
horse, at a distance of about seventy-five yards, and draw up his
rifle and fire - he missed the child. Another man came up and said,
‘Let me try the son of a bitch; I can hit him.’ He got down off his
horse, kneeled down and fired at the little child, but he missed him.
A third man came up and made a similar remark, and fired, and the
little fellow dropped."[65]

John Terrell wrote about twenty books, mainly writing about the Old
West, the frontier days, etc. In the twilight of his career, he broke
with his past a little and wrote Land Grab, the Truth about "The
Winning of the West." At the book's beginning he states,

"This is a polemical book. A friend who was formerly editor-in-chief
of a large publishing house advised me not to compile it. ‘It’s the
West that Americans would like to forget,’ he said.

"Obviously I did not heed his counsel. It is incomprehensible to me
how a people can benefit by deliberately suppressing and ignoring
opprobrious episodes of their past. By what means can they measure
their social, economic and cultural progress without taking into
account the mistakes, faults and crimes of their ancestors? Persons
whose minds are open only to pleasant legends of bygone years are, in
effect, condoning the half-truths customarily disseminated by chambers
of commerce and advertising agencies and abetting the immoral
practices of pseudopatriots and political demagogues.

"In this collection I present in brief form some facets of three
important parts of western history. There is nothing in it that can’t
be substantiated in a good library."

In Land Grab, Terrell laid out the mentality of the 49ers and all
those brave pioneers who settled the West. Of the many scholarly
accounts of "settling" the American West, Terrell's informal summary
is still one of the best I have seen.

"The ideas that dominated the thinking, if it may be termed that, of
Americans who flooded the West during the nineteenth century are not
beyond explanation. To achieve an understanding of them one only need
remember that by far the larger number of persons, both male and
female, who crossed the Missouri as emigrants were not blessed with
great intellects. They were people of the backwoods, of the city
slums, unlettered common laborers and farmers and hunters and
trappers, a vast proportion of them the dregs of American society.
They were, with some notable exceptions, uncouth, crude, ignorant and
greedy. They were religious and racial bigots. All of them were
looking for something for nothing.

"The great fallacy still harbored by a regrettably large number of
Americans and still promoted by hypocritical patriots and politicians
is that every man and woman who chose to enter Indian Country beyond
the Missouri was a hero or heroine. Paeans still ring throughout the
land for the brave souls who set out for the unknown, facing great
perils of the wilderness with a burning dream to build a greater
America.

"They didn’t do any such thing. They thought least of all, and most
likely not at all, of their country’s future. The only dreams they
had - except nightmares caused by fear - were of free land and free
gold, of becoming rich and secure, with a minimum of exertion and
little expense.

"It could hardly be expected that people afflicted with such
deficiencies, of such low levels and backgrounds, could be expected to
display intelligence in their relations with the Indians. Obviously
they could not make use of qualities they did not possess. They were
governed entirely by animalistic and materialistic instincts, and the
purity of those characteristics was seldom adulterated by even small
doses of compassion, consideration, or justice. As they were unable
to understand Indians, they treated them with disdain, hatred and
contempt, all thoroughly normal reactions.

"The colorful euphemisms that newspapers, books and periodicals
showered on the settlers who crossed the western plains enhanced the
public’s overall picture of the Golden West, but they concealed the
ingredients of depravity and viciousness that existed. Most of the
frontiersmen, pioneers and conquerors of the wild western domain,
were, and still are, highly lauded and eulogized for moral principles
they did not possess.

"’God-fearing’ was a term generously applied to them. True, they
attended church and listened to sermons and sang hymns on Sunday, but
it was also true that they conveniently forgot all Biblical
admonitions as soon as they left the church services. They turned
their religion on and off with an effective mental spigot. They
advocated and practiced a method of putting the Indian in touch with
Heaven that was more certain and less complicated than that commanded
by the doctrines of Christianity. It was, 'Shoot them where you find
them.'"[66]

My grandfather was raised on a Kansas homestead nearly a century ago,
and he told me that as a child, he and his friends “shot anything that
moved.” His attitude toward Native Americans evolved during his
lifetime, and he came to finally realize the awesome injustice that
his ancestors inflicted onto North America’s aboriginal inhabitants.
In the early days of Kansas homesteading, selling bones from the
incredible destruction of the bison herds paid well. The bones were
sent to factories in the east, where literal mountains were made of
bison bones.[67] During drought years, plowing Kansas’ homesteads for
Indian bones paid better than plowing to raise wheat. An Indian skull
brought as much as $1.25 in Dodge City. The skulls were made into
fancy combs. Indian arm and leg bones, properly “cleaned and
polished,” made knife handles “beautiful to behold.”[68]

Here is an excerpt from Stannard’s American Holocaust regarding the
Sand Creek Massacre, an event that Theodore Roosevelt would later
call, "as righteous and beneficial a deed that ever took place on the
frontier."

"Outside of Colorado, however, not everyone was pleased. Congressional
investigations were ordered, and some among the investigators were
shocked at what they found. One of them, a senator who visited the
site of the massacre and ‘picked up skulls of infants whose milk teeth
had not been shed,’ later reported that the concerned men of Congress
had decided to confront Colorado’s governor and Colonel Chivington
openly on the matter, and so assembled their committee and the invited
general public in the Denver Opera House. During the course of
discussion and debate, someone raised a question: Would it be best,
henceforward, to try to ‘civilize’ the Indians or simply to
exterminate them? Whereupon the senator wrote in a letter to a
friend, ‘there suddenly arose such a shout as is never heard unless
upon some battlefield - a shout almost loud enough to raise the roof
of the opera house - ‘EXTERMINATE THEM! EXTERMINATE THEM!’"[69]

That was the voice of the average frontier American.

Black Kettle survived the Sand Creek Massacre because the few men in
camp forcibly pulled him away with them. After Sand Creek, Black
Kettle incredibly still attended peace conferences and did all he
could to promote peace. Then one day he awoke to the call of a bugle,
as Custer led the charge in the "battle" that earned him the
reputation as a great Indian fighter. What Chivington could not
finish, Custer did. Custer's original account of the battle said that
his troops killed mostly braves, which was one of many lies that he
told. He probably would have made an apt president. The Battle of
the Little Big Horn has been immortalized in song and legend. Custer's
Last Stand was another surprise attack on an Indian encampment.
Custer disobeyed orders in order to get in on the killing first,
knowing that he would have to place the glorious mantle on his
shoulders alone to be swept into the presidency.

As with the Washita massacre, Custer proved himself a notoriously
sloppy soldier by not reconnoitering the "enemy" before attacking.
That time his "Custer's Luck" ran out, and he led a charge into the
heart of a camp of several thousand natives, natives that had recently
crippled a nearby U.S. Army, fighting under the brilliant leadership
of Crazy Horse. Custer led slightly more than two hundred men into a
camp of several thousand armed natives who were following the
fast-dwindling bison herds. He was in for a rude surprise. Custer's
presidential campaign ended ignominiously, sending all his men to
their deaths as he sought glory and the White House on the
battlefield.[70]

What kept happening as I researched the New World's rape was a feeling
of missing something important about native cultures. The Spanish
actively eradicated them. The English and Americans rarely made
attempts to understand them, unless it was studying the last few
survivors before their race became extinct, as with Ishi early in the
20th century. The natives were not saints, but they were far from
inferior human beings or the subhumans the Europeans and Americans
nearly invariably portrayed them as.

Here are some examples of the cultural differences between native and
European cultures, differences that surprised me.

*

There were many proscriptions on behavior in Aztec society, one
of which was against drinking. The Aztecs had an alcoholic beverage
called pulque (fermented cactus pulp), but except on special occasions
such as feast days, drinking was forbidden for most people. The
penalty for a noble being caught drunk was death, but commoners
received much reduced punishment.[71]

*

In eastern North America, when natives captured a white woman,
the native men never raped her. From the native viewpoint, a woman’s
body was her own. That was nearly incomprehensible to European men,
where raping captured women had been standard operating practice for
millennia.[72]

*

In the Iroquois Confederacy (the vicinity of present day New
York State) the chiefs were men, but the women elected them. If the
women did not like how a chief voted in clan meetings, they picked a
new chief, for a balance of power between the sexes still never
approached in any Western culture.[73]

*

Throughout North America, particularly as native populations
declined as a result of European disease, the natives tried
replenishing their numbers by capturing other tribes’ members and
adopting them into their tribe. That capture and tribal adoption even
happened to white people. In the Huron tribe, which lived in
present-day Quebec, the Hurons battled with the adjacent tribes of the
Iroquois Confederacy, especially the Mohawks. During those conflicts,
when a wife's husband was killed in battle, the tribal remedy for
being widowed was to capture a warrior from the other tribe. As
recompense to the widow, the warrior was either tortured to death or
adopted into the tribe as the widow’s husband and given all the rights
of the previous husband.[74]

*

The natives definitely had their wars, but they were rarely, if
ever, the large battles of extermination that characterized Europe. In
North America, the tribes of the Great Plains were considered among
the most warlike. There are reasons for that; one was the horse's
introduction and the resulting nomadic lifestyle that developed,
making traditional tribal boundaries a thing of the past. In those
warlike tribes, the greatest battle honor was not killing the enemy.
It was counting “coup.” Coup was an act of bravery. The greatest act
of coup was touching an armed enemy while one was unarmed. There was
a stick a warrior would carry into battle, called a coup stick, which
was what they touched the enemy with. It reminds me of the childhood
game of tag.

*

Compared to Europe and its proto-capitalistic culture, there was
little greed to be found among New World natives, and in many tribes
it was not only unheard of, but unthinkable. In the Pacific
Northwest, there was a tribal event called a potlatch. The chiefs
would vie for prestige by seeing who could give away the most
possessions. Sometimes they vied to destroy the most possessions
(even killing highly valued slaves), for a dark side to it. Of
course, one had to accumulate in order to give away, but that
attitude, as with many other native attitudes, was virtually
incomprehensible to Westerners. Tribal stature was gained by how well
one provided for others. Hospitality was a nearly universal virtue
among the Western Hemisphere’s natives, as virtually every
first-contact account by a European “explorer” confirms.

*

The meeting of European and native cultures often brought
surprises. One tactic that Europeans had long-used to terrify the
enemy or to demonstrate who “won,” was to decapitate enemies and put
their heads on poles. It had an unintended result with the Incas.
Many native cultures revered the dead, and sometimes kept their bodies
around, or pieces of them, as a way of honoring their ancestors. When
one of the Inca rulers, Tupac Amaru, was given a kangaroo court trial
and beheaded, the Spaniards put his head on a pole. The Inca subjects
crowded around the pole, expressing their sorrow and reverence to the
severed head. That was not the intended effect, so the Spaniards had
the head buried.[75]

*

The New World's chiefs often bore little resemblance to European
royalty. They generally had little coercive power. Nobody obeyed
their orders because they did not give any. The West’s view of the
“chiefs” is largely our projection onto them. Tribal councils and
councils of elders were often the governing bodies. The early
invaders assumed that there was somebody “in charge” among the
natives, and treated the “chief” accordingly. A chief could be a
woman (though not often), and a tribe could have a number of chiefs,
such as a chief of planting, a chief of war, a chief of harvest, etc.
The lack of command authority was evident in battles between natives
and the Europeans. The chiefs could never control and command their
braves as the Europeans did their soldiers, which was a primary reason
the Europeans usually won.[76]

*

The natives had very different ways of treating their elderly.
Among most tribes, the elderly were cherished for the wisdom they had
gained through their long lives. Councils of elders were highly
influential in making tribal decisions throughout the New World.
Paradoxically, among the tribes of present-day northern Canada and
Alaska, when somebody became old and “useless,” they were often killed
or abandoned to the elements, likely reflecting their harsh
environment.

*

While dishonesty was a European/American art form, exercised in
devious ways, even for America’s greatest heroes, Native Americans had
a markedly different perspective. While dishonestly and lying was not
unknown among Native Americans, it was seen as a sign of insanity.
Honesty and honor were considered the mark of a healthy person, and
Native Americans saw European/American dishonesty as a sign of their
craziness.

* Because few tribes had a written language, the elderly were
cherished, because they were the tribal libraries. The biggest
influence in drafting the American Constitution was probably the
Iroquois Confederation. They had a working democracy that was
centuries old when the Constitution was drafted, the world’s only
living example of democracy, and a much more inspiring example than
ancient Athens, where slaves outnumbered the “free” people. The
Iroquois strongly influenced Ben Franklin. The establishment and
their “skeptics” call the Iroquois influence apocryphal, but that is
partly because the Iroquois have never committed their laws to
paper.[77]

* The New World's natives were often superior artists. The
natives of California, for all the subhuman appellations bestowed on
them by the white man, such as "digger" (because they dug roots as a
significant part of their diets), may have been the finest
basket-weavers humanity has yet produced, and the women did that
work.[78] The Spaniards melted down 99.999% of the gold and silver
artifacts that they plundered from New World cultures, but the early
examples of pre-Columbian gold and silversmithing astounded the
European artists who saw them. When Cortés sent back the first royal
bribe from the plunder of Mesoamerica, no less than Albrecht Dürer,
one the greatest artists Europe ever produced, saw the treasures on
display in 1520 and was awestruck. Dürer was once an apprentice
goldsmith himself, and his appreciation of Mesoamerican artistry
rendered him mute. Dürer wrote “In all the days of my life, I have
seen nothing which touches my heart so much as these for, among them,
I have seen wonderfully artistic things, and have admired the subtle
ingenuity of man in foreign lands. Indeed, I do not know how to
express my feelings about what I found there.”[79] When a subsequent
bribe was sent by Cortés to Spain after the Aztecs were conquered,
French pirates seized the biggest haul of loot to hit Europe's shores
to that time, and the haul was eventually admired in the French Court.
One of Europe’s greatest goldsmiths, Benvenuto Cellini, saw the loot
at the French Court and gave the opinion that Aztec goldsmithing was
the most ingenious he had ever seen.[80] Those opinions by Europe's
greatest artists did not prevent the director of the New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art from defending the fact that not one piece
of pre-Columbian native art was on display in his museum. He said
that native art was not art at all, but a curiosity that belonged in
the natural history museum, next to the stuffed polar bears.[81] That
director's opinion is not from a hundred years ago, but was uttered in
our "enlightened" generation.

Colonialism, the First Stage of Global Capitalism

The basic tenet of all economic systems is the capture and use of
energy. Plants capture sunlight’s energy by photosynthesis, and all
life on earth owes its existence to that process. A small fraction of
that captured energy becomes plant parts that humans can digest, with
that released energy fueling their bodies. Captured plant energy
largely becomes cellulose, which comprises the cell walls. Burning
wood releases the captured sunlight energy that made the cellulose.
All organic fibers are created with captured energy. All fossil fuels
release the energy captured from ancient sunlight. Humans and most
animals cannot digest cellulose, but must consume other substances
such as sugars, starches and fats to get their energy. Human history
is largely concerned with the pursuit of energy, securing either the
energy of food, the land that can provide it, or controlling the
energy of people, animals and machines.

All political and economic systems have been mainly concerned with
controlling and concentrating energy. The rise of capitalism and the
state created new ways of harnessing energy. Money generally buys
energy or its fruits, whether it is food, manmade goods, metals, etc.
The centralizing nature of states and corporations is largely about a
select few getting their hands on energy and controlling it. The
Iroquois did not have an executive branch in their government,
something the monarchical English settlers invented, as they nearly
named George Washington the United States’ first king. In the United
States government, the balance of power between the three branches –
legislative, executive, and judicial – has been continually eroded
ever since George Washington, making the executive branch increasingly
powerful and unaccountable. The concepts of wealth and power cannot
be effectively separated, not in today’s world, which is why the term
political-economic is used. Ideologies such as “realism,” which try
separating political factors from the economic, are not very
realistic.

It has taken many years of study, after years of being brutally
awakened by my experiences in the "real world," to finally realize how
deeply I had been lied to during my capitalistic indoctrination. The
historical roots of today's global capitalism are deep. Capitalism is
not an invention by people trying to devise a fair system, or one that
"honors human nature." Today’s capitalism is a system designed by
greedy people trying to get rich. Adam Smith did not invent it, but
helped establish an ideological framework for it.

Smith wrote that the mercantilist system of his day was designed to
wipe out competitors, not serve consumers. The beginnings of
capitalism really began with colonialism. Arguments can be made that
it began earlier, but European colonialism was the watershed.

Colonialism was simply a system of exploitation. The European powers
got practice before sailing the seas by conquering their neighbors.
England's rape of Ireland and Scotland is a case in point, as well as
the general exploitation of Eastern Europe. The word "slave" comes
from "Slav," as Eastern Europeans were among the first to endure
Western Europe's rise.

Before Columbus "discovered" the New World, Spain and Portugal were
busy conquering and "settling" the islands of the Eastern Atlantic.

The Spanish Crown initiated the world's first capitalistic ventures;
it rarely financed the New World's "explorations." Rich Spaniards
did, and the Crown received a cut of the profits for sponsoring the
expedition. Cortés greased as many royal palms as possible with
plundered New World loot to gain official recognition for
commandeering the Cuban governor's invasion of the Mexican mainland.
His bribery worked.

Soon, New World loot began flooding Europe. The English, Dutch and
French joined the game and the English and Dutch formed corporations.
Corporations could be found as far back as ancient Rome and the
medieval guilds, but the Dutch and English East and West Indies
companies were the forerunners of modern corporations. The game was
"trade." It is true that trade goods lured North American natives to
deal with the Europeans, but it was dealing with the devil, as the
most prominent trade goods were firearms and firewater (alcohol) from
the Europeans, and furs from the natives. The firearms greatly
escalated native violence, turning "wars" that were more like rugby
matches into deadly affairs that extinguished entire tribes, with the
white man's Machiavellian "help." Firewater was a psychological
crutch for natives whose world was turned upside down by the white
man's arrival. The fur trade was short lived, as it drove the
fur-bearing animals to extinction.

Because the Spanish were the first to arrive, raping "virgin" lands,
they racked up by far the highest death toll. The Dutch, English and
French were no better, but because they came to the game a century
later, they killed off far fewer natives than the Spanish did. Yet,
annihilate them they did.

The English colonial experience in the New World was somewhat
different. They first sought gold, and when that failed, they turned
to tobacco, furs and taking the land from the natives with brute
force. Wherever the climate was similar to Europe's, as in North
America, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Argentina, the
Europeans invaded to exterminate the natives and make it their new
home. In the tropical regions, the Europeans merely enslaved the
natives.

I attended business school, studying economics and capitalism. The
atmosphere and ideology I was imbued with was that capitalism was far
superior to that evil communism. As with the American history that
students are taught, I now realize that I was indoctrinated into a
fairy tale ideology. Capitalism, especially after 1989 and the
collapse of the Soviet Empire, has been portrayed as humanity’s
highest state, the flower of human economic evolution. What I was
taught was heavily laden with presentism. Presentism looks at the
past through the eyes of the present, judging it by the present’s
standards. It is nearly impossible to entirely avoid. However, the
greatest crime of presentism is to use the past to justify the
present, rather than help explain it. The pejorative in history
circles for many years has been to call such presentations of history
“Whiggish,” after an English style of telling history as one grand
tale of “progress.” The capitalistic history I learned was quite
Whiggish.

What we today call capitalism was born in England, and was born due to
a unique confluence of timing, geography, technology and culture.[82]
England’s early capitalism had little resemblance to today’s version
of it. The “bourgeoisie” concept of an urban middle class came from
France, not England. The concept of the modern state came from France
and its Enlightenment/revolutionary/Napoleonic era. The current
notion of capitalistic development was partly fabricated retroactively
to create the picture of capitalism we have today.

During the 19th century, France, England and the United States all
carved out new kinds of empires. The United States was busy securing
the North American continent and periphery, taking land by force from
its neighbors. England and France had been involved in interminable
wars during the previous millennium, and competing in the plunder of
distant lands complemented their rivalry. Capitalism and
industrialization was making its rise, and the practice of chattel
slavery ended, and instead people are rented today. During the 19th
century, the European powers conquered and enslaved much of humanity.

When the Portuguese rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488, they
began the era of European influence in Asia. At first, their goal was
the spice trade, and they had it to themselves, as far as any European
rivalry went, for many years. They began defeating their Asian rivals
militarily as early as 1507, and in 1510 they conquered the Muslim
port of Goa. The Spanish established their presence in the
Philippines in 1564, and the Dutch came in the early 17th century, and
soon took control of the spice trade from Portugal. The British and
French would also join the fray. Conquering the islands off Asia was
the first step to European hegemony, although the Japanese knew the
empire game and successfully kept Europeans largely out of Japan for
centuries, until the diplomatic invasion of Commodore Perry of America
in 1853.

For the entire period of European imperialism, continuing to the
present day, superiority of violence and ruthlessness nearly always
allowed the Europeans to prevail. The imperial effort is led today by
the United States, with the world’s most irresistible military, as it
now attempts to militarize space. Warfare in Europe long ago
abandoned any notions of fighting honorably or obeying any “rules.”
The only rule was winning, and the more ruthless, the better. The
exterminatory Thirty Years’ War that began in 1618 entrenched the idea
of total warfare to Europe. Nobody in the world could match Europe’s
viciousness and mastery of violence.

The Asian mainland, however, was too challenging to invade and
conquer. The Europeans were too few and the natives too well armed
and organized. In addition, European diseases could not decimate the
natives as they did in the New World and elsewhere. China and India,
as they do today, possessed a large fraction of the world’s
population, and had long-standing imperial cultures. Until the
British conquered the Bengal region in 1764, about the best the
Europeans could do was establish coastal trade ports, as well as
plenty of Christian evangelism.

The Bengal region was possibly the wealthiest on earth when the
British conquered it. With the British East Indian Company in charge,
the British mercilessly plundered Bengal. With Bengal being
exploited, in 1770 a drought, combined with British rapacity, created
a famine that killed off one third of Bengal’s peasantry.[83] Similar
to Spain’s rape of the New World, local imperial agents skimmed off
great sums for themselves, cheating both the natives and their
superiors in the mother nation. Britain subsequently refined its
revenue collection efforts, which trimmed corruption in the field but
also refined the process of native exploitation. Dacca was Bengal’s
textile center, and in 1757, British observers called it every bit as
wealthy as London. By 1840, Dacca had been bled dry, its population
collapsing from 150,000 to 30,000.[84] The British implemented the
standard imperial formula: it outlawed local industries in order to
protect those of the mother country. Bengali textile manufacture was
outlawed, and Britain even amputated the thumbs of Bengali weavers. As
with the Spanish in Mesoamerica and South America, the British
exploited a fractious imperial environment to their benefit, taking
advantage of the disintegration of the Mughal Empire to expand its
hegemony over all of India. The British East Indian Company was soon
raking it in hand over fist.

India was ahead of Britain on the modernization curve in ways, and was
even better at steel making than Britain was at first. British
industrialization was accomplished partly by exploiting India. As
India’s industries died from being outlawed, the natives were forced
into raising crops for export; Bengal became the land where indigo,
jute, and then opium was raised for export. The economic concept of
“value added” industries was fully implemented. The basic idea is
forcing the natives to grow crops for export, such as food, cotton,
jute, etc. Then it is exported to the mother country and processed in
their factories (and/or consumed). Then finished product is shipped
back to the subject nation, the price manipulated by the mother
nation’s dominance to achieve unfair terms, economically bleeding the
subject nation dry. No mills were made in India under British rule.
They were forced to raise crops for raw materials, and then it was
shipped to the mother country.

Most notoriously, the native society was forced to raise food for
export as they starved. The British built an infrastructure to
transport those export crops. British “philanthropists” made a big
deal about how much they “helped” India by building their rail system.
To astute observers, however, those rails took food and crops from
India, not delivering them to needy natives. That dynamic was
dreadfully evident when El Niño-created droughts descended on India
and China in two events, from 1876 to 1879, and 1896 to 1900. The
British system of plunder destroyed the fabric of Indian society, and
during those drought years particularly, the spectacle was often seen
of masses of starving people standing next to rail cars full of grain,
accompanied by armed guards, on its way to Europe. From 1875 to 1877,
as the Indian famine peaked, wheat exports to England quadrupled.[85]
Tens of millions died in those two famines, and many if not most
deaths would not have occurred if not for the European plunder system
that prevailed. As the European plunder system became its most
refined, India’s population growth nearly halted from 1870 to 1920. A
similar thing happened to China. As in Mexico, the coming of the
Europeans had anti-Malthusian effects, the subject populations
stagnating or collapsing in number as they also became poorer under
Europe’s lash. In the two thousand years before British hegemony in
India, there had been only seventeen famines. By 1878, during the
previous 120 years of British rule, India endured 31 famines,
increasing in frequency by about 3000%. It was no coincidence.

The “free market” created those holocausts. The food went to Europe
instead of feeding the society that grew it, because they could not
pay for it. It was a “free-market” genocide, while Europeans lived in
a golden age and obesity began becoming commonplace. That dynamic
exists to this day, but is more refined, with the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund cracking the whip, where peasants are
forced to grow crops for export to the West instead of local
consumption. The last time I looked a few years ago, of the forty
poorest nations in the world, thirty-six exported food to the United
States. “Trade” engaged in at gunpoint is anything but “free.”

Probably the most telling statistic of the British experience in India
was that from 1757 to 1947, there was no increase in India’s per
capita income, while Britain became the world’s richest nation, to be
surpassed by its descendent, the United States.[86] In 1750, China
and India comprised 57% of world manufacturing output. By 1900, it
was 8%.[87] The relationship of Britain to India was a parasitic one.
In 1910, India provided 60 million pounds of net income to Britain,
for the world’s largest international transfer of wealth.[88] India
is still recovering from that two-century-long raping. The British
did the same thing to China, forcing China to open itself to opium
addiction, beginning with the 1839 Opium War. Bengal was forced to
raise opium so Britain could force it on China. In ultimate evil, it
may rival what Europe did to Africa and the New World in its
triangular trade of slaves, sugar and rum. To demonstrate that it was
not an aberration from a distant past, in the 1980s the Reagan
administration did nearly the same thing, threatening retribution on
several Asian nations if they did not open their nations to American
tobacco companies, who purvey the world’s deadliest addictive
substance. Those Asian nations knuckled under to the U.S. blackmail,
and tobacco addiction rates in those nations have subsequently
skyrocketed.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-colonial prime minister, spent
much of his adult life in British prisons, as Gandhi did. In 1944,
Nehru wrote The Discovery of India from his prison cell. With great
irony he wrote:

“The solicitude which British industrialists and economists have shown
for the Indian peasant has been truly gratifying. In view of this, as
well as of the tender care lavished upon him by the British Government
in India, one can only conclude that some all-powerful and malign
fate, some supernatural agency, has countered their intentions and
measures and made that peasant one of the poorest and most miserable
beings on earth.”[89]

Nehru noted that the longer the British controlled an Indian province,
the poorer it became. Nehru described the rape of Bengal by the
British:

“A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India
which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today.
Indeed some kind of chart might be drawn up to indicate the close
connection between length of British rule and progressive growth of
poverty.”[90]

The Bengal region, once among the world’s richest, it is today known
as Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest. That is a prime example of
the chief legacy of European colonialism. In grim irony, the Bengal
region is once again a textile center. The women of Bangladesh work
in sweatshops for Western corporations such as Wal-Mart, making
pennies an hour to make clothing for export to the United States, in
classic neocolonial fashion. The game is still rigged, with the only
things changing being the names, faces and techniques.

During the last half of the 19th century, Europe did a similar thing
to Africa, in its famed “Scramble for Africa.”[91] Although
evangelical zeal motivated some of the early explorers and
missionaries, it soon gave way to the usual dynamic of superior
European violence subjugating the natives and forcing them into mining
and plantation work, the fruits of their labor being exported to
Europe. The same thing happened as with the British in India: an
infrastructure was built to export the products of exploitation.[92]
Nearly the entire African continent was turned into a slave camp, and
they called it “progress.” Also, corporate monopolies were often the
agents of Africa's exploitation. Hand-in-hand with the exploitation
and genocide were strained ideological rationales such as the White
Man’s Burden (a cousin to Manifest Destiny), and outright censorship,
as when Mark Twain wrote about the genocidal exploitation in the
Belgian Congo under King Leopold’s benevolence, which killed about ten
million people. A prominent way that Europe rebuilt itself after
World War II was bleeding Africa still more, with plantation and
mining activities.

Today we have more of the same, but now it is the World Trade
Organization, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
oppressing the world’s poor in favor of the rich, and using military
might and other punitive measures to enforce the “free market,” while
saying we do it to help the world’s poor. Bigger lies have seldom
been told. Today’s global capitalist system is little more than
colonialism with new rhetoric, techniques and technology.

If those slaves harbor any notion of breaking away from the capitalist
system, we overthrow their government, first by using the subtle
tactics of the CIA, such as bankrolling our favorite candidate and
arming "rebels" or the military, depending on which one is our pawn.
When all else fails, we invade or bomb them, as we did to Southeast
Asia, as we want to do to Cuba, et cetera. We think we own the world.
Today’s genocide in Iraq has everything to do with securing cheap
access to oil. In 2004, John Perkins pulled a Ralph McGehee, and
revealed the real neocolonial game for what it is, from an insider’s
perspective.

We are not the good guys, and never have been. Europe and its
descendants have visited more death and suffering onto the world's
people than anyone in history. There are no contenders. The Mongol
hordes were disastrous in their own way, but the last five hundred
years has been the reign of the white man, and nothing has been more
horrific or bloodier than that. If humanity survives the coming
transition, the entire second millennium will be seen as the Dark
Ages, with the twentieth century possibly the blackest.

Objectivity, Sources and the Historian's Ideal

In theory, the historian has a task, which is to tell what happened.
In America, there is an ideal of objectivity that also the
journalistic profession supposedly adheres to. Peter Novick wrote
That Noble Dream to discuss the "objectivity question" in the American
historical profession. Howard Zinn seriously questions whether
history should be objective, as do many others. Zinn felt that if
telling the story of slavery from the perspective of the slave helped
the slaves become free, he was all for it. Objectivity may not be the
historian's ideal objective. Staughton Lynd wrote, "Should we be
content with measuring the dimensions of our prison instead of
chipping, however inadequately, against the bars?"[93]

In the arena of history, there are rules, ideals and methods that
historians supposedly adhere and aspire to. A worthy historian relies
heavily on "primary" evidence, which is the evidence of the eyewitness
or the participants.

If somebody writes about the "criminal career" of Dennis Lee, for
instance, as Mr. Skeptic did, a historian would adhere to the primary
evidence, which was the testimony of those who witnessed Dennis' acts.
My account of my days with Dennis is considered primary history,
because I was there, witnessed it, and participated in it. Other
primary evidence would be a court transcript from Dennis' Ventura
trial. Police reports and other witness documents can constitute
primary evidence. Secondary evidence would be a newspaper account of
Dennis' “criminal record.” The risk of relying on secondary history
is relying on the interpretation of the primary history by the author
of the secondary history. In Dennis’ case, Mr. Skeptic failed
spectacularly as a reporter of history or the news, because the
secondary history that he relied on was false. That newspaper account
contradicted the primary evidence given by the official records, so
Mr. Skeptic relied on a false account of history. In Mr. Skeptic's
case, his rendering of false history is more egregious than simply
getting it wrong, reporting that Dennis was prosecuted and confessed
to criminal acts when he in fact had not. Mr. Skeptic actively
ignored the primary evidence so he could report a false secondary
history, one that told the story he wanted to tell.

In looking at the Aztec conquest, for instance, and Hugh Thomas'
Conquest, his sources are an array of primary and secondary sources.
Thomas performed archival research in Seville, which is how a
historian ideally does his/her work. Thomas relied on primary
accounts and secondary histories, but he tried using secondary
histories written close to when the events happened. He did a
creditable historian's job of seeking sources that were most primary.
Yet, how reliable are they? The two main primary sources regarding
the Aztec conquest are the accounts of Hernan Cortés and Bernal Díaz
del Castillo. Cortés wrote five letters to the king of Spain, and the
first one has been lost to history. Cortés was stealing command of
the expedition from the Cuban governor, Velázquez, who carefully chose
Cortés, even over family members, because there were few Spaniards
that he trusted. In light of Cortés' performance, it appears that
there were no Spaniards to trust. Velázquez first distinguished
himself militarily in the New World during the treacherous Xaraguá
massacre, and slaked Cuba with native blood. Cortés sent a huge royal
bribe to Spain - the largest haul of loot to ever hit Europe's shores
until that time - which French pirates stole.

Cortés was writing his letters in part to impress the king, in part to
justify his theft of the expedition, and historians consider his
account to be self-serving in numerous aspects. The other primary
account, by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, was written sixty years after
the events happened, when Castillo was blind and in his eighties. How
trustworthy his account is has been a matter of debate for many years.

There are native accounts of what life was like before the Spaniards
showed up, but Spanish chroniclers working for the Catholic Church
recorded them. What kind of bias crept into those accounts? They
were generally recorded more than a generation after the conquest, so
people were looking back at those days through the eyes of old age,
after their world had been turned upside down, and they had survived
the devastating consequences of their enslavement by the Spanish. The
greatest chronicler of those native accounts, the priest Sahagún,
stated in the introduction of his history that he was studying the
native culture and memories so he could cure the "disease" of their
culture. Thousands of Aztec and Mayan books were burned by the
Spanish priests in those days, and only a handful have survived, and
what survived gives evidence that priceless knowledge of native
cultures was lost in the Catholic bonfires.

During the centuries since those accounts, other evidence has come to
light, such as the excavation of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlán,
which was discovered in the 1970s in Mexico City. The excavation
apparently confirms the trustworthiness of Spanish accounts of human
sacrifice. The sacrificial altar is exactly where Spanish writings
put it, and the stone skull racks give impressive testimony to the
Spanish and "native" accounts of real skull racks where the heads of
sacrificed natives were strung like an obscene abacus. Accounts such
as Díaz's, where the Aztecs even strung up the heads of sacrificed
horses alongside the human heads, seem true in light of the
excavation. In addition, the offering caches unearthed in the
excavation, including one cache of the skeletons of more than forty
sacrificed children, give impressive evidence of institutional human
sacrifice among the Aztecs. The excavation of the Great Temple has
largely settled the issue of institutional human sacrifice, but the
extent of it may be argued. Pedro de Cieza de León wrote that human
sacrifice among the Incas did happen, but the Spaniards greatly
exaggerated it to justify their conquest.

Although the issue of human sacrifice has largely been settled, the
issue of Aztec cannibalism has not. Columbus began the cannibalism
myth in the New World on his first voyage, and no convincing evidence
of cultural cannibalism by the pre-Columbian New World natives has
ever come to light.[94] Thomas gives numerous accounts of native
cannibalism in Conquest, but the accounts are arguably more in the
tradition of myths that were universally held than of actual deeds
being performed. The first mention of Aztec cannibalism comes from
Cortés, after he had worn out his "welcome" with the Aztecs, and
attempted to justify his conquest. He wrote, "they are all cannibals,
of which I send Your Majesty no evidence because it is so
infamous."[95] His next accounts of cannibalism are given while
retelling the war against the Aztecs, and Cortés reported that their
enemies had abandoned "sacks of maize and roasted babies" when pursued
by the Spaniards.[96] Roasted babies. That sounds exactly like the
wartime propaganda that has characterized the dehumanization of the
enemy, practiced from time immemorial.

No independent evidence of cultural cannibalism has ever been adduced
for those native cultures, and other accounts deny them. For
instance, during the siege of Tenochtitlán, the Spaniards and their
native (chump) allies reduced the Aztecs to starvation. While the
bodies of their fallen surrounded them, they starved, and there is no
account of them eating human flesh to stay alive.

In coming to my own conclusions of the nature of the Spanish conquest
and aftermath, I have read primary accounts (Columbus and his friends,
also Las Casas, Cortés, Castillo, Zorita, Cieza de León) and numerous
secondary accounts. I have had to partly rely on the scholarship of
others. Relying on secondary scholarship is perilous for the
historian. I have tried mitigating my potential errors by reading a
spectrum of secondary history on the issues. If I read sympathetic
and antagonistic histories, I have a fair chance of seeing the entire
spectrum of evidence that exists, and making my own determinations.

Yet, even primary evidence is subject to being questioned. For
instance, my writings regarding my days with Dennis are considered
primary history. Yet, others who rode in the saddle with Dennis will
not see things quite the way that I did. My controller, who
engineered the theft of Dennis' company, would surely give a starkly
different account of events in Seattle than I did. I know the man is
dishonest; I saw him in action. I cannot be rationally disputed that
he committed theft, but he may present a case for his noble efforts in
stealing Dennis' company. A historian may give his account and mine
the same weight in arriving at the picture of what really happened in
Seattle. That is the historian's right and duty, but is more evidence
that there may not be an "objective" history to report, anywhere.

Washington Irving, a novelist, wrote the first great American history
of Columbus. He relied on primary and secondary evidence for his
tale, which is a salient example of how "historians" can lie. He
sifted through the bloody facts for the few that justified making
Columbus into a hero, and even invented new "facts." That a novelist
committed that crime is one thing, but that no American historian
challenged that fabrication until my lifetime is a profound commentary
on the state of the American history profession. In that light, the
American history taught to American schoolchildren has been worse than
worthless, if truly educating them was the goal.

Big lies were being told in virtually every area I have researched.
How can any of us develop a semblance of intelligent and coherent
solutions to our problems, when he have been so badly lied to, on all
fronts? If all we are fed are lies, be it about Columbus, George
Washington, Junípero Serra, George Bush, fluoridation, mainstream
cancer treatment, the energy industry, the assassination of JFK, data
from NASA, what is happening in Iraq and Yugoslavia, etc., how can we
ever arrive at effective solutions to our problems? We cannot, given
how misinformed we are, but one way to cut through all of it is to act
from the heart, and realize that the ends never justify the means.

When Americans were being fed lies that bombing Yugoslavia and Iraq,
or invading Panama and Vietnam, were regrettable yet necessary actions
to make this world a better place, my response is that violence only
makes the world more violent. So far, I have never seen any violent
"good guys." Violence is always a violation. If we want a loving
world, we need to act loving. Teddy Roosevelt's corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine was "tough love," a doctrine that has led to the
enslavement, misery and deaths of millions of Latin Americans. I see
no love in that doctrine, just the flowery justification for violence
and exploitation. Violence always violates somebody's free will.

In 1988, James Sandos, writing in the American Historical Review,
discussed the issue of Junípero Serra's proposed canonization and the
task of the historian.[97] In the 1930s, Serra was the first person
subject to the revised process of naming somebody a saint. The first
stage was the compilation of the historical record of the person's
life. America's most prominent historian on the Spanish experience in
North America was Herbert Eugene Bolton. He was the only person
outside the Catholic Church who was part of compiling Serra's life
story. Bolton was supposed to impart historical objectivity to the
Vatican commission that accumulated the historical documents. To be
fair to Bolton, he was more than seventy years old and had his hands
full with other matters. In the later years of his academic life,
Bolton became aware of an incipient trend in American scholarship, one
that began telling the story of the white man "civilizing" North
America from the native's perspective.

Anthropologist John Harrington heavily relied on Bolton's original
archival work. In 1930, Harrington sent Bolton a copy of his essay
"The Reaction of the American Indian to his European Conquerors."
Harrington wrote:

"…any amount of study of the American Indian only confirms the opinion
that he was from start to finish a reluctant recipient of the European
civilization brought to him by his discovers and conquerors. The
initial fear passed rapidly through the cycle of loving and returned
to a long twilight of dread, mistrust and suffering."

Bolton read Harrington's work with a

"…great deal of interest and high approval…One of the great
shortcomings in the early history of the western hemisphere is our
lack of a record of what the Indians thought about things. If we only
knew what he said and thought about our ancestors we probably would
hang our heads in shame. This work of yours is in the right
direction."

Bolton was leading a healthy trend in American historical scholarship
toward a more balanced view, where our history was not only told from
the viewpoint of the bloody conquerors (my ancestors), but also by the
voice of the conquered. His performance on the issue of Serra's
canonization process was another matter entirely, and served to show
how entrenched is the white man's bias toward himself and his
ancestors, even in the most "objective" of us. Around World War II,
other scholars such as Sherburne Cook were doing intensive research
into the historical record, which showed that the coming of the
Spanish was anything but glorious to the natives. Cook's research
showed that the Indians interned in the missions endured a genocidal
population collapse.[98] The experience in Baja California
demonstrated that the mission system was an instrument of genocide,
and the Franciscans ignored the California governor's advice (stop
imprisoning the natives in the filthy "dormitories," for instance) to
end the incredible death rates of native children behind the mission
walls.

In the revelations that attended opening the Nazi death camps, Carey
McWilliams published Southern California Country, An Island on the
Land, in 1946. McWilliams aptly compared the California mission
system to the Nazi death camps.[99] Although the expressed purpose of
the Nazi death camps was to exterminate the Jew and other "subhumans,"
and the California mission system was intended to "save the native’s
souls," both produced the same result: the extermination of the
inmates. Bolton and others on the Serra commission were aware of
those trends in scholarship when they testified in 1948 regarding
Serra's life and work, most particularly his establishment of the
California mission system. Bolton actively engaged in the whitewash,
painting Serra's legacy in glowing tones, helping to put him on the
fast track to sainthood.

The most common response to the mission system by the natives was
fleeing, and the fugitive rate in California was about ten percent,
with the highest, 15.6%, at the mission that Serra is most closely
associated with, the San Carlos mission. After 1790, the "marketing"
tactic of the Spanish priests was often sending Spanish soldiers into
the countryside to bring back "recruits." Even with the
secularization of the missions, the carnage continued and even
escalated, with the ranchers in charge. One non-Spanish witness
reported that as the soldiers were driving the fresh "recruits" to
"civilization," the native children being driven along began falling
behind. The leader of the recruiting mission did the logical thing:
he hastily baptized the children and then killed them by beating their
heads against the rocks. They were "saved."[100]

Bolton actively sanctified Serra's image, testifying that his
considerable research on the missionizing work of the Spanish priests
gave him a "partial indication of my competence to testify to the
merits of Fray Junípero Serra, the greatest of all this galaxy of
apostles to the heathen in North America." To this day, scholars do
not have access to the full proceedings of the commission, but what
has come forward indicates that Bolton completely abandoned his
"historian's" perspective and actively participated in the whitewash.
In Bolton's instance, it was literally a case of a historian playing
hagiographer. Bolton knew of the work being done by Cook and
McWilliams, as did others on the commission. Yet, Bolton and others
apparently disregarded the highly unsettling nature of their
revelations. Sandos wrote, "One might understand a
seventy-nine-year-old man succumbing to romantic rhetoric, much of it
his own…" Yet, the product that Bolton helped package was not
history, but hagiography. The many dark aspects of Serra and his
legacy were swept under the carpet, with the complicity of one of
America's most respected historians.

Sandos wrote:

"Compilation of the historical record in Serra's case presents
disturbing issues to the historian. If we are to avoid withering
criticisms such as Voltaire's that history is a trick played on the
dead or Napoleon's that it is a fable agreed upon, we must insure that
all sides of an issue are presented. Historians have been taught for
well over a century that contradictory evidence ought to be evaluated,
not dismissed; and, if it cannot be explained, then readers should be
allowed to judge it themselves."

Bolton is in good company. In 1986, the Church again turned to
historians for an accounting of Serra's record. Regarding the 1986
inquiry, Sandos wrote,

"Not only was Cook's analysis disregarded but also were Serra's own
words, the growing body of evidence from Indians, and the insights
available from anthropology, all of which would have contributed to a
balanced view of the past. Why were professional standards again
suspended?"

Good question. Professional standards are easily suspended in every
profession, especially science and medicine, and including my
erstwhile profession of public accounting, if there is money or other
gain in it. For the historian, the gain is a whitewashed version of
the past, serving the current power structure.

Sandos finished his essay with some profound questions and
observations.

"Tensions in the controversy presented here suggest two major
difficulties in trying to use history in the service of religion:
advocacy and presentism. Advocacy represents a suspension of the
quest for objectivity in favor of a search for supporting material. In
the case of sainthood, the operational hypothesis is not "What did the
candidate do?" but rather "What did the candidate do that demonstrates
proof of a holy (by Euro-American Christian standards) life? The
questions are fundamentally different: the first is speculative and
historical, the second, which presupposes the conclusion, is
utilitarian and pragmatic. The purpose of assembling a historical
record for a potential saint is to generate, among other products, a
life of the individual that stresses the candidate's heroic virtues.
This written product is hagiography. When serving a religious
institution, the historian risks sacrificing a dispassionate
reconstruction of the past in favor of justifying a foreordained
conclusion.

"Disregarding Cook's assessment that mission punishment of Indians
constituted 'severe and unwarranted punitive discipline' for the time
suggest a more difficult challenge than mere advocacy faces the
historian. Here, the historical record is being manipulated, probably
in an unconscious way, by a variation of the fallacy of presentism.
Since historical writing is the active reflecting on the past in the
present, there is danger that the present can distort the historian's
perspective. Because we now know how events turned out, it becomes
imperative to maintain a sense of historical time lest the present
moment be portrayed as inevitable and all sense of historical
contingency be lost. In the quest for sainthood, an idealized past is
sought in the present to be used as the basis for guiding the future.

"When religious advocates of the Serra cause ask us to judge Junípero
Serra by eighteenth-century standards, not twentieth, they strike a
resonant note with historians. But their request is simultaneously
disingenuous, given their purpose, which is canonization. Sainthood
requires that Serra's experiences, especially those with the
California Indian, transcend time and place. Sainthood means that his
is a universal example for all Catholics to follow. Phrased another
way, if Serra is canonized, the eighteenth century would judge the
twentieth and all the centuries to come.

"…Judging Father Serra by the standards of his time is what the
historical record ought to permit. The failure of Bolton in 1948 and
of the historians interviewed for Bishop Shubsda in 1986 to present
both sides of Serra's story profoundly challenges the ethics of the
historical profession. Personal bias, either in advocacy or apology,
seems to be preventing objectivity by historians in public service.
These episodes demand that historians re-examine the role their
colleagues play in the service of religion. At the very least, the
lesson for us all is caveat scriptor."

If history and the news are fabrications, how can we learn the lessons
of history and relate them to current events? We cannot. A major
reason why history repeats itself is that we are taught lies about it,
so the lessons are not learned and not applied to the present day's
events. The primary delusion that Americans labor under is that we
are the good guys as we unleash death, destruction and exploitation
onto the world on an unprecedented scale.

For all the presentism arguments, Columbus, Cortés and Serra did have
standards to hold them to. They self-righteously dictated those
standards to others many times, and unless hypocrisy is a relative
historical value, they can be held to account. Their standard was
Jesus and his message of love. They were Christians who wore their
faith on their sleeves, Columbus calling himself the Christ-bearer,
and Cortés putting up Christian images wherever he went, preaching his
faith as he slaughtered countless natives. Is there something wrong
with that picture? Can they be held to the standards they dictated to
others? I think so.

If American historians were an honest lot, on every Columbus Day there
would be picket lines of historians in front of the White House,
decrying the travesty of naming a national holiday after Columbus. In
one sense, American historians have prostituted themselves, as has
probably every professional group. They bow to the prevailing winds
of wealth and power, and if the powers that be want national holidays
named after mass murderers, or want to grant sainthood to an initiator
of genocide, the historians will produce a "history" to justify it.

When some of the CIA's (or other secret organization's) activities
have crept into the public eye too visibly to be denied any longer, a
strategy of partial disclosure is followed. Part of the story is told
that is true, the part they can no longer deny. They tell that story,
the one everybody already knows, accompanied with other "confessions"
and context. They are usually fabrications designed to lead people
away from the deeper truth of matters. It is a standard
disinformation tactic.

In the mainstream media today, racism is still alive and well, but
subtler than it used to be. Time Magazine ran an article soon after
Silence of the Lambs debuted, and gave an example of how the FBI does
its forensic sleuthing to catch those Hannibal Lecter-like criminals.
The only example they gave was a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman, raped
and murdered by a black teen-aged boy.[101] Time and the FBI were
guilty of promoting, however subtly, the long-standing myth that black
men rape white women whenever they get the chance. That is a myth
spun long ago in America’s slave-owning culture. The incidence of
black men raping white women is not remarkably different from white
men raping white women, etc.[102] Yet, the myth has persisted in
order to keep black men in their place. Where did all those
not-so-black Americans come from? Was it black slave men sleeping
with the wives of their masters? Or, was it all those white masters
who essentially raped their slave women? Which one outweighed the
other by a ratio of about ten-thousand-to-one? It used to be a felony
act for a white woman to have sex with a black man in Virginia. If
black men took up raping white women as a habit, it could be
considered an act of vengeance by the race, but they do not. The
defunct Lies of our Times regularly pointed out that kind of subtle
racism. Today, Z Magazine and other progressive publications point
out the subtle and not-so-subtle racism, sexism and classism that
still pervade American society.

For an example of the kinds of subtle racism that infects works by
white men attempting balanced scholarship regarding Native Americans,
David Weber's The Spanish Frontier in North America will suffice. It
is not the flag-waving exercise of earlier works of history, yet there
are biases that Weber was probably unaware of. He attempts balance,
but took it fairly easy on the Spanish genocidists who marauded
through the Spanish frontier. From the Caribbean to Mexico to South
America to North America, the story was the same: the Spanish
slaughter of the natives, followed or accompanied (or even preceded)
by European disease, with the natives enslaved and worked to death,
with the priests sometimes at the effort’s forefront.

Spanish violence inflicted on the natives was so far beyond the
violence that went the other way - native violence inflicted on the
Spaniards - that native violence barely bears mention. The casualty
ratio was more than 1000 to one, regularly. The Spanish frontier in
North America was more sparsely populated than the Caribbean, Mexico
or the Incan Empire, especially after Soto and others spread diseases
among the natives that depopulated entire regions. Although Weber
mentioned some of the innumerable acts of Spanish violence against the
natives, in the book he presents some art of the day. Twice he
presented images of Spanish-native violence. In both instances, it
was natives killing Spaniards.[103] Weber may have been unaware of
that disparity in his depictions. Where the real death toll by
violence was about 1000-to-one in favor of the Spaniards, Weber
pictorially depicts a score of the natives two, the Spanish zero.

Weber can probably present a convincing rationale for such a skewed
depiction, but his bias is typical for white men who think they are
being "balanced." It is similar to Sir Hugh Thomas continually
minimizing the pre-Columbian native population of the Caribbean,
holding to estimates of sixty years ago, estimates that are considered
the ultra-conservative extreme today. If Thomas was asked about it,
he might protest that it had nothing to do with minimizing the white
man's crime of "settling" the New World. He may even believe it. That
kind of bias is surely less pronounced than the halcyonic writings
about Columbus in days of yore, but it demonstrates how far Western
scholarship has to go before it can aspire to be "objective."

In the end, having primary source documents means far less than the
bias of the historian sifting through them.

Footnotes

[1] Lies of Our Times, November 1990, p. 2

[2] The Christic Institute was given an unprecedented million-dollar
fine for daring to bring the lawsuit. See a brief description of what
happened to them in Vankin and Whelan, 50 Greatest Conspiracies of all
Time, pp. 310-314.

[3] See Lee and Solomon, Unreliable Sources, pp. 4-7.

[4] Webb later wrote the widely hailed Dark Alliance about the
Contra-Cocaine story.

[5] The alternative media covered the El Mozote and Bonner story
extensively in the 1980s, and Bonner was vindicated when the mass
grave was discovered. See Pedelty, War Stories, pp. 93-97. See
Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 49, 62, 102. See Lee
and Solomon, Unreliable Sources, pp. 99-100.

[6] See Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 72-83 and Kwitny, Endless Enemies, pp.
220-237.

[7] See, for instance, Michael Parenti’s Dirty Truths, pp. 235-252 and
his Against Empire, pp. 175-196.

[8] See Pete Brewton’s The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, pp. 368-379.

[9] Silber's performance can be seen in the documentary Manufacturing
Consent, Noam Chomsky and the Media. In that video can also be seen a
name-calling exercise by a Dutch official in a debate with Chomsky.

[10] See Schwartz, The Creative Moment, p. 86.

[11] Chomsky, The Common Good, pp. 41-42.

[12] See, for instance, Edward Herman’s The Real Terror Network.

[13] Croteau and Hoynes, By Invitation Only, p. 112.

[14] See Lee and Solomon, Unreliable Sources, p. 29.

[15] See Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, p. 391.

[16] See Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, p. 390.

[17] See Blum, Killing Hope, p. 200-204.

[18] See Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, pp. 386-387.

[19] See Blum, Killing Hope, p. 215.

[20] See Bob Harris, "Pinochet," Z Magazine, December 1998, pp. 8-10.

[21] A summary of events in Cambodia and Laos is in Herman and
Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 253-296.

[22] See Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 193-197.

[23] New York Times Magazine, May 8, 1966, p. 89. Quoted in Blum,
Killing Hope, pp. 193

[24] Herman and Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World
Fascism, p. 210-211.

[25] See Chomsky, Powers and Prospects, p. 209.

[26] An excellent and accessible summary of East Timor contrasted with
Cambodia is in the video documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam
Chomsky and the Media. Otherwise, The Washington Connection and Third
World Fascism, and Manufacturing Consent provide excellent summaries.

[27] From a pre-invasion population of about 700,000, the death toll
to the East Timorese people is reckoned conservatively at 100,000 and
more realistically at 200,000. Those numbers may understate the true
death toll. Gabriel Defert authored what is considered by some to be
the best analysis of the Timorese deaths in his Timor Est le Genocide
Oublié. That 1992 paper estimates that 308,000 people may have lost
their lives in the Indonesian invasion and occupation. That is 44% of
the population. The Jewish people may have lost "only" 33% of their
population in the World War II Holocaust. In addition, Indonesian
professor George Aditjondro estimated 300,000 Timorese deaths based on
his analysis of Indonesian Army data. See East Timor: A People
Shattered By Lies and Silence, by Professor António Barbedo de
Magalhães, of the Oporto University, Portugal (published July 17,
1996). It is has been available on the Internet. A death toll of
200,000 deaths appears reasonable.

[28] See Lee and Solomon, Unreliable Sources, p. 279 for the NYT
editorials, and pp. 278-283 for coverage of the incident in general.

[29] New York Times, July 5, 1988 editorial. See Lee and Solomon,
Unreliable Sources, p. 279 for the editorial.

[30] See Rampton and Stauber’s Banana Republicans and Weapons of Mass
Deception or Norman Solomon’s War Made Easy for analysis of the
media’s performance in the post 9/11 years and run up to the invasion
of Iraq. By 2005, many documentaries came out on the media’s
performance after 9/11, and how it cozied up to the Bush
administration, such as Outfoxed, Weapons of Mass Deception and Orwell
Rolls in his Grave.

[31] See Orwell, Animal Farm, the Everyman’s Library edition, p. 99.

[32] See Orwell, Animal Farm, the Everyman’s Library edition, p. 106.

[33] See George Seldes’ The Great Thoughts, p. 243.

[34] See, for instance, Milton Meltzer’s Mark Twain, Himself, pp.
256-257.

[35] David Barsamian's book Stenographers to Power: media and
propaganda, is a series of interviews of people such as Chomsky,
Parenti, Bagdikian, etc.

[36] See Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, pp. 169-170.

[37] There is a distinction to be made here, although it is not very
important. William Bradford was one of the Mayflower Pilgrims, and
wrote the original history of the Plymouth Colony, but it was lost for
a couple of centuries. They were not really Puritans, being a more
radical group called Separatists, who left the Church of England,
feeling it was too corrupt. The Puritans were members of the Church
of England who also thought it was corrupt, and they tried reforming
it from within. The twenty-year period of English Civil Wars and
conflicts that began in 1640s is also known as the Puritan Revolution.
Whether Puritan or Pilgrim, they were all still Calvinist Christians,
and dourness was one of their more salient characteristics.

[38] See Cave, The Pequot War, pp. 122-167. See Steele, Warpaths, pp.
92-93.

[39] See Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, pp. 151-156.

[40] See Loewen, Lies my Teacher Told Me, pp. 75-97. See Steele,
Warpaths, pp. 80-109.

[41] See a discussion of Washington's plan, called nothing less than
"criminal" and a "conspiracy" by its author, in Allan Eckert's That
Dark and Bloody River, pp. 439-442. See also the discussion of
Washington’s plan in Sword’s President Washington’s Indian War, p. 27.
[42] See Sword’s President Washington’s Indian War, pp. 31-44. See
Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence, esp. pp. 268-312. See
Richard Drinnon’s Facing West, esp. pp. 131-164. See Ward Churchill’s
A Little Matter of Genocide, pp. 208-209.

[43] See Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 185.

[44] See Stannard’s American Holocaust, pp. 120-125, and esp. p. 252.

[45] See Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, pp.
124-146. Actually, there is a mention, and it amount to a few words.
Schlesinger deals with Jackson’s famous rejection of the Supreme
Court’s decision to recognize the Cherokee’s rights. He covers it
with this phrase, “Jackson refused to intercede,” on page 350. That
is the only mention.

[46] See Drinnon’s Facing West, p. 149.

[47] See Daniel Fogel’s Junípero Serra, the Vatican and Enslavement
Theology, p. 122. Spanish-introduced syphilis also devastated the
natives of Baja California, see Fogel, p. 50.

[48] It is almost impossible to find a book on Serra that is not
hagiographic, but the truth shines through, even in the adoring books.
A Franciscan friar wrote an upbeat biography of Serra, but most
telling of all was the book's title, The Last of the Conquistadors,
Junípero Serra (Omer Englebert, 1956). See Jackson, Robert H. and
Castillo, Edward. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization -
The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. See Fogel,
Daniel. Junípero Serra, the Vatican and Enslavement Theology. See
The Life and Times of Junípero Serra, by Msgr. Francis Weber, which an
abridged edition of Maynard Geiger's hagiographic book, published in
1959. See Rawls, James J. Indians of California, The Changing Image.
See Sandos, "Junípero Serra's Canonization and the Historical Record"
in American Historical Review, pp. 1253-1269. See Weatherford’s
Native Roots, pp. 129-147.

[49] See Fogel, Junípero Serra, the Vatican and Enslavement Theology,
p. 76.

[50] See Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish
Colonization, p. 48.

[51] See Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide, pp. 140-143.

[52] See Fogel, Junípero Serra, the Vatican and Enslavement Theology,
p. 56.

[53] See Fogel, Junípero Serra, the Vatican and Enslavement Theology,
p. 48. See also Englebert, The Last of the Conquistadors, Junípero
Serra, p. 49.

[54] Recorded by his biographer Father Palóu. See Stannard, American
Holocaust, p. 140.

[55] See Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish
Colonization, p. 109.

[56] See Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 143.

[57] See Drinnon’s Facing West, 1990 edition, pp. xxviii-xxix.

[58] See an account of the presidential controversy surrounding the
winter before the Little Big Horn in Miller's Custer's Fall, pp.
22-45. Miller's work is not easily dismissed. He interviewed 72
native participants in the Little Bighorn battle, and Miller
interviewed them in their own tongue.

[59] See Miller, Custer's Fall, p. 13.

[60] See Stan Hoig’s The Peace Chiefs of the Cheyennes.

[61] See Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 234.

[62] See a detailed account of the Camp Grant massacre in Terrell,
Land Grab, pp. 4-10.

[63] See Stannard’s American Holocaust, p. 126.

[64] See Stannard’s American Holocaust, p. 153.

[65] See Stannard’s American Holocaust, p. xi.

[66] See Terrell, Land Grab, pp. 15-17.

[67] See a photo of a mountain of bison skulls in Welch and Stekler,
Killing Custer, p. 76.

[68] See David Humphreys Miller’s Custer's Fall, p. 32.

[69] Stannard, American Holocaust, pp. 133-134.

[70] There is plenty of Custer scholarship. Some of my sources for
his career were: Andrist, The Long Death; Welch and Stekler, Killing
Custer, Miller, Custer's Fall, and Slotkin, Fatal Environment.

[71] See Clendinnen, Aztecs, p. 48-49.

[72] See Drimmer, Frederick. Captured by the Indians. pp. 12-13.

[73] See discussion in Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.
pp. 19-20.

[74] I do not know how many tribes of North America did this, but the
Iroquois did, as did others. See Graymont. The Iroquois, pp.45-46,
for a mention of that practice.

[75] See Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas. pp. 445-450.

[76] There are many accounts of that “disorganized” native behavior in
battle. For an example of the difficulty the chiefs had in
controlling their braves in a battle they won over an invading
American army, see Sword, President Washington's Indian War. pp.
171-191.

[77] For documentation on the Iroquois Confederation’s influence on
America’s Founding Fathers, see Bruce Johansen’s Forgotten Founders,
which explores the profound impact the Iroquoian political system (and
Native American thought in general) had on America’s Founding Fathers,
particularly Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. See
also Weatherford, Indian Givers. pp. 133-150. See Graymont, The
Iroquois, pp. 23-33. See Mander, The Absence of the Sacred. pp.
225-245. See Wright, Stolen Continents. pp. 114-140.

[78] See Fogel, Junípero Serra, the Vatican and Enslavement Theology,
p. 89.

[79] Reproduced in Thomas, Conquest. p. 536.

[80] See Jenifer Marx’s The Magic of Gold, p. 341. Cellini
unsuccessfully tried to reproduce the Aztec goldsmiths’ artwork.

[81] See Wuthenau, Unexpected Faces in Ancient America, p. 10.

[82] See Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism and The
Pristine Culture of Capitalism.

[83] See Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India, pp. 174-188.

[84] See Chomsky, Year 501, The Conquest Continues, pp. 11-14.

[85] See Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 27.

[86] See Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 311.

[87] See Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 294.

[88] See Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 297.

[89] Nehru. The Discovery of India. p. 301.

[90] Nehru. The Discovery of India. p. 296.

[91] See Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa.

[92] See Kim, Millen, Irwin and Gershman’s Dying for Growth, pp.
91-125.

[93] See Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 431.

[94] See Arens, The Man Eating Myth.

[95] See Cortés, The Second Letter, Letters from Mexico, translated by
Anthony Pagden, p. 146.

[96] See Cortés, The Third Letter, Letters from Mexico, translated by
Anthony Pagden, p. 245.

[97] See Sandos, "Junípero Serra's Canonization and the Historical
Record." American Historical Review, 1988, p. 1253-1269.

[98] Cook's work is largely contained in the research papers published
in the periodical Ibero-Americana. His research and scholarship was
seminal and crucial in developing the more accurate views today toward
the indigenous Californians and the effect of the white man's arrival.

[99] See McWilliams, Southern California Country, An Island on the
Land, pp. 21-48, esp. p. 29.

[100] See Rawls, James J. Indians of California, The Changing Image.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984, p. 60.

[101] Anastasia Toufexis, "Mind Games with Monsters," Time, May 6,
1991, pp. 68-70. I wrote to Time when that article came out, letting
them know what I thought about it. I never heard back from them.

[102] See, for instance, Angela Davis', Women, Race, Class, pp.
172-201. She made the case that white men committing rape is a
situation far more prevalent because of their special status in
America. Men of color are far more likely to be punished for that
crime than white men are.

[103] Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, p. 73 and 170.

The Next Section: Columbus, The Original American Hero (148K)

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Forgotten Founders, Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois
and the Rationale for the American Revolution, complete 1982 book
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/index.html#FF

Exemplar of Liberty
Native America and the Evolution of Democracy, complete 1990 book
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/index.html#EoL

Reaching the Grassroots:
The World-wide Diffusion of Iroquois Democratic Traditions
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/grassroots.html

Print editions:

New Worlds for Old
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Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World
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Florida of the Inca
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by El Inca [aka Garcilaso de la Vega] 1605

[godlessclif]

> Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present
> controls the past. - George Orwell, 1984.
>
> As Orwell said, whoever writes the news also writes the history. My
> historical investigations, which have taken several years, were to see
> if anything I had been taught as a student was true. My media studies
> were necessarily complemented with studying history and politics. They
> cannot be effectively separated. If you are an American and more than
> forty years old, compare this site's essay on Columbus to the tales
> you were told in school. The man who initiated history's first
> complete genocide of millions of people became an American national
> hero.
>

Thanks for "The Six Nations" website. Learning the truth is a lot
like Darwin learning his english country garden was not
an Eden, but a field of constant warfare between alliances
of species. The economic colonialism form of capitalism
is particularly odious as a paracitic form of life.

Of course like Cornell West said, "If the only form of
christianity you encountered was the KKK you would
think Jesus was about burning crosses and lynching blacks.

I do hope a benign form of capitalism combined with socialsim
emerged. The Iroquois democratic form is a great hope for
an economic system that will work. In a recent interview
Robert Rubin admitted the American economy is unsustainable
even when we are robbing our economic colonies blind.

Orwell's charector Emanuel Goldstein explained it all
in the appendix of the novel 1984. That book was written
in 1948 and still most people don't understand it.
I even me a wing nut on the web that though "Big Brother"
was a communist and the superstate of "Oceana" was based
on the Soviet Union.
I asked "If Oceana is the Soviet Union than what state
is Orwell refering to when he talked about the Eurasian
superstate??"
He got mad. Then I pointed out the similarity between
"Big Brother is watching you" and "Uncle Sam wants you"
A poster whose eyes follow you. He logged off.

Also I did find a copy of
"The curious republic of Gondor and other whymsical tales"
by Samuel Clemens. It was never published with the popular
penname Mark Twain on it. Some olster had donated his copy
to the Tamarac branch of the Broward County Library
and it was for sale at bargain prices. A copy might cost
you $100 if you can find one, but the Broward librarians
wanted to get rid of it before anyone read it. Broward is
the same Florida County where Luther Campbell had
the the first banned record album in US history and was
arrested by Sherriff Nick Navaro. I moved
to Palm Beach County.

[publius2k]

On 23 Jan 2007 02:16:28 -0800, "godlessclif"
<elianete...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I just stumbled onto that webpage yesterday when searching for a
specific fact. With it containing over 1200 pages and representing
12,000 hours of research and writing, it'll take some time to do it
justice. I scanned his footnotes and saw many of the books i have
heard of or read, so am feeling pretty good about his sources.

- - -

The Six Nations:
Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/index.html

Concepts of liberty and democracy grounded in the Haudenosaunee
[Iroquois] system have been incorportated in the current
constitutions of USA, Canada and most European nations.

GAYANASHAGOWA
- The Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee
[The Iroquois Confederacy of Nations]:
http://www.constitution.org/cons/iroquois.htm

Free eBooks online:

Forgotten Founders, Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois
and the Rationale for the American Revolution, complete 1982 book
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/index.html#FF

Exemplar of Liberty
Native America and the Evolution of Democracy, complete 1990 book
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/index.html#EoL

Reaching the Grassroots:
The World-wide Diffusion of Iroquois Democratic Traditions
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/grassroots.html

Print editions:

"White Roots of Peace: The Iroquois Book of Life"
by Paul A. W. Wallace, Leon Shenandoah, Sidney I. Hill,
John Kahionhes Fadden, and John Mohawk (1994, 1946)

"History of Five Indian Nations"
by Cadwallader Colden (1727 [p1], 1747 [p2])

New Worlds for Old
- Reports from the New World and Their Effect on
the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500-1800
by William Brandon [1986] Ohio University Press

"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus"
by Charles C. Mann (2005)