of civilization, is a second traditional justification for inflicting anything, including genocide, on those possessing the wrong principle. When I was a student in Munich in 1962, unrepentant Nazis still explained to me matter-of-factly that the Germans had had to invade Russia, because the Russian people had adopted Communism. My fifteen field assistants in New Guinea's Fakfak Mountains all looked pretty similar to me, but eventually they began explaining to me which of them were Moslems and which were Christians, and why the former (or the latter) were irredeemably lower humans. There is an almost universal hierarchy of scorn, according to which literate peoples with advanced metallurgy (for instance, white colonialists in Africa) look down on herders (such as Tutsi, Hottentots), who look down on farmers (such as Hutu), who look down on nomads or hunter-gatherers (such as Pygmies, Bushmen).
Finally, our ethical codes regard animals and humans differently. Hence modern perpetrators of genocide routinely compare their victims to animals in order to justify the killings. Nazis considered Jews to be subhuman lice; the French settlers of Algeria referred to local Moslems as
All three types of ethical rationalizations were employed by Australian colonists to justify exterminating Tasmanians. However, my fellow Americans and I can obtain a better insight into the rationalization process by focusing on the case that we have been trained from childhood to rationalize: our not-quite-complete extermination of American Indians. A set of attitudes that we absorb goes roughly as follows.
To begin with, we do not discuss the Indian tragedy much—not nearly as much as the genocide of the Second World War in Europe, for instance. Our great national tragedy is instead viewed as the Civil War. Insofar as we stop to think about white versus Indian conflict, we consider it as belonging to the distant past, and we describe it in military language, such as the Pequod War,
Great Swamp Fight, Battle of Wounded Knee, Conquest of the West, and so on. Indians, in our view, were warlike and violent even towards other Indian tribes, masters of ambush and treachery. They were famous for their barbarity, notably for the distinctively Indian practices of torturing captives and scalping enemies. They were few in number and lived as nomadic hunters, especially bison hunters. The Indian population of the US as of 1492 is traditionally estimated at one million. This figure is so trivial, compared to the present US population of 250 million, that the inevitability of whites occupying this virtually empty continent becomes immediately apparent. Many Indians died from smallpox and other diseases. The aforementioned attitudes guided the Indian policy of the most admired US presidents and leaders from George Washington onwards (see quotations at the end of this chapter).
These rationalizations rest on a transformation of historical facts. Military language implies declared warfare waged by adult male combatants. Actually, common white tactics were sneak attacks (often by civilians) on villages or encampments to kill Indians of any age and either sex. Within the first century of white settlement, governments were paying scalp bounties to semi-professional killers of Indians. Contemporary European societies were at least as warlike and violent as Indian societies, when one considers the European frequency of rebellions, class wars, drunken violence, legalized violence against criminals, and total war including destruction of food and property. Torture was exquisitely refined in Europe: think of drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, and the rack. While the pre-contact Indian population of North America is the subject of widely varying opinions, plausible recent estimates are about eighteen million, a population not reached by white settlers of the US till around 1840. Although some Indians in the US were semi-nomadic hunters without agriculture, most were settled farmers living in villages. Disease may well have been the biggest killer of Indians, but some of the epidemics were intentionally transmitted by whites, and the epidemics still left plenty of Indians to kill by more direct means. It was only in 1916 that the last 'wild' Indian in the US (the Yahi Indian known as Ishi) died, and frank and unapologetic memoirs by the white killers of his tribe were still being published as recently as 1923.
In short, Americans romanticize the white/Indian conflict as battles of grown men on horseback, fought by US cavalry and cowboys against fierce nomadic bison-hunters able to offer strong resistance. The conflict is more accurately described as one race of civilian peasant farmers exterminating another. We Americans remember with outrage our own losses at the Alamo
ISHI, the last surviving Indian of the Yahi tribe of northern California. The photograph on the opposite page shows him, starving and terrified, on 29 August 1911, the day that he emerged from forty-one years of hiding in a remote canyon. Most of his tribe was massacred by white settlers between 1853 and 1870. In 1870 the sixteen survivors of the final massacre went into concealment in the Mount Lassen wilderness and continued to live as hunter-gatherers. In November 1908, when the survivors had dwindled to four, surveyors stumbled upon their camp and took all their tools, clothes, and winter food supplies, with the result that three of the Yahis (Ishi's mother, his sister, and an old man) died. Ishi remained alone for three more years until he could stand it no longer and walked out to white civilization, expecting to be lynched there. In fact, he was employed by the University of California Museum at San Francisco and died of tuberculosis in 1916. The photograph is from the archives of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
Our rewriting of American history stems from the aspect of genocide that is of greatest practical importance in preventing it—its psychological effects on killers, victims, and third parties. The most puzzling question involves the effect, or rather the apparent non-effect, on third parties. On first thought, one might expect that no horror could grip public attention as much as the intentional, collective, and savage killing of many people. In reality, genocide rarely grips the public's attention in other countries, and even more rarely are interrupted by foreign intervention. Who among us paid much attention to the slaughter of Zanzibar's Arabs in 1964, or of Paraguay's Ache Indians in the 1970s?
Contrast our lack of response to these and all the other instances of genocide in recent decades with our strong reaction to the sole two cases of modern genocide that remain vivid in our imagination, that of the Nazis against the Jews and (much less vivid for most people) that of the Turks against the Armenians. These cases differ in three crucial respects from the genocide we ignore: the victims were whites, with whom other whites identify; the perpetrators were our war enemies whom we were encouraged to hate as evil (especially the Nazis); and there are articulate survivors in the US, who go to much effort to force us to remember. Thus, it takes a rather special constellation of circumstances to get third parties to focus on genocide. The strange passivity of third parties is exemplified by that of governments, whose actions reflect collective human psychology. While the United Nations in 1948 adopted a Convention on Genocide that declared it a crime, the UN has never taken serious steps to prevent, halt, or punish it, despite complaints lodged before the UN against on-going genocide in Bangladesh, Burundi, Cambodia, Paraguay, and Uganda. To a complaint lodged against Uganda at the height of Idi Amin's terror, the UN Secretary-General responded only by asking Amin himself to investigate. The United States is not even among the nations that ratified the UN Convention on Genocide. Is our puzzling lack of response because we did not know, or could not find out, about on-going genocide? Certainly not: many cases of genocide of the 1960s and 1970s received detailed publicity at the time, including those in Bangladesh, Brazil, Burundi, Cambodia, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, Lebanon, Paraguay, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, and Zanzibar. (The casualties in Bangladesh and Cambodia each topped a million.) For example, in 1968 the Brazilian government filed criminal charges against 134 of the 700 employees of its Indian Protection Service for their acts in exterminating Amazonian Indian tribes. Among the acts detailed in the 5,115-page Figueiredo Report by Brazil's attorney general, and announced at a press conference by Brazil's minister of the interior, were the following: killing of Indians by dynamite, machine-guns, arsenic-laced sugar, and intentionally introduced smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, and measles; kidnapping of Indian children as slaves; and the hiring of professional killers of Indians by land development countries. Accounts of the Figueiredo report appeared in the American and British press, but failed to stimulate much reaction.
