Bombing the Cradle of
Civilization. (04/25/03)
A question one can always ask on the day after Iraq fell victim to the coalition of the
willing is what do Sand Creek, Warsaw, and Baghdad have in common? There is no simple answer to that question
and, whatever one can think to say in response to it, there will be as many
puzzled faces afterwards as there are before.
Puzzled expressions are likely to occur because Americans of European
descent have been lying to themselves about the nature of their collective
enterprise in the Western hemisphere for so long, and so deeply and thoroughly,
that any expression of truth, especially if said by a member of any group of
other, non-European, people, will fall harmlessly to the ground of the presumed
and collective innocence that protects all “Americans” from ever having to
confront who and what they really are, from what they have increasingly become. George W. Bush will likely be blamed by
generations to come for willfully tearing off the mask that has always
concealed real America from itself. Finding the real face beneath the mask of
innocence worn by America for countless generations is a relatively
easy task to accomplish.
Sand Creek is a proper place to start, since it marks a
mid-point in the layering down of the sediments of stratified heritage, the
ones that constitute the mask, best represented now by George W. Bush (cowboy)
in his recent unfettered run to the ruination of the cradle of
civilization. The print media, then as
now, had its place in fashioning the story, even if without embedded
warrior/journalists like the ones we have now, when the following account of
battle appeared in The Rocky Mountain
News shortly after the November 29th combat: “Among the brilliant feats of arms in Indian
warfare, the recent campaign of our Colorado volunteers will stand in history
with few rivals, and none to exceed it in final results.” Sounds pretty damned
wonderful. A few paragraphs later
the “results” of the campaign are given:
“Among the killed were all the Cheyenne chiefs, Black Kettle, White
Antelope, Little Robe, Left Hand, Knock Knee, One Eye, and another, name
unknown. Not a single prominent man of the tribe remains, and the tribe itself
is almost annihilated” (Editorial, 1864).
That account of the conflict might have stood forever as historical
truth were it not for the fact that several eye-witnesses to the US war against
the Cheyenne and Arapahoe in Colorado came forward, even before the US
Congress, to provide a different view of events than the ones presented by the
media of the times.
John S. Smith, an interpreter for the white population of
Colorado, who spoke both Cheyenne and Arapahoe, and also knew most of the
chiefs of the natives assembled at Sand Creek, was called upon after the battle
by Lt. Col. Bowen to identify any of the dead that he could recognized. He testified before Congress (“Joint
Committee on the Conduct of the War, Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians,” 38th
Congress, 2nd Session, 1865) that he told Bowen “it was possible I
might recollect the principal chiefs.”
Bowen took him to view the dead and dying natives. His efforts, however, were not particularly successful
because “[t]hey were terribly mutilated, lying there in the water and sand;
most of them in the bed of the creek, dead and dying, making many struggles.
They were so badly mutilated and covered with sand and water that it was very
hard for me to tell one from another.” (John S. Smith, Testimony before the “Joint Committee,” 38th
Congress, 2nd Session, March 14, 1865, Washington DC). One rather chilling detail of the statement
is that only some of the people Smith saw were dead before they were mutilated
beyond recognition; others, apparently, were hacked to pieces before they died
and even some were still living when Smith saw their mutilated remains after
the battle. When asked who had done the
mutilations, Smith replied that it had been done by “the United States troops.”
The massacre was even worse than it seems, since the entire
band of Cheyenne and Arapahoe who were murdered
at Sand Creek surrendered to the US military several weeks before
the attack and had given up all their arms.
They were, in fact, a relatively defenseless camp of some 1,200 men,
women, and children, who had been promised protection by the US military. Lt. Col. Chivington,
who led the assault, however, disclaimed any knowledge of surrender and
insisted that the natives were well-armed and hostile. He said some 400 to 500 natives had been
killed in the battle with only 7 US soldiers killed, 47 wounded, and 3
missing. Sounds remarkably like the
ratio between American and Iraqi soldiers in the recent war there. When asked if any women and children had been
killed, Chivington claimed only one native woman, and
no native children, had died. Smith told
it differently by claiming that the ratio between men and women and children
was closer to half and half. The Congressmen
had been told the same by other witnesses and asked Smith the following
question:
“Were the women and children slaughtered indiscriminately,
or only so far as they were with the warriors?
Answer. Indiscriminately.
Question. Were there any acts of barbarity
perpetrated there that came under your own observation?
Answer. Yes, sir; I saw the bodies of those lying there cut
all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to
pieces.”
When asked what reason Smith thought Chivington
had for attacking the Cheyenne and Arapahoe at Sand Creek, he replied that he
did not know from any personal conversation he had ever had with the commander
of the Colorado Volunteers, but that many people had told him that Chivington intended to run for public office in the
territory and needed a military action to further his political career. This would not be the only time in American
history, of course, that an individual office-seeker would employ a military
conquest against a defenseless enemy to secure his place in the Federal
government.
Chivington, after testifying in
contradiction to virtually everything Smith said about the attack, made the
following statement to the Joint Committee:
“I would, in conclusion, most respectfully demand, as an act
of justice to myself and the brave men whom I have had the honor to command in
one of the hardest campaigns ever made in this country, whether against white
men or red, that we be allowed that right guaranteed to every American citizen,
of introducing evidence in our behalf to sustain us in what we believe to have
been an act of duty to ourselves and to civilization.” (J. M. Chivington,
Congressional Testimony, March, 1865).
So, it turns out that the massacre and mutilation of the
Cheyenne and Arapahoe at Sand Creek had been done out of duty to settlers’
rights to deprive native people of their land and possessions (hundreds of
buffalo robes were confiscated as compensation for the dead and wounded
Americans who fell at Sand Creek from the annihilated Indians) and to protect
civilization from the brutal savages who occupied the plains. The actions of the “United States troops,”
after the battle was won, begs the question, even in the midst of the conflicts
found in the testimony, as to whom exactly held the claim to civility and to
civilization. One can probably safely
assume that the natives did not mutilate themselves after they were killed and
wounded by the Americans. But this is
precisely how the mask was built. This
is how it is maintained. Black Kettle,
Left Hand, White Antelope, and One Eye, were never given the opportunity to
demand justice or claim they too were only defending civilization against
invading barbarians, people both capable and willing to hack their living
bodies to pieces in order to assure victory over a defenseless adversary.
Recent commentary from the right-wing ideologues now
populating the better part of America have been rather fond of drawing
comparisons between the fall of Saddam Hussein and the fall of Adolph Hitler,
making George W. Bush out to be some kind of latter-day-saint who has
successfully defended civilization from the hands of a powerful and sadistic
tyrant. I find that comparison odd
because it seems to me that the beginning of the Second World War, specifically
Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September, 1939, bears considerably more
resemblance to Bush’s invasion of Iraq than the end of that war does to
anything that has happened in the Gulf since he took control of our government
two years ago. Germany, helped by the
opening of an eastern front against Poland by the Russians, needed only 27 days
from invasion to surrender (September 1st—September 28th)
to secure victory against the demonic Poles.
They must have been worse than Satan himself because Hitler cannot now
be faulted for having failed to annihilate the Polish people for reasons of not
having tried hard enough. That is
exactly what he attempted to do. The
Russians were also willing partners in that effort. All-in-all, some 5.5 million Polish citizens
were collectively murdered by the Germans and Russians during the war. To say that Bush has similar plans for the
Iraqis might be an exaggeration but several recent developments may suggest
something of the kind is in store for anyone there who resists American
hegemony.
Taking first things first: Bush’s war against Iraq actually required one day less
(26) than Hitler’s blitzkrieg did against the Poles, and that was accomplished
without the ability to open a northern front against Baghdad because the Turks refused to
allow US troops access to northern Iraq through their territory. Saying that, however, fails to acknowledge
the fact that no surrender has been signed by Saddam, or by any of his agents,
to this day, so technically speaking the war continues until some document or
another declares its termination. No one
seems particularly concerned about that curious lapse. One principal reason for the rapidity of conquest
in both cases was due to the fact that both the Polish and Iraqi armies were
overwhelmingly out-gunned by their adversaries.
The disparity between US and Iraqi forces was probably more pronounced
than it was between German and Russian versus the Polish army in 1939. The disparity has been obvious in 2003. In the first US armored incursion into
Baghdad, for instance, an engagement that lasted about four hours, or about as
long as it took Chivington to murder 500 Cheyenne,
America lost one soldier killed and six wounded. Reports of Iraqi losses begin with a low
number of 1,000 and extend upward to as many as 3,000 combat deaths, including
military and civilian. No one attempted
to estimate the number of wounded Iraqi fighters from that event. This is similar in ratio to the glorious
results of the Sand Creek massacre in 1864, even much higher, of course, and
can certainly be attributed to much the same cause. At Sand Creek, the enemy of US forces was
simply unarmed. In Baghdad, enemy forces were
overwhelmingly out-gunned, since Toyota pick-ups with a few AK-47’s are
no match for Abrams tanks. The situation
in Iraq has been so disproportionate, in
fact, that the US military has adopted a policy of
not releasing kill-numbers for enemy combatants and civilians in the conflict.
In 1939, Hitler simply claimed that Poland was actually part of Germany and he had every right to invade
without any other cause. Bush, on the
other hand, had more reasons for invading Iraq than any sane person can
comprehend. Iraq had a huge stockpile of weapons
of mass destruction, and was prepared to distribute them to anyone who asked,
if their intent was to use them against America.
So far only a few traces of such weapons have been found and there is no
evidence Saddam intended to give them, or sell them, to anyone else. The idea that Saddam’s military posed a
threat to neighbors or to the US is simply false on the ground of
its actual utility against American forces.
Iraq turned out to be no threat to
anyone. The demonization
of Saddam’s regime, as the most evil collection of tribal murderers the world
has ever known, is simply standard procedure for waging a pre-emptive war
against an enemy of choice. Precisely
the same tactic was employed against Black Kettle and Left Hand prior to the
Sand Creek massacre and stands now, as then, as everything that is necessary to
marshal and advance an overwhelming military force against a defenseless
population. That Bush and his
administration have done this should surprise no one familiar with the way
Cowboys always justify their murderous response to the existence of
Indians. Paint them horrible enough,
even if unarmed and defenseless, and most white Americans (80%) will support
the troops as they go about the business of annihilating this or that tribe of
Indians or Iraqis. It is no accident, of
course, that Afghanis, Iraqis, Syrians, and Iranians are always characterized
as tribal people. Americans can always
be counted on to favor the annihilation of tribal people.
Another parallel to Nazi Germany that strikes me as significant
is the fact that the US military was not concerned with
protecting the Baghdad museum against looters. The Nazis were notorious for art theft during
their invasion and occupation of their European neighbors. That the priceless artifacts of Mesopotamian
civilization were so easily looted by professional traffickers in antiquities
is no surprise either, at least not to a native American, not to anyone who has
watched white men plunder the gravesites of his or her ancestors for 500
years. Some of the comments that have
surfaced in response to criticism of the US for allowing the destruction of
museums and libraries in Iraq help to illustrate my
point. According to Maureen Dowd (“A
Tale of Two Fridays,” NYTimes, April 20, 2003), Donald Rumsfeld,
not known for his tact or reasonableness in the face of challenges, made the
following statement to the press when asked about the military’s failure to
defend the museums:
"It's the same picture of some person walking out of
some building with a vase," he said, "and you see it 20 times and you
think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were
that many vases in the whole country?"
It is almost impossible to respond to such a massive
statement of dismissal, as if the actual number of vases that might exist in an
entire country matters more than the fact that the ones that are missing were
four or five thousand years old, are irreplaceable, and are worth millions of
dollars or euros in the illegal artifacts’ trade. Never mind the fact that the vases he is talking
about represent a civilization that predates Rumsfeld’s
militaristic vision by thousands of years and may be the actual source, if not
birth-place, of the ideology that fuels his own perceptions of reality. The fact that he claims to have no regard for
such things makes his house the first place I would look if I were assigned the
task of finding the people responsible for the looting and sale of those
artifacts.
Jim Hoagland, in “Victims of Civic
Passivity” (Washington Post, 04/17/03, A23), makes an even more
egregiously imperious statement than anything Rummy came up with; that is,
“But the rush to condemn Americans for looting and
destruction committed by Iraqis obscures fundamental questions about social
responsibility and accountability in Iraq and throughout the Arab world.
The debate about responsibility for the museum's losses goes to the heart of
the need for urgent moral and psychological change in the greater Middle East.”
The idea that the looting of Iraq’s museum of antiquities was done
by Iraqis in some kind of moral or psychological (pathological?) collapse, and
not by outside agents of traffickers with keys to the vaults, is nothing less
than any white man’s “rush” to condemn every “colored” victim for the crimes
white society perpetuates against them in order to avoid the very moral
responsibility that Hoagland so quickly assigns to
the Iraqis. Bush’s war created the
climate of chaos in Baghdad that allowed the museum to be
looted. The fact that it was done with
such ease, with such dispatch, suggests that adequate time for careful planning
was available for the people who actually benefited from the massive theft of
those artifacts. Claiming, as Hoagland does, that the looting demonstrates a broad
immorality across the whole of the Middle East, one in desperate need of a
Christian renewal and conversion, no doubt, is more than an insulting
stereotype: it borders on out and out racism.
The Washington Post would probably kick this guy to the curb were it not
for the fact that 80% of Americans subscribe to precisely these kinds of racial
slurs against whatever enemy right-wing ideologues are serving up for the war
of the moment.
Hoagland, perhaps anticipating what any
reasonable thinker might conclude from recent events, safeguards himself, and
the Bush administration, from charges related to a re-invention of Nazi
ideology in their neoconservative program when he
notes that
“Princeton University's Bernard Lewis recently pointed out
that ‘the ancestry of the Baath may be found not in
the Middle East, not in Islam, not in Arabism but in the Nazi Party and the
Communist Party, two sources of inspiration’ that were introduced into Iraq and
Syria through European colonialism.” (Jim Hoagland, “De-Baathification,
Root and Branch,” Washington Post, 04/24/03, A25).
I know nothing about Bernard Lewis’s biases, his research
reputation, his credentials, but it does seem odd to me that Hoagland has already discovered a way to deflect charges of
Nazism from the Bush administration, even from his own support of it, before
anyone has even raised the possibility that Bush’s actions in Iraq may have
some similarity to the way Hitler began his own 1,000-year reign of peace in
the context of his Third Reich. If
Saddam Hussein’s political party (Baathist) is a
latter-day expression of Nazi-Communism, which in itself is a curious
conflation of opposites but then why leave any demonic base uncovered, then it
becomes impossible to suggest that Bush himself, and other members of his team,
might be tainted by a conservative ideology more closely aligned with Arian
supremacy than it is with any other political point-of-view.
All this may be idle chatter anyway given the situation that
has been developing lately in southern Iraq.
What may be the final and ultimate undoing of this first phase of the
Bush war against Islamic people is the sudden, and completely unanticipated,
rise of Shiite fundamentalism in the south.
The pilgrimage to Karbala, which may have
drawn as many as one million celebrants, all of whom have collectively demanded
the immediate departure of American troops, has displayed an aspect of
anti-democratic fundamentalism that Bush and his people should be able to
recognize from their own personal commitment to Christianity’s version of the same
thing. While Bush uses Abrams tanks,
stealth bombers, and smart-bombs to enact his version of holy war, the Shiite
majority in southern Iraq may resort to suicide bombers to
pursue jihad against American interests in the region. If that happens, and there seems to be little
in place to prevent it, Bush’s commitment to “nation building” will evaporate
before the dust settles from the first detonation of a human bomb. Bush will endure such attacks, if US
casualties result, but only as long as it takes to establish a credible claim
that he tried to create democracy in Iraq but failed because the tribal
structure and primitive nature of the people who dwell in the cradle of
civilization were not masculine enough, not elevated enough, not progressive
enough, to sustain such a sophisticated governance on their own.
Harold Meyerson, editor of the
American Prospect, in his recent assessment of Bush’s presidency (“The Most
Dangerous President Ever,” 05/01/03), remarks that reporters
returning from interviews (pre-war apparently) with the people most responsible
for America’s pre-emptive war policies,
people loosely grouped under the heading of “neoconservatives”
(neocons)
“come back to report that growing Islamic militance in the Arab world is precisely what the neos want; it justifies the United States in extending the
conflict to other nations until the entire region is transformed. In a sense,
this parallels the beliefs of the growing number of religious Armageddonists who see chaos in the Middle East as a prelude to the coming
rapture. It's hard to say which idea is loonier, or more dangerous.”
With 250,000 American citizens at risk in various parts of Iraq at this moment, the neocons should be careful what they wish for. If the instability they seek begins too soon,
if it grows uncontrollably violent out of the pilgrimage of the Shiites to Karbala, for instance, the US military will be forced to
respond to save itself by killing hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians,
an act of death-dealing which can be blamed on the victims, of course, but one
that will be so harshly judged by the rest of the world that it will
effectively end any positive influence the US might have in the wider world for
generations to come.
The idea, finally, that Bush may actually be seeking a
thousand-year reign of millennial peace, like the one that will supposedly
follow Armageddon, is clearly one that appears both insane and dangerous. Religious myth, as long as it remains just
myth, cannot harm anyone except the people who individually embrace it. The dangers of mixing religious ideology with
political action, as fundamentalist Shiites certainly do, as George W. Bush may
be doing, is that the power of the State becomes a real world actor in the
psychodrama of the beings and entities who only exist in the minds of the
people who believe in them. The nineteen
highjackers of 9/11 acted in accordance with the
commands of Allah and 3,000 people died at their hands. A different God may direct George W. Bush’s
war against Iraq but He is neither more real than
Allah nor less dangerous to the well-being of everyone who does and does not
believe in His material reality.
In earlier times, political ideologues were much less subtle
than they are now, whether religious or strictly secular in their
points-of-view. James A. Morone, in his essay for the American Prospect “In God’s
Name” (05/01/03), quotes Cotton Mather and
William Bradford with reference to the Pequot war in 1636:
“’It was time for the devil to take alarum’, wrote minister Cotton Mather; Satan was
rousing the natives to ‘oppose the possession [of New England] which the Lord Jesus Christ was
to have’. Well, that's one way to picture your enemy.
“In 1636 the colonists launched a war against the ‘devil
worshippers’. In the decisive battle, the colonial militia attacked Fort Mystic, a Pequot village enclosed by a
wooden palisade. The colonists set the enclosure ablaze, then
killed hundreds of men and women as they ran from the flames. The survivors
were rounded up and executed, drowned or sold into slavery. The bodies of so
many ‘frying in the fire’, noted William Bradford, seemed to many ‘a sweet
sacrifice to God’. European churchmen protested, but the Americans paid them no
mind.”
Two hundred and twenty-eight years later, God’s army struck
the Cheyenne and Arapahoe at Sand Creek. Today, George W. Bush is in Iraq working the will of God against
another tribal people: same story; same result.
Some Europeans still protest; others collaborate. Eventually, the white man will play out his
string and the spirits of the people of color who have died at his hand will
hang the pieces of his mutilated body against a clear blue sky.
