Appendix I. Expansion and Contraction of Cultures

There is a deeper psychological reason for world violence than claiming of wealth. Humans, like all creatures, struggle for space on this earth. That struggle causes the borders of cultures over the centuries to expand and contract like an accordion. The primary considerations that dictated the winners, and thus decided who expanded their culture, were new technologies and resources.

The award-winning physiologist Jared Diamond outlines how the domestication of the horse by Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE) between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago permitted Indo-Europeans to combine their greater mobility with new technologies such as the wheel, metallurgy, and the plow to form an economic/military package with which Indo-European speaking people steamrolled their way across the world and today subdivisions of the Indo-European language are spoken by half the people of the world.

For thousands of years [after the domestication of the horse], the military value of horses continued to improve with inventions ranging from metal bits and horse-drawn battle chariots around 2000 BC. to the horseshoes, stirrups, and saddles of later cavalry. While most of these advances didn’t originate in the steppes, steppe people were still the ones who profited the most, because they had more pasture and hence more horses…. Speakers of Proto-Indo-European merely happened to be in the right place at the right time to put together a useful package of technology. Through that stroke of luck, theirs was the mother tongue whose daughter languages came to be spoken by half the world today.1

Within that major cultural expansion were many mini-steamrollings as different subdivisions of Indo-European culture (Spain, Britain, Holland, Portugal, Germany, Italy, et al.) struggled for wealth, power, and territory. At times the losers were decimated and the gene pool of the winners expanded. At other times the losers absorbed the winners and their gene pool expanded as they carried the cultural steamroller forward. The language differentiated in different regions but the basic Indo-European language and culture, on an ever-widening language/cultural base, continued its expansion. Its greatest expansion was the colonization of the world in the past 500 years under Christianity which later metamorphosed into the rhetoric of “free trade.”.

Where primitive cultures were typically pushed off the face of the earth (Indians throughout the Americas and island cultures throughout the world), Western culture has advanced (we hope) to where genocide is no longer acceptable. But those battles between cultures go on in the form of battles over control of resources and world trade, the cornerstones of wealth production and wealth distribution. The winners of these latest struggles and their allies are, as always, wealthy and the losers are, again as usual, impoverished.

Many early societies, such as the American Indians, were very democratic. But these people did not have immunity to diseases common to Europe and Asia. Populations collapsed to a fraction of their previous levels, and entire tribal subdivisions in these regions disappeared. Over 95% of the native populations of the Americas were exterminated in what was undoubtedly the greatest genocide in history.

The Indians on the Caribbean islands were hunted down with dogs and given the choice of accepting the white man’s religion and being choked to death or not accepting and having both hands cut off and turned loose. The natives of Tasmania were similarly eliminated. These genocides, when recorded at all, are recorded only in little-known archives. Military commanders would record their assaults on native populations as defensive battles of an on-going war with the natives as the aggressors, not as a military offensive that burned their villages, destroyed their crops, and slaughtered innocent women and children.

Death from disease is frequently addressed; even the distribution of blankets infected with smallpox to decimate the Indian population is occasionally mentioned. But the destruction of a culture’s food supply and the destruction of the economic structure which provided food, clothing, and shelter, the resultant sickness and deaths, and the fact that populations not having some immunity to smallpox (the world’s greatest killer) suffered a 75% mortality rate—and thus that the giving of those infected blankets was a key part of planned mass genocide—are not mentioned in polite history.

The paying of bounties for Indians, with a special premium for Indian boy scalps by the American colonies starting in 1641 and reaffirmed through enacting those same laws in the states of New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Texas, California, Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, and Arizona (an incomplete list), just as was done with wolves and coyotes, is such obvious state murder of innocents that only the bravest researchers dare put it in print. A reading of our sources will conclude that this description of Indian genocide throughout both the Americas is very conservative. Entire tribes by the hundreds were wiped off the face of the earth.a

Of course, all that gets recorded in American history is that the Indians were savages who scalped people, not that they were largely a friendly, pacifist people willing to share with these strangers, whose government structure provided the model for the U.S. government and whose scalping were only copying that which was being done to them. When you take a close look at history, it is a history of survival of the meanest. Violent cultures overwhelm gentle cultures and commit massive genocide then write history depicting those gentle people as savages and themselves as gentle benevolent people.

A study of the slave trade will arrive at the same conclusion; the violent cultures of Christians and Muslims were enslaving and impoverishing gentle cultures for centuries. Very safely kept out of history books is that Hitler’s plans for extermination of what he felt were inferior races were developed from his admiration of America’s laws and policies for extermination of Indians and enslavement of blacks.b Of course, Hitler knew of the Genocides of the Americas because, like all cultures, his culture could write the honest history of another culture while studiously ignoring the injustices of their own.

The collapse of the civilizations of the losers in these “clashes of cultures” can be seen today as the population of the collapsed Russian economy shrinks by 800,000-per-year.2 As Russians “theoretically” still have control of their land and resources and they have not been subject to germ warfare or bounties for their scalps, their defeat was not nearly as total as that of the native populations of the Americas, Africa, and Australia. Islands, big and small, were especially vulnerable to their natives being erased off the face of the earth.

The violent suppression of rights, theft of wealth, and claiming of land rights on the periphery of empire is as old as history. As this is being written, Sixty Minutes presents a documentary on Britain shipping 10,000 temporarily abandoned children to Australia over a period of 30 years, telling them they were orphans. Only on arriving in Australia did they find out the Church and State had collaborated to send these children half way around the world to populate the land to keep it away from the “Asian hordes.” Only 40-to-50 years later did they find out their parents had been alive all along.3

Footnotes

1. For societies with superior technology and superior weapons “steamrolling” many American Indian tribes into to extinction, read: Ward Churchhill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997); Austin Murphy, The Triumph of Evil: The Reality of the USA’s Cold War Victory (Florence, Italy: European Press Academic Publishers, 2000), Introduction; B. Cook, “Hitler’s Extermination Policy and the American Indian,” Indian Historian 6, Summer 1973), pp. 48-49; Koning, Hans, The Conquest of America: How the Indian Nations Lost Their Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993); Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); D. Stannard, American Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); R. Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The Americas Through Indian Eyes (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). See also: H. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1902); Churchhill, Ward, Indians Are Us.( Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1994); A. Domenech, Deserts of North America (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860); R. Downes, Council Fires (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940); Jack D. Forbes, The Indian in America’s Past (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964); D. Grinde, “Cherokee Removal and American Politics.” Indian Historian 8, Winter 1975, pp. 33-42; A. Jaimes, The State of Native America (Boston: South End Press, 1992); F. Jennings, The Invasion of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); C. Larsen, “In the Wake of Columbus: Native Population Biology in the Postcontact Americas.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 54, 1994, Supplement 19, pp. 109-154; P. Marks, In a
   Barren Land (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1998); C. Meister, “Demographic Consequences of Euro-American Contact on Selected American Indian Populations and their Relationship to the Demographic Transition” Ethnohistory 23, 1976, pp. 161-172; H. Merriam, “The Indian Population of California.” American Anthropologist 7, 1905, pp. 594-606; V. Miller, “Whatever Happened to the Yuki?” Indian Historian 8, Fall 1975, pp. 6-12; F. Waters, Book of the Hopi (New York: Penguin, 1977); Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the
   Americas Transformed the World (New York: Ballantine, 1988). Back to text
2. Upon learning about Hitler copying America’s policies of genocide, I immediately wondered if this is why I could never locate a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf that was not abridged. An empire would not want a book with such explosive history in its libraries. Back to text

Endnotes

1. Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 272-73 and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). Back to text
2. 60 Minutes, May, 19, 1996. Back to text
3. 60 Minutes, February, 3, 2002 Back to text

This is a chapter from the book, Economic Democracy; The Political Struggle for the 21st Century. Visit that link for more information about the book.