Odd O'blography

American Genocide

America is a country built on genocide.

This is not a popular idea, but it is firmly rooted in truth. Acknowledging that truth might actually strengthen our nation for the future. The genocide was accidental, at least at first, but an ongoing, intentional pattern has emerged, especially in the 20th century.

There’s no disputing that European diseases ravaged the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Estimates of the horrific death toll range as high as 90 percent. The Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond, describes this history in detail. Many historians agree that it played an integral role in the success of the British colonies in New England. The poorly equipped colonists arrived to find a largely empty landscape with room to build and little resistance from the decimated native population.

It was only later that genocide became an ‘official’ policy. The Iroquois Confederacy controlled Midwest territory from southern Canada to Virginia for more than three hundred years. It was split by competing interests during the French and Indian War. The losing side ceded Iroquois land to the winners. The same scenario played out again during the American Revolutionary War. The European immigrants played musical chairs to see who would be master of the new world. The ultimate losers were the native peoples, left without a place to call their own.

The formal warfare between the European nations ended in 1783. The spoils included the land to the west of the new nation. In 1795, the remnants of the Iroquois and several other tribes were defeated by American troops and forced out of the Ohio territory. A flood of land-hungry settlers, including some of my own ancestors, surged into the vacated area. This movement was so large and so rapid that Ohio became the 17th State in the Union just seven years later.

Ohio isn't often considered when the heroic tale of taming the American West is told. The trail of tears is more tragic, and the subjugation of the plains tribes makes more thrilling movies and TV shows. But the eradication of the native culture from the Buckeye State was so successful that, today, there isn’t a single Indian Reservation in Ohio. Truly an American success story!

But so what? Winners prevail and the losers whine, right? What good does it do to dwell on the past and feel bad about ourselves? The myth of American Exceptionalism has no room for unpleasant truths. It’s true that we can’t change the past. There’s no do-over and no realistic way to make amends for past sins. The only thing we can change is our future, and we must acknowledge the past to know that change is needed.

Could a greater awareness of Native American genocide have influenced the course of the world wars? Perhaps it would have prevented the unnecessary atrocity of the Dresden firebombing. Could Truman have been influenced to give the Japanese military a demonstration of nuclear capability before the execution of two hundred thousand civilians? Who knows?

Perhaps a public mourning of the loss of life in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki would have influenced the course of the Korean conflict. Two million north Korean civilians would have been spared from a saturation bombing that served no strategic purpose. And it’s just possible that an acknowledgment of the Korean genocide would have made the U.S. military command think twice before killing a million Vietnamese civilians. Our collective shrug at the deaths in Vietnam certainly made it easier to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Middle East.

We don’t need to dwell on the bad exclusively. There are many bright spots in American history that deserve to be celebrated. But acknowledging the sins of the past is the first step to avoiding the sins of the future. Those who would hide those sins from our children are building toward the next genocide. And that’s the real tragedy, setting up our kids to casually perpetuate the sins of their fathers through willful ignorance.