“All my life, I’ve had to listen to rhetoric about the United States being a model of freedom and democracy, the most uniquely enlightened and humanitarian country in history, a “nation of laws” which, unlike others, has never pursued policies of conquest and aggression. I am sure you’ve heard it before. It’s official “truth” in the United States. It’s what is taught to schoolchildren, and it’s the line peddled to the general public. Well, I’ve got a hot news flash for everybody here. It’s a lie. The whole thing’s a lie, and it always has been. Leaving aside the obvious points which could be raised to disprove it by blacks, and Chicanos, and Asian immigrants right here in North America-not to mention the Mexicans, the Nicaraguans, the Guatemalans, the Puerto Ricans, the Hawaiians, the Philipinos, the Samoans, the Tamarros of Guam, the Marshall Islanders, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Dominicans, the Grenadans, the Libyans, the Panamanians, the Iraqis, and a few dozen other peoples out there who’ve suffered American invasions and occupations firsthand-there’s a little matter of genocide that’s got to be taken into account right here at home. I’m talking about the genocide which has been perpetrated against American Indians, a genocide that began the instant the first of Europe’s boat people washed up on the beach of Turtle Island, a genocide that’s continuing right now at this moment. Against Indians, there’s not a law the United States hasn’t broken, not a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY it hasn’t committed, and it’s still going on.”
-Russell Means, American Indian Movement
October 12th, 1992."In July 1763, General Jeffery Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America, sent a memo to Colonel Bouquet, a Huguenot in the service of England, asking:
'Could it not be contrived to send the Smallpox among the disaffected Tribes of Indians?'
Bouquet replied: 'I will try to inoculate the Indians with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself.'
Amherst answered: 'You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets."
-Daniel N. Paul, We were Not the Savages, 1993.
"The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the morality of their enterprise. They therefore [prepared]...quantities of propaganda to overpower their countrymen's scruples. The propaganda graudually took standard form as an ideology with convential assumptions and semantics. We live with it still."
-Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America, 1975.
"The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world."
-David E. Stannard
"Maybe we made a mistake in trying to maintain Indian cultures. Maybe we should not have humored them in that, wanting to stay in that primitive life style. Maybe we should have said: No, come join us. Be citizens along with the rest of us."
-Ronald Reagan |
