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Chapter 4
We Were Not the Savages - Persecution, War, Alliance and Terrorism
In a critique of the mistreatment of Amerindians by Europeans, nineteenthcentury
historian Francis Parkman described how it varied at their hands:
“Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and
neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him.”1 Parkman’s
observation about the English is true, but they also, like the Spanish, crushed
the Indian, a fact that is witnessed by their actions after their invasion of the
Americas. To realize their goal of complete domination of the inhabitants and
the illegal acquisition of their lands, they used practices that utilized unbridled
treachery, violence and cruelty. American Indian civilizations fell like dominos
before their vicious onslaught.
When viewed in the abstract it’s easy to understand how it came about
that the colonial English were without conscience in their mistreatment of the
Amerindians, whom they labelled savages; most of the barbarities they used to
crush them were first tested against Caucasians on their home turf: the British
Isles. The Highland Scots and the Irish were the prime targets. They suffered
unimaginable horrors while being subjugated. Torture, rapes, summary executions,
property destruction and confiscation, etc. were the norm.
Persecution
The barbarism employed by Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and other European
Nations to subjugate Amerindian peoples during colonial times, and by
the countries they begot in the Americas as a result of colonization, probably
exceeds, or at the very minimum equals, the barbaric performances of the
twentieth-century regimes of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union
combined. Like the people who suffered horribly under those regimes, Amerindians
at various times and places, over the past five hundred years, were
imprisoned and executed without trial or recourse, enslaved, tortured, relocated
without consent, treated as inferior human beings, subjected to deliberate genocide
and demonized by monstrous lies; children were removed from families,
properties were confiscated by the state without compensation, cultures were
destroyed and so on.
These inhumanities were carried out and condoned by a White supremacist
population under the guise of helping the Christian Church spread its version
of enlightenment. To disavow that most of the European population were
involved rings hollow, because the evil was known by everyone and largely
unopposed—a fact verified by the historical record.
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