Ethnic Cleansing American Style
(The Trail of Tears)
The Americans did not invent ethnic cleansing, and its concomitant genocide, but they were expert practitioners thereof, and exported the blueprint to their allies, in much the same way that they handed over their state of the art F 15’s, F 35’s etc, to keep the practice alive.
A recent census gives the Native Indian population of the US to be 5.2 millions, but before the white man “discovered” America the most conservative estimate was 8.4 million with the higher mark of 112.5 million. The near wholesale disappearance of the race was not all due to the new diseases white man unwittingly brought from the old world. There were recorded cases of wilful contamination spread by gifts of tarnished blankets for example, but spurred by greed for land and gold, the new settlers committed bloody massacres, decimating the local natives. Although George Washington preferred assimilation of the native tribes, turning them into Christians, persuading them to adopt the mores of the white man, many of his successors saw the natives as savages, a threat, therefore to be eliminated. Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren for instance. In a letter to his wife Rachel, Jackson crowed: “I detached General John Coffee with part of his Brigade of Cavalry and mounted men to destroy Creek Town … General Jackson wrote, that he had performed this slaughter in elegant style. More than 170 Native Americans were killed. Still, there was more killing to do.”
The new arrivals from the Old World naturally aspired to make a fortune, and aimed for maximum returns with minimum effort. The American continent was vast, but why start afresh when prime land was already available, having been developed by the five “civilised tribes”, who had accepted Washington’s precepts, having given up their nomadic lives, traded their tepees for houses with rooms and windows, making a living by rearing cows and agriculture, following the way of life of the men from another continent, even to the extent of owning slaves. The settlers were determined to drive them out, and, unsurprisingly, there were many people with power who viewed their demands as legitimate.
The five civilised tribes_ Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles_ so-called because they had believed Washington, that if they converted to christianity, adopted white man’s clothing and practices, their lives would be less of a struggle, were shocked when in the early 1800’s, the newcomers began attacking them. They stole livestock; burned and looted houses and towns; committed mass murder; and squatted on land that did not belong to them. After a few targeted killings, meant to encourage voluntary migration, but which produced negligible results, more drastic steps had to be taken. In Georgia, for example, where gold had been found, the state began to expropriate the homesteads of the Cherokees. A federal court ruled this practice to be illegal, but as Andrew Jackson remarked, What’s the point of a law if no one is prepared to make use of it. The homeless Cherokees were becoming destitute, and to crown it all, President Jackson instigated the Indian Removal Act in order to put the expulsion of people in a legal frame.
The Removal Act, included the codicil that all removals had to be voluntary. The infamous Balfour Declaration also included the equivalent, which said that it was “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” It was like getting a straight line to pass through 3 different points on a circle.
The Act started being put into practice in 1831, when the US army began the mass expulsion, driving the natives at gun point, often after having set fire to their properties, on what was known as the Trail of Tears, often chained and without food, to the so-called Indian Territory, soon to become the state of Oklahoma, where they would obtain land. No one had any say
in the quality or location of the half-promised land, and thousands missed out entirely. The forced journey was, on average two thousand kilometres long, the Cherokees had the lengthiest trek of nearly three thousand and five hundred kilometres. About a third died of cold or starvation. Of 17,000 Cherokees who went on the Trail of Tears, 6000 died, as did 3500 of the 15,000 Creeks.
