A General Background to the U.S. Empire
There is a lot of information to digest and many, many examples given in the chapters ahead to illustrate the pattern of behaviour exhibited by Imperialists be they the Romans, the Spanish, the British or the Americans. And that information is included to illustrate it conclusively.
We trace a line from the initial discovery of the Americas by the European right the way through to the modern era, but at this stage just looking at the behaviour within current US borders. However, these activities were not within US borders at the time – for example, California originally belonged to Mexico – and we see that the expansion of the US border, even within this frame, is the start of the US Empire abroad. Following this investigation of US behaviour “at home”, we look in successive chapters at American behaviour abroad in the aftermath of World War 2 and the pursuit of an American Empire.
The purpose is to examine the information to see whether there is a point at which the behaviour of the powerful changes for the better. Are the Americans pursuing a benevolent agenda at home? Are they seeking to strengthen democracy abroad? Stripping away the propaganda and instead looking at the actual events brings to light a picture in radical contrast to the much more acceptable and easily digestible conclusions of everyday news output.
We pick up the story with the arrival of the first Western Power on American soil.
1492 – Christopher Columbus, an Italian sponsored by the Spanish Monarchy, lands in the “West Indies” (he was looking for India).
1514 – Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic) 285,000 dead, 14,000 survive genocide, disease and slavery in Spanish Gold Mines.
1519 – Hernan Cortes and the Conquistadores land in Central America. Cortes betrays the Aztecs, laying siege to the Aztec capital and winning Mexico for Spain by 1533.
1588 – Britain defeats Spanish Armada, gains sea supremacy and takes Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua.
1622 – Virginians destroy Indian crops – a tactic of European troop commanders from experience in Ireland.
1776 – U.S. Independence from several European powers (except Britain).
1779 – In one of the first acts of the newly independent United States we see that they start as they mean to go on. The Iroquois – the finest civilisation north of Mexico – are destroyed by General Washington’s troops in the Sullivan expedition. Towns and crops utterly destroyed. Washington orders that the Iroquois are “not to be merely over-run but destroyed”.
1783 – Full U.S. Independence – war with UK won.
1794 – The Cherokee nation, the largest tribe of the Iroquois confederacy, already have a written alphabet, constitution, judiciary, legislature and executive. Losing the war against the whites, they sign a treaty granting them 7 million acres of mountain land in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.
But in 1828, gold was discovered on their land. Laws were passed declaring all laws of the Cherokee nation to be null and void and forbidding Indians to testify in court against whites.
The Cherokees protested to the Supreme Court and were upheld by John Marshall. Retorted President Jackson, “John Marshall has rendered his decision now let him enforce it”.
Cherokees receive $4 million for their land. General Winfield Scott with 7,000 troops enforces removal to west of the Mississippi. The “Trail of Tears”, during which many died, was paid for by the Cherokees, the U.S. extracting the payment from the Cherokee settlement.
1814 – Indiana offers $50 bounties for the “destruction of Indians and skunks”. In Oregon for “Indians and coyotes”. Women clubbed to death and children swung against trees to knock their brains out to save ammunition.
1818 – U.S.A, Spanish Florida – 1st Seminole War – General Andrew Jackson leads the assault on the Seminole people.
1823 – The Monroe Doctrine – “The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end”.
1824 – The creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the control of the Secretary of the Department of War.
1825 – Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma forcibly marched 600 miles from traditional lands to their new “Reservation”. During the march, 14,000 died.
1829 – “The U.S. seems destined to plague and torment the continent in the name of freedom.” (Simon Bolivar)
1838 – U.S.A, Spanish Florida – 2nd Seminole War – General Andrew Jackson eliminates native Americans from the South-East.
The key to traditional Indian existence (clothing and food) was the buffalo and so these were systematically slaughtered – 4 million buffalo per year at the peak.
1850s – Mexico – U.S. invade (from 1846) and take 1/3 of Mexico in genocidal assaults on natives. The pretext was “internal aggression” inside Mexico against U.S. organised by the British and Spanish. Mexico ceded New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California to the U.S.A for $15 million.
1863 – Start of war against the Navajo, led by Brigadier James H. Carleton. Survivors marched out of the territory on another “Trail of Tears” to 180 miles south of Santa Fe. The reservation was only 40 square miles and was to be shared with the Mescalero Apaches. The reservation was a mess and they were marched back to their homelands with the promise of support which proved to be another lie amongst many, many other broken promises.
But the Navajos prospered multiplying their number from a few thousand to 80,000 and making blankets and turquoise. Then they discovered uranium, oil and coal on their land.
1868 – A Treaty with the U.S. Government promises that the Black Hills of Dakota, a sacred place to the Sioux Nation, will remain theirs “for as long as the grass grows”. General Custer says that the Indian must be removed to make way for the Caucasian and heads for Dakota on an “exploratory scientific mission” – prospecting for gold. The Government breaks the Treaty and orders the Indians to move to a reservation or the Black Hills will become a “free-fire zone” and the army will be sent in. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull triumph over Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (Custer’s last stand) but eventually lose out.
1890 – Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts says:- “The Head Chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own, there was not a pauper in that nation and the nation did not owe a dollar… yet the defect of the system is apparent. They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common … there is no selfishness which is at the bottom of civilisation. Until this people will consent to give up their lands and divide them amongst their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates they will not make much more progress.”
This paves the way for the “Dawes Act” or “General Allotment Act”. Common law tribal ownership of reservations was replaced by individuals being allotted a piece with the excess “purchased by the Government for $1.25 an acre and thrown open for settlement”. Indian land dwindles from 138 million to 52 million acres.
Indian children are forcibly taken from their parents, sent to white boarding schools. Their hair was cut and they were forbidden to speak their own language, wear their own clothes or maintain their own customs. They were given English names and compelled to undergo religious training by designated Christian sects. Pol Pot must have been proud to follow in the traditions of Americans in instigating his “Year Zero” forced re-education of the Cambodian masses.
And then we move into the 20th Century and follow American activity beyond its new borders. What we have seen the Americans practicing “at home”, what was of course actually someone else’s home, we now see them repeating, for the first time, abroad….
1900-1950 – 17 U.S. invasions in the Caribbean and central America.
1904 – The Roosevelt Corollary – The U.S. as the international Police power in the interests of civilisation.
1918 – The Committee on Public Information, the first major Government agency, discovered by the end of the First World War that “one of the best means of controlling news was flooding news channels with “facts” or what amounted to official information”, e.g. from 1979 in Nicaragua the U.S. State Department keep their Press barons busy with unsubstantiated mud-slinging at the Sandinista regime… “drug running, genocide, subverting their neighbours, international terrorism”.
c.1921 – Walter Lipmann devises the term “Manufacture of Consent” for the change in the order of Power. Citizens cannot be massacred for disagreeing, (as before), now they must be made to consent to the brutalities of their country’s leaders. If, of course, these brutalities cannot be more simply concealed from view.
1923 – Scarcely 220,000 Indians remain in the U.S.A.
It is worth pausing here to examine the above statistic a little more closely. 400 years earlier, repented Conquistador turned Priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, said of the Americas in 1542…. it looked as if God had placed … the greater part of the human race in these countries”. Signor de las Casas had no interest in revising the numbers downwards, unlike the settlers who to this day angrily declare from their vast estates that there were barely more than 10 million people on the entire continent, and thus it was virgin land that was claimed by their well-intentioned ancestors.
While the plain observations of men like Signor de las Casas may be casually dismissed by academics with an interest in assuaging the guilt of their sponsors, decades of research at Berkeley University, California provide the most accurate estimate of the population of Central Mexico alone at 25 million. Even if we weight the population distribution of the continent disproportionately in favour of Mexico we still cannot deduce an overall figure of less than 200 million spread across the Americas. This is still a conservative estimate, but even then it is still far more than our timid academics dare to concede.
The higher numbers are further supported by evidence of human habitation in Monte Verde, located in southern Chile, that is more than 32,000 years old. It was previously assumed that humans first arrived, crossing over from eastern Russia a mere 13,000 years ago. With evidence of such prolonged human habitation over a timescale that has now recently tripled, Bartolomé de las Casas’ populous continent comes into even sharper focus. And from this we can arrive at two conclusions.
Firstly, the scale of the slaughter should never again be underestimated. The rape of the Americas was more than mere words like holocaust and genocide can describe. This was the most shameful destruction of humanity in the entirety of human history and one that academia continues to shield us from to this day.
Many, many millions of deaths were attributable to outright murderous malevolence from the invaders and many, many millions more were from the arrival of diseases from Europe which were deliberately passed to the locals. The tactics of biological germ warfare were known in Europe from as early as the 1340s – the earliest recorded occurrence shows that Tartars did it to the Genoese settlement in Kaffa in the Crimea, catapulting poxed corpses over and into the besieged city’s walls.
Secondly, we can conclude that, given the very large numbers of people inhabiting the continent before the arrival of Europeans at the end of the 15th century, there was little or no “virgin land” on the continent. It was taken, the owners were murdered and the theft was legitimised in a Title Deed.
America’s past stalks its present, and a billion billion words of absolution will never make it disappear. America’s empire is as ugly as any other in history and is the reason that we must look for another way of being.
From 1945, two world wars have weakened the European Imperial Powers leaving the continent of America wide open to U.S. interests.
1945- Caribbean – Britain allows U.S. to build 6 military bases in exchange for 50 old warships, marking the transition of power from Europe to the U.S. over the North American continent.
1945 – U.S. care for useful Nazi gangsters who are exported to Argentina, Chile and Bolivia and train future Death Squads in El Salvador.
Post WW2 planning – “The Grand Area” – The Third World defined as “to fulfil its major function as a source of raw materials and a market to the western industrial societies. Imperialism baldly stated.
1947 – The Truman Doctrine – supporting “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”.
With the advent of PR, it now becomes necessary to translate the new form of speaking. Reading Truman’s statement above once more … Truman’s “Armed minorities” are the popular national movements that attempt to resist the aggression of Foreign Powers like the United States. And “outside pressures” means any foreign power – other than of course the U.S. – that is interfering in the country in question.
Early 1950s – sharp increase in U.S. military spending, similar to the early 1960s and the mid 1980s. The three periods also co-incide with declared economic stagnation.
To re-start the economy, the Government channels military investment via the “Pentagon System”. This public subsidy is used for research and development (R&D) of advanced technology e.g. 5th generation computers. The subsidy is channeled via the Department of Energy (Nuclear Power and Weapons), NASA and the Pentagon to pay for the R&D with the new product then copyrighted and marketed by private corporations who keep the profits.
The citizen pays twice, first for the R&D and second for whatever retail price the corporation decide to charge them.
We see this happening again during the Coronavirus Pandemic. China and its apparent “genocide” of Uighur muslims in Xinjang is the latest scare to justify another massive increase in public money heading for the Pentagon.
1951 – Hans Morgenthau wrote … “The symbol of the threat of a non-existent communist revolution becomes a convenient cloak, as it was for German and Italian fascism, behind which a confused and patriotic citizenry can be rallied to the defence of what seems to be the security of the United States, but what actually is the security of the status quo”.
And so to the 1951 “phoney arms ploy” in Honduras, a massive PR exercise that planted Russian guns into the arms of dead peasants in a staged riot to convince the North American media to bring on McCarthyism.
Late 1950s – Soviet world power peaks. Influence over 6% of the world’s population and 5% of the world’s GNP, apart from their own territory.
Early 1960s – U.S.A – sharp increase in military spending (cf. early 1950s and mid 1980s)
1963 – U.S.AID (U.S. Agency for International Development) report – “the ultimate target is the human mind. It may be “changed”, it may be rendered impotent for expression or it may be extinguished, but it still remains the critical target.”
1984 – U.S.A – Disposable income shifts after 4 years under Reagan (by fifths) – bottom 5th (-8%), 4th (-2%), 3rd (+1%), 2nd (+4%), 1st (+8%). It got worse – see 1989.
Mid 1980s – U.S.A – sharp increase in military spending (cf. early 1950s and 1960s)
1985 – Ruth Sivard counts 125 military conflicts since World War 2. 95% in the Third World, 79% involving Western Forces, 6% involving Communists.
The lies of power are eventually exposed by the truth of research. But at the time, McCarthy’s lies were King, courtesy of the Phoney Arms Ploy. The U.S. brutally and murderously suppressed resistance all across the Latin American States in the 1950s, branding the residents as evil Communists. Sivard’s truth arrived 30 years too late to save them.
1987 – Latin America over the last 5 years has transferred $150 billion to the West. Also $100 billion of capital flight. That’s 15 times more than U.S. Marshall Plan aid for post war Europe.
1989 – U.S.A – Study of incomes from 1979-87 shows 9.8% decline for poorest fifth, 15.6% increase for the richest fifth, mainly achieved by poverty wages. U.S. ranks 22nd in infant mortality, 70% greater than Western Europe.
Even worse for black Americans – in Roxbury, an ethnic suburb of Boston, it’s worse than Greece, Spain, eastern Europe and much of the Third World.
But look at GDP/capita – U.S. ranks second behind Switzerland. The U.S. and South Africa are the only two industrialised nations without guaranteed health care.
And the people of the U.S.A at home – do they want any of this? The Public almost unanimously oppose cuts in Social Security, preferring cuts in defence. They prefer cuts in military rather than health by 2:1 and Medicare/Medicaid by 4:1. Clean Air Act support is 7:1.
Brainwashing crosses people’s wires. Programmed by “welfare cheats”, the public oppose “welfare” but overwhelmingly support all specific social programmes. Also massive support for worker/community control over business enterprise, but again, the evil “socialism” is advocated by virtually no-one. PR is winning the War for Words.
49% believe the Government is run “by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. In other words they don’t believe that the U.S. is a democracy. But 40% believe that the country is run for the benefit of all people.
That’s the picture of Americans “at home”, and a few glimpses abroad as they start to wander beyond their borders. It’s not a huge surprise to see that they treat the locals in other countries pretty much the same as they did in the country they took first.
We will look deeper into this behaviour now as we examine the pattern of U.S. activity in specific countries, starting with the regions that the U.S. attacked first – Central America and the Caribbean.
But before that, we will put the press releases of Government and the editorials of newspapers to one side and look at the pronouncements that Power itself uses to guide its actions. It serves very well to suspend the disbelief that what we have been told and what has actually happened could be such very different stories.