Honduran Cops, The Latest U.S.-Backed Killers
Weekend Edition March 29-31, 2013
From Western New York, 1779, to Honduras, 2013
Honduran Cops, The Latest U.S.-Backed Killers
by NICK ALEXANDROV
Official U.S. support for bands of killers dates back to the nation’s inception, likely one reason H. Rap Brown called violence “as American as cherry pie.” The country’s founding father helped start the trend when he sent General John Sullivan to Iroquois territory in 1779, giving him explicit instructions “that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.” “It will be essential to ruin their crops,” the Town Destroyer—as Washington became known—emphasized. Sullivan and his men brought their adventure to a close when they “skinned the bodies of Indians from the hips downward, to make boot tops or leggings,” historian Ernest Cruikshank wrote in the late 1800s, prompting a contemporary, John Watts de Peyster, to wonder “which were the savages, the Continental troops or the Indians,” in the situation just described.
Scholars today tend to remark only that Washington seems “more a monument than a man,” as Gordon Wood never tires of pointing out; Wood spoke a month ago at an event celebrating Washington’s birthday, beginning with the premise that the first U.S. president was great, and proceeding from there. Bertrand Russell once criticized medieval philosophy for assuming in advance it knew the truth, thereby avoiding genuine inquiry—still apparently a prerequisite for academic success, given Wood’s reputation.
The belief that indigenous groups wasted the opportunities the land provided drove policies of dispossession and extermination, the latter being the term Jefferson, Jackson, and other luminaries favored. Little wonder Hitler admired this facet of U.S. history. During the California Gold Rush, whites murdered and raped the region’s native inhabitants, some of whom had known there was gold in the area, without valuing it as an exploitable resource. What could the land’s rightful owners do with such people? “Why not annihilation?” Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum asked in an 1890 editorial, capturing the zeitgeist.
These assumptions about the right to control territories, and the obstacles blocking enlightened developers from achieving their aims, grew more expansive after the Native American genocide. As WWII drew to a close, U.S. planners outlined a system of “foreign missions throughout the world” in conformity with corporate aims. “We are colonizing to some extent,” Representative Eugene Worley (D-TX) affirmed, not quite doing justice to Washington’s plans to copy the British imperial model—“a good goal to shoot at, because they are the masters,” the American Maritime Council’s John E. Otterson argued, voicing views his audience, a House subcommittee, received well. After listening to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle’s 1943 discussion of U.S. intentions to govern the planet’s skies, Representative Charles A. Eaton (R-NJ) asked him to “define for us the difference in principle between Mr. Hitler’s program to obtain control of all land and all peoples and all oceans and seas, and the proposed program now for America to obtain control of all the air on earth[.]”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/29/honduran-cops-the-latest-u-s-backed-killers/
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