Thanksgiving: celebrating the hidden holocaust

Colonists and settlers had all sorts of intentions. Some of them had capital, and were simply looking for new investment opportunities. Others were trying to escape lives of hardship at home to make new lives for themselves with a fresh start by settling in the colonies. Others wanted to deliver the message of Christianity to native populations. Almost all of them saw themselves as part of the inevitable historical momentum of Progress, bringing the fruits of European civilization to backward peoples.

It is, though, irrelevant what these different individuals intended. Because the sum, accumulated outcome of European imperial expansion involved massive, systematic violence.

Violence of all kinds.

Wholesale massacres, forced labour camps, disease, malnutrition due to the imposed conditions of economic deprivation, mass suicides due to depression and cultural alienation.

As Irving Louis Horowitz argues in Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder, "the conduct of classic colonialism was invariably linked with genocide."

Starting from 1492, when Christopher Columbus is said to have discovered the Americas, the deadly conquest commenced. The complex civilizations of Native Americans, over the next few centuries, were devastated. In his Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, British historian Mark Cocker reviews reliable estimates of the death toll:

"Eleven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean Empire of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil, the Portuguese conquest saw Indian numbers dwindle from a pre-Columbian total of almost 2,500,000 to just 225,000. And to the north of Mexico" Native Americans declined from an original population of more than 800,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. For the whole of the Americas some historians have put the total losses as high as one hundred million."

Although the majority of these deaths occurred due to the impact of European diseases, disease alone does not explain the variations of death toll rates in different parts of the Americas. The key factors in which diseases operated were ultimately the kinds of repressive colonial social formations imposed on natives by European invaders, consisting of different matrices of forced labour regimes in mines and plantations, mass enslavement for personal domestic use of colonists, religious and cultural dislocation, and so on.

Ultimately, what wiped out the Native Americans was a system of relentless extraction.

As David Stannard concludes in his extensive study of the genocide, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, these factors accelerated and intensified the impact of disease. He further describes the colonists' strategic thinking:

"At the dawn of the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the Indians they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion and culture and land and independence, swearing allegiance 'as vassals' to the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown, or suffer 'all the mischief and damage' that the European invaders choose to inflict upon you."

You're either with us or against us.

But the system of genocidal extraction in the Americas was part an emerging world system of imperial profiteering through death-dealing.

When Native Americans continually died out en masse, a new labour force was needed. We got them from Africa.

Cue the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which produced the protracted deaths of truly vast, incomprehensible numbers of people. While slave structures had already existed locally, it certainly did not exist on the vast scale it reached in the course of European interventions.

English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Danes, and Portuguese slave-traders started out by raiding villages off the West African coast. The slave trade, lasting from the 1450s to the 1860s, consisted of "a series of exchanges of captives reaching from the interior of sub-Saharan Africa to final purchasers in the Americas." An observer at the time, British journalist Edward Morel wrote in The Black Man's Burden: "For a hundred years slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death."

From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the total death toll among African slaves being in transhipment to America alone was as high as 2 million, reports R. J. Rummel in his Death by Government. Although the many millions who died "in capture and in transit to the Orient or Middle East" is unknown, among the slaves "kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died." Overall, in five centuries between nearly 17,000,000"---"-and by some calculations perhaps over 65,000,000"---"-Africans were killed in the transatlantic slave trade.

University of Essex sociologist Robin Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery demonstrates the centrality of an emerging extractive capitalist economy to the growth of slavery. The momentous profits of slavery accumulated in the "triangular trade" between Europe, Africa and America, and contributed directly to Britain's industrialization.

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