Nowtopian

For a nation whose vaunted freedom was secured at the point where mass human bondage met genocidal expansion, what we are experiencing today is like a series of afterimages—the past-present that is these United States.
—Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War, p. 122

The 1924 Immigration Act, then, had an explosive effect. On the one hand, the limits it placed on the numbers of European and Asian migrants who could enter the United States reinforced Mexico’s importance as a source of cheap labor for the United States’ expanding economy. On the other hand, it created an agency—the U.S. Border Patrol—that institutionalized a virulent form of nativism and concentrated its animus on Mexican migrants.
—Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, p. 124-125

I live on stolen land, and you do too. Here in San Francisco we all live on unceded Ohlone territory. After the Spaniards came along with Catholicism and cows, the local folks were mostly wiped out by overwork and disease. But not everyone died, and descendants have emerged in the past decades. California’s First Peoples are working hard to undo the ignorance and cultivated amnesia that repeats the false tale of their complete genocide.

After Mexico gained its independence, the lands that the Spanish crown had allocated to the Missions to hold in trust for the “neophytes” (the new colonists that they hoped to make out of the Indians they brought into their Inquisition-shaped world), were usurped by the Californios. Bernal, De Haro, Noe, Vallejo, Peralta and many others were soon lords of tens of thousands of acres of prime California real estate. But their paradise didn’t last long. The United States provoked a war in 1846 and used it to seize the northern third of Mexico, and within a couple of decades all the original Mexican ranchos had been squatted and stolen, often with legal sanction by U.S. courts.

It’s remarkable how much this blatant and venal theft at the origins of American California is left out of the narratives taught children in schools. But then on second thought, it’s not really so surprising. Early historians of California (and before that, historians of the United States) held strange, race-based ideas that escaped historical analysis. In one of the books I’ll be discussing here, Greg Grandin’s excellent The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, he makes this point:

If the study of history is the study of change, these early historians of the United States were decidedly ahistorical. Their germs were something like the physicists’ Big Bang, sudden and pristine. When the Puritans landed, “their institutions were already perfected,” George Bancroft, among the country’s most influential historians prior to Turner, wrote. Woodrow Wilson, who studied with Turner under Adams at Johns Hopkins, argued in 1899 that early Christian settlers “were inventing nothing”; ideas that would later result in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were already fully formed upon their arrival in the New World. Americans, Wilson said, were “simply letting their race habits and instincts”–as developed in Europe–”have natural play.” (p. 114)

Writing in Race and America’s Long War, Nikhil Pal Singh delves deeper into the psychology of settler colonies like the United States. He reveals the very structure of thought that makes it so difficult to hold any self-awareness of the barbarism that accompanied the founding of the nation.

… in the United States, (and other settler colonies), invasion, occupation, and territorial dispossession constitute not a singular event but a structure of reasoning, feeling, even imagination… one that demands fealty and that orients attitudes toward the present and future. (p. 24-25) … The military tradition conferred by the Indian wars included practices of “extirpative war” that observed no distinction between combatants and civilians, combined with the adoption of forms of exemplary, extravagant violence said to have been learned from the savages themselves, such as scalping. Settler frameworks, in turn, consciously blurred the lines between war and policing, investing ordinary citizens with an expansive police power. (p. 26)

At the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the United States continues to flaunt its military but it is an increasingly empty and ineffective demonstration of pointless violence. Bombing multiple countries regularly, having torn up the Middle East and left whole swaths in smoking ruins, and maintaining military and spy installations in well over 100 countries around the world, you’d be hard pressed to explain why the so-called indispensable nation, the “most powerful country in the history of the world,” has such a hard time getting its way these days. The protracted decline of U.S. power is staring us in the face, but politicians go on blithely proclaiming the unique goodness of the American project as though it were 1949 or even 1962 (not that it was any good then either!).

Constant rituals glorifying the military amidst crumbling infrastructure and stark social decomposition, incessantly claiming “we’re #1,” requires a great deal of ignorance and self-delusion. Digging deeper into the complicated past lets us trace a quite different arc than the syrupy self-congratulations that passes for history. It turns out that the United States has been on the wrong side far more often than not in its bloodthirsty, racist efforts to dominate the world. The roots of this despicable orientation are not hard to find in the very founding of the country, and have been advanced by awful, mean-spirited, politicians and their wealthy sponsors again and again.

Colin Galloway’s fascinating book The Indian World of George Washington provides a nuanced and detailed look at the land-hungry speculator who became the first president of the United States. It’s strange to realize that the first four years of his presidency, 1789-1793, were characterized by an active “foreign policy” that mostly involved days- and weeks-long visits from dozens of visiting dignitaries from the cultures of the southern United States, i.e. Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and others. Washington knew he had to make peace with these militarily powerful civilizations that occupied most of today’s deep South, because his priority at the time was to wrest control of the Ohio River valley from the Shawnee and their many allies. It also required him to continue an ongoing peace with the Iroquois confederation. His goal was to avoid facing a wider alliance of indigenous peoples who together at the time could have blocked the expansion of the United States westward (and by so doing, made Washington’s investments in thousands of unceded acres in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio worthless). Galloway is a fantastic historian of Indian North America, with many other books covering the Plains Indians, the Shawnee, and others. He recounts the ill-fated first U.S. military expedition led by General Arthur St. Clair that was wiped out by a broad alliance of Indian tribes in 1792 not far from today’s Pittsburgh. In this book he unpacks the fraught relationships that Washington and his allies made and broke both before and after the Revolutionary War with various tribes of eastern North America. It helps makes sense of the longer trajectory of genocidal violence that the U.S. pursued consistently through the following century—a history that looks so bad that few have been willing to give it the central importance in national history that it deserves.