Systematic use of terror and preventive war are historic U.S. American values. Their roots are directly and inextricably interconnected to the defense mechanism we call racism. The defining and enabling experience of the Republic of the United States is the genocidal elimination of the human beings who originally lived on our lands. Eurocentric racism and so-called divinely inspired ethnocentrism have been inherent characteristics facilitating the “development ” of our civilization through a long history of brutal exploitation of land, labor, and natural resources. Once the Pacific Ocean was reached the attitude began to spread outward until it now stretches to every corner of the globe. These values did not originate with the United States but date to the first urban civilizations in the Fertile Crescent some 5500 years ago.
Nonetheless, most of us were raised to believe that the United States is an “exceptional” civilization, superior to all others in history. Americans have historically died and killed to maintain this belief. After my military experience, however, I was motivated to seriously study history for the first time.
Captain John Smith of the Virginia colony in the early 1600s referred to our original inhabitants as “subanimals” and “beasts” worthy only of “extermination.” Puritan leader John Endicott of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regularly ordered “death” to the Pequot Indians. Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, refers to our original inhabitants as “merciless savages” and George Washington termed them “beasts of prey” to be “destroyed.” European settlers regularly called them “brutes” or “vermin” to be “eliminated.” General William Tecumseh Sherman in the 1870s ordered “extermination” as the “final solution” to the “Indian problem.” Hitler later took note.
During what we call the Spanish-American War, 1898-1902, U.S. forces fought against Filipino citizens, calling them “goo-goos,” while murdering upwards of a half million of them under orders such as “burn and kill the natives” issued by General Jacob H. (”Hell-Raising”) Smith to U.S. Marines.
The explicit origins of preventive/pre-emptive war through use of terror can be discerned in the behavior of our leading Founding Father. Continental Army Commanding General George Washington ordered Revolutionary War General John Sullivan in the summer of 1779 “to lay waste all the [Iroquois, especially Seneca] settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed. . . . But you will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected. . . . Our future security will be in their inability to injure us . . . and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them” [italics added]. There it is — preventive war using terror.
