[News] Colonization and Massacres

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/dunbar04162008.html

Apri1 16, 2008


 From Jamestown to Virginia Tech


Colonization and Massacres

By ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

What does it mean, if anything, that a student, 
child of Korean immigrants, killed thirty 
classmates and faculty at a Virginia university 
while nearby celebrations of the onset of colonialism was taking place?

In April 2007, all the news seemed to be coming 
from Virginia and was about mass murder, 
occurring yesterday (400 years ago in Jamestown) 
and today. I heard no commentary on the 
coincidence of those bookends of colonialism. 
Maybe I noticed because I was working on the 
first chapter of a history of the United States 
and had colonialism and massacres on my mind.

Jamestown famously was the first permanent 
settlement that gave birth to the Commonwealth of 
Virginia, the colonial epicenter of what became 
the United States of America nearly two centuries 
later, the colony that in turn gave the United 
States its national capitol on the Potomac River 
up the coast. A few years after Jamestown was 
established, the more familiar and historically 
revered Plymouth colony was planted by English 
religious dissidents, but still under the 
auspices of private investors with royal 
licenses, accompanied by massacres of the 
indigenous farmers, just as Jamestown was. This 
was the beginning of British overseas 
colonialism, which led to its eventually far more powerful spawn.

343 years after ragged mercenaries set foot on 
Powhatan territory at Jamestown and began 
massacring the indigenous farmers and stealing 
their food crops, the United States invaded 
Korea, a half-million troops strong, with 30,000 
remaining more than a half century later.

The Virginia Tech killings were heralded as the 
worst "mass killing," and "worst massacre," in the United States.

Descendants of massacred ancestors--indigenous 
peoples, African Americans, Mexicanos, 
Chinese--took exception to that designation.

But, we know what those headlines meant; they 
meant the largest number of innocents killed by 
one armed civilian, although even that's probably 
not accurate either, so they really mean with 
guns and in the last half-century or so, maybe 
beginning in 1958 with nineteen-year-old Charles 
Starkweather, and his even younger girlfriend 
Caril Fugate, who killed eleven in Nebraska and Wyoming.

Then, in 1966, there was Charles Whitman up on 
top of the University of Texas tower, sniping and 
killing 13, wounding 31 others before being shot 
by police. Twenty years later, the post office 
killings began in the quiet town of Edmond, 
Oklahoma, a few miles from where I grew up, 
giving rise to a new term, "going postal." Other 
workplace killings followed, with around 50 
deaths up to now. More recently, school killings 
have prevailed, some 22 incidents since 1989 in the U.S.

Having lived through all of them, I have been 
interested in the mass response to each one, ever 
since Starkweather, who was my age at the time. 
Each mass killing is followed by an orgiastic 
chorus of proclamations about a bubble of 
normality punctured by a sole evildoer. Perhaps 
the incidents play a role in U.S. society 
somewhat as Dostoevsky had his character, the 
"idiot," play as the member of the family who is 
weird or evil so that the rest of the family can 
be perceived or perceive themselves as "normal." 
With all the anger and tension we experience and 
observe daily, it's a wonder mass killings don't 
happen more often, but maybe the mass killer 
speaks for many and is a preventative.

The Dostoevskian "idiot" is a universal archetype 
under the patriarchal western family and the 
triad of family, church, and state. But, there's 
more to it than that in the United States. This 
can be seen from how we react. Some say we react 
so massively because it's the 24-7 television and 
internet that causes us to dwell on such events. 
But, I recall the Starkweather crime spree from 
my youth in rural Oklahoma with no television at 
all and only local papers and local radio, and it 
didn't even happen in Oklahoma.

Everyone knew about it, following the news of the 
killers' evasion of the massive law enforcement 
pursuit, fearing the killers' arrival at their homes.

At the same time the news repelled and terrified 
me, I harbored curiosity about and perhaps 
admiration for the teen killer and his 
girlfriend. I was already successfully "the 
idiot" in my family, as an invalid with chronic 
asthma. Sickliness still was considered a 
character flaw and a weakness in that post 
frontier rural setting. As well, my childhood 
bedtime stories were about heroic outlaws--Jesse 
James, Billy the Kid, Pretty Boy Floyd, Belle 
Starr, Bonnie and Clyde. They were heroes to many 
who were inspired by their deeds. I can 
understand how Cho might be secretly admired.

Cho stated in his suicide message, "I die like 
Jesus Christ to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people."

Then there's the factor of the continual 
reincarnation of the Anglo-Scots outlaw, so 
pervasive on the North American frontier, often 
erroneously referred to as a "cowboy."

But, I think we have to go back to that yesterday 
in another part of Virginia, Jamestown, the site 
of the British queen's visit in April to 
celebrate the first permanent English colony in 
the western hemisphere; Vice-President Dick 
Cheney, in his Jamestown speech commemorating the 
400 year anniversary called the birthplace of the 
United States. Indeed it is, a bloody birth at that.

When Cho went on his killing spree, there was a 
great deal of news about the 400 year 
commemoration, especially in Virginia, highly 
publicized planning for which had been ongoing 
for a year. Was Cho curious enough to do a search 
on the internet about Jamestown? (Maybe the FBI 
knows from studying Cho's hard drive, but they 
most likely wouldn't "get it") Or maybe Cho just 
looked at a book, or had taken a history course. 
Perhaps he saw some pictures of drawings of the 
Powhatan Indians who were killed by Captain John 
Smith and his soldiers. Perhaps Cho saw a 
reflection of his own features in those Powhatan 
faces, and was reminded of what had happened to 
his own people, the multiple massacres of Korean 
civilians in the 1950s U.S. invasion and 
occupation of his parents' homeland, the 
occupation and humiliation continuing today. (I 
recall stories from Native American vets 
returning from Vietnam, how they could not bring 
themselves to shoot when they could see the faces 
of the people who looked like their relatives.)

Much was made in the press about Cho being Asian, 
then specifically, Korean, surely touching on 
those mystic chords of memory of "yellow peril" 
and Asian wars "lost" by the United States, or 
not "won" militarily. Yet, there was nothing 
about the Korean War, 1950-1953, and the ongoing 
U.S. military presence. Uncountable millions of 
Korean civilians were killed in the war, many in 
U.S. military massacres of refugees. Millions of 
children were left without parents. Cho was not a 
child of those Korean war orphans stolen by U.S. 
religious groups, children who grew up in white, 
middle-American communities not knowing their 
real names or birth dates or families or villages.

Cho's parents had immigrated in 1992, when he was 
eight years old, settling in a Virginia suburb of 
Washington D.C., where they started a dry 
cleaning business, sending Cho and his older 
sister to the best schools. That may sound like 
the "American Dream" realized, but only if one 
has never taken notice of the toxic, backbreaking 
work involved in a family owned and run 
dry-cleaning operation, with the immigrant 
parents working themselves to death so their 
children might have a crack at that putrid dream 
of consumerism. Cho and his sister were 
beneficiaries of their parents' labor to pay for their elite educations.

In his video rant, Cho expressed hatred for the 
"rich kids" who surrounded him. In U.S. society 
we are not allowed to hate anyone or anything not 
designated by the State as the enemy. We are 
jumped on and accused of "playing the class card" or "playing the race card."

"The rich are not like you and me." "The poor 
will always be with us." Get real and accept it 
we are told. It's toxic thinking. Why should we 
have to swallow and internalize our righteous 
hatred of the rich? Hate, yes. The language can 
be dressed up to it rage or outrage, but, hate is a concept underrated.

Everyone does it, but no one wants to admit it. 
We are held back and diminished by the claim that 
hating is bad for us, bad for everyone.

We are told that it's all right to hate the act 
but not hate the person. We are allowed to hate 
wealth or capitalism but not the purveyors. Even 
in the post-modern intellectual world where 
"agency" is bestowed upon the poor and oppressed 
(they are responsible for their actions), the 
rich remain an abstraction. It's a ridiculous 
logic that keeps us hating and blaming ourselves 
for not being rich and powerful, literally driving people crazy.

Who are the rich? We have to be careful about 
that, living in a country that does not admit to 
class relations, and class is subject to little 
analysis. It's not a matter of income per se.

High income can certainly make a person 
dilusional, and most U.S. citizens who live on 
high fixed or hourly incomes due to circumstances 
of a good trade union or a professional degree 
have no idea that they aren't rich. In polls they 
say they are in the top fifth of the income 
ladder, and they aren't. A majority of U.S. 
citizens don't want to tax the rich more, because 
they think they will be rich one day. They won't. 
The rich own not just a mortgaged house and a 
car, maybe a boat or a cabin in the woods or a 
beach house to boot; rather they own us. Even the 
cash and luxury soaked entertainment and sports 
stars are not the rich; they certainly deserve 
contempt and disgust, but not hatred. Don't go 
for scapegoats--Jews, Oprah, Martha Stewart, or 
random kids on campus as Cho did. Hatred should 
be reserved for those who own us, that is, those 
who own the banks, the oil companies, the war 
industry, the land (for corporate agriculture), 
the private universities and prep schools, and 
who own the foundations that dole out worthy 
projects for the poor, for public 
institutions-their opera, their ballet, their 
symphony, that you are allowed to attend after 
opening night, and they own the government. My 
oldest brother, who like me grew up dirt poor in 
rural Oklahoma, landless farmers and farm 
workers, rebuts my arguments by saying that no poor man ever gave him a job.

That says it all. The rich own you and me.

In all the arguments about the crimes of the 
Judeo-Christian-Muslim religions, rarely is their 
greatest crime ever discussed--the leveling of 
class, rich and poor are the same in god's sight. 
What a handy ideology for the rich! The same with 
U.S. democracy with its "equal opportunity" and 
"level playing fields," absurd claims under 
capitalism, but ones held dear, even by liberals.

When rampages such as Cho's occur, my first 
thought is not why, rather why not more often. 
What do we do with the anger, the rage? Violence 
in the United States is usually associated with 
the narrative of the frontier having hardened the 
society, creating the killer, the "cowboy," all 
that is bad, a direction taken away from the 
rational Puritans and the wise Virginians who did 
all they could to get along with the Indians. 
But, that's a lie; the killing began at the 
beginning and the purpose was to eradicate the 
inhabitants of North America, to take their land, 
and to replace them. There is no redemption in 
exorcising the "cowboy" or firearms.

Such probing as this is said by some to justify 
or rationalize individual violent behavior, and 
in a way it does. But, the alternative, to name 
it evil, is not helpful, nor is blaming guns, 
freedom, lack of mental health counseling. Why 
not seize the opportunity to explore what we have 
in common with the culprit, explore his humanity, 
rather than vilify him? Some say that any time or 
effort spent trying to understand does a 
disservice to the victims and their families. 
That kind of thinking has strangled and 
suppressed even studies of history, such as the 
holocaust. Whose interest is served by shutting 
down discussion of motives and circumstances, 
and, particularly, history? One is not alleging 
lack of criminal intent or behavior, but what 
made it possible? Wouldn't this be an appropriate 
moment to at least acknowledge the pathological 
celebration of colonization in Virginia at the 
time of the shootings, and the war and continuing 
occupation of Korea as a possible cause for Cho's decision?

As a child during the Korean War, I sold Veterans 
of Foreign Wars crepe paper roses. Several young 
men in our rural farming community were drafted 
and came home wounded or not quite right in the 
mind. One of the boys who returned sat with my 
brother and me and our cousins and told us about 
Korea. He told us how, poor as we were, how lucky 
we were in comparison with the Koreans.

"They're lucky to eat a spoonful of rice once a 
day," he said. Then he told us about going 
through a small village and seeing an old man die 
of starvation right in front of him, and said a 
tapeworm came out of his mouth. His story made us 
feel lucky to be free Americans fighting 
communism, proud of our country for helping 
others. He later blew his brains out with a 
shotgun, but he didn't take anyone with him. Maybe he had a conscience.

Video games portraying violence and casual 
killing are blamed for leading young men like Cho 
to act out in reality. But what about the virtual 
real war that has saturated the brains of 
everyone since the invasion of Afghanistan in 
October 2001, and subsequent war in Iraq? From 
age 17 to his death at 23, Cho, like the rest of 
us, had a head full of pictures of licensed 
killing and torture. His highly functional 
sister, a Princeton graduate, works as a 
contractor for the U.S. State Department's 
management of the Iraq War. Which of the actions 
of the two were more destructive?

This essay is excerpted from 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0742561305/counterpunchmaga>There 
is a Gunman on Campus edited by Ben Agger and 
Timothy W. Luke, from Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, 
university professor, and writer. In addition to 
numerous scholarly books and articles she has 
published two historical memoirs, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859841627/counterpunchmaga>Red 
Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997), and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0872863905/counterpunchmaga>Outlaw 
Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960­1975 (City 
Lights, 2002). She is a contributor to 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904859844/counterpunchmaga>Red 
State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from 
the Heartland, edited by Josh Frank and Jeffrey 
St. Clair. She can be reached at: 
<mailto:rdunbaro at pacbell.net>rdunbaro at pacbell.net




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