[News] What White Supremacists Know - The violent theft of land and capital is at the core of the U.S. experiment

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  What White Supremacists Know

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Nov 20, 2018

*The violent theft of land and capital is at the core of the U.S. 
experiment: the U.S. military got its start in the wars against Native 
Americans.*

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The United States has been at war every day since its founding, often 
covertly and often in several parts of the world at once. As ghastly as 
that sentence is, it still does not capture the full picture. Indeed, 
/prior/ to its founding, what would become the United States was 
engaged—as it would continue to be for more than a century following—in 
internal warfare to piece together its continental territory. Even 
during the Civil War, both the Union and Confederate armies continued to 
war against the nations of the Diné and Apache, the Cheyenne and the 
Dakota, inflicting hideous massacres upon civilians and forcing their 
relocations. Yet when considering the history of U.S. imperialism and 
militarism, few historians trace their genesis to this period of 
internal empire-building. They should. The origin of the United States 
in settler colonialism—as an empire born from the violent acquisition of 
indigenous lands and the ruthless devaluation of indigenous lives—lends 
the country unique characteristics that matter when considering 
questions of how to unhitch its future from its violent DNA.

The United States is not exceptional in the amount of violence or 
bloodshed when compared to colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, the 
Caribbean, and South America. Elimination of the native is implicit in 
settler colonialism and colonial projects in which large swaths of land 
and workforces are sought for commercial exploitation. Extreme violence 
against noncombatants was a defining characteristic of all European 
colonialism, often with genocidal results.

The privatization of land is at the core of the U.S. experiment, and its 
military powerhouse was born to expropriate resources. Apt, then, that 
we once again have a real estate man for president.

Rather, what distinguishes the United States is the triumphal mythology 
attached to that violence and its political uses, even to this day. The 
post–9/11 external /and/ internal U.S. war against 
Muslims-as-“barbarians” finds its prefiguration in the “savage wars” of 
the American colonies and the early U.S. state against Native Americans. 
And when there were, in effect, no Native Americans left to fight, the 
practice of “savage wars” remained. In the twentieth century, well 
before the War on Terror, the United States carried out large-scale 
warfare in the Philippines, Europe, Korea, and Vietnam; prolonged 
invasions and occupations in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican 
Republic; and counterinsurgencies in Columbia and Southern Africa. In 
all instances, the United States has perceived itself to be pitted in 
war against savage forces.

Appropriating the land from its stewards was racialized war from the 
first British settlement in Jamestown, pitting “civilization” against 
“savagery.” Through this pursuit, the U.S. military gained its unique 
character as a force with mastery in “irregular” warfare. In spite of 
this, most military historians pay little attention to the so-called 
Indian Wars from 1607 to 1890, as well as the 1846–48 invasion and 
occupation of Mexico. Yet it was during the nearly two centuries of 
British colonization of North America that generations of settlers 
gained experience as “Indian fighters” outside any organized military 
institution. While large, highly regimented “regular” armies fought over 
geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged 
deadly irregular warfare against the continent’s indigenous nations to 
seize their land, resources, and roads, driving them westward and 
eventually forcibly relocating them west of the Mississippi. Even 
following the founding of the professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, 
irregular warfare was the method of the U.S. conquest of the Ohio 
Valley, Great Lakes, Southeast, and Mississippi Valley regions, then 
west of the Mississippi to the Pacific, including taking half of Mexico. 
Since that time, irregular methods have been used in tandem with 
operations of regular armed forces and are, perhaps, what most marks 
U.S. armed forces as different from other armies of global powers.

By the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), whose lust for displacing 
and killing Native Americans was unparalleled, the character of the U.S. 
armed forces had come, in the national imaginary, to be deeply entangled 
with the mystique of indigenous nations—as though, in adopting the 
practices of irregular warfare, U.S. soldiers had become the very thing 
they were fighting. This persona involved a certain identification with 
the Native enemy, marking the settler as Native American rather than 
European. This was part of the sleight of hand by which U.S. Americans 
came to genuinely believe that they had a rightful claim to the 
continent: they had fought for it and “become” its indigenous inhabitants.

Irregular military techniques that were perfected while expropriating 
Native American lands were then applied to fighting the Mexican 
Republic. At the time of its independence from Spain in 1821, the 
territory of Mexico included what is now the states of California, New 
Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Upon independence, 
Mexico continued the practice of allowing non-Mexicans to acquire large 
swaths of land for development under land grants, with the assumption 
that this would also mean the welcome eradication of indigenous peoples. 
By 1836 nearly 40,000 Americans, nearly all slavers (and not counting 
the enslaved), had moved to Mexican Texas. Their ranger militias were a 
part of the settlement, and in 1835 became formally institutionalized as 
the Texas Rangers. Their principal state-sponsored task was the 
eradication of the Comanche nation and all other Native peoples in 
Texas. Mounted and armed with the new killing machine, the five-shot 
Colt Paterson revolver, they did so with dedicated precision.

Having perfected their art in counterinsurgency operations against 
Comanches and other Native communities, the Texas Rangers went on to 
play a significant role in the U.S. invasion of Mexico. As seasoned 
counterinsurgents, they guided U.S. Army forces deep into Mexico, 
engaging in the Battle of Monterrey. Rangers also accompanied General 
Winfield Scott’s army and the Marines by sea, landing in Vera Cruz and 
mounting a siege of Mexico’s main commercial port city. They then 
marched on, leaving a path of civilian corpses and destruction, to 
occupy Mexico City, where the citizens called them Texas Devils. In 
defeat and under military occupation, Mexico ceded the northern half of 
its territory to the United States, and Texas became a state in 1845. 
Soon after, in 1860, Texas seceded, contributing its Rangers to the 
Confederate cause. After the Civil War, the Texas Rangers picked up 
where they had left off, pursuing counterinsurgency against both 
remaining Native communities and resistant Mexicans.

The Marines also trace half of their mythological origins to the 
invasion of Mexico that nearly completed the continental United States. 
The opening lyric of the official hymn of the Marine Corps, composed and 
adopted in 1847, is “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of 
Tripoli.” Tripoli refers to the First Barbary War of 1801–5, when the 
Marines were dispatched to North Africa by President Thomas Jefferson to 
invade the Berber Nation, shelling the city of Tripoli, taking captives, 
and blockading key Barbary ports for nearly four years. The “Hall of 
Montezuma,” though, refers to the invasion of Mexico: while the U.S. 
Army occupied what is now California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the 
Marines invaded by sea and marched to Mexico City, murdering and 
torturing civilian resisters along the way.

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White supremacists are not wrong when they claim that they understand 
something about the American Dream that the rest of us do not, though it 
is nothing to brag about.

So what does it matter, for those of us who strive for peace and 
justice, that the U.S. military had its start in killing indigenous 
populations, or that U.S. imperialism has its roots in the expropriation 
of indigenous lands?

It matters because it tells us that the privatization of lands and other 
forms of human capital are at the core of the U.S. experiment. The 
militaristic-capitalist powerhouse of the United States derives from 
real estate (which includes African bodies, as well as appropriated 
land). It is apt that we once again have a real estate man for 
president, much like the first president, George Washington, whose 
fortune came mainly from his success speculating on unceded Indian 
lands. The U.S. governmental structure is designed to serve private 
property interests, the primary actors in establishing the United States 
being slavers and land speculators. That is, the United States was 
founded as a capitalist empire. This was exceptional in the world and 
has remained exceptional, though not in a way that benefits humanity. 
The military was designed to expropriate resources, guarding them 
against loss, and will continue to do so if left to its own devices 
under the control of rapacious capitalists.

When extreme white nationalists make themselves visible—as they have for 
the past decade, and now more than ever with a vocal white nationalist 
president—they are dismissed as marginal, rather than being understood 
as the spiritual descendants of the settlers. White supremacists are not 
wrong when they claim that they understand something about the American 
Dream that the rest of us do not, though it is nothing to brag about. 
Indeed, the origins of the United States are consistent with white 
nationalist ideology. And this is where those of us who wish for peace 
and justice must start: with full awareness that we are trying to 
fundamentally change the nature of the country, which will always be 
extremely difficult work.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/This essay is featured in /Boston Review/’s fall 2018 print issue /Evil 
Empire/. /

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