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<h1 class="reader-title">What White Supremacists Know</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Nov
20, 2018</div>
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<p><b><font size="+1">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.</font></b></p>
<hr>
<p>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, <em>prior</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<em>and</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><img
src="http://bostonreview.net/sites/all/themes/br_hhog/assets/release/images/icon_separator.svg"
alt="section separator"></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This essay is featured in </em>Boston Review<em>’s
fall 2018 print issue </em>Evil Empire<em>. </em></p>
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