austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil

22 THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
TABLE 1:
TALLY OF UNARMED CIVILIANS DELIBERATELY KILLED BY
Unarmed Number
THE USA
IDI Cb:III .KiiWl .Y1w
Indians 5,000,000+ pre-1910
Filipinos 1,000,000 1899-1906
Ger., Jap. 500,000 1942-45
Koreans 1,000,000+ 1945-53
Indonesians 500,000+ 1965-66
Vietnamese 1,000,000+ 1965-73
Cambodians 500,000+ 1969-73
Iraqis 1,000,000+ 1991-98
Miscellaneous 500,000+ 1946-98
Q1hw lloko!l»:D Hi5tl2� 2( USA
Iwil II.OOO.QQQ±
HistQ� Q(USA
fdmao: Saun:e
Churchill (1994)
Schirmer and Shalom ( 1987)
Markusen and Kopf ( 1995)
Ho, Hui, and Ho (1993)
Griswold ( 1979)
Herman (1970)
Herman & Chomsky ( 1988)
lAC (1998b)
Blum (1995)
Although each of the foregoing extermination campaigns is fairly
well documented in the listed references, the breadth and depth of the
USA atrocities merit providing more details and perspective.
The USA's Beginning Genocide
To begin the analysis with the USA's first, longest, and largest mass
murder, it is first necessary to estimate how many Indians were in what
is now the USA before the arrival of the white invaders. This task
is especially important because USA propaganda would have people
believe that the USA was largely a vast unsettled wilderness (occupied
by only a few "non peoples called savages") before the invasion of the
whites (Jennings, 1975).
Henige ( 1998) has provided an abundance of facts indicating overestimation
of the original Indian populations in Central and South America,
but the Indian population existing within the USA before the arrival of
the Europeans has been widely underestimated by a very large amount
for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Churchill, 1994).
While the USA was originally estimated by many early observers to be
populated with millions oflndians (Thornton, 1987), even these guesses
may have been far too low (at least partially because they were lacking
in documented analysis). Nevertheless, many successive researchers
have discounted (instead of more appropriately raised) such prior esti-
iNTRODUCTION
mates, resulting in a compounded reduction in the already low numbers
that lack scientific justification and that are unquestionably far below
the actual original level of the native American population (Churchill,
1994).
There is a very important political purpose and personal nationalistic
bias in reporting very low numbers. In particular, underestimating the
original Indian population makes the USA seem almost vacant originally
before white occupation, thereby creating the impression that the
conquest of the territory was a "settlement" as opposed to an invasion
and mass killing (Johansson, 1982). There was also an important legal
reason for the extremely low bias in early Indian population estimates,
as British colonial law only allowed settlers to seize vacant territory and
did not permit the taking of land by force or fraud (Jaimes, 1992).
Jennings ( 1975) has indicated that many of the low estimates of the
original Indian population are based on "official" USA government
sources, such as a Smithsonian Institute book listing numbers estimated
"without specific documentation" by Mooney ( 1928). 1 The meaninglessness
of such government estimates is easily illustrated by Mooney's
count of only 25,000 Indians in all of New England in the early 1600s,
when one tribe living in a small 800 square mile area of New England
alone numbered over 30,000 at that time, and when there is documentation
of other densely settled territories of New England (numbering as
many as 100 Indians per square mile) as well (Jennings, 1975). Similarly,
whereas Mooney ( 1928) estimated scarcely a million Indians for
the entire USA, archaeological evidence indicates millions of Indians
lived in the eastern end of the Ohio Valley alone (Jennings, 1975). Nevertheless,
modem authors, even those sympathetic to the Indians like
Brown ( 1970), often recite ridiculously low numbers based on the "official"
USA count. Mooney's "official" ( 1928) book actually implies less
than one Indian per square mile on the 3+ million square miles of the
USA. Such a low estimate is obviously ludicrous when one considers
that there was a well-documented one Indian on average per square
mile in "one of the world's areas least hospitable to human habitation"
in a Western Hemisphere desert (Dobyns, 1966). Even numbers below
ten million Indians in the USA appear somewhat absurd in light of
researchers estimating 8 million or more Indians on a single island
(Hispaniola) in the Caribbean. (Thomson, 1998).
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