Pushing and Shoving

“Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold” is a heroic attempt at an appreciation (or, really, depreciation) of the European invasion of lands outside Eurasia and the subjugation of their peoples in the last 500 years. The subject is too vast for anything approaching full coverage, so Mark Cocker offers case studies instead: the Spaniards in central Mexico circa 1520, the British in Tasmania in the 19th century, the Americans in Apache territory (Arizona, New Mexico and adjacent Mexico) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the Germans in Southwest Africa (Namibia) in the same decades. Usually fire-walled one from the other in national history books, all are examples of the same phenomenon, European imperialism. The book includes brief analyses of how the invaders as well as the politicians and intellectuals back home justified the invasions.

“Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold” is as angry as Emile Zola’s account of the Dreyfus Affair, “J’Accuse”--angrier, in fact, because Cocker’s subject is injustice committed against whole peoples, not just one man, and the crime includes slaughter, not just false accusation and incarceration. The invaders in these four cases resorted to as much murder as it took (and, often, a bit more than that) to break the resistance of the people fighting to maintain independence and control of their traditional lands. The invaders, to quote the Roman Tacitus on his government’s policies, “made a wilderness and called it peace.”

Can the dread word “genocide” be applied? There has been a great deal of debate over whether these imperialists were consciously practicing genocide or simply trying to protect themselves and to subdue indigenous populations and eliminate them as claimants for land. I take genocide to mean the attempt to eliminate a people. “Ethnic cleansing” (can that addition to our vocabulary be attributed to Serbia?) is the attempt to make people go away and disappear. There is a third category: the subjugation by whatever force necessary of a people in order to reduce them to slaves, either de jure or de facto. Genocide, if successful, means 100% mortality among the attacked. Ethnic cleansing, if successful, may leave survivors--somewhere. Subjugation is, by definition, intended to leave survivors and, if they proliferate in numbers while remaining obedient, that fits nicely into the subjugator’s plans.

Alfred W. Crosby is the author of “Ecological Imperialism,” “The Columbian Exchange,” “America’s Forgotten Pandemic” and “The Measure of Reality.”

Did the European imperialists commit any and all of these? Oh, yes, indeed. Europeans and their overseas descendants were the worse things that ever happened to the native peoples of the lands Cocker discusses. That is nigh onto a simple fact, one that I recommend Euro-Americans like myself recognize so we can get on with dealing sensibly with the resulting problems. It happened before and is still happening. The Turks are the worst thing that ever happened to the Armenians; the Germans are the worst thing that ever happened to the Jews; the Hutu and Tutsi are at present the worst things that ever happened to each other. History is the story of pushing and shoving: repairing at least some of the damage begins only when the successful pushers and shovers acknowledge what they’ve done.

“Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold” is a good place for white folks to start. Cocker is more than a purveyor of horror stories running for political office or for the bestseller list. He condemns invaders but does not make angels of the invaded. They had been pushing and shoving one another before the Europeans arrived and could be very stupid in dealing with the white threat, joining up with the invaders for loot and to settle old feuds. However, their chief problem was not their own shortcomings but white aggression, vicious and sustained beyond any they had previously known. The invaders treated them all, Aztec urbanites and Tasmanian hunters and gatherers, with great consistency. The indigenes weren’t Europeans and weren’t enthusiastic about becoming like them. They did not practice monogamy, believe in one god or wear many clothes. They were not alphabetically literate or sufficiently obedient, and they often occupied valuable land and possessed things worth having. They were either in the way or were needed as converts and laborers but never as desirable neighbors.

Cocker’s thesis is a simple one. Europeans and their overseas descendants must acknowledge that the white invasions amount “to one of the great acts of human destruction, comparable to the Nazi Holocaust, or the Stalinist purges of the Soviet Union, or the mass slaughters of communist China.” Those who disagree with him insist that Hitler and Stalin murdered millions and European imperialists murdered only thousands, usually only hundreds. Their additional victims died of starvation, disease and anomie. So what? Cocker’s statement is one with which the informed must agree.

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Yet Cocker’s righteous anger sometimes carries him over the edge. Yes, Americans slaughtered all of North America’s passenger pigeons and almost all of its buffalo, but not because of an abiding need for blood-letting. The dastardly deed was done in answer to the demand for meat, bone and hide back East and in Europe; in other words, the motive was money. This is important to note because the need to kill might be inalterable, but greed can be refocused and distracted with rewards other than the proceeds from slaughtered game.

I am not happy with Cocker’s designation of all the victims of Europe’s conquests as “indigenous peoples.” He uses the term, as is common, to designate the people of the Americas, Australia, black Africa and the Pacific. It certainly is preferable to the appalling old tag, “backward peoples,” but aren’t the Chinese--who never get called indigenous--indigenous to China, as the Scots are to Scotland, the Egyptians to Egypt? Cocker sometimes substitutes the catchall title “tribal peoples.” Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone else can precisely define what a tribe is, and whatever the definition, it surely doesn’t fit the Aztecs or Incas. That would be like calling the Romans a tribe.

Cocker has written a book on a broad subject, the kind that professional historians too rarely produce. And this brave author makes a few mistakes in his interpretations and sometimes in his facts. He underestimates the diseases that the Europeans inadvertently brought with them across the oceans. For instance, he states that tens of thousands of Aztecs died of the Eastern Hemisphere’s smallpox just before Cortes and the Conquistadors began their assault on the indigenes’ capital, which ended in the latter’s total defeat. Yet pages later, when he lists the three key Aztec deficiencies, he omits their susceptibility to smallpox.

Indians, he also argues, had no systems for writing language. Yes, they did. The Incas somehow managed a huge empire without any means to keep records or exchange messages other than the quipu (knotted strings as aids to memory), but the Mesoamericans, which included the Aztecs, the Mayas and their neighbors, did write. We have many examples of their writing and can read a good bit of it.

Despite Cocker’s claim, the Spaniards were fearful not only of the Aztecs’ arrows but also of the darts they propelled with the throwing-stick (atlatl), which could, if they hit squarely, go right through armor--as they today can go through a car door. Cocker’s knowledge of the sources, primary and secondary, on the Amerindian civilizations and their subjugation is shallow. I am surprised by the absence in his bibliography of the works of Miguel Leon-Portilla of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and James Lockhart of UCLA.

“Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold” is not history but polemic, albeit an informed one. That is not bad per se: The Declaration of Independence is another admirable polemic and also not as good as it could be as history. Righteous anger tends to produce accounts that slide into diatribes about the good guys versus the bad guys. Cocker has written the kind of book we needed a generation ago, when our concept of history was profoundly Eurocentric, but now surely all of us given to reading history books are doubtful about the immaculate gloriousness of white civilization. What we need now is not more hellfire exposes but thoughtful examinations of the interactions of the white invaders and the “indigenous peoples.” The former were not just soulless winners and the latter not just obliterated losers. Both are still with us, often as the mixed descendants of both: mestizos, metis, South Africa’s so-called coloreds, etc. And this book would have a greater significance had it recognized that the invaders and invaded were complicated people and their interactions were much more than just collisions.