6. On Sensitivity to History

Recall that one of the character flaws we discover in exploring "the Mind of Japan" is their "clumsy attempts to sanitize the past" and "the complete absence of a sense in Japan of their own history," much like the Soviet officials who mobilized "every conceivable weapon...to suppress the public's memory" of the "grisly episodes" that form "the larger cancer" of history, finally in vain, because "You Can't Murder History."

Or can you? The fate of the Indochina wars in US ideology illustrates our right to pontificate on this issue. A still more recent example is the Central America episode of the past decade: some future historian will gaze in wonder at our self-adulation over the monstrous atrocities we perpetrated there, surpassing even the earlier achievements that have helped to keep our "backyard" in deepest misery.

The very idea of an American intellectual judging others on how they come to terms with their history is so astounding as to leave one virtually speechless. Who among us, from the earliest days, has failed to come to terms with the truth about slavery or the extermination of the native population? Can there be a resident of civilized New England, for example, who has not committed to memory the gruesome details of the first major act of genocide, the slaughter of the Pequot Indians in 1637, the remnants sold into slavery? Who has not learned the proud words of the 1643 Puritan account of these inspiring acts, describing the official dissolution of the Pequot nation by the colonial authorities, who outlawed even the designation Pequot "so that the name of the Pequots (as of Amalech) is blotted out from under heaven, there being not one that is, or (at least) dare call himself a Pequot"? Surely every American child who pledges allegiance to our nation "under God" is instructed as to how the Puritans borrowed the rhetoric and imagery of the Old Testament, consciously modelling themselves on His Chosen People as they followed God's command, "`smiting' the Canaanites and driving them from the Promised Land" (Neil Salisbury). Who has not shown hansei while studying the chroniclers who extolled our revered forebears as they did the Lord's work in accord with the admonitions of their religious leaders, fulfilling their "divine mission" with a pre-dawn surprise attack on the main Pequot village while most of the men were away, slaughtering women, children, and old men in true Biblical style? In their own words, the Puritans turned the huts into a "fiery Oven" in which the victims of "the most terrible death that may be" were left "frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same," while the servants of the Lord "gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them." Can there be anyone who has not asked whether our history might offer some later resonances of this exultation over the extermination of those who had "exalted themselves in their great Pride," arrogantly refusing to grant us what they have?⁴⁵

Or if southern Connecticut is too remote for intellectual and moral guides in our greatest city, then surely they could not have failed to immerse themselves in the records of the actions that cleared the New York region of the native scourge only a few years later. For example, the account by David de Vries of his experiences in Lower Manhattan in February 1643, while Dutch soldiers massacred peaceful Algonquin Indians right across the Hudson, finally exterminating or expelling almost all Native Americans from the New York Metropolitan area. The killers in this case preferred another favored model of the Founding Fathers,

considering they had done a deed of Roman valor in murdering so many in their sleep; where infants were torn from their mother's breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small [cradle] boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown.

Not unlike the Rio Sumpul massacre on the Salvador-Honduras border in 1980, the first major atrocity of the US-run war in El Salvador, which some day perhaps the New York Times may even discover; and countless other operations of the elite battalions fresh from their US training, armed with US arms, and guided by the doctrines we have taught them for many years.⁴⁶

⁴⁵ John Underhill, John Mason, and William Bradford. See Laurence Hauptman, in Hauptman and Wherry, Pequots; Salisbury, Manitou, 218ff. See Jennings, Invasion, for discussion and general background.

⁴⁶ Robert Venables, "The Cost of Columbus: Was There a Holocaust?," View from the Shore, Northeast Indian Quarterly (Cornell, Fall 1990). Rio Sumpul, see TNCW.