Savages and savagery

Savagery n. 1. a. The quality of being savage b. an act of cruelty or violence 2. an uncivilized state
WEBSTER’S

“For here in my native country, too, the ancient law of human nature holds good. First one must vilify in one’s own spirit what one is about to destroy in others; and the greater the unadmitted doubt of the deed within, the greater fanaticism of the action without.”

Laurens van der Post
The Lost World of the Kalahari p. 41



Surely one of the greatest ironies of all time has to be the fact that those who were in the process of labeling others as savages were themselves at the same time guilty of acts of savagery often beyond even the imagination of those being savaged. It seems that whenever a more "advanced" (technologically) society encountered others they could label as "savages," (or gooks, towel heads, redskins, or such) their first impulses were to brutalize and destroy them. No doubt a clue as to what was to follow can be found in the famous voyages of Christopher Columbus. On his very first encounter with the Arawak Indians in the Bahamas (who were, in fact, very peaceful people) he captured some of them by force. As they wore small earrings of gold he wanted them to show him the source of that much desired treasure. Then, on another encounter, when the Indians refused to do what he wished, two of them were run through with swords and left to bleed to death. Then on Haiti, where Columbus believed there would be gold fields, he ordered everyone older than fourteen to collect so much gold every three months. If they brought it in they were given a copper token. As there were no gold fields as such, merely bits of gold dust, the Indians could not comply. No matter, when they did not have a copper Columbus had their hands cut off and let them bleed to death. If they tried to run away they were hunted down with dogs and killed. Failing to find the gold he wanted Columbus loaded his ships with slaves to be sold in Spain (Zinn 1980:2-4).
The cutting off of hands was widespread under the Spanish, as was the cutting off of ears, the deliberate slicing of Indian flesh to test the Spanish blades, the brutal flogging of Indian slaves, rape, the killing of helpless infants, burning people alive, and brutality of all kinds too outrageous to believe (de las Casas 1971).
Columbus gave such a glowing account of the islands he had discovered that on his second voyage he was in charge of seventeen ships and twelve hundred men. Their mission was to acquire gold and slaves. Columbus had left 39 men on Hispaniola (the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) to find and store gold. Upon his return he learned they had been killed by the natives, murdered because they had roamed the island taking slaves for labor and sex. Columbus sent many expeditions around the islands searching for gold. When they did not find it they filled the ships with slaves, picking the best 500 from the 1500 they had rounded up and penned. Two hundred died on the voyage to Spain. The Arawaks tried to resist but they were no match for the muskets and swords and horses of the Spanish. When the Spanish took prisoners they either burned them alive or hanged them. The Indians began mass suicides using poison made from the cassava plant. They killed their infants to save them from the Invaders. Within two years half of the original population of Haiti, 250,000 individuals, were dead.

The Spanish in the Indies took pleasure in inventing cruelties:
“The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties, the more cruel the better, with which to spill human blood. They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen of them at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. When the Indians were thus still alive and hanging, the Spaniards tested their strength and their blades against them, ripping chests open with one blow and exposing entrails, and there were those who did worse. Then straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive…My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write, not believing them myself, afraid that perhaps I was dreaming. But truly, this sort of thing has happened all over the Indies, and more cruelly too sometimes, and I am quite sure that I have not forgotten” (de las Casas 1971:121).
Later, as the Spaniards moved into Central America Vasco Nunez de Balboa apparentley invented a new technique for killing Indians, called “dogging.”
‘This had to do with setting vicious mastiffs and wolfhounds – raised on a diet of human flesh, trained to disembowel upon command, and often equipped with special armour – loose on hapless natives. ‘A properly fleshed dog could pursue a “savage” as zealously and effectively as a deer or a boat…To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to rip apart their human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts.’” (Churchill 1997:105).

It would be nice if one could say these were just the acts of a few bad apples. But when you consider that this kind of thing went on virtually everplace Europeans encountered "savages," it was clearly not just a few. In Australia and Tasmania, the "savages" were hunted with dogs and even in some cases used as dog food. We all know what happened to American Indians. The same things happened in Africa and South America.

One could well argue that the "higher" up a society is supposed to be on a scale of savagery to civilization, the more likely they were (are) to engage in savagery. The so-called savagery of savages was mere child's play when compared to what has gone on in so-called "civilized" societies up until now. And unfortunately this is continuing at this very moment. Consider our brutal treatment of Iraqi women and children, along with men. Consider what Israel is doing in Lebanon, indiscriminately killing innocent civilians, including women and children (Hezbollah, of course is doing the same thing with their random missiles). Someone who knows about such things said today that up until the second world war casualties were usually 90 percent military personnel, but now that has been reversed and most by far of the casualties are innocent civilians, including women and children. While there is no space here to pursue it, it is most unlikely that any "primitive" society engaged in such indiscriminate slaughter, at least on such a massive scale. It's true they did not have the means but I strongly suspect they would not have had the desire - most of them needed their enemies for one thing or another (even for taking some of their heads, for brides, and etc.).

There is not the slightest doubt that the United States and Israel are committing war crimes. Hezbollah was accused of committing war crimes also (but there was no mention of Israeli or U.S. war crimes). What van der Post observed above is true: there seems to be a universal law that makes one group of people want to completely dehumanize another so as to facilitate their destruction. Is this really a demonstration of "intelligent design?"