Dangerous Exceptionalism

Wm N. Grigg is a genius and an enormously talented writer. His recent series on the American gulag was among the most thought provoking works of authorship I have had the honor to read in many years: http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2006/11/opening-gates-of-gulag-pt-iii-one.html

To those who say that “it can’t happen here”, Grigg points out that it already has happened here in US policy concerning Indians and the atrocious treatment of indigenous people by the US government. This is an area in which I have some small expertise, and I wonder that it never occurred to me to draw the analogy between the Indians and the overreaching of the US government today.

The US can never be redeemed from the shamefulness of its Indian policies as long as its people cling to the myth of their exceptionalism. The abrogation of treaties, the imposition of collective punishment, the theft of land and treasure, indiscriminate murder, biological warfare, and mass displacement were grievous crimes against humanity no less shameful than the misdeeds of Hitler or Stalin. We have conveniently swept this aspect of American history under the rug, paying the slightest lip service to the mistreatment of Indians in historic instruction. We do not do enough to hold the offenders in the contempt they merit. We have not sufficiently acknowledged our guilt as a nation to begin to think about forgiveness; yet we seem to have forgiven ourselves and to have forgotten what depths of depravity we are capable of plumbing.

I am profoundly ashamed of the role some of my ancestors played in the harassment of Indians and the national project of ethnic cleansing. These otherwise ordinary men, churchgoing family men all, salt of the earth, participated in crimes against the Cherokee and enjoyed the benefits of their removal. I don’t know if they felt any twinge of conscience when they occupied the lands they were given in the lottery or when they went on campaigns against Cherokee villages. They were ordinary men, and evildoers. The crimes against the Indians were not the handiwork of a few bad men; rather, almost everyone participated or benefited or acquiesced in it.

I reckon that there are plenty of ordinary men and women in America today who would proudly serve as guards in the gulag, who would deem themselves conscientious as they informed on their neighbors, who would approve and support collective punishment and dehumanization of those whom the state labels as its enemies. I have already been scandalized that there are those among my acquaintance, otherwise seemingly decent men, who condone the murder of civilians and the imposition of collective punishment in the current hostilities, who shrug off reports of the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as mere “collateral damage” of no more moment than the death of so many vermin, who reckon that war need not be carried out proportionately.

We are not exceptional. We are no more immune to tyranny than any nation. No atrocity is beyond us. Denial of our ordinariness as a nation makes us stupid and insufficently on guard against the doing of evil and the creation of opportunities for evildoing.