Translated from the French of the article in ‘Le Libertaire’, NYC, August 17, 1860
Since socialist revolutionaries are constantly portrayed as men of disorder, wanting to overturn society for no purpose whatsoever, let’s take a look at this perfect society, which declares itself inviolable and unassailable in its qualities; let’s take a look at the price it has paid to establish itself on the globe, and the means it has employed to get there.
So as not to be charged with exaggeration or falsehood, we’ll take our figures from a magazine published monthly in New Orleans by slaveholders who assert the necessity of keeping the black race in slavery, for the happiness of mankind. We’ll see what bloodbath civilization has set upon the populations covering the globe in recent centuries. Each time it has come into contact with inhabitants living in a savage state, it has produced like a bad epidemic air the greatest devastation among them, either by reducing these new peoples to servitude, if their nature was to be good, gentle and humane, like the inhabitants of South America or the East Indies, or by massacring them, if they were of a proud and independent nature, like those who inhabited North America.
As soon as Pope Alexander VI became aware of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World, he issued a bull recognizing Ferdinand and Isabella’s possession of this new continent, provided that after conquering it they sent missionaries to preach and establish Catholicism. The means employed to convert the so-called idolaters to the worship of the mild and merciful God could not have been more gentle and humane, since in the first fifty years following the discovery, over three million inhabitants were massacred by the Spaniards, for the greater glory of God and the benefit of civilization. According to the Spanish author Las Casas, the total number of Indians who were massacred by the Spaniards is estimated at between twelve and fifteen million.
In Brazil, in this vast empire, there are hardly ten thousand Indians left; and even then – says one voyager, Mr Wallace – one would be hard-pressed to find among them the quality of free man that once existed among them. Where are those tribes of Guaranis and Eupimondas who inhabited the pleasant valleys of Rio Janeiro and the whole of Minas Geraes? They have entirely disappeared. Like the Guanche race of the Canary Islands, just ask the Portuguese, it was they who exterminated them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
On November 21, 1620, the ship May Flower unloaded one hundred English Puritans on the New England coast at Cape Cod. Outcast from their fatherland, they had come to seek refuge in this land, free in this era. As soon as they disembarked, some Indians rushed over to them, shouting “Englishmen, welcome!” but were put to flight by the firing of several rifle shots at them.
Since that era, the destructive scourge of civilization has reaped giant strides over this Indian race in North America, and what iron or lead could not destroy, disease, whisky and all the vices that civilization drags in its wake have; of the sixteen million Indians who lived either on the banks of the great rivers, on the lakes or in the immense forests of the United States, there remain less than half a million relegated to the West.
Of the three [thousand] Hurons who inhabited Lower Canada when the French settled there, one searches in vain for them today; they no longer remain. In Upper Canada, the Ojibwas underwent the same thing. Everywhere, in Nova Scotia, in New Brunswick, where only fifty years ago the Indian wigwam stood, today the Anglo-Saxon race is invading with frightening rapidity, so that we can foresee the day when the few Indians still found languishing there will be obliged to disappear entirely.
At the Cape of Good Hope, who could estimate the immense sums the British government has spent to establish itself there, and the thousands of Caffres it exterminated so as to maintain itself there? Here’s an extract from missionary Moffat’s reports:
“I found these regions in which, according to the testimonies of farmers, thousands of inhabitants lived peacefully on the product of their game; but now, alas, where are they?… It would be difficult to find a single family…”
In New Zealand, although only recently colonized, depopulation is becoming more and more apparent as the civilized approach. In Van Dienem’s Land, a few more years and the indigenous race will have entirely disappeared. In the Sandwich Islands, when they were visited by the navigator Cook in 1779, the natives seemed to be gifted with the best qualities: a good, gentle and intelligent nature; they numbered around four or five hundred thousand. Since civilization entered into relation with them, it would seem that the plague has ravaged these islands. According to J. J. Jarvis, author of a history of the Sandwich Islands, no more than sixty-five thousand remain. In 1777, according to Cook, there were two hundred thousand inhabitants; in 1858, according to a census, there were six thousand!
Let’s stop here, and note that wherever civilization has spread across the globe, it has always been with the cross or the Bible in one hand and the sabre or the rifle in the other, treading in blood and strewing with corpses the road along which it has passed.
F. Girard
See also:
Settler Colonial Myths (Vanishing Indian, Ecological/Noble Savage)
Une Page D’Histoire de la Civilisation, par F. Girard (1860)
A Martyr, from The Alarm (1885)
An Archive 