and men”; who once “supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses—the bodies of men, women, and children that he and his men had massacred.” Jackson ordered his troops to “specifically seek out and systematically kill Indian women and children who were in hiding in order to complete their extermination.”12
In what is known as the Trail of Tears, President Jackson ordered the forced removal of tens of thousands of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole from their homes in the Southeast to the Indian Territory—now Oklahoma. Although the U.S. government granted this land to the Five Nations forever after they had been brutally removed from their original homes, this was just another promise that was broken as thousands of white settlers rushed in and claimed Native American lands. The Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing opened up some 25 million acres of land for white settlement, slavery, land speculation, and cotton production. The overall death toll rate from this “presidentially ordered death march … was almost as destructive as the Bataan Death March of 1942.” More than eight thousand Cherokee “died as a result of their expulsion from their homeland. The death rate for the Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokee was equal to that of Jews in Germany, Hungary, and Romania between 1939 and 1945.”13
Jackson is the preeminent figure in the early U.S. history of genocide, “the archetype Indian killer, slave trader, speculator, merchant and then president … as whites took over much of present southern states.” His murderous and genocidal brutality clearly contradicts the Noble Cause principle. He claimed that the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that led to the Trail of Tears would advance the Native Americans “from barbarism to the habits of enjoyments of civilized life,” as if he were a deeply concerned and humane person, stating: “Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempts to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people.” After a particularly brutal attack that killed Cherokees who had resisted removal, Jackson told Congress: “Severe as is the lesson to the Indians, it was rendered necessary by their unprovoked aggression.”14
This rationale would be repeated in later U.S. violence around the world, as resistance became “aggression” that justified “honorable self-defense” by U.S. forces that would later define the victimizer-victim relationship in Vietnam. Those who resisted U.S. aggression were called “terrorists,” whereas the U.S. forces that invaded that country were defending themselves and the “free world.”
Among the prominent citizens supporting and advocating genocide against Native Americans in the nineteenth century was L. Frank Baum, author of the much-beloved The Wizard of Oz and editor of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer newspaper in South Dakota at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. Before the massacre, he stated: “The nobility of the redskin is extinguished and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The whites, by law of conquest, by civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” Shortly after the massacre, Baum wrote: “We had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up … and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”15
Alongside the imperial destruction of Native American nations, came economic, political, and military aggression against Latin America that began very early in U.S. history and has continued to the present with more than fifty years of economic embargo and terrorism against Cuba—condemned by virtually every state in the United Nations. Journalist-scholar Juan Gonzalez, former State Department official William Blum, and historian Greg Grandin document this violent imperial history. Gonzalez points out that U.S. presidents such as Jefferson, Jackson, and Theodore Roosevelt, all firm believers in white supremacy, “regarded [U.S.] domination of the region as ordained by nature. The main proponents and beneficiaries of this empire building, however, were speculators, plantation owners, banks and merchants who bankrolled armed rebellions in those Spanish-speaking lands by white settlers.”16
One of those famous citizens supporting U.S. government aggression against “those Spanish-speaking lands” was the great American poet Walt Whitman, who enthusiastically supported the invasion of Mexico in 1846 and “proposed … stationing … sixty thousands US troops [there] in order to establish a regime change.” His imperialist views on Mexican regime change were built upon white supremacy: “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.… What has miserable, inefficient Mexico … to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?”17
A century after the Mexican invasion, Blum documents the staggering number of U.S. interventions that have taken place in Latin America since the Second World War: Haiti, Guatemala, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama—and Cuba. Historian Greg Grandin points out that by the mid-twentieth century alone, the United States had sent its warships into Latin America more than six thousand times, invaded numerous countries, engaged in long guerrilla wars in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti, annexed Puerto Rico, and stole part of Colombia “to create both the Panamanian nation and the Panama Canal.” Added to these, “American corporations and financial houses came to dominate the economies of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, as well as large parts of South America,” commencing “their overseas expansion before they headed elsewhere, to Asia, Africa, and Europe.”18
In his analyses of U.S. history, Andrew Bacevich has exposed a central premise of the Noble Cause principle: “The restless search for a buck and the ruthless elimination of anyone—or any-thing—standing in the way … have been central to the American character.” This “American character” applies to European settlers and their descendants, though not Native Americans, since this “restless search” has not been central to their culture. “If the young United States had a mission,” writes Bacevich, “it was not to liberate but to expand.” From the beginning, the United States compulsively expanded and “the historical record leaves no room for debate” on how this was done, which was “by any means necessary” including “full-scale invasions [and] ethnic cleansing.” This record totally contradicts the mythical Noble Cause view we have been taught about post-Independence expansion.19
Moving ahead into the mid-twentieth century and the present, it is clear that the beliefs about the Noble Cause principle after the Second World War do not match the facts. Blum has compiled an extensive and factual list of U.S. imperial violence during this period. It includes an extraordinary number of unprovoked invasions and covert actions against sovereign nations—what is now called “regime change.” Excluding his list of Latin American countries cited above, these nations include Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Congo, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Libya, the Soviet Union, Syria, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia. As he states: “It would, moreover, be difficult to name a single brutal dictatorship of the second half of the 20th Century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported, but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the population.”20
There is overwhelming evidence to support the scholars’ assertions made above. However, historian and political activist Michael Parenti argues that the dominant class and its allies in the corporate media, political system, and universities refuse to admit that U.S. leaders “have been the greatest purveyors of terrorism throughout the world.” The facts are quite clear: the United States and its “surrogate mercenaries have unleashed terror bombing campaigns against unarmed civilian populations … in scores of countries, causing death and destruction to millions of innocents.”21
Since the Second World War, the greatest U.S. violence has been in Asia—concluding with Vietnam. This included crushing the Huk (Hukbalahap) rebellion in the Philippines, a peasant-led guerrilla movement that led resistance against the Japanese in the Second World War, and continued their struggle against a government elite that had collaborated with the Japanese during that conflict. Using Cold War propaganda that the
