nin.’s Reviews > American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters > Status Update

2/5 “Authorized violence on the frontier, to name but one effect, is thus always conceived of not as war but as pacification, the repression of violators of the peace and the clearing of the way for the final transformation to order, independence and freedom for those who are eligible to participate. Others can legitimately be punished with large-scale violence. And so, to devastating effect, indeed they were.”

3/5 “The border, the line moving constantly outward, is accordingly invested with decisive importance. In the most immediate, concrete sense, it becomes, famously, the frontier, a zone of transformation where freedom is created from scratch, as it were, out in the open. Land beyond, always by definition untouched, properly virginal, is turned into land proper when it has been cleared and subsequently surveyed. Wildness is eliminated. The settlement of what will become the United States is colonial in the true sense of the word. Land, then, is either not yet occupied or insufficiently occupied by people whose capacity to contract with one another and thus to be free and independent is next to nil.”

4/5 “It is one of the signal features of the Empire of Liberty, accordingly, that it is keen on land but not on people, especially if the people in question happen to be different and already on that land. Amerindians, not being the Same and being irrationally in possession of the land, were thus an obstacle to be overcome by whatever means necessary. Contrary to a great deal of obvious evidence, the conventional justification assumed that Amerindians, being “naturally savage,” were incapable of being American in the sense of fulfilling the criteria for what passed for a rational person.”

5/5 “Crass self-gain aside, the foundational argument here was forthright and ingenious: property, not vague possession, was the essential characteristic of true selfhood; property meant independence and the capacity to make the land productive; Amerindians had no property and were apparently incapable of production; hence they were not real selves; hence they had no intrinsic right to the land. To relieve them of their land, one should nevertheless (contradictorily, but as a sign of superior civilization) enter into the kind of purchasing contracts they were presumably unqualified to conclude. Amerindians, until well into the nineteenth century, were thus defined as sovereign nations capable of concluding (unequal) treaties at the same time as they were constitutionally unfit for sovereignty. Whatever the means, in short, law and exchange are the master signifiers of the process, the politically correct way of dispossessing peoples.”

IT CONTINUES, WAIT!!!! 6/5

“Such theorizing is of course not particular to colonial North America and the United States, but it reached its purest and most lethal expression here and it became an integral part of the larger destinarian schemes of the 1840s. By then, however, the Amerindians had ceased to be a major obstacle and, by their dispossession and expulsion, turned into evidence of the very freedom, independence, property and democracy that had presumably replaced them, all, again, plainly according to the irrefutable historical edict of Providence. Their destiny, so to speak, had already been established: graphically removed, legally subordinated, militarily reduced to a disturbance on the frontier.”