rating in all directions, and their de­scendants eventually populated the globe. Around

arie Yovanovitch ‘Devastated’ by Trump’s Attack: Live UpdatesEven as Ms. Yovanovitch was testifying about “the smear

accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan,

The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infec­tious disease during medieval pandemics. The principal reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish "Reconquest" and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into depen­dency and servitude were ingrai�ed, streamlined, and effective. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them-nearly three hundred years of colonial warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent re­publics of the hemisphere.

his conclusion articulates a default assumption.

TERMINAL NARRATIVES

Elie Wiesel

The traumatized souls thrown off the land, as well as their de­scendants, became the land-hungry settlers enticed to cross a vast ocean with the promise of land and attaining the status of gentry. English settlers brought witch hunting with them to Jamestown, Virginia, and to Salem, Massachusetts. In language reminiscent of that used to condemn witches, they quickly identified the Indigenous populations as inherently children of Satan and "servants of the devil" who deserved to be killed.7 Later the Salem authorities would justify witch trials by claiming that the English settlers were inhabit­ing land controlled by the devil.

The sacred status of property in the forms of land taken from Indigenous farmers and of Africans as chattel was seeded into the drive for Anglo-American independence from Britain and the founding of the United States

Along with the cargo of European ships, especially of the later Brit­ish colonizing ventures, came the emerging concept of land as pri­vate property.

The sea voyages of European explorers and merchants in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not the first of their kind. These voyagers borrowed the techniques for long-distance sea travel from the Arab world. Before the Arabs ventured into the Indian Ocean, Inuits (Eskimos) plied the Arctic Circle in their kayaks for centuries and made contacts with many peoples, as did Norse, South Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvian, and Melanesian and Polynesian fishing peoples of the Pacific. Egyptian and Greek knowledge of the seas most likely extended beyond the Mediterranean, into the At­lantic and Indian Oceans. Western European seagoing merchants and the monarchies that backed them would differ only in that they had developed the bases for colonial domination and exploitation of labor in those colonies that led to the capture and enslavement of millions of Africans to transport to their American colonies.

profit motiv

What each actually participated in was a culture of conquest-vio­lence, expropriation, destruction, and dehumanization. 1

CULTURE OF CONQUEST