The UmBlog

The Portuguese Catholic brothers brought Christianity to Japan, and a large group had converted by the 1500's when Japan decided it needed more land and headed west to Korea. There were Christian warriors among the invasion force and their behavior was indistinguishable from non-Christian Japanese forces, as Ben Kiernan recounts it in Blood and Soil. About 150,000 Japanese troops landed in Korea in May-June 1592, spearheaded by the Christian daimyo Konishi Yukinaga and his division of 18,000 coreligionists. They soon found the walls of Korea's three southern fortresses “so low that defenders on the top were inundated by enemy shot and arrows and had to creep around on their knees to avoid being hit.” The Japanese tried to wipe out he Korean forces, and massacres proliferated. The Japanese took Pusan in a few hours on May 25. They took 8,000 heads, putting “every one who showed a sign of resistance to the edge of the sword.” Two days later, Konishi attacked Tongnae, defended by ...

Ben Kiernan is fair in Blood and Soil in his treatment of Christians and genocide. But the ones calling for moderation and peace and neighborly treatment, e.g. Erasmus, didn't prevail against those "sword of the Lord" types, e.g. Cromwell, in England's assault on Ireland. A moderating influence on English policy was the European Renaissance humanist tradition of Erasmus, who had urged missionary rather than military action and “fatherly charity” even to non-Christian Turks, for “they also be men” and respond to “kindness.” The English Reformation thinker Thomas Starkey believed human nature to be essentially good and the intellect its prime agent. In 1536, he criticized Henry VIII's government for its harsh actions against opponents and urged a policy based on persuasion. However, another early Reformation tendency, exemplified by Henry's chief minster, Thomas Cromwell, laid greater stress on obedience and coercive authority. In largely Catholic Ireland, grea...

This is part of my blog-a-book series on Ben Kiernan's Blood and Soil . I live near the two large American Indian, Mohegan and Mashantucket, casinos. The Mashantucket Pequots suffered genocide from English colonists when they were attacked in their walled village ( picture ) and the colonists killed all ages and genders by steel and lead and fire ( original sources ) in May, 1637. This scenario repeated on larger and larger scales as the Europeans spread further west. As in German south west Africa, missionaries who had identified with the nations they tried to convert protested to no avail. Even converted tribes were not spared. In 1779, Washington [D.C.] had also decided “to carry the war into the Heart of the Country of the six nations” of the Iroquois northwest,” to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent them planting.” That fall, General John Sullivan burned down 40 Iroquois towns and destroyed 160,000 bushels of corn. An Onondaga chief complained that Ameri...

Samson Occom's biographer in 1899, W. DeLoss Love, greatly admired his subject. If any native has merited the dignity of being called an Indian statesman, that man was Samson Occom. To recapitulate his views: he believed in the efficacy of Christian missions, and in education, particularly in industrial affairs; but he seems to have thought that the civilization of the Indian depended in large measure upon his relation to the land upon which he lived. So long as he roamed at large in the forest, he thought the native would remain a savage. It was necessary to gather them apart from the white men and on land which they could not sell, where they could be taught industrial pursuits and obtain a living from the soil. Moreover, he believed in maintaining, so far as possible, a tribal unity, establishing a form of self-government under the protection of the state, and preserving the Indian blood inits purity, especially from a mixture with the negro. These principles he sought to embod...

World War 2 was started by agressive nations motivated in part by racial supremacy. Hitler told Germans and Austrians that they were the superior race of Aryans. He also used the European Jewish population as a scapegoat for all the ills they had brought on themselves when they lost WW1. The Japanese also considered themselves a superior race and saw a distinction between themselves and all other Asian people in China, Korea, and the Pacific islands. In Japan, anyone not Japanese was sub-human. In central Germany, anyone not "Aryan" was sub-human as well. The United States sent to the slaughter nearly 300,000 Americans to defeat these racist ideologies. Ironically, the United States had its own racist ideologies to defeat within. Eighty years prior to WW2, over 200,000 Americans died in conflict over this very issue in the Civil War. Before and after that war, the US used genocidal means to eradicate it's own aboriginal population. A footnote in American history Hitle...

I think this will be my last blog-a-book quote from Ben Kiernan's Blood and Soil . This massacre, the Pequot, happened not 10 miles from my home. The first person accounts below are so graphic, that even most of the Indians who allied with the English couldn't stomach their brutality and abandoned the English. The English reach for support from Joshua's bloody wars in the Old Testament, forgetting that they are not part of that covenant with God, nor in the "promised land." The Pequots, Mason wrote, were “utterly Destroyed, to the Number of six of seven Hundred” in just one hour. “There were only seven taken captive, and about seven escaped.” Mason was triumphant: “Thus was God seen in the Mount,...burning them up in the fire of his Wrath, and dunging the Ground with their Flesh:It was the Lord's Doings, and it is marvelous in our Eyes.” God had “laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn, making them as a fiery Oven...filling the Place with d...

My library acquired the just-released book Blood and Soil, a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur , by Ben Kiernan, and I was the first to check it out. I don't think I will be able to finish it then record all the quotes before it's due date. So I'm sharing some as I go along. The trauma of this book for me is reading about so many genocides I never knew about before. Kiernan is a fair author so far. The only one guilty is mankind. Sadly, victims become victimizers. It is a terrible cycle. Today's quote points out that victimizers will repeat their crimes when opportunity affords. Genocides not only exhibit similarities, many are actually related events. Their relationships are often personal and generational. For example, we can identify the German precursors of individual Holocaust perpetrators. Heinrich Goring, father of the future Nazi leader Hermann Goring, served in 1885-91 as Reichskommissar of German Southwest Africa (now Namibia)...

As before , this is part of my blog-a-book series on Ben Kiernan's Blood and Soil . Here is an example where even Christian conversion, financial participation with the U.S. economy, and special pleas from U.S. citizen missionaries could not prevent the greed, expansionism, and racist hatred of a "Christian" nation. However, in 1817 the 15,000 Cherokees remaining in the southeastern United States established their own bicameral legislature and an executive, judiciary, and army. The legislature outlawed further land sales to the United States and in 1827 adopted a written constitution and bill of rights modeled on that of the United States, declaring the Cherokee nation “sovereign and independent.” They set up five schools, while the 30,000 Choctaws and Chickasaws in Mississippi and Alabama ran 13 more. In 1821, Sequoyah invented the Cherokee writing syllabary, into which parts of the Bible were translated, and in 1828 the bilingual weekly Cherokee Phoenix began public...

Jake Page in his book, In the Hands of the Great Spirit , has a few observations on the interaction between the church and the New World. Several Spanish missionary priests made great efforts at identifying with the culture of the Native Americans. They served as intermediaries between the two cultures with little success. For several decades, the Spanish crown had received petitions, particularly from a scholarly friar named Bartolome de Las Casas, the first priest ordained in the New World, that the colonists of the New World treat the native populations with kindness rather than hostilities. Coronado’s orders were to explore and take possession of the lands to the north, but specifically not to harm the Indians. He was met at Hawikuh by an assemblage of some two hundred Zuni warriors, who refused his demand for food and drew lines of cornmeal on the ground with dire warnings about crossing them. Coronado ordered a charge and in the ensuing melee he himself was severely woun...

Most people find summer a great time to read books, but I haven't. In the winter when we are trapped inside because of lousy weather, then I have time to read, but now...I'd rather bike around Block Island , Rhode Island. One book I can't finish at this time is The Invasion of America by Francis Jennings. It interests me as he discusses the tribes that still live in my area, the Narragansetts, Niantics, Pequots and Mohegans. He described Block Island as a "mint" of wampum, the pre- and post-colonial currency of the area (p.93) An Englishman, Captain John Oldham, was murdered near Block Island and the native inhabitants were presumed guilty. A punitive party was sent to mete out "justice," but were unsuccessful. The expedition turned into an expensive fiasco, however. On Block Island, English guns and armor easily overcame the Indians' brief resistance, but no amount of trudging about that isolated tiny tract of land would disclose the Indians after ...

This quote from Jake Page's book In the Hands of the Great Spirit agrees with the thesis of Kiernan in Blood and Soil , that in the European eyes, farming was civilized, hunting and gathering was savage. Of course, as the Europeans encroached on Native american farms, they forced them to resort to hunting and gathering, causing an ever condemning feedback loop. As Page notes, there were other cultural issues on the Indian side, especially gender roles. Another difficulty white Americans had was the communal methods of the Indians which morphed into accusations of Soviet communism after WW1. Meanwhile, the Indian policy favored by George Washington was that of Henry Knox, his secretary of war. Knox called for making treaties with the tribes that would result in opening the lands of the Northwest to settlers, but the treaties were to be made fairly and squarely – “honorably,” to use the contemporary word. Expansion with honor. This can be made to sound utterly cynical, especia...

February is Black History Month in the United States, which I want to use to read the accounts of those whose experience so different from mine. Many historical texts are now freely available and are starting to fill up my Kindle. This story broke my heart as I read it, and I encourage all Americans to read the accounts, like this, of our own practice of inhumanity. While I get justifiably upset when I read the wicked inhumanity of the Japanese, I tend to forget that their behavior was not unique to their culture. We Americans have committed many inhumane horrors throughout our history, especially in our slave-owning period. Anyone who refers to the American Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression have no idea of the degree wickedness the Confederacy was trying to protect. This account by escaped slave Harriet Ann Jacobs , Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself (1861) should be enough for any modern defender of the Confederacy to be ashamed. The book is long, ...

I keep telling my kids that today is not a holiday but an Italian pride day. Italians are proud of their brave sailor, Columbus, who found the new world. But I can't join in the celebration of the destruction of entire nations. I came across this article today about the process of reconciliation between white Christians and tribal nations in British Columbia and was moved deeply by this pastor's confession . "It must be hard for you," I said to the First Nations people, "to believe that salvation has come to my house when I refuse to repent of behavior that's harmed you deeply. It must be hard to believe the Bible and its Good News when white people have had it for so long but don't seem any better for it." If your self-righteous patriotism gets in the way of this confession please read up on information from my book reports on the book Mayflower (Indian enslavement and casualties ) or on The last days of the Incas ( uprising ), or this report on 1...

The history of genocide is grim reading. Yet it can shed light on current conflicts, either due to the history I'm ignorant of or the factors that I never considered. Ben Kiernan boils it down to four things. From the title, Blood and Soil , we can anticipate two, racism and agrarianism (see previous entry on this book ). The other two factors he points to are expansionism and antiquity. Just this body count from a single paragraph in the introduction leaves one sick in the gut. Central to this book are four recurring ideological preoccupations of the perpetrators of genocide, extermination, and genocidal massacres: racism, expansionism, agrarianism, and antiquity. The presence of these four obsessions often seems sufficient for genocidal violence, though not all four are necessary conditions. For space reasons, this study cannot be comprehensive. It excludes some cases of mass murder that deserve more attention, from the Mongols’ slaughter of the inhabitants of Baghdad in 1258 to ...

After finishing Blood and Soil I grew interested in the injustice against Native Americans by Europeans. Part of that injustice is the false education I received on Indian history. The Native Americans were no more savages than the warring tribes who overtook them by disease, famine, and outright genocide. I walked down the aisle in my public library where I might find American Indian history and came across Jake Page's In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians . Jake Page seems to have credentials as a former Smithsonian and Natural History editor who has lived among the Hopi Indians for many years in the Southwest. He's written other specific tribal Indian histories as well. He synthesizes archeology, history, and anthropology really well. His writing style is almost conversational, but not informal. In the next few posts I will share some quotes on pre-contact history then highlight some of his research on the interaction between Indian...

1 Corinthians 5:11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler , drunkard , or robber . Do not even eat with such a one. (NRSV) We arrive at number 3 in the top 6 list of ways to get kicked out of church. As the links in the verse indicate, I have posted on the last three. I'm working my way up the list. I figure sexual immorality may take several posts, since humans have found so many ways to be sexually immoral and the Bible covers many of those. As I noted earlier , I think all of these sins, except drunkenness, correspond to one of the 10 commandments. Idolatry is the number 2 commandment. For the Corinthians, who came out of the Greek and Roman mythology and idol worship, this demarcation is very important to them. When I wrote about idolatry earlier, I spent many posts on its importance today. I will quote from those posts in 2007. The commandment itself is at Ex...

As a follow up to an earlier post from Ben Kiernan's book Blood and Soil . The destruction of the Herero proved to be the opening genocide of the twentieth century. Among the three main Southwest African ethnic groups, totaling 125,000 people before 1904, German repression took approximately 80,000 lives in three years, at a cost of 676 German dead, 907 wounded, and 97 missing. The toll exacted by Europe’s leading military power highlights the contrast between the German policy toward civilians and that of their Herero and Nama opponents, who made concerted efforts to spare women and children. As historians Jon Bridgman and Leslie Worley point out, “representatives of the German government” set out “to destroy a whole people with the knowledge and the tacit approval of the Kaiser and the General Staff.” (386) It was convenient to have the American example in their dealings with indigenous people. Read more on genocide , human rights , book reports , and history .

This last quote from The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie makes a connection for me to Kiernan's Blood and Soil (see those book reports and quotes ) whose thesis was that conquerors justified genocide on the need to return the conquered society to an agricultural idyll. MacQuarrie adds to this the thought that economics drove this idyll. Conquerors need a peasant class to provide abundant tribute without complaint. As Kiernan pointed out though, an agricultural society wasn't worth keeping if it was subsistence based and content with their lives (Irish or native American), which disqualify it from being "civilized." Peasants are subservient, and the conquered cultures who weren't subservient were crushed. This is what Pizarro did to the Incas. The behavior of Pizarro and his entourage had thus far followed standard conquest procedure. First, evidence of a native empire had to be discovered. First, evidence of a native empire had to be discovered, one civ...

Original post below updates... update: post at Get Religion with good links update 2: Israel expresses concern over Turkish-Armenian massacre dispute at Int. Herald Trib . choice quotes... The debate in Washington over the World I massacre of Armenians has put Israel in an uncomfortable position. Turkey is a key Israeli ally and one of its few friends in the Muslim world. At the same time, Israel was built in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, and genocide is an extremely sensitive topic....Israel has acknowledged that massacres were perpetrated against the Armenians and expressed sympathy for their suffering. But the government has stopped short of calling it genocide.Regev said Thursday "there is no change" in Israel's policy.Earlier this year, the parliament shelved a proposal for a discussion on the Armenian genocide at the request of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. At the time, Livni expressed concern the issue could destabilize ties with Turkey. This makes the U.S....

Another quote from Blood and Soil by Ben Kiernan on atrocities by European Americans against Native Americans. This is one committed by a Christian church elder. The year 1864 was an election year in the Colorado territory, where whites were settling on Cheyenne and Arapaho land. The Rocky Mountain News sought settler support for the Colorado governor’s proposals for the territory’s statehood. The paper proclaimed in March 1863 that Indians “ought to be wiped from the face of the earth,” one of 10 occasions that year on which it urged extermination of Indians. After two soldiers fell in a clash, 25 Indians died in reprisal. The military commander predicted” “[N]ow is but the commencement of war with this tribe, which must result in exterminating them.” A Methodist Episcopal church elder, Colonel John Chivington of the 1st Colorado Cavalry, campaigned for Congress on his policy to “kill and scalp all, little and big.” On May 31, 1864, Chivington ordered Major Edward Wynkoop, commander...