Genocide By Any Other Name
- Mike Dickey
- 15 hours ago
- 2 min read
"For the dead and the living, we must bear witness."
-Elie Wiesel
The countryside in this part of New York is dotted with historical markers reminding us of how this land became "available" for American settlers.
I drove by one in Big Flats a few minutes ago on my way back from a doctor's appointment in Elmira.
It's not a story I learned in U.S. history class---George Washington sending Sullivan through the Southern Tier and the Finger Lakes region with a mandate to burn and murder their way across the lands of the Haudenosaunee--part of the Iroquois Confederation--after the natives massacred some settlers, with the help and approval of the British, in the Wyoming Valley just south of here.
Wikipedia blithely states that the expedition was "largely successful". What that means, children, is that forty villages where thousands of people lived were burned to the ground, their crops torched, and a huge refugee population arrived on the Brits' doorstep at Fort Niagara, where many died from starvation, disease, and exposure during the following winter. A civilization with its own language, government, fairly sophisticated economy, and way of life blotted from the map, never to return.
I found myself thinking of these victims of the rapacious land greed of the colonial settlers (keep in mind one of the main reasons we parted ways with the Mother Country was that the crown prohibited crossing the mountains to the west and settling in lands occupied by mostly peaceful natives) when I read this week about the Israeli plan to "depopulate" Gaza for national security reasons. History sure rhymes here--a horrible cross-border raid and massacre leads to a military effort dedicated to wiping out the local population to create a security buffer against future raids.
And the cruelty of the invaders is, as it was in 1779, totally out of control. One prominent Israeli politician has gone from mocking Palestinian prisoners who complain of cruelty in captivity to posting AI videos of shoving them up a conveyor into a slaughterhouse.
Our horrible president hasn't signaled his approval for the genocide just yet, but in the recent past has floated plans to turn Gaza into the next South Beach. That only works if the natives are, well, departed.
But enough of all that. P and I are in the midst of another Friday work day, before heading down to the City for the holiday weekend because we decided we needed a little Vitamin NYC.
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