Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –
After watching a documentary on the RTE Irish language station TG4 about the relationship between Irish immigrants and the Indigenous Peoples of North America (Éire agus na chéad náisiúin, broadcast on 5 September) I visited U.S. General Philip Sheridan’s family house in Killinkere, County Cavan. In front of the gable wall stands a large memorial block erected in June 1969 that has an inscription declaring that the house is General Sheridan’s birth place. Sheridan’s place of birth has not been verified. He might have been born on route to the United States or in Albany, New York State as he claimed. Underneath the inscription is a quote from General Ulysess S. Grant dedicated to General Sheridan. It reads –
“He belongs to the very first rank of captains not only of our army but of the world. I rank him with Napoleon and Frederick and the great commanders of history.”
Sheridan, who was born in 1839 and died in 1888, not only fought with utter ruthlessness against the Confederate Army in the American Civil War but committed acts of genocide against the indigenous peoples of the United States. Among the tribes he waged scorched-earth war against are the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa.
As befitting his genocidal actions Sheridan is reputed to have said that “the only good Indian is a dead one.” As with his birth place this is disputed but accords with the view that was common among his military peers and the people who sought to make a home for themselves on land that the indigenous peoples had lived on for generations. On his deathbed Sheridan was honoured by been promoted to the rank of General of the Army.
Although General Sheridan never explicitly advocated the extermination of the indigenous peoples of North America it was more a matter that many of the European settlers and their descendants thought that this is what should happen. This was encapsulated in the idea of Manifest Destiny which considered the indigenous peoples to be an impediment to the fulfilment of God’s plan for the continent which was for it to become the home of the Christian peoples of the world, in particular white people.
The idea of Manifest Destiny was first publicly aired by newspaper editor John O’Sullivan in mid-1845 and promoted by the 11th President of the United States, James K. Polk who mentioned it in his first State of the Union Address on 2 December 1845. For those interested in genealogy the president’s family emigrated from the north of Ireland in the 1720s. John O’Sullivan’s father was from Ireland and his mother from England.
Implicit in the concept of Manifest Destiny is the sense of entitlement. This is the idea that one is entitled to something because they believe they are superior in a multitude of ways to others, perhaps by virtue of their social class or because they believe that what they desire has been bequeathed to them by God. In either case they see their role, their life’s work, to take from others what they think is theirs by right or because they deserve it. On the basis of their sense of righteousness, they don’t regard killing those who have what they want as sinful or as a stain on their character. Their moral defence is that their brutality is sanctioned by an authority higher than them which can be history, government or God. In their eyes, and the group they identify with, they are God’s avenging angel.
It is this sense of entitlement that likely enabled the new arrivals in the United States, Australia and elsewhere to eliminate, contain and enculturate the indigenous peoples. The same credo is evident amongst the Jews who think that Palestine was bequeathed to them by God as stated in Genesis 12: 7, 17:8 and Numbers 34 in the Old Testament/Hebrew scriptures.
The template as to how European colonialists should treat the Indigenous Peoples who had what they wanted might be said to be contained in Exodus, (33:1), the second book of the Bible. A similar message is conveyed in Deuteronomy, (20: 16-17), the fifth book of the Bible.
“But as for the towns of these peoples … you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites … just as the Lord your God has commanded.”
It is difficult to know if the suffering one group imposes on anther is based wholly on the belief that they are simply doing God’s will or are using God, or an authority such as a government, to disguise their intentions for self-advancement.
We can learn a number of things from Sheridan’s life story. One is that we are susceptible to being brutalised and coming to regard people who appear different from us as of less moral worth than us. Regular exposure to any phenomena makes it seem normal. The once widespread practice of corporal punishment in schools and smoking in enclosed public spaces are examples.
Young children don’t tend to see killing people and eliminating cultures as one of the things they want to do later in life. Nevertheless, a sizeable number grow up to believe that they are entitled to belittle, intimate and kill those they see as a threat. This is largely due to their susceptibility to the message that the group / tribe / nation they identify with is under existential threat. This is at the heart of this September’s cross-community dispute of the Orange Order’s wish, supported by a Court of Appeal ruling, to parade along the Garvaghy Road in Portadown.
One way to counter this narrow sense of belonging and of entitlement is through nurturing the view that there is no ‘other’, that all sentient beings deserve respect and are an integral part of the whole. The Chinese and the Russians are not the enemy, as militarists want us to believe. Nor are people with a different skin colour or culture from us, which is something General P. Sheridan and his ilk did not appreciate. The real impediments to living on good terms with others, and with nonhuman nature, are ignorance, fear and greed.