First off, you have to fully grasp that Las Casas meant every word above quite literally. This statement, from his last will and testament, came at the end of a life most of which was dedicated to documenting the “unjust, barbarous, and tyrannical manner” in which the Spanish conquistadores accomplished their genocide of the Americas. He was there with Kolumbus as “these godless, evil and ignoble acts” were perpetrated. Las Casas was also there at the king’s court watching the actual loot roll in, watching all of Spain “prosper” from the “bloody wealth usurped at the price of much ruin and many massacres.” There is no hyperbole in the Las Casas description, if only because it’s impossible to overstate the enormity of the crime.

But most importantly it’s imperative to understand Las Casas’ confidence that “God will direct his ire and fury upon all Spain.” This prediction was meant with absolute literalness. It was not some figurative turn of phrase just to provide metaphorical amplification of the accusations against the nation of Spain.  Las Casas, the Catholic priest, actually believed this stuff – that some supernatural and omnipotent being would in fact punish Spain for these crimes by the literal destruction of the Spanish people. It’s critical that you get this if you’re going to get a handle on Las Casas, most of whose life was consumed with this fear for the Spanish empire’s survival and in turn was dedicated to saving that empire from his god’s “ire and fury.”

Now, Las Casas was no saint. And neither, for that matter, was his god. Daniel Castro accurately pegs Las Casas as fundamentally an agent of Spanish imperialism. In Castro’s Another Face of Empire Las Casas is featured in the title role as the smiley face of Spanish imperial conquest of the Americas.(1) This would be as opposed to the frowny face of bloody subjugation embodied in the conquistador colonialists doing the actual dirty work of genocide and looting. Castro shows clearly that Las Casas was devoted to stopping the colonists’ genocide of the indigenous population of the Americas in favor of “a form of systematic benevolent imperialism that ideally would result in the best of all possible worlds for all concerned.”(2) In other words, conquest and plunder without all the muss and fuss and a happy ending with rainbows and lollipops for everyone. Sure.

And Las Casas’ god was no better. This god in fact demanded of Spain and Las Casas the impossible: both conquer (“convert”) the indigenous population and do it in a fashion that tickles their fancy. Do all that and everything’ll be hunky dory by god.  But at least don’t kill them every one in such a barbaric manner because that just turns god’s stomach and he’ll have to destroy all of Spain in return. That was heaven’s the tall order for the “benevolent” imperialism of Las Casas if he was to save his beloved Spain.

Well at this point in the story you might want to simply say fuck Las Casas and his god and be done with it and you wouldn’t be half wrong if you did.

But you’d be enough wrong for it to matter because you’d be missing some things that can be helpful to the oppressed and exploited. So don’t give up on the imperialist agent Las Casas and the Spanish genocide of the Americas just yet. Hopefully your forbearance will be rewarded in Part Two.

1. Castro, Daniel. Another Face of Empire. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007.

2. Ibid., 72.

This video and other recent work here concerning John Brown and his army are indebted to a revisiting of Comrade Brown, especially via a recent biography by David S. Reynolds, “John Brown, Abolitionist.” This book deserves reviewing soon. The recent John Brown work done here can be considered preliminaries to that review.

For now, it will be helpful to mention that the book is oddly mistitled. One of the several recommending features of Reynolds is that he himself provides overwhelming evidence that John Brown was not an “abolitionist” under any recognizable sense of the term at the time. With this evidence in front of us it’s clear that, if John Brown was an abolitionist, then there were no other white abolitionists in amerikkka.(1) And if we take the norm of the self-named white “abolitionists” as a rough definition of the term, then that term simply does not apply to Comrade Brown.

To see just how much John Brown was not an abolitionist we need look no farther than the amerikkkan Civil War. This was a war in which whites killed each other in the thousands over conflicting ideas of how best to prevent the very same slave rebellion and Black Nation revolution that John Brown gave his life trying to spark. (This is not, by the way, Reynolds’ explicit analysis.)

Slave-owner Jefferson complained that slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears – a recurring dilemma for oppressors when the oppressed have outgrown their usefulness in one capacity and the need is to shuffle them to another. It’s always the transition that’s dangerous. The southern crackers had their own solution for this risk management problem: just hold on tighter. They “needed” slaves, so they needed slavery, and the safest way to continue enslaving the Black Nation was to have as many slave states as possible, each watching the other’s white back. The northern crackers had gotten more industrialized, through slave labor, so much so that they didn’t “need” actual slavery any more. They were doing so well that probably the only thing that really could’ve fucked ‘em up would’ve been some kind of slave rebellion, the kind they saw in nightmares even in their waking hours.

And here’s where we see that John Brown was not an abolitionist. The actual white “abolitionists” always kept both feet firmly planted in amerikkka. No doubt many white abolitionists were at times allies of the Black Nation and helpful to the cause of liberation. But they were above all amerikkka-firsters. So you had the “Colonizationist” abolitionists, who wanted to save white amerika by ending slavery and shipping Blacks out asap to Africa. And you had the white nationalist paternalism of the “pacifist” abolitionists, who wanted to save white amerika by ending slavery “peacefully,” meaning doing nothing that would jeopardize white slavery-driven prosperity. These abolitionists dreamed of “elevating” Blacks ideologically into amnesia of oppression and quiescence, while keeping the clamps on by denying them basic bourgeois democratic rights. Or take the “Free Staters” who fought to keep slavery out of Kansas. Often called abolitionists, their actual fight was to keep the territory not only “free” of slavery, but of Blacks and First Nation peoples as well. The common denominator among white abolitionists was white supremacy first, “abolition” way second. And of course the same reactionary denominator bonded the white abolitionists with their pro-slavery southern brethren.

Comrade John Brown was something else altogether. His risk management priority for the white nation was in fact to put amerikkka and its national oppression mortally at risk through slave rebellion and Black revolution. As a true nation traitor and revolutionary, Comrade Brown followed the ideology of the oppressed without hesitation or equivocation. Of course “abolition” is just a word, to be defined as broadly or as narrowly as suits an intended purpose. Call John Brown what you want, but we all know what he was – a servant of the oppressed. And we know what he wasn’t – an amerikkkan.

(1) There were in fact a few other whites who were ideologically closer to John Brown than the abolitionists and as such deserve honorable mention here. Jabez Hammond advocated armed slave rebellion in words, but took no step in practice to accomplish this. Gerrit Smith, one of John Brown’s financial backers, also supported Black rebellion at times. Smith was unsteady in his support, though, and ultimately turned his back on that cause after Harper’s Ferry. Lysander Spooner upheld the violent overthrow of slavery by Blacks but, like Hammond, was short on action.

Final Solution:  The Whites and Their “Indian Residential Schools”

Dedicated to Ward Churchill and all who speak the absolute truth about amerikkka .

The PBS documentary “In the White Man’s Image” follows the initial development of the “Indian Residential Schools.” PBS advertises the documentary as “the story of a humanist experiment gone bad.” This one simple characterization should be all any rational persyn requires as proof that amerika is simply too fucked to fix and needs utter destroying. Consider. The assailant stands with dagger full force and to the hilt into the victim’s gut. Then what possible next action on the part of the assailant toward the victim could possibly be called a “humanist” action? Removal of the dagger? A bit better, but not “humanist.” Removal of the dagger, binding the wound, and rushing the victim to medical aid? Still better, but has the assailant has now become a “humanist?” Not hardly. How about this: no rush to medical attention, no binding the wound, the dagger remains held fully in place. The assailant’s very next action is to then tell the victim, “and now my good buddies will kill your children.” According to the oppressor nation ideology of the amerikans, when the perpetration is against First Nations, it is precisely in this last scene that the assailant fully deserves the mantle of “humanist.”

The white nation pogrom against the First Nations called the Residential Schools was in no sense a matter of “good intentions gone wrong.” Even the paraded catch phrase summation of this policy, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” belies such a whitewashing characterization. The comprehensive violence to be necessarily inflicted on the First Nations children in the intent to “Kill the Indian” ensured just that: they would be killed – emotionally, ideologically, and physically. No “Man” would be saved by this policy of the whites other than the White Man, who through extermination would be saved having to be accountable to the oppressed. Those who want to impute “good intent” to the whites’ Residential School policy openly wave the banner of national oppression. Only that ideology would be other than completely skeptical of any white intent after the whites had already committed hundreds of years to First Nation genocide. Only that ideology would be accepting of any white nation intent as “good” that did not demonstrate immediately and tangibly that the whites were leaving the territories they had stolen and were, on their way out, divesting themselves of all possessions to the First Nations by way of reparations. Waving the banner of national oppression, the “good intent gone wrong” characterization of course assumes that neither of these conditions will obtain. “Well of course the assailant won’t remove the dagger or try to undo the damage done. How silly to think otherwise.” This white nationalism just assumes continued national oppression and then tries to conjure up good intent within that reactionary context. So we shouldn’t be surprised when the “good intent” conjured up turns out to be, well, killing First Nation children. And generally we should never be surprised at the contortions resorted to by the whites to get themselves off the hook for crimes committed by them and for their benefit.

The video here, Final Solution, is presented by way of agitation as the briefest of introductions to the growing body of work laying bare the murderous nature of the amerikan and kanadian Residential Schools, as well as the little Eeichmann complicity of all whites in this program of extermination. This introduction will hopefully lead potential allies of all oppressed nations to study this history and rethink any illusions they may still harbor around the issue of friends and enemies – the white nation always stakes its claim to the latter category. The video relies on 3 books: Ward Churchill’s “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” John Milloy’s “A National Crime,” and David Wallace Adams’ “Education for Extinction.” The latter two works are excellent for their detail in exposing the history of these white nation concentration camps, Milloy for kanada and Adams for amerika. (And even a cursory reading of these two books and comparing the policies toward the First Nations in kanada and amerika will go a long way in explaining why we Maoists consider this as simply one white settler nation.) Churchill’s is much the shorter book, being itself an overview of already existing research. What Churchill does add is unambiguous political context. First, he calls the Residential Schools policy just exactly what it was: the continuation of the war of genocide by the whites on the First Nations. Secondly, Churchill correctly tosses aside the frivolous new age approaches to “healing” between the First Nations and their white oppressors as so much psychological smoke and mirrors while the white nation occupation of First Nation territory continues. He does the same with white nationalist “leftist” notions of First Nation “self-determination” without return of their stolen territory – Churchill estimates that at half the continent, and we’d agree with that as a minimum.

What is quite clear throughout the literature on the Residential Schools is that the whites – all whites – knew and approved. Reports of the “abuses” of this genocidal policy were in government documents, books, magazines, newspaper headlines. To be sure, these reports questioned only the “overly harsh” administration of the policy. The general plan of “Killing the Indian,” needed no reporting – it was known by the whites as a simple fact of daily life and was completely uncontorversial amongst them. Of course even the “abuses” raised no hue and cry among the oppressors, and nothing was done even about these. Here you can look for another contorted excuse from the whites to get themselves off the hook for genocide – maybe they did know all about the Residential Schools, but nobody back then knew that it was genocide, nobody knew it was “wrong.” You know, it was “just another time,” and they “did things differently back then.” Well that won’t wash because lots of people did peg the Residential Schools precisely as genocide. The First Nations peoples knew genocide when they saw it. That’s why they hid in the hills with their children, and faced beating and jail rather than comply with the white “officials.” That’s why they ran away from the schools, and faced death in trying to get home or torture on capture. The oppressed will always recognize oppression. The oppressors will always pretend ignorance.

Adams, David Wallace, “Education for Extinction” (University Press of Kansas, 1995)

Churchill, Ward, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” (San Francisco, City Lights Books, 2004)

Milloy, John S., “A National Crime” (University of Manitoba Press, 1999)

Notes to Final Solution:

1. Adams, 140.

2. Milloy, 137.

3. Churchill, 21.

4. Adams, 147.

5. Adams, 148.

6. Milloy, 143.

7. Churchill, 62.

8. Adams, 115.

9. Adams, 152.

10. Churchill, 34. 

11. Churchill, 43.

12. Churchill, 36.