RICHARD SLOTKIN ON AMERICAN FRONTIER MYTHS: PART THREE

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1992, 1998) ("[T]he symbol of 'savage war' . . .  was both a mythic trope and an operative category of military doctrine. The premise of 'savage war' is that inevitable political and social differences--rooted in some combination of 'blood' and culture--make coexistence between primitive natives and civilized Europeans impossible on any basis other than that of subjugation. [Query: Is this not the premise underlying White Supremacism, White Separatism, or White Tribalism even now in twenty-first-century America? Minorities are the savage natives--though the model minorities have been sufficiently surrogated or domesticated--, while many white Americans view themselves as, just that, civilized Europeans.] Native resistance to European settlement therefore takes the form of a fight for survival; and because of the 'savage' and bloodthirsty propensity of the natives, such struggles inevitably become 'wars of extermination' in which one side or the other attempts to destroy its enemy root and branch." Id. at 12. "By the terms of the Frontier Myth, once imperial war was conflated with savage war both sides become subject to the logic of massacre. The savage enemy  [i.e., the Other] kills and terrorizes without limit or discrimination in order to exterminate or drive out the civilized race [i.e., the Us, or rather the White Us]. The civilized race learns to respond in kind, partly from outrage at the atrocities it has suffered, partly form a recognition that imitation and mastery of the savages' methods are the best way to defeat them. A cycle of massacre and revenue is thus inaugurated that drives both sides toward a war of extermination, Only an American victory can prevent actual genocide [because, of course, the Americans view themselves as the 'civilization' under siege by the 'savages,' e.g., illegal immigrants, islamic terrorists, criminals, minorities, and so forth and so on]: the savage enemy would indeed exterminate all of the civilized race, but the civilized carry massacre only as far a necessary to subjugate the savage. To achieve victory in such a war, Americans are entitled and indeed required to use any and all means, including massacre, terrorism, and torture." Id. at 112. Of course, the savage enemy does not view itself as 'savage', and it may not view the its enemy as 'civilized.' There the rub of savage war. Each side view the other as a barbarian, knowing and respecting no constrains to war. Here's a flashback: "[P]olls taken in 1990-91 indicate that most Americans have not recovered their faith in the most fundamental principles of national ideology: the belief that American democracy offers effective means for expressing the will of the people through political action, and the belief in national and personal progress--the idea that each generation will do better and produce more than the one before. There is widespread public skepticism about the ability of the political leadership, Republican or Democrat, to provide an accurate assessment of our problems, a useful set of predictions and policies, or even an honest set of account books. There is a growing awareness that the real bases of American political and industrial strength have been weakened and our culture undermined by the waste and abuse of our human resources in the last fifteen years, in particular our failure to invest in public health and education, in the restructuring of our displaced industrial workforce, in the improvement of our cities, and in measures of reducing the size and permanency of the 'underclass.'  These failures have undermined our capacity to compete with other industrialized nations and have prolonged the crisis of demoralization that has affected our political culture since the end of the 1960s." Id. at 653-654. That was written in 1992 and now, a quarter of a century later, the same holds true . . . only more so!).