The life of European settlers — and the class structure of their society — was abnormal because it was dependent upon a foundation of conquest, genocide, and enslavement. The myth of the self-sufficient, white settler family “clearing the wilderness” and supporting themselves through their own initiative and hard labor, is a propaganda fabrication. It is the absolute characteristic of settler society to be parasitic, dependent upon the superexploitation of oppressed peoples for its style of life. Never has Euro-Amerikan society completely supported itself. This is the decisive factor in the consciousness of all classes and strata of white society from 1600 to now.

Settler society was raised up, above the level of backward Old Europe, by a foundation of conquest. This conquest was a miracle drug for a Europe convulsed with the reaction of decaying feudalism and deadly capitalism. Shot into the veins of the Spanish feudal nation, for instance, the miracle drug of “New World” conquest gave Spain the momentary power to overrun North Africa, Holland, and Italy before her historical instant waned. For the English settlers, this conquest made real the bourgeois vision of building a whole new European society. Like many such “fixes”, for Euro-Amerikans this conquest was addicting; it was habit-forming and rapidly indispensable, not only culturally, but in the mechanism of an oppressor society whose lifeblood was new conquest. We will examine this later, in the relationship of settlerism to imperialism. For now, it is enough to see that this conquest is a material fact of great magnitude, an economic and social event as important as the emergence of the factory system or the exploitation of petroleum in the Middle East.

We stress the obvious here, because the Euro-Amerikan settlers have always made light of their invasion and occupation (although the conquered territory is the precondition for their whole society). Traditionally, European settler societies throw off the propaganda smokescreen that they didn’t really conquer and dispossess other nations — they claim with false modesty that they merely moved into vacant territory! So the early English settlers depicted Amerika as empty — “a howling wilderness”, “unsettled”, “sparsely populated” — just waiting with a “VACANT” sign on the door for the first lucky civilization to walk in and claim it. Theodore Roosevelt wrote defensively in 1900: “… the settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.”(9)

It is telling that this lie is precisely the same lie put forward by the white “Afrikaner” settlers, who claim that South Africa was literally totally uninhabited by any Afrikans when they arrived from Europe. To universal derision, these European settlers claim to be the only rightful, historic inhabitants of South Afrika. Or we can hear similar defenses out forward by the European settlers of Israel, who claim that much of the Palestinian land and buildings they occupy are rightfully theirs, since the Arabs allegedly decided to voluntarily abandon it all during the 1948-49 war. Are these kind of tales any less preposterous when put forward by Euro-Amerikan settlers?

Amerika was “spacious” and “sparsely populated” only because the European invaders destroyed whole civilizations and killed off millions of Native Amerikans to get the land and profits they wanted. We all know that when the English arrived in Virginia, for example, they encountered an urban, village-dwelling society far more skilled than they in the arts of medicine, agriculture, fishing-and government.*(10) [*The first government of the new U.S.A., that of the Articles of Confederation, was totally unlike any in autocratic Europe, and had been influenced by the Government of the Six-Nation Iroquois Confederation.] This civilization was reflected in a chain of three hundred Indian nations and peoples stretched from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America, many of whom had highly developed societies. There was, in fact, a greater population in these Indian nations in 1492 than in all of Western Europe. Recent scholarly estimates indicate that at the time of Columbus there were 100 million Indians in the Hemisphere: ten million in North America, twenty-five million in Central Mexico, with an additional sixty-five million elsewhere in Central and Southern America.(11)

These numbers have long been concealed, since they give rise to the logical question of what happened to this great mass of people. The European invaders — Spanish, Dutch, English, Portuguese, and French — simply killed off millions and millions to safeguard their conquest of the land and provide the disposable slave labor they needed to launch their “New World”. Conservative Western historical estimates show that the Spanish “reduced” the Indian population of their colonies from some 50 million to only 4 million by the end of the 17th Century.(12)

And from the 10 million Indians that once inhabited North America, after four centuries of settler invasion and rule there were in 1900 perhaps 200,000-300,000 surviving descendants in the U.S.A.(13) That was the very substantial down-payment towards the continuing blood price that Third-World nations have to pay to sustain the Euro-Amerikan way of life.

So when we hear that the settlers “pushed out the Indians” or “forced the Indians to leave their traditional hunting grounds”, we know that these are just codephrases to refer politely to the most barbaric genocide imaginable. It could well be the greatest crime in all of human history. Only here the Adolph Eichmanns and Heinrich Himmlers had names like Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson.

The point is that genocide was not an accident, not an “excess”, not the unintended side-effect of virile European growth. Genocide was the necessary and deliberate act of the capitalists and their settler shocktroops. The “Final Solution” to the “Indian Problem” was so widely expected by whites that it was openly spoken of as a commonplace thing. At the turn of the century a newspaper as “respectable” as the New York Times could editorially threaten that those peoples who opposed the new world capitalist order would “be extinguished like the North American Indian.”(14) Only a relative handful of Indians survived the time of the great extermination campaigns. You see, the land wasn’t “empty” after all — and for Amerika to exist the settlers had to deliberately make the land “empty”.