There is a subtle but pervasive pressure of values, applied throughout the academic world, at least the one that I have known, that the subject, the student, that is myself, or any other person who submits to academic discipline, should deny him or herself, and submit to the 'objective' search for an always elusive knowledge, never quite attained, but approximated, disinterestedly. One is enjoined to bring back the results of this disinterested search to professors or colleagues who are also under this same pressure, who judge ones success or failure according to an invisible 'canon', discipline or rule, which is often as arbitrary and shifting as the egos of those who claim to sit in authority. Being unable to separate or recognize any real difference from the men and women who have taught me and what they have taught me, I have never been able to quite accept this procedure, and find it to have led me into various Kafkaesque lacuna and cul de sacs, dead ends and round-abouts, that have left me alien, vaguely failing, Sisiphysian, and wondering who and where I am, who are my teachers, and what is the nature of the system of education that I have entered, with its labyrinths of knowledge and blind, merciless, bureaucratic paths and false promises. In entering academic history, what I have entered, of course, is a system of knowledge/power, a university, an institution that relies on rules, procedures, abstract conceptions, many of them hidden, many of them mere conventions, with no one remembering how they got started or why they continue, or even, exactly, what they are.

In such an environment, the pursuit of 'truth' often leads to the institutional establishment of falsehoods. Knowledge becomes a theater of mirrors magnifying power. Knowledge/power is a theater. It is a social construction made of abstractions, artificialities, sublimations, practices, technologies and philosophies. God, the state, freedom, the market, the corporation, consciousness, myths, money and a thousand other props go into the production. History is largely the story of these props. But in the end the play of history is usually shown to be a farce, a satire, merely the mythological costuming and plotting of men and women who want empires, control, wealth, position and fame. The history that tries to remove the props and masks and step out of the theatre is rare. The reality of people's lives is outside the theater, in the neglected realm of ordinary pursuits, in the forgotten realms of those who live and suffer daily. Human suffering transcends gods and corporations, transcends the state and wears away kings and vain ministers: it silences the lies of the media, shames the schemes of the rich and blackens the gold dreams of the masters of truth. Knowledge is a dream and power is its nightmare and the only way out of the theater of knowledge/power is to admit that the theater is an illusion and must be understood, criticized, and eventually dismantled.

This book is an attempt to question the props, scenery, staging and plays that make up the theater of knowledge/power. I cannot help questioning the certainties I have been handed by those who claim to know. I question religions in which I have participated, arts and social arrangements. I look for what can be trusted to insure my rights and the rights of those who suffer from knowledge and power. But the more I have looked the more even the pose of truth and certain knowledge adopted by Big Science becomes a dissembling means to justify and aggrandize corporate and governmental power. And if Big Science cannot be trusted to be free of dissimulating mythologies that hide a will to power and enable injustices than how much more trusted can history be, which has nothing like the class-based status of science? In some respects, history can be more trustworthy because it has little status as a discipline, and thus less interest to protect. But foolishly, history tries to adopt the methodological paraphernalia of Big Science, hoping to capture some of its allure and credibility. Yet this involves history and historians, however unwittingly, in becoming yet another agent in the play of mirrors in the labyrinthine theater of power. Neither knowledge or power or the relation of these to injustice, are questioned. The result is that history, like science, becomes merely another factor in the attempt to dissemble human sufferings behind the mythical facade of the search for truth. Kafka's world has become our world and we must stumble through the wreckage of transcendent symbols that have left millions of the dead in their shadows.

I do not invoke Kafka arbitrarily here. He struggled under a dictatorial father. He worked in an impersonal insurance company, and struggled under the weight of entrenched religious and political ideologies. His books and stories are a protest against knowledge and power and institutionalized inhumanity. His is a cry in the dark of a human heart struggling against abstract systems and the mystified knowledges of the experts. Kafka's cry in the dark is a preliminary shudder of horror before the black curtain of Auschwitz and Nagasaki descend. Kafka did not live to see the full horror his writings intimated. But a woman close to Kafka, Milena, died in a Nazi camp, living out in reality the terror that her lover, Kafka, saw mostly in imagination. [1]

After Nagasaki, the threat to humanity that had been known intimately only by Native Americans, Africans, European serfs and peasants, Tasmanians, Gypsies, Jews, Slavs, and those killed under the reigns of Stalin and Mao, among others, became a threat to all beings. The threat originated in Europe and migrated to the United States and from thence to the rest of the world. The Native American poet Leslie Silko, has expressed the threat posed by the Euro-Americans succinctly and well:

The threat has not dissipated and the horror still haunts. Silko writes, in the same novel in which this poem appears that "from that time on, [from the time of the creation of the atom bomb and other means of chemical, genetic and environmental destruction] human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things: united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away"[3] I do not believe, as Silko seems to, that the cause of our distress is a spiritual agent cooked up by 'witchery' and evil minded men. This is to mystify what can be simply explained as greed, ambition, knowledge and need of power. In our world, there is poverty, extinctions of tens of thousands of animals and plants, global pollution, untold millions killed in atrocities, wars, and the means of the destruction of the earth held in the hands of those who cannot be trusted. Yet the 'experts', in pursuit of fame and position, pay this little mind, and go on spinning ever finer and finer webs of elaborated or escapist knowledge to serve those in power who maintain the system that creates the horrors. In an age where everything was possible, through knowledge, now, for anyone of conscience, nothing could be done. Ignorance sometimes seems an appropriate escape. But even this beautiful illusion is betrayed. The weight of knowledge hangs over our heads like a promise of future terror. Millions, billions of unprotected beings lay exposed.

Questioning the system of knowledge/power that created the atrocities and maintains the threat to the fragile life on earth is not an academic necessity: it is a human one. With exceptions the academy is not concerned with fragile natural and human rights but with perpetuating itself and those who find position and profit within it. Out of sympathy for unprotected beings, I find it necessary to detach myself from those that are detached. I will not serve a disinterested professional purity of knowledge that puts abstractions before people, that puts knowledge before human fragility, and transcendent, corporate or scientific duty, discipline and detachment before the rights and protections of the endangered beings on earth. I am attached and interested, impure and fragile: I am a person and my knowledge is personal and I will not be ashamed. I will write history in accord with these beliefs, and not in accord with an invisible canon of academic authorities.

The question that Kafka asked in The Trial and The Castle, reasserts itself in most institutions: how can an ordinary individual maintain their fragile humanity in a structure that is so thick with impersonal, bureaucratic symbolism and invisible abstract criteria that the line between reality and unreality is blurred beyond sense? How does one negotiate through systems of knowledge and power? How does one bridge the gap between the unreality of abstract structures and the existential fact of being a living being in nature? This is the question that goes to the heart of this thesis. How do we unravel the mythic structures that surround and enclose us, and affirm the human reality of human rights on an earth conflicted in clouded claims to power and at war in a strife of knowledges? History for me is the cry of an elemental human heart out from under the weight of the ages. I am a part of it: history is a part of me. I will not be crushed by the abstract and the impersonal. I will not submit to a history that does not include me. I will not be ground into powder by a machine of history that dictates to me who I am and what I should know. No one should be. We have the right to write our own histories, without being accused of arrogance, hubris, artificial sins of pride or subjectivistic nihilism. Human rights is not a sin, nor is questioning knowledge and powers.

I have been led, in accord with my own conscience and my own experience, to question the validity of the hierarchies, knowledges and ideals. I question institutions of 'higher' learning, and to seek instead, what I have always sought : my own personal understanding of things. I try to follow where my heart and mind lead me, right or wrong. I have been wrong many times, on a few occasions very seriously wrong indeed. But on those occasions where I have been most wrong, even to the point of my life being threatened as a consequence, I learned the most. I may be as wrong here as I have been at other times in my life, but I must make the attempt, even if it fails. Even if it fails, I leave behind a piece of my heart, and effort to find out what is real, and an intact conscience.

I am trying to understand history not in order to proclaim universal truths, but to explain aspects of the world I live in. I have never understood the world I live in, after 25 years of searching for answers I still do not understand. But what I have learned of my own fallibility and from my own suffering, is that these, and little or nothing else, are alone generalizable. I am sure of suffering and injustice, and sure of the role that systems of knowledge play in the injustices. I am sure of the suffering I have seen, and I draw from this conclusions about the sufferings of others whom I have not seen. If I pursue this with a certain passion, it is because I have experienced something of the terrors that systems of knowledge and power can produce in their victims myself. I know what it is like to be a victim. My concern with human rights grows out of an understanding of what it means to have them taken away. I have experienced nothing near the terror and horror that those who survived Hispanola, Wounded Knee, Nagasaki or Vietnam must have felt, but I know enough about similar kinds of terror to identify with other victims and to wish to express this sympathy. Perhaps in a small way I would like to honor the dead that did not survive the terror of knowledge/power as I have survived it. Perhaps like many victims of terror I feel a little guilty I am still alive. But since I am still alive I feel I must try to witness, however haltingly, against systems of knowledge and power.

There is an indelible sense of horror that I have: an understanding of what terror is that makes me identify with victims rather than the powerful. This is a psychological fact that I cannot ignore, and which necessarily informs my point of view. Others may judge this as they wish, but it is the source of my ethical concern. I admit this up front.

History, which for centuries has largely served knowledge and power, ought to question knowledge and powers, from the university itself, to states and philosophies, heroes, sciences and histories of all kinds. I am not a disembodied scholar living in a weightless intellectual space, without a heart and a body that feels pain. I do not seek the high road to the ultimate idea. I am not a number, a cog in a wheel, a 'consumer', a statistic, a dot on a map, a soul whose only meaning is in another world, or the future name on a gravestone.

I might have been a slave on the ships of the middle passage, crowded into a tiny space, sick with the bloody flux and wishing only to die. I might have been a Native American woman raped and killed by a Spaniard or a Britishe red coat. I might have been one of those killed "for freedom" in Nagasaki or Vietnam. It may have been me that the Red Guards killed in my hut in China in 1967. It may have been me clutching to my brother in the gas showers at Auschwitz as we breathed in the sick smelling air. It may have been me on the inquisitorial rack spitting at the Inquisitor as he tried to torture me into correct beliefs about Christ. It may have been me on the 700 foot ladder leading into the Potosi mine in Bolivia, when I slipped and fell to my death bringing ten others with me. It may have been me, with my scalp cut off and my privates decorating the saddle of an American cavalry man at Sand Creek. Did my mother miss me or my wife cry in the dark night after night? Would my children know who I was?

But I can see the other side too. The fact of ordinary German people's complicity in the "final solution", or the complicity of ordinary Americans in racist and exterminist ideologies against Native Americans indicates that anyone can be seduced by systems of knowledge/power. The promises of power and knowledge are compelling. Could I too might have been one of the killers: maybe I could have been one of the stockbrokers, the Plantation owners, the SS guards, slave raiders, the bankers, Insurance brokers or hard hearted military men mindlessly following orders. Or was I a suburban businessman, working my job and voting republican while my country killed 4 million in Vietnam? Could I have celebrated the lies the US government told about dropping the Bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Could I drink tea at 4 pm, and invest my money, like John Locke in the slave trade? I might have been one of those who burned down villages of old people and children on the Russian steppe for Marx and Uncle Joe. Did I shoot Native Americans from railroad cars in 1886? Was I in the plane over Hiroshima in 1945? I realize the CEO suffers for his millions while other people starve. But I cannot sympathize. I might have been him. But I am not. I was not. I can understand the victims, but I cannot write a "balanced" history that treats those who lost their rights as being equally sympathetic as those that took others rights away. I was not in any of these places, but if I was, I would hope I would be sorry. I hope I would see the mistake I made and the destructiveness of my beliefs. I would want to change myself, my attitudes, my assumptions, what I consider useful knowledge. I have tried to admit to myself the shame and guilt of history because of its involvement in atrocities. Perhaps I too was a guilty one, who decided to change his mind, and to cease to think as once he thought, because he knew that thinking this way harmed others.

Since my primary subject is the terror that systems of knowledge and power have imposed on us since Columbus, or somewhat before Columbus, it might be thought that this is another conspiracy theory. Actually, the English language has not developed the means to deal with the subtlety of distinguishing between legitimate fear and the paranoid fears of the powerful. Before the French Revolution terror was something the King visited on his own people. God was the ultimate symbol of the terror of the state. After the Terror of the Revolution, terrorists became those who revolted against unjust powers. Conspiracies were always seen as coming from below.

For those who wish to protect their power, responsible intellectuals are those who justify their tyranny, whereas anti-intellectuals are those who resist power and criticize the obvious injustices that flows from the policies of the elite, The latter are branded as conspiracy theorists, even when their reporting of injustices is accurate. It all depends on how one is situated relatively to those who have real power. The fact that terms like 'paranoid', 'intellectuals' or 'terrorist' are interchangeable and can be used to describe completely opposite individuals, values and realities, indicates the terms are meaningless and hide a struggle for control of knowledge and power. For Stalin, intellectuals were those that justified his Marxist regime. whereas dissidents, or paranoid, anti-intellectuals, were those that questioned it. The latter were usually killed or imprisoned as mental cases. In the U.S. orbit of influence, intellectuals are those who support liberal free market capitalism, for the most part, or they are renegade dissidents who must be marginalized in the U.S., as Chomsky and Feyerabend have been, or killed in U.S. client states like Columbia, Brazil or El Salvador. In all these cases the paranoid and the intellectual is defined by his or her relation to empire, be it in opposition or complicity.

The historian Richard Hofstadter was speaking of the ultra right McCarthyites of the 1950's when he spoke of the "paranoid" style in American Politics. [4] But actually the McCarthyites were only the surface of a much more dangerous paranoia in government and business elites, that, during and after the Truman years, promoted the Cold War and consolidated the National Security state, broke unions, resisted Civil rights, and anti-Vietnam war protests, undermined the UN, took over the media and threatened the entire world with nuclear destruction on more than one occaison. The real terrorists, propagandists, anti-intellectuals and paranoids were in Washington and the boardrooms of Big Business. The government-big business-military alliance, was truly paranoid, and continues to hurt, kill or force the suffering of people around the world.

Little distinction is made in the use of the word "paranoia" , concerning who is afraid of whom and for what reason.[5] Richard Nixon is a good example of the paranoid defensiveness of the powerful. Nixon oversaw the illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war, which killed some 600,000 people and threw Cambodia into a political chaos which resulted in at least another million deaths, yet Nixon saw himself as a victim. The tendency of those with enormous power to see themselves as victims is not new in history. Emperor Constantine, saw himself as a victim. Hitler, like Napoleon, saw himself as a victim, as did Stalin, who did a drawing of himself as a sheep surrounded by wolves. There is quite a long list of similar 'great men' in history who were prone to varying degrees of righteous and ruthless paranoia.; Augustine, William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carnegie, Robespierre, Khomeini and many others. [6] It is difficult to determine in all these cases, as well other cases like George Bush or Winston Churchill, whether it was the abstract power provided by states or a personal need to destroy others in the interests of this power that is the predominant factor in their paranoid delusions of granduer and their need to vent their rage on innocent victims.[7]

Blaming the victim is common the most regimes of knowledge/power. Rather than face its own iniquity, power blames its victims and projects of them what it is. The responsibility that is avoided and denied at the top is projected onto those who resist. Those who question the power of the powerful must be villified and if necessary, destroyed. The real victims of powerful interests, or those who speak for real victims, are branded as conspiracy mongers, terrorists and paranoid dissidents. Charlie Chaplin was thrown out of the U.S. for his politics of sympathy with the poor: Pablo Neruda was not allowed entrance the U.S. for the same reason. Martin Luther King was branded as a dangerous subversive by the FBI and hounded by a very paranoid J.Edgar Hoover, who launched against King one of the biggest surveillance efforts in U.S. history. Probably killed by the FBI, King, with tragic and bitter irony, was suspected of conspiracy. Actually in the last two years of his life, he came to espouse the view that the race problem in the US could not be solved except by a redistribution of wealth. Since the wealthy are the powerful in the US, King had to be eliminated.

The paranoia of those in power, who suspect on some level, rightly, that their power is illegitimate, criminal or unjust, must go to great pains to discredit or eliminate their critics. The paranoia of the powerful should not be confused with the fears, often justified, of the weak and powerless struggling to maintain their rights when these rights are regularly infringed. Activists like Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Haywood and the I.W.W.: poets like Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg, author of "Howl", or writers like Chomsky, Zinn and Said, are not paranoid conspiracy theorists, but, in differing degrees, advocates of human rights against a system that undermines civil and human rights to maximize power, profit and inequality.

The prevalence of paranoia in political and aesthetic expression in the 20th century appears to be an outgrowth of both the terroristic nature of many systems of knowledge/power in the 20th century as well as the prevalence of victims of such systems. While not denying the physiological aspects of mental illness, the psychologist Thomas Sass speculates that the prevalence of schizophrenic imagery in modern art, as in the work of the surrealists, Dadaists, Kafka, Artaud, Beckett, Rimbaud, Duchamp, Pynchon, Neruda and many others, may be a cultural response to the enormous physical and psychological threats imposed by the technocratic, political and economic powers that largely rule the 20th century world. Terror has psychological effects. Mass terror has cultural effects, and in the twentieth century these effects are present in the dislocated, absurd, surreal or angry cry of oppressed humanities. While this thesis cannot be proven, it carries a certain intuitive truth.[8]

If it is paranoid to distrust those who speak rationally of the fiction of 'corporate persons', or to fear those who put profit before people, hierarchy before human rights, or mental abstractions before human bodies, I am paranoid. I am angry and I am afraid. There is ample reason to be. To pretend to the ritual, quasi-religious calm of disinterested scholarship would be a lie and an hypocrisy. I am trying, in this book, to take a stand against the hidden injustices that knowledge creates. I will look to neither gods, science or regimes of knowledge as my candle to light the way. But rather to look to human rights as a standard, and to look out at history from my own heart, at all the ways the of the world that surrounds it. There are 5 billion people in the world, all of whom are my equal in terms of human rights. History is nothing without human rights: it is merely an excuse for murder. But if human equality is assumed and attained, history opens up to everything and everyone.

History has become like a city of conflicting belief systems, divided and contending over a territory that belongs to none of them. History belongs to no one and to all of us in our fragility, not to our will to power or knowledge over others. Historians erroneously suppose that their "discipline" has coherence, when in fact they usually mistake the coherence of history with the coherence of cliques in history departments, political ideologies, Marxist, capitalist, economic or social science categories or the tacit norms and standards of the larger society. This is merely the mentality of a bureaucracy or a Guild of cultural managers. In the history departments that I have attended, at three different colleges, one can find different, even opposable views on the same subject. The opposable views are all taught with the same certitude, and often with the same self-important belief that it is the "truth" that is being conveyed. I am not proclaiming the "truth" here. I am trying to understand, in a personal way, what history is and has been. I am not pretending, as most historians do, that I am an expert or a scientist who is merely reporting evidence and facts in a disinterested manner. I am writing in a personal and passionate way about the history I have learned, and selecting out those facts that seem to me important. Those who wish to are free to reject it, criticize me, or stop reading what I have to say.

I am seeking patterns, correspondences, analogies in a comparative history of knowledge and power and atrocities. I do not consider the chronological development particularly important, though I have maintained a rough chronology. Looking at history for patterned meaning rather than a chronology of events involves changing perspective in considering different times and cultural areas at the same time as one seeks out unifying factors. I am exploring the contested ground of the mythic terrain which we call history. I am looking for a way out of these myths and the mythic morass they have created.

This is not properly or strictly a relativistic approach.[9] Relativism, properly so called, makes no assumptions, but accepts all points of view as equally valid- "anything goes". A relativism as extreme as this easily becomes another Machiavellian tyranny. I am only assuming one principle, and that is the necessity of ethics in history, of natural and human rights. I am not advocating the sort of relativism that assumes that history is ultimately relative to the technical apparatus of doing history: the rules of evidence, procedure, research, logic and argument. These are the techniques of a guild, and though important in some respects, they tend to be erected into the ultimate criteria of historians, to the neglect of ethics and content. Ethics and content are more important than technical apparatus, however sophisticated. I will be assessing history and regimes of knowledge/power relative to the ethic of human rights, not the technical rules of historians, though I will try to observe the latter. I agree with Jesse Jackson who speaks of the need of trying to tell truth to power. But I am not claiming the "Truth" in this effort. I an only claiming to write a different version or scenario of history, and asserting that history, in many respects, though not entirely, is relative. But I am not advocating a total relativism, but rather a qualified one: it is qualified by the need of human rights, in all cultural, political and economic contexts.

My concern is the study of belief systems and their relation to atrocities. I dwell particularly on horrible events in the past because I hope to raise questions about the direction and mentalities of the present. Our too often glorified and self congratulatory civilization hides behind its highest aspirations and most transcendent purposes. I believe there is a causal relation between the highest metaphysical, philosophical, scientific and political beliefs and systems and atrocities. The concrete reality of the corpses left behind in atrocities bring the sublime aspirations of the 'great' geniuses, culture heroes, statesmen, prophets and scientists into question. This book seeks to demonstrate this.

I will be exploring the comparative meaning of diverse histories, but simultaneously, I will inquire into the meaning of history itself. This is not an exercise in philosophy, as a few of my advisors have maintained, but rather an effort to think about history from the point of view of the present. A justification for writing from the point of view of current concerns about human rights can be found in John Dewey, who said that " the fact of selection is acknowledged to be primary and basic...all history is necessarily written from the standpoint of the present, and is, in an inescapable sense, the history not only of the present but of that which is contemporaneously judged to be important in the present." [10] To this could be added Zinn's justification for writing history about the neglected, dispossessed and resistant. "The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction- so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements- that we need some counter force to avoid being crushed into

I will not hypocritically pretend to disinterested scholarship. I have chosen an interest. I choose a path against power and against knowledge systems that support creating profits at the expense of human suffering, that create fear, exercise mind control, intimidate, lie and murder people. I agree with Tvetlan Todorov, who, in his book, The Conquest of America, writes a dedication to a "Mayan woman devoured by dogs", since the Spaniards used killer dogs to murder natives in villages. This dedication already indicates his concerns with the victims rather than the victimizers. He does not try to paint the misnamed 'discoverers" of America, as benign explorers, as they usually are in the Imperial myth, but shows the pursuit of scientific curiosity, in the case of Columbus and Cortez, to have been an adjunct, indeed, a central causal factor, in murder and exploitation. The pursuit of the 'empirical' and the pursuit of 'empire' are historically inseparable motivations. He observes that "for Cortez, the conquest of knowledge led to the conquest of power", and that this is unjust. And he asserts that if knowledge must be acquired, it ought to be "to resist power".[12] I agree with this. Knowledge is not independent of human beings. As soon as knowledge comes to be considered apart from people and their participation in nature and society, there is likely to be danger, harm and destruction. Todorov observes that unless knowledge is "accompanied by a full acknowledgment of the other as subject it risks being used for purposes of exploitation, or 'taking'; knowledge will be subordinated to power".[13] We are all related, no one is an object. "I am another" said Rimbaud, perhaps ironically. But I prefer to take this sentence literally: no one is apart from others. Wealth, power and knowledge create discrimination and impersonal detachments, the 'other' becomes merely an object of use- and these are elements essential to exploitation and atrocity.

I am trying to look at history as a participant, not as a detached observer. Todorov's concern, also like Lifton's, and as we shall see, like Zinn's is to look at history as a human being aware of his responsibility to other human beings. This takes priority over the concern for detached knowledge, wealth, fame, power, or position often pursued by academics, scientists, discoverers, inventors and other great men. Todorov says that his interest in writing the history of the Conquest is "less an historian's than a moralist's: the present is more important to me than the past". He says that he will write a history of the conquest without losing sight either of the common humanity of the victims of the Conquest, nor the ethical questions that arise from the historical facts. "I will be as true as possible to the story of the Conquest, but never lose sight of the...ethical meaning". [14]

It is interesting that Todorov sees history as a discipline divorced from ethics. He must announce his concern with ethics, because it is not considered part of the practice of disinterested historical inquiry. Graduate departments in history, as in every other "discipline", try to dictate a temper of mind, or a notion of method, procedure, professional excellence, rules of evidence, standards of writing, as well as political and social norms, however widely conflicting. No doubt all this is useful, even necessary, especially in a "discipline" as chaotic and embattled as history. Yet still one cannot fail to notice that in history departments, ego plays a large and even central role despite the rhetoric of neutral balance and disinterestedness, and that the medieval hierarchy of the university tends to exaggerate these conflicts into political battles, or to negate ethical concerns as irrelevant to disinterested inquiry.. The battle is political and concerns the effort to control and dictate the cultural mind or cultural memory and the mythologies that support it. But little question arises as to what right anyone has to control the cultural mind, or why the mind, or the amoral intellect, as opposed to an ethics of democracy, diversity and human rights, should be given priority and ascendancy as the cultural values most esteemed. The society that surrounds the ivory tower where these battles occur is moreover deeply entrenched in preserving the history that flatters the upper classes and the intellectual elites that serve them: yet at the same time the violence that the elites regularly visit upon the less fortunate cannot fail to be noticed by at least a few. Some brave souls, like Lifton, Todorov, Zinn, Said, Stannard and others actually try to tell these stories. But since the university is a microcosm of the knowledge/ power systems that rule in the larger society outside the university, such voices have little effect, and are generally drowned in criticism or neglect.

I have been told by an historian that this book is "anti-intellectual" and by another that it is too much an "intellectual" history. For what it is worth I think it is neither. I am consciously opposing Platonism, neo-Platonism, Hegelianism, and other traditionalist or religious glorifications of the "Idea", all of which performed valuable service to imperial ideologies. [15] All the atrocities I will be considering were justified in the name of an ultimate idea, a god, science, truth, or civilization. But I am not thereby advocating for the Marxist, Cartesian, Darwinian or other materialism that reduces life to mechanisms with the human intellect overarching nature like a computer-god. "Hard Science' is also an Idea, or an ideal, that justifies killing while it seeks to rip back the veil to expose the universal mysteries. I do not believe reason or intellect or the archetypal "Idea" is superior to or supersedes human rights. I am trying to use reason in support of human rights, not in support of another tyranny of the intellect, an empire of reason or a scientific amoralism that allows itself total license without concern of ethical consequences. I should add that I do not speak either as a "social historian" or an "intellectual historian". The first seems to have a allergy against ideas which is dangerous in a period that is so prone to tacit ideology and the "manufacture of consent". The second merely serves to justify the history that conquerors write about themselves. It is the story of the winner's version of what happened, as Howard Zinn once put it.

Nor is my purpose to speak exclusively of the failure of Western forms of knowledge/power. I am also attempting forays into cross cultural analysis of multiple systems of knowledge/power. I am concerned with the interactions of systems of knowledge/power because atrocities tend to occur at the junctures and conflicts between different cultural systems. Nor do I mean to indict the West entirely. The fact is that the majority of major atrocities since 1492 have been of Western origin, even if they were committed by Chinese Maoists or Nationalist Japanese and Iranians. Marxism and nationalism are Western ideologies. But I am not denying other cultures committed atrocities also. I am asserting a common pattern among all these atrocities.

Human rights concerns are Western in some respects, at least in the formal enunciation of the idea, though other cultures have practiced benign forms of democratic human rights long before Westerners formalized the ideas. But human rights is not an "idea", It is a concrete reality the absence of which is readily discernible in Africa as well as China, the United States as well as Germany and Jamaica, Human rights does not respect nations, religions, ideas or ideologies: it belongs to everyone, yet no one can possess it, own it, or trade it against other people's disadvantage. It cannot be bought or sold, bargained against or used to justify anyone's power over others. It raises the low and brings down the high without harming the rights of either of them. It is as fragile and precious as life itself. The fragility of human life and human rights is a paradox that questions the power even of paradoxes. This, I hope, will become clearer as I proceed

This book ties together a number of personal pursuits. Having spent over ten years searching through religious communities, practices and ideas, I despaired of their being a 'spiritual' alternative answer there to the evident failure of Western thought and practice. Part of this book explores some of my findings and the reasons for this disillusionment. I also pursued philosophy, on my own, for many years. But what I have concluded is that philosophy, historically, has been primarily about attempts to formalize, serve or justify dominant powers. In the last 50 years it has been mostly about justifying science and its claim to cultural supremacy. If it is true that philosophy is an intellectual justification for the means to power, whether power is defined in capitalist, scientific, Marxist or religious terms, then this book is not philosophical. I still have some respect for the art and poetry worlds, or at least that part of them that are divorced from market interests, because art and poetry are democratic, and teach people to accept the humanness of others.

This paper partly originated in a question one of my professors, Jeff Stewart, asked- "what are the causes of the European conquest of the world?". Jim Borchert also contributed to it when he asked "what were the primary causes of the slavery?". The 'personal is political' and I see no reason why a Master's thesis or a book should not define its actual context. My intention is not nihilistic as one of my Professors implied. My primary concern is human rights and democracy, and it is from this point of view that I critique knowledge and power. My critique is constructive, not destructive. Since the University I attend is a "top-down" hierarchy, it is inevitable that it too should fall in the parameters of my critique.

What I am trying to do in this book is fairly simple: I am trying to understand why atrocities happen and what part knowledge and power played in them. I have deduced something of a theory of why atrocities happen, though I do not use the word theory here in the formal scientific sense. I have no pretense to the god's-eye view that formal theories like Newton, Darwin or Einstein tried to adopt. I am a person writing a book about things that concern me in the world. I am not a dispenser of universal truths that can be replicated by machines, nor am I a god, looking down with false modesty from the "shoulders of giants", to paraphrase a famous, falsely modest, phrase of Newton's.. I am trying to look at history from the point of view of people who were killed, some of them by gods and others by sciences and theories. I am not trying to create a theory in this sense, but merely an understanding and a sympathy with the dead.

August !995 was the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. !997 is the 50th anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. These two events, in some respects, frame my thesis. My thesis is an investigation into the relationship of the pursuit of knowledge and power to atrocities that accompanied Euro-American expansion since Columbus. From the beginning of this inquiry I made one assumption, which is also my conclusion, and that is the incontestable importance of human rights in history. I can state this conclusion at the outset. What amazes me is how difficult it has been to justify writing about history from a consistently human rights perspective, as it were unheard of or 'bad history' to do so. I do not feel the need to prove the necessity of a system that upholds human rights against hierarchies and artificial systems of knowledge and power, since it seems self evident that it ought to be done. But complete proof has been demanded of me. I cannot give complete proof. History does not offer complete proof of anything. .But the histories I will be discussing, I believe, will offer ample proof. What I intend to show is that human rights transcends transcendence, transcends "Truth", "God", "History", Science" or any other abstraction that is put before the basic rights of people. The university system rests on a 'tradition' that goes back to greece and Medieval Christianity. I will be attempting to critique some of the Great Books and Great Ideas of the Western Canon, as well as offering a critique of some of the books and authors that have written on the Conquest or on subjects concerning systems of knowledge and power and how they have developed since 1492. It will be clear where I stand on these issues and which authors I sympathize with.

One of the largely unspoken canons or rules of history is that one is not 'to assume what one intends to prove'. But the strategic, falsely modest dissimulation of pretending one has no assumptions may work well for some. It is not appropriate here. I am not pretending to have gone into this inquiry blind, as if I had no assumptions. I have always felt alien and outside the society in which I was born, and I have sought out people who feel the same way for many years. I will not pretend I have not lived or thought about the world I live in. I assume that my own existence is worth something, and that the existence of others likewise has value. It is from this perception of my own value that I derive the value of human rights for others. This perception seems neither 'subjective' nor 'objective' to me. It is merely the fact of my life and the lives of others. I value these lives more than "truth". The basic assumption of this book is that life is worth more than "truth".

I do not believe that anyone goes into an extended study without assumptions. Darwin, for instance, claims in his Origin of the Species that he did not originally have any assumptions or preconceptions. "After five years work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject", he writes, as if he were merely a disinterested observer, letting the 'facts' lead him to the 'truth'.[16] But this is a ruse, or at least an astonishing demonstration of unconsciousness. Actually, Darwin's disinterestedness is a pose, and he was deeply influenced by the idea of Malthus and Adam Smith, as well as the belief that Britain and its science had been 'naturally selected' for empire and the subjugation of nature and other cultures. These preconceptions virtually dictated the facts he selected. I have no pretense to having a mind that is a Tabula Rasa: I am a human being with experiences and preconceptions. I believe human rights must have priority over all forms of power and all forms of knowledge.

Knowledge and power are seamlessly and inextricably related. To question one is to question the other. I wish to write a history from the point of view of those dead and victimized by atrocities. By considering systems and regimes of knowledge/power from the eyes of the suffering and the dead, I wish to express the hopes of one day reversing the economy of benefits and deprivations that result from systems of knowledge and power. I hope that one day a peaceful and unilateral application of basic human rights will deprive the elite of some of their power and benefits and redistribute benefits to those who are deprived. The core of belief in human rights from which I judge systems of knowledge and power derives from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and organizations such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace.

The continuation of atrocities throughout this century, committed by many governments, but especially those, like the US, that claim to observe a Bill of Rights, indicates the need for a much more complete enumeration and observance of Rights. The US Bill of Rights should be replaced by the Declaration of Human Rights, since the latter is much more complete and includes the former. My understanding and definition of human rights is derived above all from an understanding of suffering. But suffering comes in many forms. The Universal Declaration implies many, but not all of the kinds of suffering that result from the deprivation of rights.

The Declaration, which contains 30 articles, outlines the right to freedom, equality and dignity "without distinction of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status". It implicitly forbids the kind of economic discrimination and class elitism such as rules in America. Everyone has the right not to suffer from nationalistic prejudices against other nations, be these from war or trade. We have the right not to be tortured, degraded or treated inhumanly. We have the right to equality of protection before the law: a right severely abridged in the US and elsewhere. One has the right to remedy if ones rights are violated. No one is subject to arbitrary arrest. One has the right to be presumed innocent before the law. and to have "all the guarantees necessary for his defense. One has the right to privacy, freedom of movement, to any country: the right to asylum from persecution One has the "right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes the freedom to change his religion or belief". Everyone has the right to free expression, assembly and to vote. Everyone has the right to social security and the "economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for the free development of his personality". Everyone has the "right to work, to free choice of employment and to protection against unemployment". Everyone has the right to "equal pay for equal work": to a living wage "worthy of human dignity", to join unions, to reasonable working hours: a standard of living adequate to health. Everyone has the right to adequate food, housing and health care, as well as security to assist against disability, old age, sickness or other lack of livelihood. Mothers and children have the right to "special care and assistance". Everyone has the right to education. Everyone has the right to be free of coercion. [17] Everyone has the right to live, without abuse, exploited for others profit.

The purpose of human rights is to protect individuals. My critique of knowledge/power is concerned. as its positive correlate, ultimately with ordinary individuals, not corporate, religious, epistemological or political, institutions, fictions or mythologies. My concern is to critique those systems of knowledge which dispossess the discrete and ordinary individual, seeking to subsume him or her in an abstract system of beliefs. If I speak of some that are called "great" it is not because I consider them great I do not. Someone said that 'genius' is the inconsistency in the system. More often it is the inconsistency that justifies the system. A critique of genius, the great and powerful is necessary to limit their power.

The definition of power that I am using is that power is only outwardly a paradox: it sanctions a means of conferring benefits on some and punishments or deprivations on others and it does this through a system of knowledge and belief that dictate legitimate and illegitimate actions and behavior. [18]The benefits that accrue to those in power are obvious enough: the powerful have their power, the wealthy their wealth: the cleric his position and the scientist his fame and place in the consensus of scientists. A critique of power is therefore, necessarily, a critique of the knowledge system that supports it, and the limiting of power necessarily involves the restriction of benefits to those who claim to know, in view of diminishing the deprivations perpetrated against those who are excluded and considered illegitimate. This is not merely a matter of separating knowledge from power, but of questioning the motives and purpose of knowing. We must stop seeking 'pure' knowledge for its own sake, but rather knowledge for others or for the earth's sake. There must be a different path to knowledge, as Jeremy Rifkin has suggested " a path whose goal is to foresee how better to participate with rather than dominate nature"[19]

My definition of knowledge as inseparable from power is complex and problematical, and needs more research. But for the moment I can say a few tentative things. My concern is more about what knowledge does or has done in history than what it is. Knowledge is defined by what it does, in context, not what it claims to be. There are different forms of knowledge. What a society considers useful knowledge has been generally that which leads it to greater power. The virtual obsession, since Descartes, among Western philosophies with defining exactly what knowledge is, is concomitant with the drive for world power. The rise of philosophy has largely followed and encouraged the brutality of conquest. My concern is what knowledge has done, not what it is. But I believe that looking at what knowledge actually does, who uses it and why, tells us what it is. In other words, knowledge is part of a system and a continuum of consequences. Science has no independent or transcendent existence. It is thus quite possible to be opposed to or to favor some knowledges over others. Judging by consequences, science and its alliance and mutual development with state, economic and corporate powers has had more deleterious than positive effects on

human and nature's rights. Science need not be gotten rid of, but it certainly ought to be subsumed under human rights as defined by the Universal Declaration, and thereby brought into accord with truly democratic and environmental laws in order to protect unprotected beings. Men and women are not separate from what they know and think. Changing the world begins with changing how one thinks of it and how one knows it.

The question remains, having defined what I mean by the words knowledge and power, what I mean by the conjunction "knowledge/power". Though Foucault used this phrase, my conception of it is different than his, as it is different from Francis Bacon's conception of knowledge as power. I am not a Nietzschean, as Foucault was, and have no interest in justifying the will to power through knowledge. Nor am I opposed, as Foucault seems to have been, to some aspects of the Enlightenment, particularly the rise of humanistic concerns. My concern is to critique abstract conceptions, claims to permanent and eternal truth and by showing these in their historical context, to bring them into question. I am aware of the benefits systems of knowledge can create. I have lived in various religious climates, practiced various religions, been deeply involved in the culture of my times and have partaken of the benefits of science- benefits that I do not deny. The benefits are tirelessly repeated, everywhere. But the benefits carry with them horrendous human costs, and it is these that concern me.

Systems of knowledge/power operate on the basis of an economy of benefits and deprivations. Those who benefit from the system, be they Egyptian priests or Kings, aristocratic Catholic Cardinals or corporate managers depend upon giving benefits to their allies and the deprivation or punishment of enemies and others for their power. The system of knowledge, be it Egyptian religion, Christianity or international capitalism, justifies, legitimizes and helps enforce these sanctions of benefits and deprivations. The god concept or the idea of scientific neutrality are enabling mechanisms that license, reflect or justify the system of knowledge/power that they serve. The god concept, like the ideal of scientific neutrality, acts as a screen or filter through which benefits and deprivations are separated and distributed. The purpose of human rights is to reverse these systems and to restrict the benefits that flow to those at the top of a system of knowledge/power by protecting those who are punished by the system and alleviating the deprivations they suffer. This is why it is essential to question the god concept and the related and similar notion of scientific neutrality and objectivity, which I will be doing in subsequent pages. Throughout this book, I will be opposing a concept of basic human rights against systems of knowledge and power. I will explore how great ideas, religions and systems of belief and knowledge have contributed to atrocities. This is my thesis and intention.

I will be questioning systems of knowledge and how they exercise power. This means questioning religion as well. The god concept or its variations in the East, such as the Tao or Atma and Brahma, are formative attempts to create knowledge systems that justified enormous civilizational power and injustices that resulted from power. I have lived inside religious systems and am aware of what it means to be a believer. I have lived in a capitalist and scientific civilization all my life and know what it means to invest faith in these. I do not question systems of knowledge/power in order, like Ahab In Melville's Moby Dick, to destroy the White Whale. To believe this would be to misunderstand my intent. On the contrary loving or hating God or gods, or loving or hating Marxism or Scientific capitalism seems to me to be both false alternatives. The world is not a mirror that hides a better reality behind or beyond it: There is no transcendental realm of the gods, no perfect Marxian future, no American dream of suburban greed finally obtaining the wealth of Midas. These are transcendent aspirations, states of mind, poetic or religious mythologies which dictate practices and have effects. The scientific search for total explanation, metaphysical concepts and experiences of gods are projections of human purposes, motives and intentions onto the unknown.

Religious people say that Christ or Muhammed are not to blame for atrocities committed by Muslims or Christians just as scientists claim that they are not to blame for the destructive effects of scientific inquiry. But this separation of men and ideas or theories and applications is false. There are no pure ideas: no pure Christs, gods or scientific formulae. People should not be scapegoated for ideas, Ideas are not pure: they are created by people and serve their purposes. Ideas are events in the world like anything else. People and human rights come before ideas. Christ and science are created concepts which serve institutions. If these have created atrocities, and they have, then the fault lies as much with the ideas as with the men involved. People, beings and nature are more important than the most exalted ideology religion or science.

In denying the transcendental, I am not denying mysteries, rather I am questioning the uses that can be made of ideas and mysteries. The mystery is not a god. It is something ordinary, part of daily life- something different, and this difference suffices me. I have lived too close to nature and loved it too much in its specificity to need romantic attempts to abduct nature to justify high-flown metaphysics. I do not need, anymore, to turn nature or other humans into an excuse to glorify my religion or science. Einstein's 'mind of god' was largely a projection of his own need of total mathematical formulazations, and this need turned out to fit well with totalizing military and corporate interests. Like wise Emerson's "over-Soul" is a Platonic fantasy of an American Individualist who sought to recreate the world in the image of himself. I have no "Song of Myself" to sing like Whitman and do not admire Whitman's transcendentalist expansionism because I know aspects of it mirrors the Manifest Destiny doctrines that helped murder Indians. I love Whitman's love of individual Americans but not his love of America, nor his need to make a religion of himself as the embodiment of a national or universal ego. One should not make a god of anything, especially of god. People and beings come before concepts. If science creates the means to destroy the world than clearly science is blamable: if religions cause Inquisitions, help kill Indians and increase suffering than religions must be accounted. I question science and religion because I care about nature, people and the world. One must make a choice about what one believes and studies. Unjust societies do not happen by chance: they grow and result from ideas and implementations of ideas acting in unison. Choices are made and these choices are determined by how one believes and what one thinks.

It seems that all ultimate metaphysical formulations, from those of Christ, Lao Tzu and Muhammed, to those of Descartes, Newton and Einstein are attempts to impose a consciousness as a kind of final solution. The drive to grasp and impose a supremacy of knowledge as absolutely as possible levels, vanquishes and destroys by virtue of a transcendental impulse that seeks ultimate control, circumspection, exclusive rights the power to determine, limit and profit. The Catholic church claimed to possess the 'keys of life and death', salvation and damnation. Now science has supplanted the church and claims or aspires to possess the same keys in a more literal fashion, through genes, atoms, brain and computer circuits. A consciousness, imposed by a system of knowledge is paradoxical by its very nature. Knowledge gives power and power is ambiguous: it destroys while it creates, gives as it takes away. Once this paradox ceases to be seen as a mystery of unfathomable dimensions, knowledge can no longer be seen as separate from its effects. The tree is known by its fruit. The meaning of knowledge is how it expresses its power in practice. Ideas are no longer independent entities but active causal agents in history. One begins to see the outlines of how systems of knowledge/power can be deconstructed, criticized and demystified. This opens the possibility that human rights might become a concrete international reality, and not merely a hope.

The destructive effect of systems of knowledge/power can be known somewhat more clearly. If one knows that the Parmenidean or Platonic notion of the "One" would produce an unjust and totalitarian state or that Christianity added to the Roman totalistic bureaucracy an element of world conquering millennialism, then one can begin to see how Marxism and scientific/capitalism, in our world, have likewise produced atrocities. The atrocities are already implied in the formative ideas of the system of knowledge that helped create the social powers that generated the atrocities.

The coming millennial year 2000 has no spiritual meaning for me whatever. Far from wishing an end to the world I wish the year 2000 would bring an end to endism, an end to transcendental ambitions, and end to the totalizing and apocalyptic mentalities of the preceding centuries- an end to the will to power through knowledge. I do not believe in a new heaven and a new earth. I think St, John was an idealistic fanatic whose desperate poetry is a dangerous and repressive dream of unbridled violence committed in the name of love. This earth is enough for me, and it needs our care. A reversal of Columbus' dream of America as a New Jerusalem is dearly wished and would have many positive results. America's pretensions to primacy and excellence have created numerous atrocities all around the world. The year 2000 is not a turning point for me but rather a time to question apocalyptic thinking, belief systems, scientific and religious consciousness and the drive towards knowledge/power. I do not know anything about worlds beyond, gods and ultimate 'laws' of the universe, I know only that this earth and this sky need attention and care and all the more so because of the destructive effects of systems of knowledge and power.

Questioning the structures and hierarchies of knowledge means questioning the powers of the society one lives in and where it came from. History is not a science because life is more than knowledge and the problems and sufferings of the living require more imagination for their solution and alleviation than quantified analysis can supply. History is not a religion because absolutist truths and totalistic goals merely mythologize knowledge and power. Religion, history and science cannot answer the just accusations of those they victimize: gods or abstract systems do not have to answer their accusers nor can they participate as equal beings in a democracy.

History is an art and not a science, Though evidence is important and the need to be accurate essential, an empirical history does not exist and the desire to create one is one of the newest forms of knowledge/power. Science is the conqueror in today's world, and the effort to write a scientific, social or technological history is merely the newest story of conquerors.

History is about those that are dead, and in an age shorn of metaphysical certitudes, the dead have nothing to tell us about god: they speak of life and the right of human beings not to suffer as those in the past have suffered. I will be writing about atrocities, because these events bring suffering, deprivations and the inequalities of knowledge/power into unambiguous focus. They illuminate the hypocrisy of those who stand in hierarchies above us; who claim to have transcended us, who are beyond and above and living in the heaven or the 'pure land 'and 'pure science' of cultural abstractions. Human suffering, and thus the need of human rights and care, transcends god, transcends transcendence, and brings history itself into question. [20]The suffering of those of whom I shall be speaking transcends all the transcendent ideas, gods, great men, books, empires and sciences that there are or have been.

No one escapes human suffering. Even the business man must confront his own weakness, mortality and death. It is this universal and truly democratic nature of suffering that enables it to transcend all systems of transcendence and knowledge. Suffering levels all pretensions and brings into unambiguous focus what really matters in life. Life itself is what matters, the human right to live, love, care and be cared for, the right to be uncoerced, to health and work, to be a free, protected human being whose rights cannot be taken away. Suffering is irreducible and reveals the human condition and the need of alleviation of sufferings and hence the necessity of rights. Suffering is not symbolic of anything else. The Buddhists and the Christians tried to make suffering a symbol for their transcendent conceptions of salvation and nirvana. But suffering is not symbolic nor ultimately serviceable to ideological manipulations, or religious or transcendent efforts to use suffering as a basis to create institutional powers that use suffering for their advantage. Suffering can only be answered by addressing its causes concretely and literally, in terms of the violation of rights.

The gods have all but disappeared, and in their wake have come idealization, ideas; sciences, institutions, corporations, states and technologies; and these now, instead of gods, motivate actions and supply for men, and it is mostly men, the means to power through knowledge. The dying of the gods, still an ongoing process, does not alter the nature of power and knowledge fundamentally; it merely sublimates knowledge/power into new forms. This process and passage from gods to intelligences, consciousness and ideologies is an historical development. In the historical moments I will be considering, one can see the process whereby men create gods, regimes and technologies, out of themselves or their motives and ideas, and turn them against others in their relentless drive for total knowledge and power.

Symbol systems and belief systems are generated out of human needs and aspirations. What is believed in is not the important question. The important question is why it is believed. Why is there a need to believe in something? Belief, seen this way is nearly synonymous with desire. One creates and sustains beliefs out of need and compensatory drives. One must dismantle symbols and ideas into their motives and intentions. One does not want to suffer: therefor one believes or helps create and sustain the idea of an abstract and symbolic god who is merciful and comforting. One does not want to die, therefore one's god is immortal or one seeks fame and certain, total knowledge. One does not want to be betrayed by others, so god is the 'Loving Friend', the Beloved, the faithful. One does not want to be weak and ignorant so the god one creates and sustains, or the god one inherits is all knowing and all powerful. Or one adheres to an impersonal science which is adamantine in its mathematical crystalinity, and this acts as shield against the messy impermanence of human relations.. The desires that motivate abstract symbols systems can be altered, modified, negotiated or changed. The symbols and institutions that sustain them are less changeable and easily turn into hardened sources of injustice, repression and cold indifference. The eternal realm of ideas is imaginary, but cultures have invested this realm with reality, usually by force of violence. Those who do not accept the forced imposition of systems of belief tend to be harassed or killed. Believers in symbols systems tend to demonize those that question the source of their power. Knowledge systems and the power they provide to individuals distorts these individuals beyond their ordinarily human state, creating personages of them they could never have been by themselves. Knowledge systems magnify individuals through institutions and the institutions generate far more destruction than would have been possible for a single individual. The value of human rights is that it is individual, concrete and resists the tendency of belief systems to become hardened into abstractions and institutions that encourage and magnify the commission of injustices.

I will be thinking about patterns and pictures of knowledge, power and death: about Himmler with the Bhagavad Gita in his pocket, trying to suppress his squeamishness, as he watches women in the gas chambers being murdered: about Columbus with his eye on god and his own glory as his sword pierces the heart of an innocent Native American; about Oppenheimer realizing at the moment of the first atomic explosion that he has become like a Hindu god, many-armed and master of life and death: Von Neumann, who loved watching atomic explosions and who saw the computer and the atom bomb as extensions of his ego: about Philip II who used his image of Christ to justify murdering people of many races: about William Laurence, who saw the Figure of the Statue of Liberty in the Mushroom cloud that rose of Nagasaki, as the bodies of men, women and children were burning into jelly under skirts of the Lady Liberty. These pictures, grounded in historical facts, become a means to meditate on knowledge, power and social justice.

To read the images of history requires an undoing or unraveling of the abstract imagery of power and knowledge. History is a puzzle of the mind, an archeological dig into both the mind of the past and ourselves in the present. One is surrounded everywhere by unknowns, One organizes the unknowns and the knowns into patterns that one hopes will answer needs in the present. My concern is not to build new icons of knowledge and power, as both Marx and Foucault tried to do, but rather to de-transcendentalize history, if this phrase makes sense. Religious Icons are pictures of mythical powers; they are the advertising of traditional worlds. The image of the virgin Mary, for instance is perhaps the most pervasive of the advertising Icons of the Medieval Church. Icons, be they Christian, Tibetan or Hindu, picture an abstract world superior to this world, and they devalue this world.[21] Icons are supposed to be fiqurations of heavenly or divine witnesses that stare out at the viewer from a better world beyond: they are witnesses to the 'truth' of the knowledge that rules and denigrates the world of ordinary lives and beings.

The icon is a model of correct behavior, and acts as an emotional center or an ideological training device. It represents the theory of knowledge that governs the society. Tibetan Icons, painted on rocks. flags or paintings, for instance, functioned to explain to a mostly illiterate population a Buddhist system of beliefs, largely controlled by the Priests in the Potala in Llasa. The Icons thus served to justify, explain and teach the ideology of state control or to dictate a mentality and create and constellate emotion reactions, much as television and advertising support corporate control today through sit-coms and managed news.

To ask the question, implied by the above observations, of whether culture defines political economy or political economy defines culture is a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" sort of question. Knowledge defines power, but power also defines knowledge. Both culture/knowledge and political-economy/power are at play in weaving of civilizations. My concern here is not to create Icons but to use Innocent III, Columbus, Philip II, Newton, Darwin, Himmler, Oppenheimer, Von Neumann and Laurence and others as anti-Icons, that is, figures that question the legitimacy of knowledge system, not figures which reinforce them. My effort in this is not to create a new form of aniconism, but to question how we image the world and image it differently.

My concern is more modern; perhaps even anti-Taoist; having once painted Icons myself, I now seek to picture anti-icons. I will use images to try to deconstruct power and knowledge, not to support them. Icons picture the ideal worlds of legitimate knowledge/power, not the real world in which individuals actually live and suffer concretely. I thus seek to turn the aesthetic and epistemological justification of Iconography upside down. My intention is to use images of power and knowledge against themselves and to write history, in some respects, as an anti-historian, taking the side of the losers and the failures instead of the winners and the successful in history. I wish to show the causal relation between the highest cultural ideals of various civilizations and how these ideals led to atrocities.

Someone said. and I cannot remember who, that after Auschwitz, poetry or art is impossible. [22] I do not believe this statement is to be taken literally. The point is that somehow, after Auschwitz the fragile human heart is somehow broken, and cannot recover from the magnitude of the horror. The creative urge, even the urge to procreate, is diminished by such horrors. Life on earth itself, at the creative root, has been made doubtful, questionable and endangered. There is some truth to this. I can feel what is meant more than think it. Before Auschwitz, poetry and art served powers: after it, they must critique powers . While it is true that poetry cannot express the horror of it, poetry and art are the few remaining areas where democratic concerns can still be openly expressed. Poets in coffee shops and in the privacy of their rooms, and small activist groups or individuals all over the world speak of human concerns, loves, angers and rights, and this is the very stuff of democracy. A broken heart still lives on. Perhaps it is better said that after Auschwitz poetry, culture and history cannot be the same; they can no longer uncritically mythologize and justify the claims of the powerful, the wealthy and the 'masters of them' that claim to know. The heart is somehow broken considering the enormity of the inhumanity involved. But, at the same time, creativity and humanity in its simplest expressions is vastly more important than gods, great ideas, science or any of the formalized intellectual abstractions of the past. History, before Auschwitz, had it backwards. After Auschwitz, history is not merely turned upside down, as Marx wished it to be, but inside out. We are no longer the puppets of gods or histories.

If history cannot be the same after Auschwitz, it is even more true after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But history largely does remain the same, because the Bomb remains the symbol of the power and glory of the beneficence of the American Empire, and many of those in governmental, military, corporate and University institutions who live and profit from the system whose ultimate protective symbol is the bomb, resist the reappraisal of history that is needed. Most histories are still telling the false stories of the conquerors. Most histories are still hiding behind the supposed "facts", behind academic procedure and the godlike pose of the disinterested observer.

The tradition of writing Masters or Doctorate theses is that one is supposed to achieve a definitive conclusion of study, a kind of Platonic, timeless, balanced statement of mastery of a dominion of knowledge. Mastery of history has tended to ally itself with the masters of society. I am not attempting to enunciate timeless, universal truth, or claiming to be a "Master" or "Doctor". I have no interest in being elected to these heirarchies. It would be contrary to questioning systems of knowledge and power, which is my primary intent. I returned to college and sank myself into study of systems of knowledge in depth, not in order to climb the medieval ladder or the archiac university system. I was not seeking power, but understanding of the wounds the world has made me and others suffer. My subject is atrocity, and I am angry about atrocity, desperate about how systems of power operate to exploit and harm the poor and the weak and I am looking for solutions to prevent further atrocities. I am a human being who wants to talk about the human rights that I ought to have and others ought to have. I will not create a religion of history, or suppose I am an expert who deserves special rights and privileges. My experience of the university system is that it is not an answer or a means to anything: it is a problem. History is a problem. I seek to give back the dilemmas and problematic uncertainties that the university and history have given me. For a time I have entered the university system as an alien and outsider. Still an outsider at the conclusion of this study, I wish to return to the dragon some of its own teeth and scales, hoping I have weakened its strength ever so slightly. Even though few are likely to read this, I have tried to question the justice and goodness of our systems of knowledge and education, in the hopes that one day, no doubt far distant, learning might serve human rights rather than knowledge and power.

I have tried to burrow beneath conventional history and reach down into the loss and the grief of the unjustly dead. It is their suffering that concerns me. The historical profession does not concern me, nor is my intention to create a career for myself.. The interpretation of "facts" in history tends to become a creation of a mythology and in some cases a theology. I wish to question the assumptions not only of historians, but of history itself. Perhaps it will be said I am judging too harshly, but not if one considers that millions of people are dead and still suffering because of systems of knowledge/power, and the abstractions that these systems use to justify themselves, like the Christ symbol, the abstractions of 'Science", 'God', or 'History', are still being used to anesthetize the imagination. People become complacent because of these abstractions. A major function of the Ivory Tower seems to be to protect thinkers and researchers from having to concern themselves with reality. But one of the primary purposes of the ethical fiction of disinterestedness is to insulate researchers from awareness that the university is a microcosm of the society around it, and injustices of the society around the university implicate the university in complicity.

Judy Chicago, in her series of paintings called the Holocaust Project, expresses the threat of disinterested complacency very well in a painting of a suburban couple in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sitting complacently on their lawn chairs, enjoying the leisure of the American Dream, sipping drinks, while inside a mountain behind their house, are stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons, some of them ready to be fired. There is such a stockpile in Albuquerque, in fact. What Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil" lives on in the suburbs and the universities of the richest nation in the world.

After Nagasaki, history cannot be the same because the history of those in power threaten all history and all life with their weapons and their knowledge. Once the end of history became a realistic prospect, after Hiroshima, all histories that heretofore envisioned an end to history become questionable, even urgently to be doubted. Descartes; cult of doubt became doubtful. Christians thought history would end in Christ's glory: Nietzsche thought it would end in Eternal Recurrence: Marx in a utopia, and Francis Fukuyama in the splendor and perfection of American capitalism. But these now seem merely the symbolic delusions of intellectual empires, as vain as have been the historical empires. It is apocalyptic histories that end in Nagasaki. Ends to history come to an end. Historical purposes all come into doubt and the great One Volume History of the World envisioned by partisans of total knowledge is a book with no binding and the pages are scattered into the most obscure areas of the earth.

After Nagasaki, the history of those who control the apparatus of power and knowledge can no longer be trusted. The myths can no longer be trusted as true and the heroes no longer admired as models one might emulate. After Nagasaki, history in any official or professional sense is suspect, to be doubted. After Nagasaki, history ceases to be knowledge and becomes a question that grows out of a wound. It seems to me that as elite global control spreads, and local history, traditions and cultural values become increasingly irrelevant, the questioning wound that is history will grow. The deeper question is how to heal the wound of history and make people's lives more easily livable.

This paper is primarily about the meaning of history in relation to knowledge/power, Columbus, Cortez, Conquest, the slave trade, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I believe that it is impossible to understand Hiroshima, or the recent, largely ignored, atrocities in Rwanda, without a fundamental questioning of the growth of Euro-American Imperialism. Hiroshima is an apocalyptic event; which is to say that it need not have occurred, but had to occur because of the inherent logic of the apocalyptic idea itself, which is part of a very old system of beliefs that was falsely assumed to be righteous. Hiroshima is apocalyptic not in the religious sense but in the sense that the very idea of apocalypse, the idea of righteous destruction, contributed to it. Nagasaki brings all apocalypse into question. Questioning Hiroshima means questioning "history" and questioning history means questioning the European Invasion and the forces and ideas that created it. Questioning Hiroshima thus means questioning the Platonicly enshrined dogma of the righteous beneficence of Western Civilization- the 'great books" and 'great ideas", that nourished the growth of its power and knowledge. And since both the Conquest of the Americas, the European expansion and the resulting atrocities were accompanied by the rise of the University. it is necessary to question the ethic of disinterested, "pure" knowledge and the university system. The atom bomb, after all, was largely the brain child of academics. The idea that the academic environment is somehow separate from the real world, and knowledge and culture are somehow immune from entanglements with power and injustice is a convenient fiction that needs to be cast aside.

Hiroshima begins in 1492 or even earlier, not 1945. It is the history of those who suffered under the long term Imperial system of apocalyptic knowledge and power that concerns me. There is a fundamental relation between the dead of Hiroshima, the dead killed by the English in Bengal: the dead in the Potosi mines of Bolivia; the dead at Sand Creek killed by the U.S. Army or those killed in Black Kettle's camp by Custer and his men: the dead of the Inquisition and the 4 million Vietnamese dead, killed by the United States. Custer killed for the "march of history", just as Nixon ordered Vietnamese and Cambodians murdered to save Vietnam for freedom and history. Those who were killed are among the mute advocates of human rights democracy, which is that democracy which is nearly everywhere suppressed. The story of those who were victimized by the Conquest is slowly being pieced together, insofar as this is possible, given the loss of evidence available after 1492, largely destroyed by the Europeans, since they rarely considered recording the reaction of their victims. Just as today the reaction of the victims in Vietnam, Iraq or Panama are largely ignored.

It would seem to be time to envision the end of all these ends to history. There is no end to history because there is no ultimate meaning to it. People mean something; history does not. Even this history means little or nothing unless it somehow unravels itself in the mind or heart of the reader, undoing its own pretensions in a hope of ending the oppressiveness of knowledge and power. I do not seek to create another form of knowledge/power. It is those who suffer from regimes of knowledge and power, or from the historically determined ideologies that ride rough shod over the innocent that originally drew me to history. History, for me, paradoxically, has become the story of those who have suffered from History.

In an age where the entire world has now been colonized and neocolonized, there is a need to colonize the colonizers. In an age where science is everywhere triumphant, there is a need to investigate the investigators, inquire of the inquisitors, scientifically study science and the scientists. To apply the techniques and strategies of historians against the powers of history is a needed task. The police need to be policed and the Judges should be judged, the legislators legislated and the presidents presided over by ordinary people. Canons should be erected against the canonists. The accepted categories should be reversed against their creators, the creators should be judged by their creations, ideas judged by their consequences, history told by those left out of history and a mirror held up to the face of tyranny and terror to show how ugly is the supremacy of knowledge and power.

I have sometimes longed to walk far outside the vanity of history, and away from the egos of historians, not because one wishes history would vanish, but because one longs for relief for the troubled, justice for the deprived, and human rights for those whose rights are infringed to preserve a superabundance of rights for those who have too much. Human life is not history, any more than the map is the territory or the congress is the 'people'. These disciplines and abstractions are inherently alienating, and make of life a jungle of symbols and representations that hide human impluse, longing and suffering behind words, images, numbers, bureaucracies and traditions.. Millions have died because of systems of knowledge, abstractions and organized beliefs. One cannot presume to speak for all those who have suffered, but one can share the longings and wish for a history that talks the language of the invisible, not a religious language, but one that treats the dead or those who are effectively the living dead with the respect that the living deserve but rarely get. Social invisibility results from systems of knowledge/power, which alienate, exclude or kill ordinary people, and we are all ordinary despite the artificial categories of knowledge, class, education, religion, or race which are used to discriminate against the ordinary.

I have a point of view: however this may break the unwritten historians code that one is not to take a point of view. My point of view is an impossible one; I side with the with the invisible witnesses who were never allowed to live long enough to say what they saw; or who were ignored if they spoke. I want to write history from the eyes of the dead, to speak out of their silent fears and the forgotten pain of their losses. But to take the point of view of invisible witnesses of atrocities and mute advocates of human rights requires some degree of identification with the terror they must have felt for their murderers. I understand something of this terror: how it freezes the heart and shocks the body and leaves one dull and staring incomprehensibly, trying to grasp the unspeakable cruelty of men with power. So my story is largely the story of the powerful and the murderers. It is an analysis of the belief systems by which the powerful and the murderers sustained their high opinion of themselves. I do not share the high opinion that the powerful have of themselves. I am trying to look at history from out of the graves of old people, women, men and children that never saw a funeral--from out of the mass graves where Reagan left dead bodies in Honduras, where Nixon left corpses in the jungles of Vietnam, where Truman and Oppenheimer left whole cites of the dead, where the Mayans cast corpses down from pyramids, where the US army sent diseased blankets into Mandan villages. Ideally, I would like those who read this book to smell the dead as I have smelled them, and to love those who were murdered and to regret their involvement in a culture that ignores these things and to change their minds.

The excluded, the suffering and the unjustly dead are the measure and conscience of the included, the well-off, the socially accepted and the powerful. The invisible at the bottom of the system, paradoxically, bring into question the invisible ideology that justifies those at the top of the system. My purpose in analyzing systems of knowledge/power ultimately is to bring the arrogance of those who claim to know, face to face with the terror of knowledge that their victims have suffered: to call forth the nightmares that power creates and turn these images of terror back upon their creators, that they might see what they have wrought and regret the transcendent dream of knowledge and glory that motivated them- this is a history I can only fearfully imagine, and one that I can only more fearfully try to convey.

[1] See Buber-Neumann, Margarete, Milena, the Story of a Remarkable Friendship New York Seaver Books, 1977

[2] Silko, Leslie Marmon. In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry New York: W.W. Norton pg. 1646-1647 See also her novel Ceremony, where this poem appears in context, pg. 132-138

[3] Leslie Marmon Sillko Ceremony New York, Penquin Books 1977. pg. 246

[4]The current "culture wars," are largely the result of power struggles over who will control the mind of the culture and who will profit from this control. The "war" is waged primarily by those who already possess the power and domain of the territorial intellect. The war is a war against democracy and human rights in the institutions of 'higher' learning. Equality cannot be allowed in any serious measure. The hierarchy of the university itself militates against any real and equal multiculturalism.

An interesting aspect of this battle is the concern over defining the role of the intellectual. Arguments about the nature and function of the intellect or the intellectual have been especially intense in the 'discipline' of history because history is largely the story of the powerful; much of history is a system of apologetics for aspects of the knowledge system that maintains the powerful. Richard Hofstadter, for instance