The March of Commerce" and Manifest Destiny

             Theodore Roosevelt believed in much the same philosophy as Locke and the writer's of the American Constitution, such as Jefferson, who followed Locke. Enclosing land meant exploiting labor or killing Indians, both of which were thought the "right" of property owners.  Property rights were given precedence over human rights, making property and profits of greater worth than human beings. Jefferson wanted to exterminate the Indians, and referred to them in the Declaration of Independence as "merciless Indian savages". [1] Independence was not for them. Native Americans would not even get the right to vote in the US until 1924.  Those that were here first, 30,000 years before the Europeans were the last to be called 'citizens'.

            The "New World" for the Native Americans, was not Cathay or a flowery paradise, but death, disease, dispossession, disfranchisement, exile, and genocide, in the cases of some of the tribes. T. Roosevelt said that "I don't go so far as to say that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth".[2] During the late 19th century the U.S. Government sold for minimal prices 100 million acres of land to corporations and  granted outright, for free, 128 million to railroads, an area greater than the size of Texas. Much of this land was Indian land that the government has signed treaties to honor as Indian land. The treaties were betrayed.  Huge additional tracts were given to states, who sold them at a profit.[3] Murdering Indians was the key to enclosing land, and enclosing land was about enriching the already wealthy. The building of the Railroad was considered by the partisans of Manifest Destiny, at the time, the "Grandest Enterprise under God". [4] But little is said about it being government policy to use taxpayers money to enrich railroad tycoons and simultaneously use the railroad as an excuse to invade Native American lands and kill some 50 million Buffalo on which they depended. General Philip Sheridan, after whom a city in Wyoming is named, (which is rather like naming a German city after Goebbells or Goring) wrote: 

[the buffalo hunters] have done more in the past two years....to settle the vexed indian question than the entire regular army has done in the past thirty years. They have destroyed the Indians commisary.....let them kill skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your praries can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowbay, who follows the hunter as the     second forerunner of an advanced civilization.[5]

             There are photos of buffalo bones piled fifty feet high, proud merchants standing on the bones looking little different than the Nazi officers standing over corpses at Auschwitz. The same self satisfied indifference to the death of others  can be seen in these photographs.The same cold hearted inhumanity that inspired the Nazi exterminators inspired the merchants, military and government offials that sought to kill off the buffalo and the Indian.

             In the "march of commerce and civilization", the railroad was an important weapon by which Indians were driven from their land. In pursuit of empire and glory, gun powder, which blew holes in mountains so the trains could pass was called the "artillery of heaven".  Chinese workers were used virtually as slaves. For power and knowledge and Manifest Destiny progress ransacked the landscape, killed off the animals, wasted the forests, removed the Native Americans, exploited Chinese, African American and Irish labor to move towards a better world for the rich. Westward the March of Progress and Empire takes its bloody and inhuman toll. Adam Smith rightly called this tendency the "savage injustice of the Europeans".[6]

             Tacitly, behind Locke's writing, the image from the Bible of man, who must be fruitful and multiply and is given by god to dominate all the things of the earth, looms large. The Absolutism of the Kings of the 17th century ends up becoming the right to invest in the slave trade, as Locke did; the right to relentlessly harass and murder the Native Americans in the pursuit of money and salvation. Locke also invested in the Carolina colony, which was founded mostly by former slave traders. For Locke, Native Americans exist for the labor of free men, like himself, so that free Englishmen can become rich at their expense. As to the poor in England, Locke recommends that they begin in the workhouses at age three, perhaps hoping like Scrooge in the Dickens story to "decrease the surplus population". And this is the man that is supposed to be the 'intellectual grandfather' of the American republic, of Jefferson, Madison and the Constitution. Perhaps he is. The new world became for Locke, as it had become for Philip II, a source of self-glorification, a way to power and wealth. And this wealth and glory was seized, as Innocent III and his men seized wealth and glory from the Provence, and Columbus had seized it from the Taino, at the expense of men's blood and lives.

            The Lockean philosophy of property has some things in common with both Marxism and Nazi ideologies. It should be observed that the Lockean ideology of the "labor theory of value", which is also enunciated by Marx, is basically the idea that land, nature or things only derive value through the expense of human labor upon it. This idea is essential to the idea of freedom, at least as understood by Locke and Marx. But it ought also to be recalled that this conception of freedom was also implemented at Auschwitz, over the gates of which, as the artist Judy Chicago has pointed out in one of her paintings for the Holocaust Project, it read, "Work Makes You Free". Chicago changes this to read, with dark irony, "Work Makes Who Free?".  The work of slaves, the poor and, peasants and lower classes made the upper classes or the commissars free. The Lockean vision depended on slavery to enrich and liberate the class of English Plantation owners, just as Himmler's vision of the Third Reich depended on the work of  exploited labor inside and outside the Camps. The corporate officers of I.G. Farben and American investors in the Third Reich were made free, at the expense of many millions in poverty and death.

             As Henry David Thoreau has sagely pointed out, "I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business". [7]  This insight of Thoreau's is important, and, I think, in need of some explanation. Business is opposed to life, because it puts profit before life and property before rights. Most crimes, petty thefts, crimes of passion and the like, are usually the result of poverty, duress, and inequities. The crimes of the poor, particularly, since the crimes of the rich are rarely punished or even thought of as crimes, are humanly understandable, even if morally wrong. But the crimes of business go virtually unmentioned and unpunished. Since 1600 more animal and plants have been forced into extinction by the greed and rapaciousness of European businessmen and empire builders than may have gone extinct during the great extinction of the dinosaurs. these environmental disasters, which are ongoing and current, are the result of the capitalist, Marxist and scientific mentalities. The same forces that created the major atrocities of the last 500 years also created the environmental holocausts all over the earth.

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