
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 9, 1995                   TAG: 9511090009
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PHILIP BRADFORD
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AMERICA FORGETS ITS OWN ATROCITIES

WITH MUCH talk these days of genocide and ethnic cleansing, of displaced persons and denial of human rights, many of us propose engaging our armed forces to put an end to these atrocities.

What thinking American doesn't abhor aggression, provocation and racial subjugation practiced by foreign tyrannies on their own people? We're so quick to maintain that ours is a nation of justice and liberty, that we're the bastion of "human rights,'' and that the acts of Hitler and Saddam Hussein are totally alien from our culture.

But are they? And what gives us the moral right to intervene outside our borders?

Certainly not our pride in the glittering generalities of "truth, justice and the American way," and certainly not on the example of our rich history. Americans should think twice before pointing fingers to every seemingly unwarranted act of a foreign power. There are many instances from our own history that would preclude such hypocrisy on our part. It would be best for us not to cry in outrage over the mistreatment of others until we have a sound knowledge of our own treatment of Native Americans during the 1800s.

Over a 10-year period, 70,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes, then relocated in what was then thought a wasteland fit only for subject peoples. But these weren't Cechnyans in Russia. They were Choctaw and Cherokee, among others in the Five Civilized Tribes of the American Indians. Their destination wasn't Siberia but its American equivalent in the 1830s, Oklahoma. This program of forced expulsion didn't originate in the office of some rogue Army general, and it was certainly too vast to be engineered by a vigilante gang. It was an act of Congress, the original bill put forth by President Andrew Jackson.

At the height of a civil war where a nation's survival was at stake, its government could still afford to send forces into its vast Western provinces to exterminate those of another race. In one instance, a mounted legion assaulted a camp of "savages,'' whose leader flew the ensign of his attackers over his domicile. By day's end, rifle and artillery fire had claimed more than 300, mostly women and children. The attacking commander suffered only slight casualties. But this didn't happen in Bosnia, and the attackers weren't Serbs on an ethnic-cleansing spree. This was Colorado in 1864. The massacre of Sand Creek rarely finds it way into history books.

Of course, these weren't isolated incidents in 19th-century America. When and if these acts are taught in our schools, are they put in terms of genocide, displaced persons, or loss of human rights? Was our Manifest Destiny, so cozily associated with westward expansion from sea to shining sea, merely an excuse for a white race to subjugate a colored one? I don't defend a foreign dictator's suppression of his people, but by reflecting on our own past, one can see that the hands of our government are also bloodstained. Those who rattle sabers over tyranny in foreign lands, by what right do they propose we intervene? None, unless they're among the descendants of survivors of our own holocaust.

Philip Bradford, of Roanoke, is studying electrical engineering at Virginia Western Community College.

by CNB