A Society Built for War
There is one small problem with this image of peace-loving Native American societies: it is completely untrue. Before the Spanish imposed peace on Amerindian tribes from California to Tierra del Fuego, the unrelenting reality of their lives was a Hobbesian war of all against all. (The parallel with Rome, which imposed a similar peace through violence on the Gauls and other tribal peoples of Western Europe, is striking in this regard.) Outside of a tiny area of city-states in Mesoamerica and the Andes, Native American societies were uniformly tribal chiefdoms.
Wherever in the world such city-states and chiefdoms have arisen, warfare has been a continuous part of life. As a rule, the majority of males in chiefdoms are trained in the art of war; in city-state areas, elite males train in war while the rest of the males participate in agriculture or crafts that support the warrior elite. There are very few general truths in the history of global civilization, but one of the most reliable is that in areas where rulers monopolize violence on a small scale, warfare, raiding, and slavery will be endemic. Steven Pinker calls this “the inescapable logic of anarchy.” Only modern-day first-world anarchists for whom war remains an abstraction—e.g., people such as Dave Graeber (whom we met in chapter 2)—would argue otherwise. General peace is only possible when strong rulers monopolize violence on a large scale; this is the only thing that has historically protected people from a near-continuous threat of localized raiding.
The prevalence of violence in tribal society was summarized in a recent interview with Korsai, one of the last Indigenous inhabitants of Papua New Guinea to give up his traditional ways of life. The interviewer noted that the village next to Korsai’s had been enticed by American missionaries to go and live in an apartment building in town. When asked whether he felt he was missing out on modern amenities by not going along with them, Korsai responded: ‘Not for long! Off our neighbours went, and we were left alone on the mountain. And we loved the missionaries—because they’d taken those neighbours away! We didn’t need to worry about being attacked anymore. Also, we didn’t have to get up in the night to attack them!’ Now the Yaifo women could go off to tend the gardens without fear; the gardens were expanded and no one ever went hungry; health dramatically improved.73 The same dynamic of continuous raiding, fear, and want framed the earliest experience of the ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, who was born and raised in Benin during the eighteenth century.
Among his first memories was the time when he and his sister were kidnapped from his village by neighboring tribespeople and sold to a distant chieftain. Equiano describes the situation as follows: My father, besides many slaves, had a numerous family…. I was trained up from my earliest years in the art of war; my daily exercise was shooting and throwing javelins; and my mother adorned me with emblems, after the manner of our greatest warriors. In this way I grew up till I was turned the age of eleven, when an end was put to my happiness in the following manner. Generally when the grown people in the neighbour-hood were gone far in the fields to labour, the children assembled together in some of the neighbours’ premises to play; and commonly some of us used to get up a tree to look out for any assailant, or kidnapper, that might come upon us; for they sometimes took those opportunities of our parents absence to attack and carry off as many as they could seize.
One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls and in a moment seized us both, and, without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us into the nearest wood. At length, after many days travelling, during which I had often changed masters I got into the hands of a chieftain, in a very pleasant country. The political structure of New World societies ensured that they would experience similarly endemic raiding, warfare, slavery, and the extermination of rival tribes. A glance at the history of the major civilizations of South and Central America shows the same dreary tale of the rise and destruction of cities and civilizations that one can find in Mesopotamia, the ancient Mediterranean, sub-Saharan Africa, or anywhere else where similar forms of government prevailed. One of the first major cities of Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan, attained a population of over one hundred thousand people just as the Western Roman empire was in decline.
The rulers of this city later overthrew the rival Mayan city of Tikal and established a puppet dynasty there. Tikal in turn engaged in a centuries-long bloody rivalry with its neighboring Mayan city-state Caracol. Meanwhile, Teotihuacan was destroyed by violence; its central districts were burned, and the city went into decline after AD 600. Tikal met a similar fate about the same time at the hands of Caracol. That city went on to become a major power in the region, winning hegemony over many neighboring cities, and putting down many armed rebellions. By AD 900, internecine warfare led to a general collapse of the Mayan civilization, and the cities were abandoned. A few centuries later, the future Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan allied with the neighboring city of Texcoco for the purpose of destroying the rival city of Azcapotzalco. The victors later united with another city called Tlacopan to form a triple alliance; and their highly trained armies went on to conquer dozens of formerly independent city states.
They imposed heavy taxes on the subject peoples and sometimes displaced or exterminated entire city-states as a result of conquest or rebellion. Aztec elites also regularly conducted “Flower Wars” for the purpose of gaining sacrificial victims for their religious rites; credible sources suggest that at Tenochtitlan alone, tens of thousands of people were sacrificed every year. The picture of Andean civilization farther south is also one of nearly continuous warfare stretching as far back as the archaeological record allows us to see. The Moche civilization arose around the same time as Teotihuacan and the Mayan city-states; the Moche were imperialists who spread their influence for hundreds of miles via a policy of continuous warfare. Like the Aztecs and Maya, the Moche culturally fetishized success in warfare; they were also in the habit of sacrificing captured warriors in religious rituals.
Later on, the Andean Tiwanaku and Wari people spread imperialist states via warfare and intimidation; these eventually collapsed and were replaced by the coastal Kingdom of Chimor, whose capital was Chan Chan. Various Chimorese leaders conquered people of the neighboring valleys such as Sana, Pacasmayo, Chicama, Viru, Chao, and Santa; they then imposed their own religious rituals there, in an action that—to be fair—should be counted as “cultural genocide” by any modern Leftist. The Chimor people were eventually surrounded by and then conquered by the Incans in a war that lasted several decades. After the defeat of Chimor, its capital Chan Chan was forcibly depopulated, and many of its people were carried off to be sacrificed or enslaved at the Incan capital of Cuzco. Such acts of genocide, forced immigration, and imperialist warfare were commonplace during the building of the Aztec and Incan Empires fetishized by Charles C. Mann and his disciples.
In North America, the history of Indian tribes shows a similar pattern of warfare with little evident “moderation.” On the contrary, victorious tribes often found it expedient to exterminate enemy tribes altogether, so as to avoid the problem of retributive attacks. Women and children of defeated tribes were carted off and enslaved to ensure no continuation of enemy bloodlines and traditions. Iroquois history begins with the tale of Hiawatha, a semi-mythical leader who was remarkable insofar as he was a peacemaker—the implication being that most other tribal leaders were not. The archaeology of the period before Hiawatha has revealed many warrior skeletons riddled with arrows and/or hacked into pieces, indicating that violent warfare was normative in these regions before contact with Europeans.
The seventeenth century, the first for which we have written records, shows the Iroquois Confederacy maintaining an uneasy truce among its own membership, but only insofar as this enabled them to intensify warfare against their traditional enemies the Huron and the Algonquin. These so-called Beaver Wars lasted for many decades; they witnessed the destruction of the Wendat people, the Neutral Indians, the fabled Mohicans, and many other tribes. Faced with the threat of what the modern Left should acknowledge as genocidal warfare, many of the Iroquois’ enemies were forced to flee to French, Dutch, and English settlements for protection, where their descendants eventually took up farming, converted to Christianity, or otherwise assimilated into the dominant culture. They gave up their vaunted “traditional” lifestyle because they preferred a peaceful life as a farmer to the omnipresent threat of death by tomahawk.
Later in the eighteenth century, a few thousand Iroquois were to visit similar grisly fates on dozens of other neighbors, until only a handful of Native Americans remained in the entire territory circling the Great Lakes.
Jeff Paul-Flynn
