The answer is simple: fear,
and that old ethnic conflict "us vs. them" thing. The same forces
of fear
and selfishness that allowed Milosovic
to seize power in Yugoslavia, silence his (own) Serb opposition,
and get Serbs to start butchering and torturing
their own lifelong neighbors (not that Croats and Muslims
didn't have some share of atrocities).
A little bit of fear-mongering goes a very, very long way!
And don't forget, we, the United
States, are a nation founded on pushing aside the natives and seizing
their land. It was always the same method:
a new settlement would be tolerated by the natives, until the
population and demand for resources expanded,
whereupon there would be the inevitable clashes.
The white, settler's response was always disproportionate,
and thorough: ALL native opposition would be
overwhelmed, and destroyed.
This pattern went on right up to the 1900s.
There is a museum on the San Francisco waterfront that
details how the miners and settlers sought to
(conciously) exterminate the last vestiges of California's
primitive native dwellers. A San Francisco
society lady tried to make justice for the "Indians" a popular
cause, but she was threatened with assassination.
100 years later, not much has
changed.
Well, we did have the Civil Rights movement -
but it is totally amazing, after TWO world wars where
the United States fought for "liberty" and "freedom,"
Blacks in the deep south still had neither!
And, TWENTY FULL YEARS into the cold war, it
took the video images of our war "for freedom"
in Vietnam, juxtaposed with images of police
dogs attacking Black women and children, before
President Johnson was finally able to overcome
Thurmond's "Southern Rights" filibuster.
Amazing. Our American
schools are NOT teaching our kids the hard facts: that Germans who supported
the Nazis in WWII considered themselves religious,
loyal Christians; that today, Jews fully subscribe to the
policy of "collective punishment" they have criticized
the Nazis and others, throughout history, for; and that
America has had a long, long history of
seizing wealth and property from natives - but its a history of
broken promises and broken treaties that may
not be a harbinger of peace in the era of WMD's.
LJBK