Not POTUS, but LOTUS: Part Three of Vile Trump: The Decomposed Detritus of Dehumanized Christian White Supremacy

Part Three: Violent English Settler Colonialism in North America up to the Revolution and Founding of the United States

Part A: Puritan New England

Today, a shameless serial liar, sexual predator, ignoramus, grifter, convicted felon, and anti-immigrant lout will be inaugurated as the 47^th President of the United States (POTUS). I will not refer to him as such. Instead, he always will remain the LOTUS, "Lowlife of the United States". Having just completed a brief review of the history of the Puritans of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England, I'm convinced that neither the 47^th president nor his supporters would have been permitted to live there. They actually sent people packing.

Whereas Part Two of this article examined the violent Spanish invasion and looting of the Americas in the sixteenth century, Part Three examines a similar invasion and looting by the English, commencing in the seventeenth century. Their genocidal settler colonialism, inspired by insatiable greed for land, would eventually sweep across our country.

As Alan Taylor writes, in American Colonies: The Settling of North America (Penguin, 2001), "From the start, the English subtly differed from the French and the Spanish in a greater readiness to detect fundamental difference in color and to share some political rights with common 'white' people. In the colonies, that difference grew stronger over the generations as British America developed an especially polarized conception of race in tandem with greater political power for common whites. Unlike the French and the Spanish, the British colonies relied in war primarily on local militias of common people, rather than professional troops. That increased the political leverage of common men as it involved them in frequent conflicts with Indians and in patrolling the slave population. In those roles, the ethnically diverse militiamen found a shared identity as white men by asserting their superiority. defined against Indians and Africans conveniently cast as brutish inferiors. To avoid alienating the militiamen, British colonial elites gradually accepted a white racial solidarity based upon subordinating 'blacks' and 'reds'" (Taylor, p. xiii).

Sixteenth century England had solidified its dehumanized Christian White supremacy by contrasting it with the non-white "other." David M. Goldenberg, writing in his book, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, (Princeton, 2003), credits Kim Hall for identifying this process. He writes, "I referred earlier to Kim Hall's study that showed how the colors black and white 'became in the early modern period the conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of "self" and "other."' It wasn't a recognition of color difference, or even an ethnocentric preference, that was new in sixteenth-century England. It was the appropriation of these differences to support a racial ideology."

Further quoting Hall, Goldenberg adds, "Traditional terms of aesthetic discrimination and Christian dogma became infused with ideas of Africa and African servitude" (Goldenberg, p. 199, citing Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Cornell, 1995, p.4).

The English also acquired these prejudices from their earlier centuries-long brutal and inhumane treatment of the so-called inferior Irish, who they repeatedly assaulted and colonized. As Jane Ohlmeyer writes in "How Ireland served as a laboratory for the British Empire" (Trinity College, 31 December 2023), "England first invaded Ireland in 1169." "During the Nine Years War (1594-1603) English forces used scorched earth tactics and starvation to secure submission. Roughly 20 percent of the Irish population died during the war of the 1640s".Eyewitness accounts (known and the '1641 Depositions') recorded the brutal assaults, stripping, torture, rape and reproductive violations inflicted on women."

In the 17^th century, when the English began to settle America, Thomas Hobbes and other Anglo thinkers developed the concept of "confident ascendency," an unfounded conceit, given the cultural superiority of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, that Europe and Europeans were superior to Indigenous peoples, "to justify Indigenous dispossession and replacement" (Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America, Scott Gac, Cambridge, 2024, p. 4). The objective was to replace Indians with lower class English white supremacists. It's now called "Settler colonialism." And, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has demonstrated, in her book, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, (Beacon, 2014), "Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide convention" (Kindle location 288).

The English reflexively considered themselves racially superior to Indians and Blacks. But, as Bernard Bailyn notes in his book, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, Knopf, 2002, the English were every bit as barbarous. "Ordinary crimes were punished by public floggings that could be severe, and those convicted of treason and some felonies were hanged before large and enthusiastic crowds, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, castrated, beheaded, and hacked into quarters for display" (Bailyn, p. 41).

If this sounds like the Jim Crow American South, centuries later, when little girls would come straight from church to marvel in amusement at the lynching, roasting, and dismemberment of Blacks, simply remember that these were the type of English settlers who came to dominate North America.

Commenting further about these supposedly superior people, Bailyn adds: "Women were not mutilated, but for heresy, treason, or killing husband or master, they could be burned at the stake, though compassionate executioners might strangle them before lighting the fire.

And some of the most serious offenders were broken on the wheel - that is spread-eagled in public spectacles, their bones smashed, their bodies eviscerated before final execution, their heads and quartered bodies displayed prominently in public places" (Ibid).

In the Massachusett language, the territory of the New England shore was named Dawnland, and the Indians living there considered themselves "People of the First Light" (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann, Vintage, 2011, p. 43). "Sixteenth-century New England housed 100,000 people or more, a figure that was slowly increasing. Most of the people lived in shoreline communities, where rising numbers were beginning to change agriculture from an option to a necessity" (Ibid., p. 48).

Nevertheless, "In the last decades of the sixteenth century, in the years just preceding the first English settlements, measles, smallpox, and other virulent diseases were beginning to sweep through the most exposed groups and were carried by them into the interior" (Bailyn, p. 30).

Such facts would have been beside the point to renowned writer, Richard Haklyut the younger, who, in 1584, attempted to persuade Queen Elizabeth I and her advisors to colonize America. His "Discourse of Western Planting" was pure propaganda, but contained elitist cultural concepts that would guide English colonialism. First was his generally accepted assumption that America was a wasteland.

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