So the mushroom-shaped shadow of nuclear Armageddon looms higher than ever – and next we’ll face AI-enhanced robot troopers under authoritarian command? Can we still call this “civilization”? The two-thousand-year-old Haudenosaunee Confederacy of northeastern Turtle Island and its Great Law of Peace look increasingly likely to outlast the constitutional democracy they inspired a mere 250 years back. So is it too late to run away and join the Indians, as so many of our colonial ancestors did?

Archeologists and anthropologists agree that warfare between indigenous tribes was common in the precolonial world. Unlike modern warfare, these were not wars of territorial conquest or geopolitical rivalry. Often they were wars of revenge – a single act of violence triggering a cascading cycle of vengeance that escalated until the death toll became unsustainable and the antagonists came to their senses.

Among some Native American tribes, war was a ritualized affair where the body-count of enemy warriors was less important than the honor gained in the fight. The highest honor among certain Plains tribes was “counting coup” – touching the enemy without injuring them and getting safely away. Some Southeastern tribes settled tribal rivalries on a game court rather than a battlefield, though the game was more violent than rugby or hockey today.

Not all indigenous nations were warlike, however. Archeologists have uncovered villages with none of the evidence of tribal warfare found elsewhere – defensive earthworks and palisades or mass burial sites with smashed-in skulls. Resource-rich areas like California typically supported dense populations with relatively little conflict. Even traditional rivals would engage in trade and diplomacy, intermarriage, and intertribal celebrations under a temporary truce.

Our knowledge of precolonial times is spotty, though, because we can’t rely on direct observation. Even the earliest European observers were witnessing the beginnings of a drastic unraveling of a complex cultural tapestry. In North America, European diseases decimated whole societies before the first settlers arrived. The survivors formed new alliances to resist the invasion, even whole new tribes such as the Seminoles. People retreating from the occupation of their former lands moved into the territories of neighboring tribes, creating new conflicts. The Plains horsemen that whites call “the Sioux” originated in the Great Lakes region, where horses were unknown.

The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy – the Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Tuscarora, and Cayuga – fought fiercely among themselves for generations until a mysterious emissary known as the Peacemaker persuaded them to literally “bury the hatchet” under the legendary Peace Tree. Their Great Law of Peace was the model for the U.S. Constitution, which unified the thirteen colonies after the original Articles of Confederation failed to strike the right balance between state and federal power.

The Great Law kept the peace within the Confederacy, but the Six Nations continued to fight other tribes, usually over hunting rights, and then fought the French and English invaders. Like tribal warriors everywhere, they were no match for the advanced technology and military discipline of colonial empires, which had turned their whole societies into machines of conquest to feed the wealth of monarchs and the rising merchant class. But the intertribal bond of the Haudenosaunee was strong enough to survive and persist. They still retain their language, culture, and a remnant of their traditional territory today.

The Holy Mandate of “Law and Order”

Ironically, the coming of “civilization” helped to end intertribal warfare as the colonial powers of Europe and Asia conquered the world’s tribal nations one by one. Even as these empires fought bloody wars to extend their boundaries, they did not tolerate revenge killing or intertribal bloodshed within their domains. The ancient tribal rivalries obstructed the efficiency of bureaucratic rule and the steady extraction of resources to feed the military machine, so they were ruthlessly stamped out, along with periodic uprisings against the colonial masters.

Like the imperial powers of the past, the modern nation-state claims a monopoly on violence. The entire edifice of nationhood is founded on this claim, invoked with religious fervor by crusading politicians as the holy mandate of “law and order.” Though the urge for revenge remains a natural human response to trauma and grief, the victims of unsanctioned violence today must rely on police, courts, and prisons to make perpetrators pay.

This monopoly on violence might be considered an evolutionary advance – if modern nations did not routinely misuse it to perpetrate wars that are far more destructive than tribal warfare. Nor is the abuse of state power confined to military belligerence abroad. The quasi-religious status of “law and order” frustrates any attempt to prosecute police officers who transgress their role as keepers of the peace in ways that would brand anyone else a criminal.

Modern wars, both within and across national boundaries, can frequently be traced to ancient tribal rivalries. The hostility between Jews and Arabs began in Biblical times when the nomadic Hebrews invaded the farmlands of Canaan. Recent civil wars and “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, Rwanda, Myanmar, China and elsewhere have roots in tribal rivalry.

But some rivalries lay dormant through centuries of peaceable co-existence until changing conditions rekindled old animosities. The mainstream media rarely recognize global warming as a source of tension, but climate-driven water shortages now commonly cause friction that erupts into violence along ancient tribal fault-lines. Refugees fleeing these and other climate-driven disasters inject a chaotic new element into politically volatile regions around the world.

Tragically, global warming threatens to reverse the evolutionary trends that transformed former imperial powers into modern democracies. Though downplayed by pundits and foreign policy analysts, the legacy of colonialism is a major factor in political and economic instability throughout the Global South. Nations once brutally subjugated and plundered by Europeans have struggled for decades to gain a foothold in a global economy that remains slanted against them. And then climate disaster strikes – funded by the stolen wealth of their former rulers.

As the E.U. battles wildfire, sea-level rise, flooding and drought, it must now also deal with an influx of brown-skinned climate refugees from its former colonies, giving racist demagogues the scapegoats they need to push Europe toward a resurgence of fascism. The U.S. faces a similar crisis. And suddenly “civilization” teeters on the brink of toppling backward into a world of rival dictatorships with imperial ambitions – or at least a nostalgia for empire, such as Putin’s desperate lust to annex Ukraine.

Stoking the Fires of Revenge

But all too frequently the spark of conflict in modern war harks back to the old tribal wars of revenge, payback for a provocation that as often as not is falsely contrived for that purpose. In 1898, the U.S. blamed Spain for the mysterious sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor to light the fuse of the Spanish-American War. In 1964, history recycled itself when LBJ used alleged attacks on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify escalating aggression in Vietnam. 

Despite the rules of engagement established by the Geneva Convention, war crimes are an integral part of modern war, encouraged by propaganda campaigns that pump up war fever by stoking the flames of revenge. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 triggered a national paroxysm of shock and grief that was skillfully channeled into hatred and dehumanization of the Japanese. Wartime propaganda painted both the Japanese and Germans as subhuman brutes unworthy of civilized restraint on the battlefield – mirrored (as always) by propaganda from the other side. FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans was unjust and inhumane, but may have saved many of them from mob violence.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was sold to the American people as a shortcut to victory, though Japan was already attempting to negotiate terms of surrender. Geopolitically, the Pentagon intended the bombings to serve notice to the Soviets that the next war had already begun. Psychically, though, they gave the American people a sense of vindication through a collective catharsis of revenge in the national psyche.

Half a century later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks proved that we had not outgrown the irrational reflex of revenge. Once more shock and grief were easily manipulated into high approval ratings for another war, this time targeting people with little or no connection to the attacks. But the actual fighting merely provided patriotic cover for the war’s true aims.

The War on Terror was two-pronged: on one hand, covertly looting the U.S. Treasury by privatizing military operations and enriching “defense” contractors; on the other, clamping down on domestic freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. Combat veterans came home not only traumatized by the killing, but unsure whether they had sacrificed for their country or for a corrupt political system. Veterans of a previous quagmire in Indochina could have warned them.

Today, an even more cynical administration uses war and the threat of war even more brazenly to wage a five-pronged internal offensive: to prop up a spectacularly failing presidency, distract us from corruption and political chicanery, openly dismantle the rule of law, replace democracy with a high-tech police state and, as always, transfer our economic wealth into the offshore accounts of the One Percent. Revenge once more plays a leading role as Donald Trump’s bottomless rage channels a thirst for retribution that may explode any moment into a second Civil War.

Meanwhile, the beacon of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and its Great Law of Peace still illuminates the ages, and the message of the Peacemaker grows more timely every day. So . . . is it really too late to run away and join the Indians?

Note: as always, these are my personal opinions and do not represent any organization I’m involved with. If my words resonate for you, please share widely. Contains no AI ingredients! You can subscribe at StephenWing.com (and unsubscribe at any time). Read previous installments of “Wingtips” here.