US soldiers reused racial slurs from Indian Country across Vietnam and the Middle East

Evidence

An example of such racial semiotics in imperial warfare can be found in the recent invocation of the term ”Indian Country”—racial symbolism drawn from the colonial settlement of the U.S. West in the nineteenth century—by U.S. military personnel in the war in Iraq. Originally, ”Indian Country” had multiple meanings. From Native American perspectives, it denoted indigenous territory and ancestral landscapes; to the U.S. military, it meant hostile enemy territory and active war zones (Silliman 2008, 237). In the current racial encounter, the Middle East as a social imaginary thus has come to stand in for the American empire’s most recent colonial war. In the context of global racism and militarization, Muslims are compared to American Indians and are thus regarded as deserving genocidal violence. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 351 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Yet the tempestuous climate of the early twenties is not to be accounted for simply as a resumption of storms after a temporary lull. The very fact that the lull did prove temporary, that old hatreds came to life after the war instead of being consumed by it, needs explanation. In some degree the causes lay in the objective circumstances of 1920. That year, as part of a general adjustment to peacetime conditions, two factors which time and again in American history had encouraged anti-foreign outbreaks vividly reappeared. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1605 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: US troops reinterpreted Iraq as Indian Country, casting Muslims as deserving genocide. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 351; Suspended ethnic hatreds revived rather than being consumed by war — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1605; US troops describe remote base deployments using racialized frontier and colonizing language. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 1049 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• US troops reinterpreted Iraq as Indian Country, casting Muslims as deserving genocide. #exemplifies (0.93) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 351
• Suspended ethnic hatreds revived rather than being consumed by war #complicates (0.78) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1605