Skip to content

American Holocaust

Metadata

Highlights

the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following European contact was less than half of what the human survivorship ratio would be in the United States today if every single white person and every single black person died. The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls. — location: 60 ^ref-21521

The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. — location: 61 ^ref-45815

However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent—a sad, but both inevitable and “unintended consequence” of human migration and progress. — location: 101 ^ref-29277

In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere’s native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable. — location: 107 ^ref-61994

Moreover, the important question for the future in this case is not “can it happen again?” Rather, it is “can it be stopped?” For the genocide in the Americas, and in other places where the world’s indigenous peoples survive, has never really ceased. — location: 124 ^ref-56925

The reason these populations were able to increase, despite massive military damage, was that a greatly disproportionate ratio of men to women and children was being killed. This, however, is not what happened to the indigenous people in the Caribbean, in Mesoamerica, in South America, or in what are now the United States and Canada during the European assault against them. Neither was this slaughter of innocents anything but intentional in design, nor did it end with the close of the colonial era. — location: 2709 ^ref-47327

The Indians, this writer said, “were hunted like wild beasts” in a “war of extermination,” something Washington approved of since, as he was to say in 1783, the Indians, after all, were little different from wolves, “both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.” — location: 2719 ^ref-40391

Columbus was, in most respects, merely an especially active and dramatic embodiment of the European—and especially the Mediterranean—mind and soul of his time: a religious fanatic obsessed with the conversion, conquest, or liquidation of all non-Christians; — location: 4490 ^ref-11358

others aboard the ships that sailed with Columbus on this second voyage—and those who were to follow in years and decades to come—rarely were possessed by the array of motives that drove his quest for discovery and conquest. Some just wanted to save heathens. Far more just wanted to get rich. But operating in tandem, these two simple goals spelled disaster for the indigenous peoples — location: 4554 ^ref-63832

cracks began to appear in the edifice of Christianity’s racial ecumenism. The cause of the problem was slavery. — location: 4671 ^ref-31889

the road to Auschwitz was being paved in the earliest days of Christendom. — location: 5563 ^ref-47980

on the way to Auschwitz the road’s pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and of North and South America. — location: 5563 ^ref-27760

one of the preconditions for the Spanish and Anglo-American genocides against the native peoples of the Americas was a public definition of the natives as inherently and permanently—that is, as racially—inferior beings. — location: 5570 ^ref-37146

Since the colonizing British, and subsequently the Americans, had little use for Indian servitude, but only wanted Indian land, they appealed to other Christian and European sources of wisdom to justify their genocide: the Indians were Satan’s helpers, they were lascivious and murderous wild men of the forest, they were bears, they were wolves, they were vermin. Allegedly having shown themselves to be beyond conversion to Christian or to civil life—and with little British or American need for them as slaves—in this case, straightforward mass killing of the Indians was deemed the only thing to do. — location: 5573 ^ref-21644

upon meeting Hitler, he wrote, he thought of Martin Luther. — location: 5615 ^ref-55728

for all that Hitler held Christianity in low regard, central to his thinking, as well as to that of the Christian Fathers (and to Luther), was an intense concern with human depravity, with pollution, with defilement—and with cleansing, purity, and purgation—as well as an absolute and violent animosity for all who disagreed with him. — location: 5619 ^ref-12833

Christian West’s obsession with the immersion of the self in its own alleged vileness, — location: 5639 ^ref-49914

“Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman”—for surely the purpose of this passage is to demonstrate as powerfully as possible just how absolutely inhuman the Africans truly seemed, — location: 5662 ^ref-61157

“In confronting the black man, the white man has a simple choice: either to accept the black man’s humanity and the equality that flows from it, or to reject it and see him as a beast of burden. No middle course exists except as an intellectual quibble.” — location: 5666 ^ref-50085

(Following the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend in 1814, Andrew Jackson oversaw not only the stripping away of dead Indians’ flesh for manufacture into bridle reins, but he saw to it that souvenirs from the corpses were distributed “to the ladies of Tennessee.” — location: 5687 ^ref-37338

The rest of the book’s verses are a melange of sadism and obscenity, most of them employing personifications of entire Arabic and Islamic peoples as racially inferior, maggot-infested women whose mass destruction by the Americans is equated with brutal, violent sex. — location: 5708 ^ref-63916

The purpose of this brief tour across several recent battlegrounds is not simply to condemn what is so easily condemnable, however, but rather to illustrate how close to the surface of everyday life is the capacity for racist dehumanization and consequently massive devastation. — location: 5724 ^ref-1206

Arno J. Mayer may well be correct in contending that “from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews [in the camps] were killed by so-called “natural” causes than by “unnatural” ones—“natural” causes being “sickness, disease, undernourishment, [and] hyperexploitation,” as opposed to “unnatural” causes such as “shooting, hanging, phenol injection, or gassing” — location: 5733 ^ref-51513

To some, the question now is: Can it happen again? To others, as we said in this book’s opening pages, the question is, now as always: Can it be stopped? — location: 5748 ^ref-33049

one of the world’s foremost experts on genocide wondered in print whether “the long delay, and the obvious reluctance of the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention” derived from “fear that it might be held responsible, retrospectively, for the annihilation of Indians in the United States, or its role in the slave trade, or its contemporary support for tyrannical governments engaging in mass murder.” — location: 5759 ^ref-46712

in the spring of 1991 Poland’s President, Lech Walesa, traveled to Jerusalem and addressed the Israeli Parliament, saying in part: “Here in Israel, the land of your culture and revival, I ask for your forgiveness.”29 At almost precisely that same moment, in Washington, angry members of the U.S. Senate were threatening to cut off or drastically reduce financial support for the Smithsonian Institution because a film project with which it was marginally involved had dared use the word “genocide” to describe the destruction of America’s native peoples. — location: 5769 ^ref-42662

Moreover, the suffering has far from stopped. The poverty rate on American Indian reservations in the United States, for example, is almost four times the national average, and on some reservations, such as Pine Ridge in South Dakota and Tohono O’Odham in Arizona (where more than 60 percent of homes are without adequate plumbing, compared with barely 2 percent for the rest of the country) the poverty rate is nearly five times greater than for the nation at large. — location: 5781 ^ref-41435

much of the tribal land that still exists, constituting a little more than 2 percent of what commonly is the most inhospitable acreage in the United States, is in perpetual jeopardy of political disentitlement. — location: 5794 ^ref-52768

the federal government, in the disingenuous guise of granting Indians “self-determination,” steadfastly continues to abdicate its legal responsibility for defending tribes against state encroachment. Thus, the Indians’ ongoing struggle for a modicum of independence and cultural freedom is turned against them in a classic governmental maneuver of blaming the victim, while the campaign to terminate tribal sovereignty once and for all continues. — location: 5797 ^ref-42630