American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  “I was badly wounded and pretty weak too,” recalled Dewey Beard, a Miniconjou Indian. “While I was lying on my back, I looked down the ravine and saw a lot of women coming up and crying. When I saw these women, girls and little girls and boys coming up, I saw soldiers on both sides of the ravine shoot at them until they had killed every one of them.” The photograph shows a burial party collecting corpses from that ravine.

  Mass burials followed the carnage. One hundred forty-six bodies were thrown into this pit, dug on the same hillside from which the Army’s Hotchkiss guns, with their exploding shells, had been fired.

  Survivors were placed in a makeshift hospital, “a pitiful array of young girls and women and babes in arms, little children, and a few men, all pierced with bullets,” recalled Elaine Goodale Eastman in her Memoirs. Observed the wife of a correspondent who was on the scene: “There was a little boy with his throat apparently shot to pieces . . . and when they feed him now the food and water come out the side of his neck.” Still, wrote Dr. Charles Eastman, “they objected very strenuously to being treated by army surgeons . . . and [said] they never wanted to see a uniform again.”

  In the wake of the carnage, whites descended on Wounded Knee in search of souvenirs. In this photograph, the seated man in the middle is wearing what appears to be a sacred Ghost Dance shirt, while the standing man is modeling a woman’s beaded dress. It is not known whether the seated man on the left kept the trophy he is holding in his lap.

  General Leonard W. Colby showing off his Lakdta Sioux war curio, Zintka Lanuni or Lost Bird. After privately putting her on display for personal profit, Colby eventually released her to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She died in Los Angeles at age 29. In 1991 the Lakota people had Zintka Lanuni’s remains moved back to Wounded Knee for interment with the rest of her family.

  III

  SEX, RACE, AND HOLY WAR

  5

  THERE IS A MOMENT in Toni Morrison’s moving novel, Beloved, when Stamp Paid, a black man in the mid-nineteenth-century American South, notices something red stuck to the bottom of his flatbed boat as he is tying it up alongside a river bank. It was a particularly bad time for black people in a century of particularly bad times for them. “White-folks were still on the loose,” writes Morrison: “Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken.” And the smell of “skin, skin and hot blood . . . cooked in a lynch fire” was everywhere.

  At first when he saw the red thing stuck to his boat Stamp Paid thought it was a feather. Reaching down to retrieve it,

  he tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the way home, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was traveling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, “What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?”1

  It is a question many have asked, many times, during the course of the past millennium. What were those people whose minds and souls so avidly fueled genocides against Muslims, Africans, Indians, Jews, Gypsies, and other religious, racial, and ethnic groups? What are they who continue such wholesale slaughter still today?

  It is tempting, when discussing the actions described in the two preceding chapters, as well as genocides from other times and places, to describe the behavior of the crimes’ perpetrators as insane. But as Terrence Des Pres once pointed out with regard to the Nazis’ attempted mass extermination of Europe’s Jews, “demonic” seems a better word than “insane” to characterize genocidal behavior. Des Pres’s semantic preference here, he said, was based upon his sense that “insanity is without firm structure, not predictable, something you cannot depend upon.” And while “what went on in the [Nazi] killing centers was highly organized and very dependable indeed,” thereby not qualifying as insanity, at least according to Des Pres’s informal definition, “the dedication of life’s energies to the production of death is a demonic principle of the first degree.”2

  Des Pres continued on in this essay to distinguish between the Nazi effort to extinguish from the earth Europe’s Jewish population and other examples of genocide “from the thick history of mankind’s inhumanity,” including “the slaughter of the American Indians.” The difference he found was that “the destruction of the European Jews had no rational motive whatsoever, neither politics nor plunder, neither military strategy nor the moment’s blind expediency. . . . This was genocide for the sake of genocide.”3 Had Des Pres pursued these distinctions further, however—that is, had he been as concerned with the mass destruction of native peoples as he was with Europeans—he may well have realized that his posited contrasts were more apparent than they were real. On the one hand, much (though not all) of the European and American slaughter of American Indians—from fifteenth-century Hispaniola to sixteenth-century Peru to seventeenth-century New England to eighteenth-century Georgia to nineteenth-century California—was not driven by reasons of politics or plunder, nor by military strategy or blind expediency, but by nothing more than, to use Des Pres’s phraseology, genocide for the sake of genocide. On the other hand, much (though not all) of the Nazi slaughter of Europe’s Jews was driven by what the perpetrators of that holocaust regarded as rational motives—however perverse or bizarre or sick or hateful those motives appear to others.4

  To say this is not to say that the Jewish Holocaust—the inhuman destruction of 6,000,000 people—was not an abominably unique event. It was. So, too, for reasons of its own, was the mass murder of about 1,000,000 Armenians in Turkey a few decades prior to the Holocaust.5 So, too, was the deliberately caused “terror-famine” in Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s, which killed more than 14,000,000 people.6 So, too, have been each of the genocidal slaughters of many millions more, decades after the Holocaust, in Burundi, Bangladesh, Kampuchea, East Timor, the Brazilian Amazon, and elsewhere.7 Additionally, within the framework of the Holocaust itself, there were aspects that were unique in the campaign of genocide conducted by the Nazis against Europe’s Romani (Gypsy) people, which resulted in the mass murder of perhaps 1,500,000 men, women, and children.8 Of course, there also were the unique horrors of the African slave trade, during the course of which at least 30,000,000—and possibly as many as 40,000,000 to 60,000,000—Africans were killed, most of them in the prime of their lives, before they even had a chance to begin working as human chattel on plantations in the Indies and the Americas.9 And finally, there is the unique subject of this book, the total extermination of many American Indian peoples and the near-extermination of others, in numbers that eventually totaled close to 100,000,000.

  Each of these genocides was distinct and unique, for one reason or another, as were (and are) others that go unmentioned here. In one case the sheer numbers of people killed may make it unique. In another case, the percentage of people killed may make it unique. In still a different case, the greatly compressed time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. In a further case, the greatly extended time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. No doubt the targeting of a specific group or groups for extermination by a particular nation’s official policy may mark a given genocide as unique. So too might another group’s being unofficially (but unmistakably) targeted for elimination by the actions of a multinational phalanx bent on total extirpation. Certainly the chilling utilization of technological instruments of destruction, such as gas chambers, and its assembly-line, bureaucratic, systematic methods of destruction makes the Holocaust unique. On the other hand, the savage employment of non-technological inst
ruments of destruction, such as the unleashing of trained and hungry dogs to devour infants, and the burning and crude hacking to death of the inhabitants of entire cities, also makes the Spanish anti-Indian genocide unique.

  A list of distinctions marking the uniqueness of one or another group that has suffered from genocidal mass destruction or near (or total) extermination could go on at length. Additional problems emerge because of a looseness in the terminology commonly used to describe categories and communities of genocidal victims. A traditional Eurocentric bias that lumps undifferentiated masses of “Africans” into one single category and undifferentiated masses of “Indians” into another, while making fine distinctions among the different populations of Europe, permits the ignoring of cases in which genocide against Africans and American Indians has resulted in the total extermination—purposefully carried out—of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups.

  A secondary tragedy of all these genocides, moreover, is that partisan representatives among the survivors of particular afflicted groups not uncommonly hold up their peoples’ experience as so fundamentally different from the others that not only is scholarly comparison rejected out of hand, but mere cross-referencing or discussion of other genocidal events within the context of their own flatly is prohibited. It is almost as though the preemptive conclusion that one’s own group has suffered more than others is something of a horrible award of distinction that will be diminished if the true extent of another group’s suffering is acknowledged.

  Compounding this secondary tragedy is the fact that such insistence on the incomparability of one’s own historical suffering, by means of what Irving Louis Horowitz calls “moral bookkeeping,” invariably pits one terribly injured group against another—as in the all too frequent contemporary disputes between Jews and African Americans, or the recent controversy over the U.S. Holocaust Memorial. In that particular struggle, involving the inclusion or exclusion of Gypsies from the Memorial program, tensions reached such a pitch that the celebrated Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was driven to write to the Memorial Commission in protest over the omission of Gypsies from the program, arguing that they too deserved commemorative recognition since “the Gypsies had been murdered in a proportion similar to the Jews, about 80 percent of them in the area of the countries which were occupied by the Nazis.”10

  Although Wiesenthal’s willingness to extend a hand of public recognition and commiseration to fellow victims of one of history’s most monstrous events was typical of him (and today support solicitations for the Holocaust Memorial Museum point out that Jehovah’s Witnesses, the physically and mentally handicapped, homosexuals, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, and others also were targets of the Nazi extermination effort) it was an unusual act in the context of these sorts of controversies. Denial of massive death counts is common—and even readily understandable, if contemptible—among those whose forefathers were the perpetrators of the genocide. Such denials have at least two motives: first, protection of the moral reputations of those people and that country responsible for the genocidal activity (which seems the primary motive of those scholars and politicians who deny that massive genocide campaigns were carried out against American Indians); and second, on occasion, the desire to continue carrying out virulent racist assaults upon those who were the victims of the genocide in question (as seems to be the major purpose of the anti-Semitic so-called historical revisionists who claim that the Jewish Holocaust never happened or that its magnitude has been exaggerated). But for those who have themselves been victims of extermination campaigns to proclaim uniqueness for their experiences only as a way of denying recognition to others who also have suffered massive genocidal brutalities is to play into the hands of the brutalizers.11 Rather, as Michael Berenbaum has wisely put it, “we should let our sufferings, however incommensurate, unite us in condemnation of inhumanity rather than divide us in a calculus of calamity.”12

  Noam Chomsky once observed that “if you take any two historical events and ask whether there are similarities and differences, the answer is always going to be both yes and no. At some sufficiently fine level of detail, there will be differences, and at some sufficiently abstract level, there will be similarities.” The key question for most historical investigations, however, “is whether the level at which there are similarities is, in fact, a significant one.”13 Among all the cases of genocide mentioned above there were, we have noted, important differences. Indeed, in most technical particulars, the differences among them may well outweigh the similarities. But there were and are certain similarities of significance, and between the Jewish Holocaust and the Euro-American genocide against the Indians of the Americas one of those similarities involves the element of religion—where Des Pres’s preference for the word “demonic” resides most appropriately. And here, in considering the role of religion in these genocides there is no better place to begin than with the words of Elie Wiesel, a fact that is not without some irony since for years Wiesel has argued passionately for the complete historical uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. In seeking at least a partial answer to the question posed at the start of this chapter—“what are these people?”—an observation of Wiesel’s regarding the perpetrators of the Jewish Holocaust is an equally apt beginning for those who would seek to understand the motivations that ignited and fanned the flames of the mass destruction of the Americas’ native peoples:

  All the killers were Christian. . . . The Nazi system was the consequence of a movement of ideas and followed a strict logic; it did not arise in a void but had its roots deep in a tradition that prophesied it, prepared for it, and brought it to maturity. That tradition was inseparable from the past of Christian, civilized Europe.14

  Indeed, despite an often expressed contempt for Christianity, in Mein Kampf Hitler had written that his plan for a triumphant Nazism was modeled on the Catholic Church’s traditional “tenacious adherence to dogma” and its “fanatical intolerance,” particularly in the Church’s past when, as Arno J. Mayer has noted, Hitler observed approvingly that in “building ‘its own altar,’ Christianity had not hesitated to ‘destroy the altars of the heathen.’ “15 Had Hitler required supporting evidence for this contention he would have needed to look no further than the Puritans’ godly justifications for exterminating New England’s Indians in the seventeenth century or, before that, the sanctimonious Spanish legitimation of genocide, as ordained by Christian Truth, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Meso- and South America. (It is worth noting also that the Führer from time to time expressed admiration for the “efficiency” of the American genocide campaign against the Indians, viewing it as a forerunner for his own plans and programs.)16 But the roots of the tradition run far deeper than that—back to the high Middle Ages and before—when at least part of the Christians’ willingness to destroy the infidels who lived in what was considered to be a spiritual wilderness was rooted in a rabid need to kill the sinful wilderness that lived within themselves. To understand the horrors that were inflicted by Europeans and white Americans on the Indians of the Americas it is necessary to begin with a look at the core of European thought and culture—Christianity—and in particular its ideas on sex and race and violence.

  II

  Popular thought long has viewed pre-Christian Rome as a bacchanalian “Eden of the unrepressed,” in one historian’s words, and a similar impression often is held of ancient Greece as well. Neither view is correct. In Greece, virginity was treasured, and a young, unmarried woman discovered in the act of sex could legally be sold into slavery. “Given that this is the only situation in which Solonian law allows a free Athenian to be reduced to slavery,” writes Giulia Sissa, “it is clear that premarital sexual activity constituted an extremely serious threat to the laws governing relationships within and among families.”17 Athena herself, it is worth recalling, was not only a goddess of war, but also a virgin—a symbolic juxtaposition of characteristics that, as we shall see, was destined to resonate through many ce
nturies of Western culture. And in Rome, no less a light than Cicero observed that since “the great excellence of man’s nature, above that of the brutes and all other creatures” is founded on the fact that brutes “are insensible to everything but pleasure, and they will risk everything to attain it,”

  from this we are to conclude, that the mere pursuits of sensual gratifications are unworthy the excellency of man’s nature; and that they ought therefore to be despised and rejected; but that if a man shall have a small propensity for pleasure, he ought to be extremely cautious in what manner he indulges it. We, therefore, in the nourishment and dress of our bodies, ought to consult not our pleasure, but our health and our strength; and should we examine the excellency and dignity of our nature, we should then be made sensible how shameful man’s life is, when it melts away in pleasure, in voluptuousness, and effeminacy; and how noble it is to live with abstinence, with modesty, with strictness, and sobriety.18

  The idea is hardly a Christian invention, then, that immoderate enjoyment of the pleasures of the flesh belongs to the world of the brute, and that abstinence, modesty, strictness, and sobriety are to be treasured above all else. Still, it is understandable why subsequent European thought would regard Greece and Rome as realms of carnal indulgence, since subsequent European thought was dominated by Christian ideology. And as the world of the Christian Fathers became the world of the Church Triumphant, while fluid and contested mythologies hardened into dogmatic theology, certain fundamental characteristics of Christianity, often derived from the teachings of Paul, came to express themselves in fanatical form. Not the least of these was the coming to dominance of an Augustinian notion of sex as sin (and sin as sexual) along with a larger sense, as Elaine Pagels puts it, that all of humanity was hopelessly “sick, suffering, and helpless.” As late antiquity in Europe began falling under the moral control of Christians there occurred what historian Jacques le Goff has called la deroute du corporal—“the rout of the body.” Not only was human flesh thenceforward to be regarded as corrupt, but so was the very nature of humankind and, indeed, so was nature itself; so corrupt, in fact, that only a rigid authoritarianism could be trusted to govern men and women who, since the fall of Adam and Eve, had been permanently poisoned with an inability to govern themselves in a fashion acceptable to God.19