September 2004

Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?

tags: American Indians

Guenter Lewy, who for many years taught political science at the University of Massachusetts, has been a contributor to Commentary since 1964. His books include"The Catholic Church & Nazi Germany, Religion & Revolution, America in Vietnam," and "The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Political Life."





Related Link Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz On September 21, the National Museum of the American Indian will open its doors. In an interview early this year, the museum’s founding director, W. Richard West, declared that the new institution would not shy away from such difficult subjects as the effort to eradicate American Indian culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a safe bet that someone will also, inevitably, raise the issue of genocide. The story of the encounter between European settlers and America’s native population does not make for pleasant reading. Among early accounts, perhaps the most famous is Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1888), a doleful recitation of forced removals, killings, and callous disregard. Jackson’s book, which clearly captured some essential elements of what happened, also set a pattern of exaggeration and one-sided indictment that has persisted to this day. Thus, according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a"vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record." By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the"worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people." In the judgment of Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr.,"there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a 'race' of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history." The sweeping charge of genocide against the Indians became especially popular during the Vietnam war, when historians opposed to that conflict began drawing parallels between our actions in Southeast Asia and earlier examples of a supposedly ingrained American viciousness toward non-white peoples. The historian Richard Drinnon, referring to the troops under the command of the Indian scout Kit Carson, called them"forerunners of the Burning Fifth Marines" who set fire to Vietnamese villages, while in The American Indian: The First Victim (1972), Jay David urged contemporary readers to recall how America’s civilization had originated in"theft and murder" and"efforts toward . . . genocide." Further accusations of genocide marked the run-up to the 1992 quincentenary of the landing of Columbus. The National Council of Churches adopted a resolution branding this event"an invasion" that resulted in the"slavery and genocide of native people." In a widely read book, The Conquest of Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale charged the English and their American successors with pursuing a policy of extermination that had continued unabated for four centuries. Later works have followed suit. In the 1999 Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by the scholar Israel Charny, an article by Ward Churchill argues that extermination was the"express objective" of the U.S. government. To the Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, similarly, genocide is the"only appropriate way" to describe how white settlers treated the Indians. And so forth. That American Indians suffered horribly is indisputable. But whether their suffering amounted to a"holocaust," or to genocide, is another matter. II It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century. Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject speak of an inflated"numbers game"; others charge that the size of the aboriginal population has been deliberately minimized in order to make the decline seem less severe than it was. The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the ethnologist James Mooney proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5 million, nearly five times as high as Mooney’s, while Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the aboriginal population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the present territory of the United States at about 10 million. From one perspective, these differences, however startling, may seem beside the point: there is ample evidence, after all, that the arrival of the white man triggered a drastic reduction in the number of native Americans. Nevertheless, even if the higher figures are credited, they alone do not prove the occurrence of genocide. To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important reason for the Indians’ catastrophic decline—namely, the spread of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known by scholars as a"virgin-soil epidemic"; in North America, it was the norm. The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans. About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby,"but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath." It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers. To some, however, this is enough in itself to warrant the term genocide. David Stannard, for instance, states that just as Jews who died of disease and starvation in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, Indians who died of introduced diseases"were as much the victims of the Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs." As an example of actual genocidal conditions, Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as"furnaces of death." But right away we are in highly debatable territory. It is true that the cramped quarters of the missions, with their poor ventilation and bad sanitation, encouraged the spread of disease. But it is demonstrably untrue that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were unconcerned with the welfare of their native converts. No matter how difficult the conditions under which the Indians labored—obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical care, corporal punishment—their experience bore no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos. The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the diseases that afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they could do for them. By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghettos, and quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and medicine; unlike in Stannard’s"furnaces of death," the deaths that occurred there were meant to occur. The larger picture also does not conform to Stannard’s idea of disease as an expression of"genocidal war." True, the forced relocations of Indian tribes were often accompanied by great hardship and harsh treatment; the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to territories west of the Mississippi in 1838 took the lives of thousands and has entered history as the Trail of Tears. But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and sometimes after only minimal contact with European traders. True, too, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of divine providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that Europeans did not come to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases. Or did they? Ward Churchill, taking the argument a step further than Stannard, asserts that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the way the great bulk of North America’s native population disappeared:"it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed." In brief, the Europeans were engaged in biological warfare. Unfortunately for this thesis, we know of but a single instance of such warfare, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the British garrisons west of the Allegheny mountains. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw as the Indians’ treacherous and savage modes of warfare, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote as follows to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt:"You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst's suggestion, but whether he himself carried it out is uncertain. On or around June 24, two traders at Fort Pitt did give blankets and a handkerchief from the fort’s quarantined hospital to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his journal:"I hope it will have the desired effect." Smallpox was already present among the tribes of Ohio; at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak in which hundreds died. A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense"'trade blankets' to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota." He continues: Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter’s. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to scatter and seek"sanctuary" in the villages of healthy relatives. In this way the disease was spread, the Mandans were"virtually exterminated," and other tribes suffered similarly devastating losses. Citing a figure of"100,000 or more fatalities" caused by the U.S. Army in the 1836-40 smallpox pandemic (elsewhere he speaks of a toll"several times that number"), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival. Supporting Churchill here are Stiffarm and Lane, who write that"the distribution of smallpox- infected blankets by the U.S. Army to Mandans at Fort Clark . . . was the causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40." In evidence, they cite the journal of a contemporary at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon. But Chardon's journal manifestly does not suggest that the U.S. Army distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on the inadvertent spread of disease by a ship's passenger. And as for the"100,000 fatalities," not only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers, but he too points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter's as the cause. Another scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also refuted the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians. Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of the United States government at this time to vaccinate the native population. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program continued in force for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on the part of some officials. Still, as Thornton writes:"Vaccination of American Indians did eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox." To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians; neither can the large number of deaths as a result of disease be considered the result of a genocidal design. III Still, even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by mistreatment and violence. Should some or all of these deaths be considered instances of genocide? We may examine representative incidents by following the geographic route of European settlement, beginning in the New England colonies. There, at first, the Puritans did not regard the Indians they encountered as natural enemies, but rather as potential friends and converts. But their Christianizing efforts showed little success, and their experience with the natives gradually yielded a more hostile view. The Pequot tribe in particular, with its reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness, was feared not only by the colonists but by most other Indians in New England. In the warfare that eventually ensued, caused in part by intertribal rivalries, the Narragansett Indians became actively engaged on the Puritan side. Hostilities opened in late 1636 after the murder of several colonists. When the Pequots refused to comply with the demands of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the surrender of the guilty and other forms of indemnification, a punitive expedition was led against them by John Endecott, the first resident governor of the colony; although it ended inconclusively, the Pequots retaliated by attacking any settler they could find. Fort Saybrook on the Connecticut River was besieged, and members of the garrison who ventured outside were ambushed and killed. One captured trader, tied to a stake in sight of the fort, was tortured for three days, expiring after his captors flayed his skin with the help of hot timbers and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner was roasted alive. The torture of prisoners was indeed routine practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Valuing bravery above all things, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners. unable to withstand the rigor of wilderness travel were usually killed on the spot. Among those—Indian or European—taken back to the village, some would be adopted to replace slain warriors, the rest subjected to a ritual of torture designed to humiliate them and exact atonement for the tribe's losses. Afterward the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it in a ceremonial meal, and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory. Despite the colonists' own resort to torture in order to extract confessions, the cruelty of these practices strengthened the belief that the natives were savages who deserved no quarter. This revulsion accounts at least in part for the ferocity of the battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when a force commanded by John Mason and assisted by militiamen from Saybrook surprised about half of the Pequot tribe encamped near the Mystic River. The intention of the colonists had been to kill the warriors"with their Swords," as Mason put it, to plunder the village, and to capture the women and children. But the plan did not work out. About 150 Pequot warriors had arrived in the fort the night before, and when the surprise attack began they emerged from their tents to fight. Fearing the Indians' numerical strength, the English attackers set fire to the fortified village and retreated outside the palisades. There they formed a circle and shot down anyone seeking to escape; a second cordon of Narragansett Indians cut down the few who managed to get through the English line. When the battle was over, the Pequots had suffered several hundred dead, perhaps as many as 300 of these being women and children. Twenty Narragansett warriors also fell. A number of recent historians have charged the Puritans with genocide: that is, with having carried out a premeditated plan to exterminate the Pequots. The evidence belies this. The use of fire as a weapon of war was not unusual for either Europeans or Indians, and every contemporary account stresses that the burning of the fort was an act of self-protection, not part of a pre-planned massacre. In later stages of the Pequot war, moreover, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, further contradicting the idea of genocidal intention. A second famous example from the colonial period is King Philip’s War (1675-76). This conflict, proportionately the costliest of all American wars, took the life of one in every sixteen men of military age in the colonies; large numbers of women and children also perished or were carried into captivity. Fifty-two of New England’s 90 towns were attacked, seventeen were razed to the ground, and 25 were pillaged. Casualties among the Indians were even higher, with many of those captured being executed or sold into slavery abroad. The war was also merciless, on both sides. At its outset, a colonial council in Boston had declared"that none be Killed or Wounded that are Willing to surrender themselves into Custody." But these rules were soon abandoned on the grounds that the Indians themselves, failing to adhere either to the laws of war or to the law of nature, would"skulk" behind trees, rocks, and bushes rather than appear openly to do" civilized" battle. Similarly creating a desire for retribution were the cruelties perpetrated by Indians when ambushing English troops or overrunning strongholds housing women and children. Before long, both colonists and Indians were dismembering corpses and displaying body parts and heads on poles. (Nevertheless, Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were tried in Boston for the brutal murder of three squaws and three Indian children; all were found guilty and two were executed.) The hatred kindled by King Philip’s War became even more pronounced in 1689 when strong Indian tribes allied themselves with the French against the British. In 1694, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered all friendly Indians confined to a small area. A bounty was then offered for the killing or capture of hostile Indians, and scalps were accepted as proof of a kill. In 1704, this was amended in the direction of"Christian practice" by means of a scale of rewards graduated by age and sex; bounty was proscribed in the case of children under the age of ten, subsequently raised to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, genocidal intent was far from evident; the practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in reprisal for the extensive scalping carried out by Indians. IV We turn now to the American frontier. In Pennsylvania, where the white population had doubled between 1740 and 1760, the pressure on Indian lands increased formidably; in 1754, encouraged by French agents, Indian warriors struck, starting a long and bloody conflict known as the French and Indian War or the Seven Years' War. By 1763, according to one estimate, about 2,000 whites had been killed or vanished into captivity. Stories of real, exaggerated, and imaginary atrocities spread by word of mouth, in narratives of imprisonment, and by means of provincial newspapers. Some British officers gave orders that captured Indians be given no quarter, and even after the end of formal hostilities, feelings continued to run so high that murderers of Indians, like the infamous Paxton Boys, were applauded rather than arrested. As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts multiplied. So far had things progressed by 1784 that, according to one British traveler,"white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children." Settlers on the expanding frontier treated the Indians with contempt, often robbing and killing them at will. In 1782, a militia pursuing an Indian war party that had slain a woman and a child massacred more than 90 peaceful Moravian Delawares. Although federal and state officials tried to bring such killers to justice, their efforts, writes the historian Francis Prucha,"were no match for the singular Indian-hating mentality of the frontiersmen, upon whom depended conviction in the local courts." But that, too, is only part of the story. The view that the Indian problem could be solved by force alone came under vigorous challenge from a number of federal commissioners who from 1832 on headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs and supervised the network of agents and subagents in the field. Many Americans on the eastern seaboard, too, openly criticized the rough ways of the frontier. Pity for the vanishing Indian, together with a sense of remorse, led to a revival of the 18th-century concept of the noble savage. America's native inhabitants were romanticized in historiography, art, and literature, notably by James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his long poem, The Song of Hiawatha. On the western frontier itself, such views were of course dismissed as rank sentimentality; the perceived nobility of the savages, observed cynics, was directly proportional to one’s geographic distance from them. Instead, settlers vigorously complained that the regular army was failing to meet the Indian threat more aggressively. A large-scale uprising of the Sioux in Minnesota in 1862, in which Indian war parties killed, raped, and pillaged all over the countryside, left in its wake a climate of fear and anger that spread over the entire West. Colorado was especially tense. Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians, who had legitimate grievances against the encroaching white settlers, also fought for the sheer joy of combat, the desire for booty, and the prestige that accrued from success. The overland route to the East was particularly vulnerable: at one point in 1864, Denver was cut off from all supplies, and there were several butcheries of entire families at outlying ranches. In one gruesome case, all of the victims were scalped, the throats of the two children were cut, and the mother’s body was ripped open and her entrails pulled over her face. Writing in September 1864, the Reverend William Crawford reported on the attitude of the white population of Colorado: “There is but one sentiment in regard to the final disposition which shall be made of the Indians: ‘Let them be exterminated—men, women, and children together.’” Of course, he added,"I do not myself share in such views." The Rocky Mountain News, which at first had distinguished between friendly and hostile Indians, likewise began to advocate extermination of this “dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race.” With the regular army off fighting the Civil War in the South, the western settlers depended for their protection on volunteer regiments, many lamentably deficient in discipline. It was a local force of such volunteers that committed the massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado on November 29, 1864. Formed in August, the regiment was made up of miners down on their luck, cowpokes tired of ranching, and others itching for battle. Its commander, the Reverend John Milton Chivington, a politician and ardent Indian-hater, had urged war without mercy, even against children."Nits make lice," he was fond of saying. The ensuing orgy of violence in the course of a surprise attack on a large Indian encampment left between 70 and 250 Indians dead, the majority women and children. The regiment suffered eight killed and 40 wounded. News of the Sand Creek massacre sparked an outcry in the East and led to several congressional inquiries. Although some of the investigators appear to have been biased against Chivington, there was no disputing that he had issued orders not to give quarter, or that his soldiers had engaged in massive scalping and other mutilations. The sorry tale continues in California. The area that in 1850 became admitted to the Union as the 31st state had once held an Indian population estimated at anywhere between 150,000 and 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, the number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, disease was the single most important factor, although the state also witnessed an unusually large number of deliberate killings. The discovery of gold in 1848 brought about a fundamental change in Indian-white relations. Whereas formerly Mexican ranchers had both exploited the Indians and provided them with a minimum of protection, the new immigrants, mostly young single males, exhibited animosity from the start, trespassing on Indian lands and often freely killing any who were in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860:"There never was a viler sort of men in the world than is congregated about these mines." What was true of miners was often true as well of newly arrived farmers. By the early 1850's, whites in California outnumbered Indians by about two to one, and the lot of the natives, gradually forced into the least fertile parts of the territory, began to deteriorate rapidly. Many succumbed to starvation; others, desperate for food, went on the attack, stealing and killing livestock. Indian women who prostituted themselves to feed their families contributed to the demographic decline by removing themselves from the reproductive cycle. As a solution to the growing problem, the federal government sought to confine the Indians to reservations, but this was opposed both by the Indians themselves and by white ranchers fearing the loss of labor. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied. One of the most violent, between white settlers and Yuki Indians in the Round Valley of Mendocino County, lasted for several years and was waged with great ferocity. Although Governor John B. Weller cautioned against an indiscriminate campaign—"[Y]our operations against the Indians," he wrote to the commander of a volunteer force in 1859,"must be confined strictly to those who are known to have been engaged in killing the stock and destroying the property of our citizens . . . and the women and children under all circumstances must be spared"—his words had little effect. By 1864 the number of Yukis had declined from about 5,000 to 300. The Humboldt Bay region, just northwest of the Round Valley, was the scene of still more collisions. Here too Indians stole and killed cattle, and militia companies retaliated. A secret league, formed in the town of Eureka, perpetrated a particularly hideous massacre in February 1860, surprising Indians sleeping in their houses and killing about sixty, mostly by hatchet. During the same morning hours, whites attacked two other Indian rancherias, with the same deadly results. In all, nearly 300 Indians were killed on one day, at least half of them women and children. Once again there was outrage and remorse."The white settlers," wrote a historian only 20 years later,"had received great provocation. . . . But nothing they had suffered, no depredations the savages had committed, could justify the cruel slaughter of innocent women and children.” This had also been the opinion of a majority of the people of Eureka, where a grand jury condemned the massacre, while in cities like San Francisco all such killings repeatedly drew strong criticism. But atrocities continued: by the 1870's, as one historian has summarized the situation in California,"only remnants of the aboriginal populations were still alive, and those who had survived the maelstrom of the preceding quarter-century were dislocated, demoralized, and impoverished." Lastly we come to the wars on the Great Plains. Following the end of the Civil War, large waves of white migrants, arriving simultaneously from East and West, squeezed the Plains Indians between them. In response, the Indians attacked vulnerable white outposts; their"acts of devilish cruelty," reported one officer on the scene, had"no parallel in savage warfare." The trails west were in similar peril: in December 1866, an army detachment of 80 men was lured into an ambush on the Bozeman Trail, and all of the soldiers were killed. To force the natives into submission, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after the Civil War commanded the Indian-fighting army units on the Plains, applied the same strategy they had used so successfully in their marches across Georgia and in the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them to their winter camps, where numbing cold and heavy snows limited their mobility. There they destroyed the lodges and stores of food, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the deaths of women and children. Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in conformity with the laws of war accepted at the time. The principles of limited war and of noncombatant immunity had been codified in Francis Lieber's General Order No. 100, issued for the Union Army on April 24, 1863. But the villages of warring Indians who refused to surrender were considered legitimate military objectives. In any event, there was never any order to exterminate the Plains Indians, despite heated pronouncements on the subject by the outraged Sherman and despite Sheridan's famous quip that"the only good Indians I ever saw were dead." Although Sheridan did not mean that all Indians should be shot on sight, but rather that none of the warring Indians on the Plains could be trusted, his words, as the historian James Axtell rightly suggests, did"more to harm straight thinking about Indian-white relations than any number of Sand Creeks or Wounded Knees." As for that last-named encounter, it took place on December 29, 1890 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By this time, the 7th Regiment of U.S. Cavalry had compiled a reputation for aggressiveness, particularly in the wake of its surprise assault in 1868 on a Cheyenne village on the Washita river in Kansas, where about 100 Indians were killed by General George Custer's men. Still, the battle of Washita, although one-sided, had not been a massacre: wounded warriors were given first aid, and 53 women and children who had hidden in their lodges survived the assault and were taken prisoner. Nor were the Cheyennes unarmed innocents; as their chief Black Kettle acknowledged, they had been conducting regular raids into Kansas that he was powerless to stop. The encounter at Wounded Knee, 22 years later, must be seen in the context of the Ghost Dance religion, a messianic movement that since 1889 had caused great excitement among Indians in the area and that was interpreted by whites as a general call to war. While an encampment of Sioux was being searched for arms, a few young men created an incident; the soldiers, furious at what they considered an act of Indian treachery, fought back furiously as guns surrounding the encampment opened fire with deadly effect. The Army's casualties were 25 killed and 39 wounded, mostly as a result of friendly fire. More than 300 Indians died. Wounded Knee has been called"perhaps the best-known genocide of North American Indians." But, as Robert Utley has concluded in a careful analysis, it is better described as"a regrettable, tragic accident of war," a bloodbath that neither side intended. In a situation where women and children were mixed with men, it was inevitable that some of the former would be killed. But several groups of women and children were in fact allowed out of the encampment, and wounded Indian warriors, too, were spared and taken to a hospital. There may have been a few deliberate killings of noncombatants, but on the whole, as a court of inquiry ordered by President Harrison established, the officers and soldiers of the unit made supreme efforts to avoid killing women and children. On January 15, 1891, the last Sioux warriors surrendered. Apart from isolated clashes, America’s Indian wars had ended. V The Genocide Convention was approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948 and came into force on January 12, 1951; after a long delay, it was ratified by the United States in 1986. Since genocide is now a technical term in international criminal law, the definition established by the convention has assumed prima-facie authority, and it is with this definition that we should begin in assessing the applicability of the concept of genocide to the events we have been considering. According to Article II of the convention, the crime of genocide consists of a series of acts" committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such" (emphases added). Practically all legal scholars accept the centrality of this clause. During the deliberations over the convention, some argued for a clear specification of the reasons, or motives, for the destruction of a group. In the end, instead of a list of such motives, the issue was resolved by adding the words"as such"—i.e., the motive or reason for the destruction must be the ending of the group as a national, ethnic, racial, or religious entity. Evidence of such a motive, as one legal scholar put it,"will constitute an integral part of the proof of a genocidal plan, and therefore of genocidal intent." The crucial role played by intentionality in the Genocide Convention means that under its terms the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide. The lethal diseases were introduced inadvertently, and the Europeans cannot be blamed for their ignorance of what medical science would discover only centuries later. Similarly, military engagements that led to the death of noncombatants, like the battle of the Washita, cannot be seen as genocidal acts, for the loss of innocent life was not intended and the soldiers did not aim at the destruction of the Indians as a defined group. By contrast, some of the massacres in California, where both the perpetrators and their supporters openly acknowledged a desire to destroy the Indians as an ethnic entity, might indeed be regarded under the terms of the convention as exhibiting genocidal intent. Even as it outlaws the destruction of a group"in whole or in part," the convention does not address the question of what percentage of a group must be affected in order to qualify as genocide. As a benchmark, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has suggested"a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole," adding that the actual or attempted destruction should also relate to"the factual opportunity of the accused to destroy a group in a specific geographic area within the sphere of his control, and not in relation to the entire population of the group in a wider geographic sense." If this principle were adopted, an atrocity like the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a specific single locality, might also be considered an act of genocide. Of course, it is far from easy to apply a legal concept developed in the middle of the 20th century to events taking place many decades if not hundreds of years earlier. Our knowledge of many of these occurrences is incomplete. Moreover, the malefactors, long since dead, cannot be tried in a court of law, where it would be possible to establish crucial factual details and to clarify relevant legal principles. Applying today’s standards to events of the past raises still other questions, legal and moral alike. While history has no statute of limitations, our legal system rejects the idea of retroactivity (ex post facto laws). Morally, even if we accept the idea of universal principles transcending particular cultures and periods, we must exercise caution in condemning, say, the conduct of war during America’s colonial period, which for the most part conformed to thenprevailing notions of right and wrong. To understand all is hardly to forgive all, but historical judgment, as the scholar Gordon Leff has correctly stressed,"must always be contextual: it is no more reprehensible for an age to have lacked our values than to have lacked forks." The real task, then, is to ascertain the context of a specific situation and the options it presented. Given circumstances, and the moral standards of the day, did the people on whose conduct we are sitting in judgment have a choice to act differently? Such an approach would lead us to greater indulgence toward the Puritans of New England, who fought for their survival, than toward the miners and volunteer militias of California who often slaughtered Indian men, women, and children for no other reason than to satisfy their appetite for gold and land. The former, in addition, battled their Indian adversaries in an age that had little concern for humane standards of warfare, while the latter committed their atrocities in the face of vehement denunciation not only by self-styled humanitarians in the faraway East but by many of their fellow citizens in California. Finally, even if some episodes can be considered genocidal—that is, tending toward genocide—they certainly do not justify condemning an entire society. Guilt is personal, and for good reason the Genocide Convention provides that only"persons" can be charged with the crime, probably even ruling out legal proceedings against governments. No less significant is that a massacre like Sand Creek was undertaken by a local volunteer militia and was not the expression of official U.S. policy. No regular U.S. Army unit was ever implicated in a similar atrocity. In the majority of actions, concludes Robert Utley,"the Army shot noncombatants incidentally and accidentally, not purposefully." As for the larger society, even if some elements in the white population, mainly in the West, at times advocated extermination, no official of the U.S. government ever seriously proposed it. Genocide was never American policy, nor was it the result of policy. The violent collision between whites and America's native population was probably unavoidable. Between 1600 and 1850, a dramatic surge in population led to massive waves of emigration from Europe, and many of the millions who arrived in the New World gradually pushed westward into America's seemingly unlimited space. No doubt, the 19th-century idea of America’s"manifest destiny" was in part a rationalization for acquisitiveness, but the resulting dispossession of the Indians was as unstoppable as other great population movements of the past. The U.S. government could not have prevented the westward movement even if it had wanted to. In the end, the sad fate of America's Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed no good solution to this clash. The Indians were not prepared to give up the nomadic life of the hunter for the sedentary life of the farmer. The new Americans, convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant the original inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required by the Indians’ way of life. The consequence was a conflict in which there were few heroes, but which was far from a simple tale of hapless victims and merciless aggressors. To fling the charge of genocide at an entire society serves neither the interests of the Indians nor those of history. This article was first published by Commentary and is reprinted with permission.

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Blue Eagle - 12/12/2010 If the object is too take the land of an ethnic group; and, to do so, you must kill the ethnic group; is the killing of an ethnic group to take their property genocide?



If a government's goal is to remove an ethnic group from their land so another group of people can take the land, is that ethnic cleansing?



I would appreciate the opinions of the scholars?



Thanks, Blue Eagle

William McDougall - 10/26/2010 It is fascinating to read how the New World’s demise following the intrusion by outsiders, is written off as a tragic but uncontrollable result of immigration.



Today if a region of the world is overrun by outsiders using force, the inhabitants might resort to warfare as a form of self-protection. If disease, slavery, loses of property (hunting grounds), lose of whole ways of life and other actions (mass murder, rape and etc.), results in the eradication of many or most of the original inhabitants, most people including Democrats and liberals would be outraged.



Why are Native Americans not given the same protection now and in the past(by the politically correct), as African Americans, Hispanics and other peoples in the World.



Also remember after World War Two, at the Nuremberg trials, some of the defendants used the actions of the White Man against the Red Savages, as being similar to the Final Solution.



Their Lands and Way of Life are lost forever. They as a People will never again be a major player in the USA.



We now have an African American President. Hispanics will soon be the majority in this country. Yes I know that many Hispanics have Native American blood. But that doesn’t change what happened to the original Native Americans.



Bradley Keith LePage - 6/21/2010 I found the conclusions of the article "Were the American Indians the Victims of Genocide" insulting.



I am a person with American Indian heritage. There is no question that the land and population of Native Americans were decimated by white European settlers. Yet the author concludes that "In the end, the sad fate of America's Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy."



I wonder if this author's neighbor forcibly drove him out of his home and took his land under threat of violence, that he would not consider this a crime? The logic ability of a small child would know the answer to that, why doesn't your author.



I expect much more from a high standard of Historical accuracy quality organization like the History Network





Paul A Drouillard - 6/12/2010 The conduct and methods of the European Conquest of the Americas can only be described as ethnic cleansing, with the genocide of the Native American Peoples. The Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. hides this history, and is another slap in the face of every seeker of truth and justice. They should rename it "The National Happy Indian Museum".



The assaults, lies and cover ups continue as America carries into the 21st Century. The museum itself is another shameless act in a tragedy that will not be hidden. The Smithsonian has become partners in a 400 year old crime.

Charles Rout - 5/24/2009 "Your defintion of genocide has the appearance of tortured semantics. Inherent in the term is the intent of the perpetrator, as in the case of "homocide.""



Yes, a lawyer['s approach to genocide. Reminds me of Bush lawyers and torture. No quantity of intellectual lipstick will help this pig, to borrow from recent politics. If it is not clear from the writings of the European invaders (which is what they were) about their attitudes, as a whole, and particularly with those that ended up with the practical power, towards the native tribal people of the Americas (and yes, it is obvious), then surely their actions and the results of those actions are all you need to know.



They indeed erased the peoples and cultures of the "savages" and "infidels" as was clear from their "manifest destiny" as they repeadedly, systematically took their lands, their resources, and when they resisted, their lives.



They are gone. The invaders did this. On purpose. They were for the most part glad of it, unless fairly recent re-evaluations. Another in the long line of cultures wiped out by other cultures. Not surprising in human history. But the culture that did this one is in time and structure very close to our own.



We should face this truth bravely, and stop trying to explain it away.

Charles Rout - 5/24/2009 For me it is deadly serious. The cries of entire peoples hang over these words.

Charles Rout - 5/24/2009 'How shall a man judge what to do in such times?'

'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves, and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.'



- The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien

Charles Rout - 5/24/2009 Deep down, they know. They need the torturous weaving of logical arguments (always utterly dependent on the assumptions) to cloak themselves in dark robes, and blot out the sun of truth.

Charles Rout - 5/24/2009 Time and again the Europeans invade Indian land, forced them out, wrote treaties they failed to stick to, and murdered them (with guns or infected blankets) when they could not have their way. They systematically suppressed their language and culture. And with the aid of guns and germs, they effectively erased them from the "new world." Only the most self-absorbed and blind members of the winning culture can turn around and say it all happened by accident, it was a "tragedy", not a "crime." But every culture that has been guilty of genocide has this instinct of denial. And everyone else in the world but them can see it for what it is..

Charles Rout - 5/24/2009 Ah, the inevitability of genocide. Speaks well for humankind, does it not? And what is this argument except to say that the stronger always wipe out the weaker? God is on the side of the more recently advanced, be it weaponry, organization, farming, etc. The erasure of entire peoples for one's own gain, which accurately describes the genocide of the Americas, is "inevitable" in the same sense all barbarous acts of humanity are. Take that as you will - it has many levels.

Charles Rout - 5/24/2009 Genocide by the provisions of the convention of the United Nations in Dec. 1948 is defined as:

"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, and includes five types of criminal actions: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."



Lyman Legters

"The American Genocide"

Policy Studies Journal, vol. 16, no. 4, summer 1988



"...Let me remind you only of the witch-hunts of the middle ages, the horrors of the French revolution, or the genocide of the American Indians... in such periods there are always only a very few who do not succumb. But when it is all over, everyone, horrified, asks `for heaven's sake, how could I?' "



Albert Speer, Hitler's minister of war production, writing from prison in 1953.



"Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination - by starvation and uneven combat - of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity." P. 202, "Adolph Hitler" by John Toland



***



The native tribes were indeed systematically erased, bodily and culturally, from North, Central, and South America by Europeans who wished to possess these lands. That is genocide, in result, if not in intent. Manifest destiny and the like - there was a purpose, a belief behind it all. To even argue it borders on obscene. Intellectual work is empty without a moral foundation.





Alp Arslan SAHIN - 4/28/2009 According to your opinion; if someone is a WASP, he has a right take possession of other humanbeings properties doesn't he? For instance, that was what happened in ıraq. In fact,despoilment is the mother lode of western culture...

Alp Arslan SAHIN - 4/28/2009 Mister Lewy has a very huge apologies Bank in his brain to be able to exonerate his cutthroat@cutthroat culture!... hah hah hah...



American indians had been able to increase in numbers abroximetely approximately 18.000.000 when the white killers came to their homeland. And than,They started to evanesce rapidly because of simply different diseases. Hoo.hoh hoh.



It is so funny and bullshit!





Constance Cappel - 6/3/2008 My latest book, The Smallpox Genocide of the Odawa Tribe at L'Arbre Croche, 1763: The History of the Odawa People (Edwin Mellen Press), adds some more information about this subject.

Jenna Jenkins - 2/26/2008 Latin American Indians were exposed to the same European diseases that the North American Indians were but they still make up the majority of the ethnic background of the people of Mexico and other Central and South American countries. They were also exposed to the same warfare tactics. To call the U.S. government's systematic destruction of the Indians anything other than genocide is simply wishful thinking.

jacob mccandless - 9/18/2007 The Nazi's were not creating an Aryan state. The Aryan origins of Germany were contrasted with the Israeli/Armenian/Negroid origins of the Jews. This was to establish an unalienable identity. Jews are know to hid amongst other populations (create circumcised nations) for some unknown reason. They assassinated Ferdinand and they were brash enough to assassinate US presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. They brought the slaves to America and set the south upon itself. They had Martin Luther King killed and others. They always say it wasn't a Jew. Jew killed Jon Benet Ramsey. I'm not joking. They hate what they are and so they kill what they can't be. Look at the Israeli's. Retards. I have no doubt they were involved in the Native American affairs. They have a way of not taking up arms (except to assassinate) but getting others to -- Vietnam.



Whites are usually more docile than this. It takes a lot of proding to get them to kill. Look at European murder rates: 1 in 100,000 compared to 80 in Africans -- regardless of culture or nation.

jacob mccandless - 9/18/2007 The propaganda of Genocide was used to open the American immigration gates for Jews. This is sort of mixed war where Jews are never really disavowed of their desire to "come here" and "go there". The lack of Jewish control in the US brought about the invitation and the means of making this happen.



Every time a Jew breaks from the Jewess it is considered Death. The number of Jews who have come to America alone exceeds the number of native Americans who were on their own soil. Not mingling with some other population. Diddling and fiddling with everything for the lost tribes of Johnstown.

Abel Owl Rios - 7/10/2007 I cannot believe people even try acting that genocide did not take place.



Just like how denying the holocaust ever took place (Germany you can get arrested for doing so).



What the white man (Europeans?) did was and documented fact they were "exterminating" the Indians.



Please I hope anyone reads the following.



1.

Classification People are divided into "us and them". "The main preventive measure at this early stage is to develop universalistic institutions that transcend... divisions."

2.

Symbolization "When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups..." "To combat symbolization, hate symbols can be legally forbidden as can hate speech".

3.

Dehumanization "One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases." "Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished."

4.

Organization "Genocide is always organized... Special army units or militias are often trained and armed..." "To combat this stage, membership in these militias should be outlawed."

5.

Polarization "Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda..." "Prevention may mean security protection for moderate leaders or assistance to human rights groups..."

6.

Identification "Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity..." "At this stage, a Genocide Alert must be called..."

7.

Extermination "It is "extermination" to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human." "At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide. Real safe areas or refugee escape corridors should be established with heavily armed international protection."

8.

Denial "The perpetrators... deny that they committed any crimes..." "The response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts."





Now lets look at what genocide is defined under international law.



(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.



Now tell me genocide did not take place?



Sorry if my text seems very messy im writing this at 3:18AM (I have a class which need to pick my final essay topic most certainly will be this)

lux ben molina - 2/16/2007 of course indians were and still are victims of Genocide maybe you would see thing from a different view if you knew how things are we are dying from culture shock already dead with no dreams or belief in any god at all .But being a YAQUI INDIAN i have no say i just watch our people die in there own vermillion sleep and just wish the fucking mexican goverment never did any thing to us but then again we would be stuck in poor wrecked mexico and not the ''free'',greedy america i call home today.I have no anger for what they did ,they thought they were playing god but ended up killing themselves and good people in the way of trying to be free from something they were trying not to be .So yes indians are Genocide surviviors been here longer than the damn jews and still ignored.

S Dennis - 1/11/2007 I realize that this discussion is several years old, but I just came upon it. As I read the arguments for and against the position of the original article, I wondered when somebody would bring US policies regarding Indian boarding schools into the discussion. Thank you. Someone finally did. Even if one can choose to rationalize the many atrocities suffered by American Indians - Indians defending the land of their ancestors, their way of life, their livelihood, their religion - as the tragic result of westward expansion, one cannot deny that the well-documented series of acts committed by agents of the US government through its system of Indian education were committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such. Richard Henry Pratt, superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School and "father" of the Indian boarding school movement at one time wrote to President Rutherford B. Hayes, "I am at this time, 'fighting' a greater number of 'the enemies of civilization,' than the whole of my regiment put together, and I know further that I am fighting them with a thousand times more hopes of success." Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Jones said, "To educate the Indian in the ways of civilized life, ...is to preserve him from extinction, not as an Indian, but as a human being." However well-intentioned this preservation of human life, it cannot be denied that the systematic denial of access of Indian children to the language, religion, and so-called inferior cultural values of their parents while promoting the so-called superior values of white, Christian civilization had both the intent and the result of stamping out the Indian. It had both the intent and the result of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such. I cannot disagree more with the conclusion of the originator of this discussion who wrote, "In the end, the sad fate of America's Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values...To fling the charge of genocide at an entire society serves neither the interests of the Indians nor those of history." In actuality, the opposite is true: to acknowledge the truth about the systematic destruction of American Indians does serve both the interests of Indians and those of history. So many today wish to dismiss this truth as ancient history and as an excuse of some survivors (today's Indians) not to take responsibility for their failures to succeed in white society. And while we use this get-over-it mentality to rationalize our past, most will acknowledge that for many crime victims, the first step in healing comes when the accused both gives a full accounting of his criminal actions and shows genuine remorse for the results of those actions. Why do we insist on adding further injury by denying Indians this first step in healing? We can learn the lessons of our history only when we acknowledge the truth of our history. This is how we serve history.

Isaiah Cornova - 9/28/2006 The american people (of many european descents) did commit genocide.



I am hopi. I am not navajo or iriquois. I am not seminole or sioux to name a few of the numerous other tribes that still exist and survived the onslaught of an american genocide.



My people were and continue to be farmers, not nomads.



I only implore the World, outside of the united states to remember that the natives (of numerous tribes) request that somebody remembers we still exist and like the jews we survived a genocide of enormous proportions. American history if written by the likes of the no fault is ours americans will rewrite history and the worse can only come from that.



Remember, I am hopi not similar or kin to almost any other tribe in the united states as it is now. Much like the europeans, the french don't call themselves germans, nor do the english see themselves as Danes. Different cultures for different people. This is one glaring fact that most people, especially in ths country neglect to remember or think about.



I've got a lot more to say but i'm tired and I have to go and work for the white man because we don't want casino handouts. We'll be here long after the us is gone. 2,000 + years and running and still ticking.



Glenn Edward Gannaway - 8/16/2006 "Historical judgment 'must always be contextual.'" Shewww! That lets us (i.e., Americans of European descent) off the hook, doesn't it? At least as long as history is written by the victors. OK, let's take a look around us: rather than being populated and governed by Amerindians, North and South America are, as Alfred Crosby aptly called them, "neo-Europes," firmly under the control of the descendents of the "explorers." This much is fact, easily discernible by anyone with normally functioning senses. All the rest -- and bless Mr. Lewy, his attempt at even-handedness almost does the trick -- is rationalization in the service of the existing power structure.



Here's why we can -- indeed, why we must -- "apply today's standards to events of the past": if we're not willing to look honestly at our own past, how can we be honest about what we're doing as a nation now?



Further, Mr. Lewy commits another common error of the historian: he suggests that peoples of an earlier era in effect were incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. Discrimination against the dead is just about the only remaining form of allowable bias. But isn't it more likely that the colonists knew exactly what they were doing?





Nico J J - 5/13/2006 Dear Mr Severance,



I just read your comment and I felt the urge to reply as simply as possible.



I am a European and live in Europe. It has never been in anyone's mind here that the Western Roman Empire was the object of any genocide. The invaders were either assimilated or returned home. We in France are the produce of many invasions: the founding populations were the Gallic (Celtic) tribes, but even them probably met some pre-Gallic populations that they assimilated. Ever since we have been "invaded" by different populations or warriors, but the basic population never disappeared from the surface of earth. When the Franks invaded us (they gave us our name: France), they settled here and then were assimilated. They didn't take the place of the Gallo-Roman population.



In the case of the Indians I feel you're comparing what hapened to a soccer match: 2 teams competed and the strongest won. Except that the team who had the trophy before is not here anymore. But it's not like in a match: it had been the territory of the Indians and the bisons for thousand years and they were invaded. Their country was stolen from them, then they disappeared (or almost): even if there was no intent, when you make an action and the result of that action is that the person who was there disappears because of your action, it is still homicide. Genocide is when a population or a distinct human group disappears. How do you call the Indian disappearance ? Absentia ?

There is for sure a difference with what the Nazis did: they had a planned project to wipe out from the surface of earth and wherever they were, a distinct population that they hated. In the case of Indians the problem didn't come up because they were Indians: if the Indians had been living somewhere else, there wouldn't have been any problem (which was not the case of Jews and other populations in the eyes of the Nazis). Alas, they were on a territory that was the object of desire by other people who had otherwise no desire to share (without saying so).



At some point you say that the motive was not extermination per se as much as land acquisition coupled with the need to eliminate the threat to security. I find this a bit hypocritical.

It's like saying that a robber didn't want to kill the owner, but had to, because he/she needed to ensure his/her own safety. Wouldn't you laugh ? Do you really think so ? Land acquisition ? Would you be happy today to have people coming from overseas to make "land acquisitions" (forced land acquisitions) and ensure their own safety with guns ? You can't just say it was a mere competition and poor Indians, they lost: we wanted to take the land and the country, but not kill them. The result is that they are killed, but we didn't intend to. That's life, no guilt. Really ? Come in Europe and ask people in general. You will be surprised how they view all this. And we have our share of guilt as those were European governments and nations who initiated the first inroads in the Americas.



I agree with you that there are mass movements in history that are unavoidable in the human course. That's true. Human history is full of that. But what does this have to do with genocide ? Even if it is the result of an historically unavoidable trend, a genocide is still a genocide if the conditions to a genocide are fulfilled. And talking about unavoidable trends (always questionable anyway) does not take away the guilt, does it ?



In on e of your sentences, you say that "(...)the U.S. army was hardly going to take the side of the uncivilized tribes against its own citizenry". You're not implying that the Indians were not civilized or that a civilization is superior to another, right ? Otherwise, do you know anything about the different "Indian" civilization" ? Do you think it's "civilized" to invade a territory and take over ?



Finally, why did you have to add that the Indians (if they were still there) would have lost little sleep if it had been the other way around ?? Is it about one side against another in your eyes ? Really ? How would you react then if, again, you were invaded today and someone told you, sorry, it's the human history and, sorry, it's just too bad for you ?



Sorry for this long comment that I am not sure you will even read.

Anyway, I realize how European outlooks differ from today Americans' outlook. Acknowledging a fault speaks in your honor and means you start to master you own history: denying it is getting ready to do it again. We have made so many mistakes in our long European history: we are still learning from that, but we have progressed. Just look at how peaceful Western Europe now is, France and Germany for instance have moved a long way forward.

Andrea Marting - 5/9/2006 Thus, the Sudeten Germans were ethnically cleansed from Czechoslovakia (2 million people), Christians were ethnically cleansed from Turkey and, in exchange, Muslims were ethnically cleansed from Greece, Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arab/Muslim dominated countries (856,000 people), ethnic Turks and Bulgarians were ethnically cleansed from certain border regions, Poles were ethnically cleansed from Belorussia and Ukraine, etc., etc.



Note: there have been actual genocides, as the dictionary uses the word: "The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000). Note the key word "extirmination" which, is something quite different from "expulsion." )





Actually, if you agree with the terminology you have posted N. Friedman, then genocide has not actually been commited. Attempted yes, but commited no. Charging anyone with Genocide would be like charging someone with murder who had failed to kill their intended target. When the charge should actually be attempted murder.

Genocide never happened to the Jews, granted genocide was attempted. What happened to the Jews falls more in the catagory of ethnic cleansing. Since Jewish peoples were never exterminated.



ex·ter·mi·nate ( P ) Pronunciation Key (k-stûrm-nt)

tr.v. ex·ter·mi·nat·ed, ex·ter·mi·nat·ing, ex·ter·mi·nates

To get rid of by destroying completely; extirpate. See Synonyms at abolish.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Latin exterminre, extermint-, to drive out : ex-, ex- + terminre, to mark boundaries (from terminus, boundary marker).]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ex·termi·nation n.

ex·termi·native or ex·termi·na·tory (-n-tôr, -tr) adj.



Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.



Michael Scott Christian - 4/12/2006 Given the attitude perpetreated by the Church prior to "Discovery"? which is outlined in the Vatican "Papal Bulls" and a document called the Manifest Destiny. I think there was a definite intent form all the European countries to carry out a genocidal directive upon arrival to our lands!?



Knowingly infecting another race with a disease and killing 90% of the population not an act of genocide!?



Repudiation of documented "settlment" activities makes it exponentially immoral!



Secwepemc Nation Member

Anthony M. Belli - 12/8/2005 Excellent article, one I will use for research for my book; Whispers in the Wind - The Weber Creek Massacre. I believe Guenter Lewy is correct with the exception of the California Indian. California following the Weber Creek Massacre (1849)engaged in genocide. Governor Peter H. Burnett publiclly called for the "extermination" of the tribes. Therefore the state government established a policy of genocide. The argument is not popular with California historians. I say knowledge and intent was clear in California.



AB

David Liao - 7/29/2005 This may be a late objection, but I think your comments that Eurasian culture is somehow superior is a badly founded emotional opinion, even if you cite Jared Diamond, Durant, or anyone else.



Native Americans DID adapt in many ways. They were capable of creating and keeping diplomatic relationships, holding to treaties (in reference to the old quip that the US never signed an Indian treaty that it did not break), providing key strategic and tactical support for centuries to European and American forces, and contributing to the later part of the Enlightenment.



The Iroquois Confederacy alone contributed dormant and ignored ideals such as a democratic process involving declarations of war, balanced and effective hierarchy, and female leadership. John Locke and countless other European philosophers and Founding Fathers mirror this sentiment in observing that egalitarian government was possible in such an "uncivilized" setting.



And by the way, it was not that the Native Americans could not adapt to European culture. It was that they were eventually forbade to by law for centuries. Imagine trying to integrate into a culture that systematically confiscates your property (cross reference Cherokees) and creates laws to prevent you from reading or writing their culture (in effect until the 1850's and even beyond.)

Sandor A. Lopescu - 4/16/2005 I'm pretty sure Chris didn't actually read the article. My guess is he just saw an opportunity to mention Palestinians and genocide in the same sentence, so he went for it.

Jerry t Sena - 4/9/2005 Correction: If we cannot distinguish one thing from another, they are the same thing.



Jerry

Mubde' ABSI - 4/6/2005 Adam,

You enjoy arguments for the sake of arguing no more. Where do you put the Israelis in your argument. Are not they commiting genocide against the Palestians every day of the year.

Why do not you save your words to explain current events in the world and not the past.

What do you call the American Army attack on Afganistan and Iraq. Tons of explosives are used to wipe entire populations. Wht do you call this legal warfare. May be they will refer to this genocide as saving humanity from potential terrorists.

How about not long ago, the Nuclear genocide of two Japanese cities. What do you call that? testing nuclear weapon to save the earth from bad Japanese!!!

Our best fight against genocide is love of each other. Yes, we should all love one another and respect the greatest gift that GOD bestowed on people; their lives.

Mubde' ABSI - 4/6/2005 To Chris and Ben,

Genocide is genocide whether affected people are Native-Americans or Jews or more recenly the people of Palestine, Iraq and Muslims of Balkan region and Afaganistan. Let us not dwell much on terms but results. Killing is killing is killing no matte what politicized conventions say about them. People on earth classify all killings as genocides.

Mubde' ABSI - 4/6/2005 It is really interesting to make a similar resemblance between the Native-Indians genocide and the new Iraqi genocide. In both cases, the American Government and Its Army (not the American People) are killing masses of people for the simple pupose of changing their heritages.

No matter what the cause might be, no one should ever have the right to kill another man. "Those who kill a single man is as if they killed all men".

Americans should revolt against their government genocide practices in every country on earth.

Matt Stone - 4/3/2005 This article is an exagerration. The history of the Native Americans is very complex and it is not fair or accurate to question the history by questioning only two situations: tragedy or genocide. Both situations are true but more importantly is that the settlers never did anything to help stop the tragedy of the Natives infectious diseases. Between 1500 and 1900, the Native American population decreased from 12 million to about 270,000. We are not talking about a holocaust of 6 million, we are talking about the biggest genocide in our world's history. Are we strong enough to acknowledge this? Of course not. History has been told and history has lied.

Red A Head - 3/21/2005 don't understand the lies, cover up and guilt white americans carry regarding what their ancestors did. They did what they did, the US government is still up to the same stuff and has never changed throuout history. They only "help" a country when they have an investment in somethinf they have. Look what they have done to the African Americans, are you going to try and deny that too? If not, why would you deny actions based out of the same greed and evil, during the same time done to the Natives? What they changed their ways suddenly? ... Oh! the Africans were just visiting and working for free as a favor to the Americans?

Redhead

Charles Lee Geshekter - 1/17/2005 "A process in which some are more or less conscious....." - this is tautology and ahistorical question-begging at its worst.



The cause of the effect is what we are debating, and parsing this or parsing that aside, you need to remember that even the thinnest pancake always has two sides.

Dave Livingston - 1/7/2005 Looks to me that both Leo Geshekter and Val Jobson both make vail points. That A. when European (Industral Age) & American Indian (Stone Age) cultures collided the more primitive sociuety could not preserve itself & B. can't document them, but I've read stories, unconfirmed ones, that incidents of giving or selling dmallpox infected blankets to Indians in the West occurred. But is it genocide to destroy in that manner a few isolated villages or subdivisions of a few tribes?



In any event, there was no organized U.S. government-sponsered effort of genocide mounted against the American Indian of which I'm aware. Certainly there never was anything on the scale of the Turkish early 19th Century genocide of Armenians.

Dave Livingston - 1/7/2005 From this it appears God does support those with the bigger battalions. In sum, once European man came to these shores, the existing Stone Age cultures were doomed. It is beside the point that the American Indian as well as the European was an immigrat. The Indian merely came here sooner and was fortunate to find the land unoccupied.. But when the European came here he came with well-developed notions of land ownership & development which the Indian didn't have or understand.



Yes, it is easy to sympathize with the Indian, but his Stone Age society had no more chance against an Industral Age one than did firstly the Bushman & pigmy & then the Bantu in South Africa, or did the Bushman in Australia, when confronted by representatives of an Industral Age scociety.



On the other hand, various tribes in New Guinea have not been destroyed in confrontations with Industral Age societies, because they are isolated enough in a very rugged land, a land that is of little value to Industral Age man.



But rugged terrain isn't always enogh to permit a society to exist in the face of invasion--witness the Tibetan, who is slowly being dispossessed by the Chinese.

chad faulkner ryan - 12/6/2004 The relationship between the Holocaust and the removal of the indian people from the western americas, isn't one that I would consider logical. First of all the extermination of millions of Jews should be the definition of genocide. I don't know how you can say that it isn't. Look at the root words, geno (genetics), cide (extermination). Hitler was killing off the Jews because he didn't approve of their genetic structure. I do not believe this is in the same catagory as America's Manifest destiny. The unethical and "bullied" way we herded Native Americans was horrible, but nothing close to the Holocaust. Some say that the domination of the American continent was "survival of the fittest". I don't necessarily agree with that, but i do believe it had its purpose. American settlers had no intention of removing their race from the planet. They only wanted to move them out of the way. It was just unfortunate that the west wasn't big enough for the settlers and the Indians.

Diana Applebaum - 12/3/2004 Without speaking for Lewy,unavoidable may be close to the truth in the sense that I cannot think of a confrontation between a culture of of illiterate, hunting-gathering animists and a farming culture that ended in a manner other than the hunting-gathering culture being displaced, eliminated or absorbed. This certainly includes the frontier between the hunting-gathering cultures of Europe and the wave of Neolithic farmers that entered Europe from the Near East.(see War Before Civilization - Lawrence H. Keeley)



The same holds true for encounters between hunting-gathering bands and cultures that live by either farming or herding.



Even when two groups of farmers meet, but one is illiterate and organized on a tribal level, while the other is literate, and organized on a larger scale around a king - the tribal group lost (was displaced, eliminated, or absorbed,) even before the advent of gunpowder. The history of China could be written as a series of encounters of this kind as the tribal peoples are pushed back and the Han Chinese move in to form what we now think of as the Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Hunan, Sichuan, etc.



Inevitable sounds terrible, like shirking blame, but it is very close to being a universal phenomenon (some reservations in the case of nomadic herdsmen in suitable environments.) And it is still going on today:



24 November 2004 e-news from Survival International, supporting tribal

peoples worldwide.

Founded in 1969, registered charity (UK) no. 267444



Botswana: Bushman witness 'feared for her life' during evictions

The first Bushman woman to give evidence during the court case in which 243

Bushmen are suing the government for the right to return to their ancestral

land told how she 'feared for her life' when being evicted in 2002. She also

described life in the resettlement site of New Xade as 'horrible', with

rampant crime and alcoholism.

http://www.survival-international.org/news.htm



Papua: Thousands flee army operation that leaves three dead.

At least three tribal people, one of them a Church pastor, have been killed

in an Indonesian army operation in the central highlands of Papua. Five

thousand tribal people have fled to the mountains where they face starvation

- too scared to emerge from their hideouts in case they are shot by the

army.

http://www.survival-international.org/news.htm



Brazil: Farmers attack Indians' houses as violence escalates

A long-running battle between 16,000 Indians and the farmers and cattle

ranchers who occupy much of their land flared into violence this week.

Settlers attacked several Indian villages, burning houses and shooting

indiscriminately. One Indian has since disappeared.

http://www.survival-international.org/news.htm



UK: Tribal people journey to UK; government under attack

Three indigenous representatives arrived in London on 24 November to target

the UK government for blocking an historic UN declaration on indigenous

rights. Inuit woman Dalee Sambo Dorough from Alaska, Armand McKenzie of the

Innu people from Quebec and Cree representative Romeo Saganash are

protesting at the UK government's refusal to recognise collective rights - a

position which is damaging to indigenous peoples around the world.

http://www.survival-international.org/news.htm





Charles Lee Geshekter - 12/1/2004 In terms of comparative history, one must decide whether racial and ethnic murder ever - anywhere - came with as complete and as thorough a philosophical justification for the idea of ridding the planet of those in the despised group as was presented by the Nazis in their war against the Jews.



Quite signifiacbtly, whenever one "group" attacls another in a genocidal fashion, the victims have the "exit" or "out" of capitulation whereby they accept the philosophy or religious beliefs of the oppressor, or of subjugation through self-abasement and self-degradation before the aggressor no matter how distasteful those options are.



No such options existed for the Jews when dealing with the Nazis.



On the other hand, the Indians primarily suffered from diseases, dislocations, and depopulation. As James Axtell has lucidly demonstrated, "from time to time, some colonists did desire to commit the worst atrocity of all - genocide."





Bob Spiegelman - 12/1/2004 The question is whether an "intention" to be an intention has to be subjective (inside in the heads or words of specific actors/writers) or whether it can be embedded in the actual totality of a number of actual deeds (hundreds if not thousands) that come together and aim in a particular direction or pattern (toward a specific outcome over a given period of time). An intention need not be conscious or acknowledged up front; but embedded in a process of which some are more or less conscious in carrying out. Also, an intention (subjective or structural, conscious or not) can be genocidal without actually achieving genocide. Either way, the effect is devastating on the victims and that takes priority over all these parsings.

Bob Spiegelman - 12/1/2004 Evidence? The question is whether an "intention" to be an intention has to be subjective (inside in the heads or words of specific actors/writers) or whether it can be embedded in the actual totality of a number of actual deeds (hundreds if not thousands) that come together and aim in a particular direction or pattern (toward a specific outcome over a given period of time). An intention need not be conscious or acknowledged up front; but embedded in a process of which some are more or less conscious in carrying out. Also, an intention (subjective or structural, conscious or not) can be genocidal without actually achieving genocide. Either way, the effect is devastating on the victims and that takes priority over all these parsings.

Mike West - 11/27/2004 The vast majority of Indians died of diseases that came over with the Europeans. That doesn't excuse the many cases of murder, and destruction that was foisted upon the Indians. But your examples of the tools of genocide don't add up.

The Gatling gun was only in use in the late 1800's, and Indian warriors likely figured out ways to stay away from such a weapon. It was not a reason for the deaths of enough Indians to call it genocide.

The biological agents issue has few documentated cases, and, how could the prospective users biological warfare agents keep themselves from getting smallpox, or measles? That knowledge wasn't available back then.

Alcohol was sold to Indians, but was this more from enterprising booze dealers. I've bever read anything about U.S.Government programs to send alcohol to Indians, which would have been the only way to aide in the genocide that you wrote about.



Was the horrible acts by Mexican soldiers commited on Yaqui and, Apache children part of a Government program, or the actions of a few sadistic Mexican soldiers? It would seem to be an example of oppression, not genocide.

Charles Lee Geshekter - 11/26/2004 Adam made several telling points about military technologies with which I entirely concur.



European inventions and innovations certainly "stemmed from need and commercial innovation," which was provoked in large part by the intense and growing competitveness between burgeoning European states after 1400, a situation that was not matched in Asia or the Middle East at that time.



Because it was Europeans who sailed to the Western Hemisphere, then back and forth many times while neither native Americans nor Asians did anything remotely similar (leaving aside the case of the Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho, the exception that proves the rule), it was the Europeans, more so than anyone else who mastered the diverse and deadly arts of mass killing from a distance.



This would culminate in the airplane, followed soonafter by dropping bombs from planes (Italians in Libya in 1911), and eventually awesome and horrible weapons of mass destruction, etc.



It seems to me that given the radically different trajectories of military innovations found in Europe vs. indigenous America after 1450, it is not inappropriate or inaccurate to describe one set of cultures as "inferior" or "superior" to the other one.



This by no means denigrates or belittles native American cultures and further suggests that we study them even more intensely than ever.



But the verdict of history seems quite clear, even while we vigorously debate our respective interpretations of the facts, the theories, and the theories about the facts, as Alfred North Whitehead would have noted.

Charles Lee Geshekter - 11/26/2004 Hey Jonnie:



While not making and eating pies, you must be a very busy boy all right.



As a good story-teller, did you also know, perforce, that Asians mapped the world, spread their languages 'round the globe, established international scholarly forums, invented airplanes, and discovered the cure for several diseases?



Alas, thanks to a nefarious Euroracist conspiracy to prevent the world from knowing these facts, Asians have garnered an astonishingly disproportionately tiny share of the Nobel prizes over the past 100 years.



I know you will help get the word out.



Come to think of it, maybe you should watch more TV.

Jonathan Dresner - 11/25/2004 Mr. Geshekter,



I make my own pie, thank you very much, and watch very little TV.



I do however, know, as you and your respondents do not seem to, that the "superiority" of European weaponry, etc, was quite shallow, as all of the important technologies were borrowed from Asia rather than developed in Europe.



Cite me.

Charles Lee Geshekter - 11/25/2004 Jon - turn off that TV this minute, or you'll get no pie.

Charles Lee Geshekter - 11/25/2004 Sorry mate - but all your hootin' and hollerin', shuckin' and jivin' and weepin' and wailin' won't cut it when it comes to grasping the core, essential verdict of North American post-Columbian history.



You seem blissfully but angrily unaware of it anyhow so sadly there's little I can do to open your eyes.



As a comparative example, the Khoisan speakers of southern Africa (forager peoples) were overrun and overwhelmed by culturally superior, more adroit, more adaptive, better organized, physically stronger, better unified and far more cunning Bantu-speaking iron age cultivators.



The Khoisan hunters and gatherers had three options: to flee into more marginal habitats, to resist bitterly and stand their ground, or to be assimilated out of existence.



They tried all three and today, 800-1000 years after the initial contact the Khoisan are as peripheral, degraded and marginal to the modern world of southern Africa as the majority of descendants of native Americans (indigenous peoples) are to the United States in 2004.



You may deplore that outcome, wish and pray that it had not turned out that way, wish to assign blame and treachery all around.....but that is the inescapable conclusion.



In North America, the European colonists, settlers, invaders (whatever) were culturally superior to indigenous peoples in their ability to borrow, steal, and imitate from other cultures. That was one key genius of Euro-Asian cultures too, by the way, as Jared Diamond and others have shown.



Their curiosity about novel things, their eagerness to experiment with new ways, their grasp of the unfamiliar, and all the while their command of geography and habitat diversity..... these were among the many things that made European settlers/invaders/colonists triumphant, along with the demonstrated weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the people they encountered, including their epidemiological inferiority, or whatever politically correct euphemism you prefer to use.



There is not one shred of evidence that challenges the conclusion that there was no Navaho da Gama, no Iroquois Guttenberg, no Sioux Darwin, no Cherokee Marx, no Arapaho Freud, no Lakota Galileo, and no Hopi da Vinci.



I don't know why this is so hard for you to grasp, but I would like not to have to explain this to you again.

N. Friedman - 11/25/2004 Adam,



Very, very well put.



I reiterate my statement about Chris. He has a long way to go - being, by his own terms, an anti-Zionist - to distinguish his views from Judeophobia. Now we learn that he denies the Shoah. That, to me, is a position held ***only*** by radical Antisemites and totally uneducated people. I am inclined not to think him ignorant.



And frankly, I have never seen both such views, i.e. Holocaust denial and anti-Zionist, held by a person who is not a ***rabid*** Judeophobe. Am I missing something?

Marc "Adam Moshe" Bacharach - 11/25/2004 1) “The argument that the Native Americans did not suffer genocide in todays terms fails when one looks at the original definition...the argument that anything is genocide, even the Nazi atrocites, fails when one takes a strict construction of the genocide convention

since the specific intent requirement was not fulfilled.”



Chris, thus far you have refused to address anything that I have posted, choosing instead to simply restate your point over and over again that my argument somehow necessitates that the Nazis be excluded. You keep saying that the specific intent requirement was not fulfilled. I am saying that your interpretation goes against some of the top scholars of the subject. I am not saying that you are wrong, per se. But continuing to repeat the same claim without addressing my concerns gets us nowhere.



2) “So if you want to stick with the original definition, Native Americans suffered from what is now called genocide..if you want to use a strict interpretation of the GC, even the Nazis did not commit genocide. Pick your poison fellas...you are absolutely in the dark on this issue. I am simply trying to educate you at this point.”



I have debated with you for some time on this site Chris, but I don’t know if I have ever seen your posts so arrogant and dismissive of the facts. Perhaps if you were to post an exact definition based this original understanding, it would be useful to see if you are correct regarding the Native Americans. However, as stated above, I believe you are incorrect in your understanding of what exactly the Nazis did and why.



For the record also, I believe that the Indians were victims of genocide, and the definition need not be molested in order to make the case.



3) “why does it always have to be Jews? what about the Communists, intellectuals, homosexuals? Jews arent the only people on the planet”



I do not have the time or the inclination to explain why the Jews were specifically targeted for extermination when the Communists, intellectuals, homosexuals were not, but suffice to say, I can either believe you, Chris, and the many others who wish to rewrite history on this issue for modern political reasons, or I can believe the many people who have studied this issue and wrote extensively on it. However, I will be brief:



Communists: Hitler hated communists, but to him, the real people behind all of Communism was… guess who?... the Jews! When the Nazis occupied Communist territory, the leaders were killed, but there was never an active attempt to simply liquidate the entire Communist society.



Intellectuals: You must be joking? You honestly believe that Hitler’s aim was the total annihilation of all intellectuals? What about his scientists, his engineers? Of course intellectuals of the enemy were killed, but not because they were intellectuals per se, but because they could pose a potential threat to Nazi authority in the occupied territory.



Homosexuals: Hitler considered homosexuality to be a threat to his grand racial plan. Thus it was a crime, similar to robbery. An estimated 1.2 million men were homosexuals in Germany in 1928. Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, and of these, some 50,000 officially defined homosexuals were sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps. Unlike Jews. men arrested as homosexuals were not systematically deported to Nazi-established ghettos in eastern Europe. Nor were they transported in mass groups of homosexual prisoners to Nazi extermination camps in Poland.



Ironically, you do not ask about the Gypsies, but if you had, I would have agreed that the Gypsies were also the victims of Nazi genocide. They were perhaps the only other group that was targeted for total extermination in the short term.



The problem with this discussion Chris, is that the idea that Jews were unique victims of genocide does not conform with some people’s ideas of what Jews should be, and thus try to minimize their victim-hood, and make those who stick to history sound arrogant, or somehow begging for attention. This is not a debate, as far as I am concerned. It is a discussion between someone who believes that the Holocaust happened the way it did, and someone who believes that there was no specific intent to kill Jews, and that the Jews were no different from regular Aryan Germans, who the Nazis also killed in large numbers. None of this, of course, is intended to minimize the millions upon millions of non-Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.



4) “Your specific intent to destroy in whole or in part fails to be met since the Nazis were not targeting a specific people...they were targeting all those peoples who weren't "Aryan." Therefore the specific intent to destroy a group fails. Logic, fellas...tough to grasp, but makes you much more intelligent.”



Your arrogance has now been matched by a similar ignorance. If you are correct, the French, Italians, and many others would have been similarly rounded up and sent to camps and yet if you actually check your history books, Hitler was allies with Italy and when the Nazis occupied Italy, your promised Holocaust of the entire Italisn population never materialized.



5) “You actually demonstrated perfectly how you imbue your own ideology on the definition when you talk about your interpretation of the genocide convention and the way you construe it. In legal terms, you stretch a definition that does not exist to meet your criteria while narrowing it to eliminate those criteria you dont like.”



An interesting charge. In your next post, I assume that you have some evidence to back this up. The definition requires that intent be present, and I have been arguing that the Nazis showed intent. For some reason unknown to me, you seem to interpret this is some ideological construction?



6) “your ideological requirements could be met, but the legal ones are not. In other words, once again you are imposing your ideological viewpoint on an objective legal concept...a BAD IDEA.”



And once again, you fail to actually explain what it is you are saying? What is the basis of your charge? If I write the word “chair,” and you actually read the word “chair” on this post, are you being ideological? You seem to throw the term around but have failed to either define it or demonstrate how reading a legal definition and then applying it to a specific case is ideological.



Based on this conversation Chris, it is clear to me that you deny the Holocaust as it happened and believe that those Jews are simply either lying, or exaggerating for some nefarious purpose. If you wish to speak about the Nazi era on this post and wish to be taken seriously, I would recommend that you include some link or source for your information, because your own credibility on this issue, speaking for myself, is no longer accepted.



Some recommended reasing:

http://veritas3.holocaust-history.org/jews-central/

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/index.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005143







chris l pettit - 11/25/2004 when did I ever refer to the original definition? In my original post I referred to the definition as articulated in the Genocide Convention, which is not the original definition. In the question post i refer to the definition of the term by its founding father. He included cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing in his definition. it was not then subsequently included in the genocide convention due to the fears of the US and other powers that indigenous peoples would have a genocide claim. Where is the problem in understanding? I can;t really explain it much clearer. The argument that the Native Americans did not suffer genocide in todays terms fails when one looks at the original definition...the argument that anything is genocide, even the Nazi atrocites, fails when one takes a strict construction of the genocide convention since the specific intent requirement was not fulfilled. So if you want to stick with the original definition, Native Americans suffered from what is now called genocide..if you want to use a strict interpretation of the GC, even the Nazis did not commit genocide. Pick your poison fellas...you are absolutely in the dark on this issue. I am simply trying to educate you at this point.



Adam...I urge you to read the deliberations leading up to the adoption of the convention. The quote that you supply was hotly debated, as was the inclusion of the concept of cultural genocide. The GC has warped the definition of genocide so much that it no longer refers to the crimes committed against those targeted by the Nazis (why does it always have to be Jews? what about the Communists, intellectuals, homosexuals? Jews arent the only people on the planet). Your specific intent to destroy in whole or in part fails to be met since the Nazis were not targeting a specific people...they were targeting all those peoples who weren't "Aryan." Therefore the specific intent to destroy a group fails. Logic, fellas...tough to grasp, but makes you much more intelligent.



There were many laws that were targeted against all political parties the nazis did not like, against communists, against intellectuals who spoke out. For every instance of Nuremburg Laws, one can find secret laws (like those currently being used against dissidents and Muslims in the US) that target other groups. The argument that the Nazis committed genocide because they were targeting a group loosely described as all "inferior peoples" is intriguing. however, it becomes problematic for you in that the specific intent requirement then becomes so broad the you reintroduce cultural genocide into the GC and revert back to the original historical definition, which would mean that the Native Americans suffered from genocide, as do the Palestinians, as do the Tibetans, as did the Vietnamese...on and on. The US was targeting "communists" by the way...meaning the whole population of Vietnam and anyone who did not agree with them (see Laos and Cambodia).



You actually demonstrated perfectly how you imbu