I really have to stop reading about the US’ treatment of native Americans - it is too damned depressing! But combined with my regular travel past the Illinois Holocaust Museum, I keep finding myself wondering why (at least in the parts of the US I’ve been in) we hear so much about Germany’s extermination of Jews, and so little about the attempted (and achieved) extermination of other peoples throughout history.
The history of humankind has repeated instances of one group trying to usurp or kill off another peoples. A couple of things about the German efforts certainly warrant its continued prominence - it was on a huge scale, and it was relatively recent. But it certainly was not unique in its intent. And on at least a couple of other scales - it didn’t succeed. There still are plenty of Jews alive and flourishing, and they have a generally recognized country. Whereas other peoples are only a memory.
I don’t think anything I’ve posted (or have ever thought) could be interpreted as defending or denying Hitler’s practices, or suggesting they were anything other than evil. But in some ways I feel that the prominence given the 20th century Jewish holocaust serves to distort the overall history of humanity by somewhat suggesting it was a unique occurrance.
If my question is too ignorant, or otherwise so lacking as to not merit meaningful discussion, then please help clear up my ignorance.
It was certainly done in a manner that was unprecedented. Rounding up millions people, putting them in camps, and exterminating them. Probably the closest parallel would be the killing fields in Cambodia. Both of those were also killing one’s own citizens rather than an enemy who held territory you wanted to conquer.
The genocide of the American Indians was a combination of various plagues and conquering nations to steal their land. It also happened over a much greater time period
For one thing, the Jews and their sympathizers successfully kept the genocide from being conveniently ignored and forgotten, which is the usual pattern. Village A massacres Village B, then the people of Village A never mention the incident even to each other (and especially their children) and if the massacre is successful enough don’t mention the people of Village B ever existed; in a few generations the incident and their victims are no longer recalled. The Jews managed to keep it from being swept under the rug - note that the other victims of the Holocaust are seldom talked about or remembered.
Another difference is that the Germans have admitted it was wrong and entirely their fault, even to themselves; that’s very unusual.
The Holocaust has a lot of prominence in the West because it wasn’t perpetrated by some “Other” - most of the other genocides you could think of are in Asia/Africa/the Middle East, or are too ancient to be relatable. There are still millions of living people who were adults when the Holocaust took place.
Also it couldn’t be written off as a frenzied catastrophe. Lots of genocides have the fog of war, or a national disaster, or a collapsing government/society to cloud up the issue of how things got so bad. The Holocaust was perpetrated with careful consideration by a single continuous government which arguably had majority support. It wasn’t just mayhem - the Nazis meticulously orchestrated it even while their war effort fell apart.
So industrial genocide was unprecedented. (I will leave it to someone better informed to tackle whether the Armenian Genocide was industrial). But there’s also reasons why the Holocaust continues to stay prominent: the first being the creation of a Jewish homeland, that has been in the news almost continually since 1948, which reminds people that the Holocaust is one of the raisons d’etre for Israel’s statehood. The second is that the Nazi atrocities help historians cleanly paint WWII as a Good vs. Evil struggle like no other, which makes for the best narratives. WWII is an easier story to tell than, say, the Spanish-American War, and a big part of that is the moral purpose. Without the Holocaust the Nazis are just garden-variety unpleasant.
One more thing: the Nazis were in power for twelve years, or less than half that in non-Germany Europe, and they killed ~67% of all the Jews in Europe, plus huge proportions of Romani, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and anyone else they didn’t like, and they didn’t even start until the late 1930s.
The Native American population dropped probably 90% from 1492 to 1892 - four centuries - under a half dozen various culpable colonial powers, and with plagues and environmental destruction doing most of that. Truly awful, yes, but no one entity can be blamed, people didn’t even do most of it on purpose, and over all those centuries that’s an orderly decline in comparison- not the 20% yearly death rate for European Jews in the Holocaust.
Thank you for the thoughtful comments - please keep them coming.
I guess a part of me often finds myself thinking, “Yes the Jewish holocaust was horrific - but at least the Jewish people survived - even thrived thereafter.”
I think this is certainly a big part of it. The Holocaust is just about the only example of genocide I can think of where a good portion of the victims previously lived comfortable middle class urban lives. The more typical genocide victims are poor, rural and usually already marginalized to begin with. It’s often hard for contemporary audiences to really wrap their heads around their lives even before the genocide. The lives lived by western and central European Holocaust victims, on the other hand, weren’t so different from those lived by people in western countries today.
The results of the Nazi genocides were extensively filmed and recorded. These films and records are part of regular television viewing in US, thanks to networks like the History Channel. No such films exist for the Native American destruction and even written records are sketchy and rare. In general, I think it’s pretty rare for people committing actual genocide to leave such careful records as the Nazis did. Historians talking about other genocides doesn’t have the same emotional impact to a modern audience as the photos and videos do.
Genocide implies an intentional attempt to kill an entire group. While the situation was likely just as bad, was this the case? They were horrific assholes, but weren’t most deaths due to really poor conditions and abuse?
In German SW Africa (Namibia today), a genocide happened in the 1900s. I think the only reason most people have heard of it is because of Thomas Pynchon, who used it as a plot point a few times. Then of course Tutsis, thanks to Hotel Rwanda. And Joseph Kony, thanks to a guy who likes jackin’ it in San Diego.
Germs, mostly. I remember reading that the population was reduced drastically even before the pilgrims got there. Hence deserted villages and all. And Squanto was more helpful because he had previously been brought to Europe, so it’s not like there was zero exposure to small pox and the like early on.
That’s okay. Read “Empire of the Summer Moon.” That will fix your depression. There was also a good article called “Myth of the Noble Savage” or something like that.
The idea that ALL Native Americans just wanted to live in peace and paint with all the colors of the wind is false. They could be exceedingly brutal. After reading about the atrocities committed by the Indians against the whites, it will become clear that the Indian Wars were a two-way street. The Indians were not innocent of all wrongdoing. Many tribes were violent warrior cultures that had no concept of achievement or self-worth outside war. They often shot themselves in the foot when their atrocities provoked retaliatory violence and prevented peaceful negotiation with the whites.
“1491” is another good book to read. It details the extent of the apocalyptic damage wrought by Western diseases. While tragic, the spread of Western diseases was also unavoidable. No one intended to eradicate the population of a continent, and they didn’t have the medical knowledge to do anything about it.
Other contrasts with Nazi Germany have been very well summarized above.
They say the first genocide in the 20th century was of the Armenians by the Turks. But the slaughter (caused by armed insurrection) of Filipinos happened right at the turn and on to 1903. US estimates of Filipinos killed is around 100,000. Filipino historians (no doubt factoring in disease, starvation and other displacement factors) estimate between 200,000 and 1 million.
There are probably more organised, well educated and well resourced jewish organizations than there are for survivors from other groups? Also, you’d expect a lot of Hollywood movies given Joel Stein’s article “how Jewish is Hollywood”? It’s natural to expect it to be a major source of material.
It’s also been used for political reasons according to the likes of Norman Finkletstein to deflect criticisms of Israel’s policies.
Nowadays, perhaps (though Hollywood doesn’t really do that much Holocaust stuff), but for a very long time, Jewish Hollywood deliberately avoided that sort of thing, worrying that it would remind everyone who ran the movie industry.
A number of prominent Jewish studio directors (including Sam Goldwyn) actually attempted to prevent the release of the film Gentleman’s Agreement, which was made by a non-Jew, because they thought it would lead to anti-Semitic backlash (the film is about a Gentile writer who pretends to be a Jew to explore anti-Jewish prejudice). They were right; a number of people who worked on the film were called to testify before HUAC, because not hating Jews is communism, or something.
It’s the scale of the thing…plus the mechanized nature of what the Germans did. Yeah, what the Americans (and Spanish, and other Europeans) did to the Native Americans was horrible…but, in the majority of cases it was European diseases that did the Native peoples in. Things like the Trail of Tears, while horrible, were measured in the hundreds and thousands of slain…not in the millions. Oh, Natives died in the millions, but most of them died of disease, so it’s a bit more impersonal…unless you were one of those millions who died horrible from small pox or the myriad other diseases unleashed on them. In Germany, however, it was industrial murder, with the Germans not only striving for better, and more efficient ways to kill, but using the products of those who they killed almost like picking cotton from a field…it was personal, not business, so to speak.
That said, folks like Stalin and Mao killed as many or more of their people, so why don’t they get similar billing? Well, part of it is that it was done over longer periods of time. Part of it is simply that it wasn’t as sensational, or as well documented. Part of it was that many found it expedient to downplay or ignore those genocides, or otherwise handwave them away.
Sure, but in most of those cases they were so far in the distant past that it’s not as real to most people. The Mongols, for instance, wiped out entire cities…every man, woman and child, hell even the dogs and other domestic animals…but that was a hell of a long time ago, and there isn’t an immediate connection in most peoples minds to something that long ago. Same goes with other people who were responsible for wiping out whole civilizations in the past.
It WAS unique in the scale and methods used. Also, it was in supposedly civilized Europe, and it was modern…there were pictures, many of the locations are still there in Germany and folks who witnessed it are still alive today. And it happened right when there was an explosion in the ability for world wide media. Plus, Germany lost the war, so there wasn’t any ability of them to cover it all up and sweep it under the rug…unlike many of the later (or earlier in that century) slaughters by, say, many of the Communist dictatorships in the last century, some of which had higher body counts, but were less well known because there was less publication and evidence (and more passive compliance by a large segment of the population and press who wanted any excuse to handwave those slaughters away).
There’s also the motivation factor. Genocide is always wrong but there’s usually at least some apparent reason behind it. You have one people trying to take land that belongs to another people or one ethnic group seeing another ethnic group as a potential rival for political power or a secession movement.
But there was no rational reason behind the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews. The Jews were not a threat to Germany and they had nothing the Germans wanted. The Nazis were just killing Jews because they wanted them dead.
Scale, documentation, and how recent it was. It was not too long ago that some of the last perpetrators were found.
True, other genocides were also bad, but with the Armenians- there is no longer a Ottoman Empire. Anyone who might have been responsible is LONG dead.
There’s also motivation as Little Nemo and others pointed out. Armenians and the Ottomans had fought for decades. In the Americas, every Native genocide was preceded by a massacre- preceded by a treaty breaking, preceded by a massacre and so forth, as solosam mentioned. The Native Americans,* as a whole *were not helpless victims, some blame can be laid at their feet also. Deliberate, planned genocide at the highest levels is hard to prove vs Americans- altho no doubt there was plenty of blood to go around- we put most of it on Jackson, altho it was actually Van Buren who was responsible for the Trail of Tears (not that Jackson was blameless, mind you).
But nothing even close to the callous cold-blooded recipe for Genocide like the Wannsee Conference.
Older genocides have been romanticized, and/or were carried out by the winners who got to write their own history. Cowboys and Indians and all that.
Newer genocides haven’t been on such a scale, so well documented, or so cold hearted. The Holocaust wasn’t a mob with machetes. It was a well organized and thoughtful process, unprecedented in its calculating cruelty. The scale of it is just overwhelming. The Khmer Rouge, the Japanese invasion of Korea and China, Rwanda, etc. are all different from the Holocaust because it seemed like the perpetrators were using the genocide as a means to an end. The people they killed were “in the way” somehow. Why exactly did the Nazis kill Jews? How were they in the way? What did the Nazis want, that required the Jews to all be dead?
Our sensibilities don’t even have that vague comfort of knowing the killers’ motivations. That’s a pretty scary thought, if you ask me.
When I mentioned these thoughts to my 23 y.o. son, that was the first example he came up with!