american-holocaust

ISOAMERICAN HOJ.,OCAUSTfueled genocides against Muslims, Africans, Indians, Jews, Gypsies, andother religious, racial, and ethnic groups? What are they who continuesuch wholesale slaughter still today?It is tempting, when discussing the actions described in the two precedingchapters, as well as genocides from other times and places, to describethe behavior of the crimes' perpetrators as insane. But as Terrence DesPres once pointed out with regard to the Nazis' attempted mass exterminationof Europe's Jews, "demonic" seems a better word than "insane" tocharacterize genocidal behavior. Des Pres's semantic preference here, hesaid, was based upon his sense that "insanity is without firm structure, notpredictable, something you cannot depend upon." And while "what wenton in the [Nazi] killing centers was highly organized and very dependableindeed," thereby not qualifying as insanity, at least according to Des Pres'sinformal definition, "the dedication of life's energies to the production ofdeath is a demonic principle of the first degree." 2Des Pres continued on in this essay to distinguish between the Nazieffort to extinguish from the earth Europe's Jewish population and otherexamples of genocide "from the thick history of mankind's inhumanity,"including "the slaughter of the American Indians." The difference he foundwas that "the destruction of the European Jews had no rational motivewhatsoever, neither politics nor plunder, neither military strategy nor themoment's blind expediency .... This was genocide for the sake of genocide."3 Had Des Pres pursued these distinctions further, however-that is,had he been as concerned with the mass destruction of native peoples ashe was with Europeans-he may well have realized that his posited contrastswere more apparent than they were real. On the one hand, much(though not all) of the European and American slaughter of American Indians-fromfifteenth-century Hispaniola to sixteenth-century Peru toseventeenth-century New England to eighteenth-century Georgia tonineteenth-century California-was not driven by reasons of politics orplunder, nor by military strategy or blind expediency, but by nothing morethan, to use Des Pres's phraseology, genocide for the sake of genocide. Onthe other hand, much (though not all) of the Nazi slaughter of Europe'sJews was driven by what the perpetrators of that holocaust regarded asrational motives-however perverse or bizarre or sick or hateful those motivesappear to others. 4To say this is not to say that the Jewish Holocaust-the inhuman destructionof 6,000,000 people-was not an abominably unique event. Itwas. So, too, for reasons of its own, was the mass murder of about1,000,000 Armenians in Turkey a few decades prior to the Holocaust. 5So, too, was the deliberately caused "terror-famine" in Stalin's Soviet Unionin the 1930s, which killed more than 14,000,000 people. 6 So, too, havebeen each of the genocidal slaughters of many millions more, decades afterthe Holocaust, in Burundi, Bangladesh, Kampuchea, East Timor, the Bra-