american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 153Noam Chomsky once observed that "if you take any two historicalevents and ask whether there are similarities and differences, the answer isalways going to be both yes and no. At some sufficiently fine level of detail,there will be differences, and at some sufficiently abstract level, therewill be similarities." The key question for most historical investigations,however, "is whether the level at which there are similarities is, in fact, asignificant one." 13 Among all the cases of genocide mentioned above therewere, we have noted, important differences. Indeed, in most technical particulars,the differences among them may well outweigh the similarities.But there were and are certain similarities of significance, and between theJewish Holocaust and the Euro-American genocide against the Indians ofthe Americas one of those similarities involves the element of religionwhereDes Pres's preference for the word "demonic" resides most appropriately.And here, in considering the role of religion in these genocidesthere is no better place to begin than with the words of Elie Wiesel, a factthat is not without some irony since for years Wiesel has argued passionatelyfor the complete historical uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. Inseeking at least a partial answer to the question posed at the start of thischapter-"what are these people?"-an observation of Wiesel's regardingthe perpetrators of the Jewish Holocaust is an equally apt beginning forthose who would seek to understand the motivations that ignited and fannedthe flames of the mass destruction of the Americas' native peoples:All the killers were Christian .... The Nazi system was the consequence ofa movement of ideas and followed a strict logic; it did not arise in a voidbut had its roots deep in a tradition that prophesied it, prepared for it, andbrought it to maturity. That tradition was inseparable from the past ofChristian, civilized Europe. 14Indeed, despite an often expressed contempt for Christianity, in MeinKampf Hitler had written that his plan for a triumphant Nazism was modeledon the Catholic Church's traditional "tenacious adherence to dogma"and its "fanatical intolerance," particularly in the Church's past when, asArno J. Mayer has noted, Hitler observed approvingly that in "building'its own altar,' Christianity had not hesitated to 'destroy the altars of the heathen.'" 15 Had Hitler required supporting evidence for this contention hewould have needed to look no further than the Puritans' godly justificationsfor exterminating New England's Indians in the seventeenth centuryor, before that, the sanctimonious Spanish legitimation of genocide, as ordainedby Christian Truth, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Meso- andSouth America. (It is worth noting also that the Fiihrer from time to timeexpressed admiration for the "efficiency" of the American genocide campaignagainst the Indians, viewing it as a forerunner for his own plans andprograms.) 16 But the roots of the tradition run far deeper than that-back