american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 185tinctly racial turn anti-Semitism began taking late in the nineteenth century.Further, as Stephan L. Chorover has shown, the Final Solution ideologythat led to the destruction of two-thirds of Europe's Jews was itself"a logical extension of sociobiological ideas and eugenics doctrines whichhad nothing specifically to do with Jews and which flourished widely inGermany well before the era of the Third Reich." Indeed, drawing on aperverse interpretation of Darwinian theory, in 1933 the architects of theNazi legal system devised and enacted a compulsory sterilization law-inthe interests of "racial hygiene" -for individuals afflicted with genetic defects,and by the decade's end the wholesale killing of psychiatric patients,regardless of religion or ethnicity, had begun. These were people officiallyreferred to by the Nazi regime as "life devoid of value," or as "uselesseaters," and by the time the killing had ended at least 275,000 of themhad been exterminated. 112Certainly there was much more than this to the engine of holocaustthat thundered across Europe in the early 1940s. As Richard L. Rubensteinhas argued, for instance, the combination of bureaucratic domination ofGerman social thought and the Nazis' perception of excess and superfluous(and thus expendable) populations within their midst is a critical factorin accounting for Auschwitz and Birkenau. 113 But the point here issimply to show that explaining the Jewish Holocaust, to the extent thatsuch monstrosities can ever adequately be explained, requires the understandingof an intertwined complex of phenomena-an understanding, atthe very least, of the deep historical tradition of Christianity's persecutionof Jews, of the modern evolution of "racial" anti-Semitism, of the Nazieugenicists' attitudes toward non-Jewish "life devoid of value," and of specificpolitical, economic, and military events that occurred during the early1940s.The same sort of multi-level historical, cultural, political, economic,and military exploration is necessary if we are to begin to understand thefour centuries of genocide that took place in the Americas. For while specificparallels are crude at best, the final years of the fifteenth century inEurope were marked by a dynamism of ideas and circumstances involvingreligious, social, economic, and military backgrounds-and contemporaryupheaval-that, while very different in content, cannot help but resonatedisturbingly among readers familiar with the more horrendous and genocidalaspects of twentieth century history.From the moment of its birth Christianity had envisioned the end of theworld. Saints and theologians differed on many details about the end, butfew disagreements were as intense as those concerned with the nature andtiming of the events involved. There were those who believed that as theend drew near conditions on earth would grow progressively dire, evilwould increase, love would diminish, the final tribulations would be un-