american-holocaust

EPILOGUEIt is unlikely to have escaped notice that this book is being published tocoincide with the Columbian Quincentennial-the SOOth anniversary ofthe beginning of the genocide that nearly expunged the Western Hemisphereof its people. It is, however, less probable that many readers willknow that 1992 also is the 50th anniversary of the Nazis' conversion ofAuschwitz from a prisoner of war and concentration camp into a chamberof unspeakable horrors, designed to exterminate systematically as many aspossible of Europe's Jews, Gypsies, and other Nazi-characterized "uselesslives."As we have seen, one of the preconditions for the Spanish and Anglo­American genocides against the native peoples of the Americas was a publicdefinition of the natives as inherently and permanently-that is, asracially-inferior beings. To the conquering Spanish, the Indians more specificallywere defined as natural slaves, as subhuman beasts of burden,because that fit the use to which the Spanish wished to put them, andbecause such a definition was explicable by appeal to ancient Christianand European truths-through Aquinas and on back to Aristotle. Sincethe colonizing British, and subsequently the Americans, had little use forIndian servitude, but only wanted Indian land, they appealed to otherChristian and European sources of wisdom to justify their genocide: theIndians were Satan's helpers, they were lascivious and murderous wild menof the forest, they were bears, they were wolves, they were vermin. Allegedlyhaving shown themselves to be beyond conversion to Christian or tocivil life-and with little British or American need for them as slaves-inthis case, straightforward mass killing of the Indians was deemed the onlything to do.