american-holocaust

EPILOGUE 255Indeed, it is insufficient to stop even here. For as Michael R. Marrus rightlystates:It is clearly wrong to separate from the essence of the Holocaust those Jewswho never survived long enough to reach the camps, or who were shot downby the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, or who starved in the ghettos ofeastern Europe, or who were wasted by disease because of malnutrition andneglect, or who were killed in reprisal in the west, or who died in any of thecountless other, terrible ways-no less a part of the Holocaust because theirfinal agonies do not meet some artificial standard of uniqueness. 24The same is true of the anti-Indian genocide in the Americas. Just asthose Jews and others who died of exploitation and disease and malnutritionand neglect and in "countless other, terrible ways"-other, that is,than straightforward cold-blooded butchery-would not have died whenand where they did, but for the genocide campaign that was swirling furiouslyall about them, so too in the Indies and the Americas: the nativesof Hispaniola and Mexico and Peru and Florida and Virginia and Massachusettsand Georgia and Colorado and California and elsewhere who diedfrom forced labor, from introduced disease, from malnutrition, from deathmarches, from exposure, and from despair were as much victims of theEuro-American genocidal race war as were those burned or stabbed orhacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs.To some, the question now is: Can it happen again? To others, as wesaid in this book's opening pages, the question is, now as always: Can itbe stopped? For in the time it has taken to read these pages, throughoutCentral and South America Indian men and women and children havebeen murdered by agents of the government that controls them, simplybecause they were Indians; native girls and boys have been sold on openslave markets; whole families have died in forced labor, while others havestarved to death in concentration camps. 25 More will be enslaved and morewill die in the same brutal ways that their ancestors did, tomorrow, andevery day for the foreseeable future. The killers, meanwhile, will continueto receive aid and comfort and support from the United States government,the same government that oversees and encourages the ongoing dissolutionof Native American families within its own political purviewitselfa violation of the U.N. Genocide Convention-through its willfulrefusal to deal adequately with the life-destroying poverty, ill health, malnutrition,inadequate housing, and despair that is imposed upon mostAmerican Indians who survive today/ 6That is why, when the press reported in 1988 that the United StatesSenate finally had ratified the United Nations Genocide Convention-afterforty years of inaction, while more than a hundred other nations had long