american-holocaust

256 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTsince agreed to its terms-Leo Kuper, one of the world's foremost expertson genocide wondered in print whether "the long delay, and the obviousreluctance of the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention" derivedfrom "fear that it might be held responsible, retrospectively, for the annihilationof Indians in the United States, or its role in the slave trade, or itscontemporary support for tyrannical governments engaging in mass murder."Still, Kuper said he was delighted that at last the Americans hadagreed to the terms of the Convention. 27Others were less pleased-including the governments of Denmark, Finland,Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UnitedKingdom, who filed formal objections with the United Nations regardingthe U.S. action. For what the United States had done, unlike the othernations of the world, was approve and file with the U.N. a self-servinglyconditional instrument of ratification. Whatever the objections of the restof the world's nations, however, it now seems clear that the United Statesis unlikely ever to do what those other countries have done-ratify unconditionallythe Genocide Convention. 28For more than forty years another nation with a shameful past, Poland,refused to acknowledge officially what had transpired in the death camps-­including Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka-that had been located onPolish soil. But in the spring of 1991 Poland's President, Lech Walesa,traveled to Jerusalem and addressed the Israeli Parliament, saying in part:"Here in Israel, the land of your culture and revival, I ask for your forgiveness."29 At almost precisely that same moment, in Washington, angrymembers of the U.S. Senate were threatening to cut off or drastically reducefinancial support for the Smithsonian Institution because a film projectwith which it was marginally involved had dared use the word "genocide"to describe the destruction of America's native peoples. In that instantcontrast of ethical principles, in the chasm of moral difference that separatedthe Polish President and the American Senators, the seamy undersideof America's entire history was briefly but brightly illuminated.Illuminated as well at that moment was the persistence in Americanthinking of what has been termed the syndrome-the racist syndrome-of"worthy and unworthy victims." 3 ° For at the same time that almost allAmericans would properly applaud President Walesa's long-overdue acknowledgmentof and apology for the horrors that were perpetrated againstJewish and other European "worthy" victims in Poland's Nazi exterminationcenters during forty ghastly months in the 1940s, they by and largecontinue to turn their backs on the even more massive genocide that forfour grisly centuries was perpetrated against what their apathy implicitlydefines as the "unworthy" natives of the Americas.Moreover, the suffering has far from stopped. The poverty rate onAmerican Indian reservations in the United States, for example, is almostfour times the national average, and on some reservations, such as Pine