60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

colonialism and the holocaust – towards an archeology of genocide 109
The ideological basis for such events was provided by worldly or millenial
utopian thinking. The dream of the promised land, of the white
settler colony, of the unpopulated tabula rasa that was to be developed
anew according to one’s understanding of civilisation, or the identifi -
cation of one’s own life with a godly, historical, or civilising mission,
could create the readiness to commit mass murder if necessary. 36 The
combination of a highly developed sense of calling, the conviction of
one’s own predestination, as expressed, for example, in the doctrine
of the ‘Manifest Destiny’, with the proclivity to see Indians as heathens,
or even as rats and mice, is characteristic of this genocidal impetus
and can already be found among the Puritans in New England.
Captain Wait Winthrop prophesied as early as 1675 in ‘Some Meditations’
that God would help them destroy the Narragansett Indians
who had just fought the New England militia in the ‘Great Swamps’
(cited in Chalk and Jonassohn 1998: 194) Sir Jeff rey Amherst, commander
of the British troops in North America, stood in the same
tradition when he initiated biological warfare against the Delaware
Indians by having his offi cers give them blankets contaminated with
smallpox: ‘You will do well to try to innoculate [sic] the Indians by
means of blankets as well as try every other method that can serve to
extirpate this exorable race’. 37
In the 19th century, the religious justifi cation for one’s destined role
was gradually replaced by a Social Darwinian racial-biological view of
history. For General Lieutenant von Trotha, commander of the German
troops in the war against the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa
(1904–1908), the man responsible for the fi rst German genocide,
the destruction of the enemy was absolutely essential in a racial struggle
that supposedly could only end with the demise of one party. In
Trotha’s opinion, the Africans would ‘only give in to violence,’ so he
wanted to employ it ‘with crass terrorism and even with cruelty’ and
destroy ‘the rebellious tribes with streams of blood’ 38 because after all
a war in Africa cannot be waged ‘according to the laws of the Geneva
Convention’. 39 Von Trotha also clearly articulated the connection
between the settlement colony and genocide. When the long-serving
Governor Leutwein attempted to dissuade the newly-arrived general
36 On the signifi cance for genocide of utopian conceptions of the re-creation of the
world and of mankind, see Bartov (2000).
37 Cited by Chalk and Jonassohn (1998: 177). See also the discussion of Jan Kociumbas
in her chapter in this volume. For a short overview about the literature on biological
warfare in Australia and North America see Finzsch (2003).
38 Trotha to Leutwein, 5 November 1904, cited by Drechsler (1984: 156).
39 ‘Politik und Kriegsführung’, Der Deutschen Zeitung, 3 February 1909, cited by Pool (1991: 293).