From: markk@sagredo.West.Sun.COM (Mark Kampe)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.german
Subject: Re: Native Americans
Date: 18 Aug 1992 17:11:21 GMT
Organization: SunSoft South
NNTP-Posting-Host: sagredo.west.sun.com

ritz@brtph95.bnr.ca (Charles Ritz P215) writes:
>    Comparing the Nazi atrocities to the United States policies
> towards Native Americans is specious at best for many reasons.

While I agree that there are significant differences in motivation and
execution, I do not agree with the general tone of your note.  Most
shockingly, to read your note, there is no difference at all between
the extermination of the Jews and the extermination of the Indians.

	You claim the indians were massacred because they didn't deserve 
	to continue as a people.  That sounds amazingly like the reason
	for the slaughter for the Jews (or any of a hundred other cultures
	that have been the targets of genocide).

Genocide has nothing to do with Germans or Americans or Jews or Indians.
It has to do with people who think that other people are less important
than themselves.  If you can support any aspect of any genocide, you
carry the seed of all genocides.  The belief that you are somehow different,
and that your situation entitles you to do things that others should not
defeats the safeguards of humanity.  You are much closer to Hitler than
you think.


> 1) There was never any 'plan' to exterminate the Indians.
>    In fact, there are nearly 1 million Native Americans
>    currently living, about as great a number as when white
>    people arrived.  

	There was never a 'plan' at the Federal level, although
	there were many plans at more local levels to exterminate
	particular tribes.

>    Almost every Indian nation that existed
>    in 1600 still exists today, albeit on reservations.  

	The notion that these tribes are still surving on their
	reservations is a bizzare ones.  They have been driven
	to the most god-forsaken parts of the country, where
	they exist in an economically and culturally impoverished
	state.  Have you ever lived on a reservation?  Do you know
	anyone who has ever lived on a reservation?

>    The great majority of Indians that died died as a result of
>    disease, battle deaths and alocholism, not from planned
>    extermination.  

	Much of the disease was deliberately caused by the "white men".
	A particularly novel plan to exterminate one Apachee tribe
	involved shipping them blankets that had been used by small-pox
	victims.  It was very effective. 

	It is certainly true, however, that many indian tribes fought
	with one another as much as they did with the settlers.  We
	fought with the Brits and latter with the French ... so I guess
	that would be justification for slaughtering us?

>    The Nazis specifically planned for the extermination of world Jewry.  
>    There would be no 'reservations' for Jews.

	There were lots of governors and generals who felt the same way
	about the Indians.  I doubt that they were any less efficient
	in the massacre of the indians under their jurisdictions than
	Hitler was in the slaughter of the Jews under his.

> 2) Unlike the Jews, most Indians were utterly hostile to
>    assimilation by the dominant (white) economic and social
>    organization.  Jews never declared 'war' on the 'Aryans',
>    but Indians often declared war on the whites, and proceeded
>    to wage them with great ferocity, often killing all of
>    the whites, men, women and children, that they could get
>    their hands on.  Indian massacres were a fact of life
>    in the old west.  When has their ever been a Jewish massacre?
>    The only 'evil' the Americans committed in the Indian
>    wars was to win.

	There were warlike tribes and there were peaceful tribes.
	The raids on the Hopis and Piutes were not reprisals for
	indian massacres, but merely ways of getting their land.
	Many of the raids from warlike tribes were reprisals for
	attrocities that settlers had committed.  Now civilized
	white men would never attack someone else as a reprisal
	or over a misunderstanding would they?

	
> 3) Let's face the facts, the Indians were total barbarians
>    living in the stone age.  Every Indian nation ever found
>    practiced torture, slavery and, of course, wars of extermi-
>    nation.  

	Like this distinguished them from the white people,
	who practiced torture, slavery and wars of extermination?
	Americans held slaves at the same time that the indians
	of the mississippi basin were being slaughtered.  Rape
	and ritual mutilation were commonly practiced by the
	American settlers.  Genocide has a long history, and
	the Europeans were much better at it than the indiginous
	amerindians.

>    They lived constantly on the edge of starvation.

	Actually, many of the tribes did very well until they were
	driven from their traditional hunting grounds.  Perhaps you
	forgot that the Plymouth colony survived their first winter
	in part due to the kindness of Powhatan and his tribe.

>    There was no law courts, 

	Most tribes had a legal system and it worked better than ours.
	True they didn't have lawyers and an adversary system ... 
	"but what's your point" :-)

>    no democratic elections, 

	True, but this is hardly a reason to exterminate them ... at
	that time most of the governments in the world were monarchial.
	The chieftans generally achieved their position through achievement
	and demonstrated ability.  The territorial governers achieved theirs
	through political patronage ... which system do you think produced
	better leaders?

>    no protections against minorities.  

	I hope you meant "protection for minorities" :-) but that isn't
	much of an issue in a culturally monolithic tribe - and your claims
	are ludicrous when you look at what we were doing to the indians, the 
	africans and the chineese durring the same period of time.

>	Child mortality was almost certainly greater than 50 %.  
>	Maternal mortality  was high as well, though of course 
>	Indian women were considered useless if they could bear children.  

	And how would you compare this with the culture of the range settlers
	in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century?  Babys weren't
	born in a sterile hospital, but in homes - sometimes with an
	experienced midwife present.  I would bet the mortality rates were 
	quite comparable - maybe even a little better for the indians
	who were used to living in their environment.

> They were often killed when (and more importantly, if) they reached 
> menopause. Of course, all of the crippled were killed as well.  

	Which tribes practiced these acts?  How do you compare this with
	our sentencing our enfeebled elders to spend their last decade
	of life in an "old folks home" where they can spend years dieing.

> Needless to say, there were no pensions for the aged.  If they were
> too weak, they died as too.  

	What was the pension situation for the average European or American
	peasant in the eighteenth century?  What happened people who could
	not work and had no family to support them?

> In short, the Indians were not 'noble savages' 

	No, they were indiginous peoples who were driven out by more
	numerous settlers with superior technology.  Should we assume
	from your comment that settlers with superior technology have 
	a right (or perhaps a duty) to displace and exterminate indignous 
	peoples?

> and pre-Columbian America was not a garden of eden.

	What does this have to do with the price of guavas?

I hope you feel better now that you have caughed this vile brew up.  It
is certainly better to vomit it out than to keep it inside of you, but
it would now be better still to turn away from it and clean up your diet.