Hitler used US conquest, genocide of Indians as model for Soviet invasion
Channel: Jason Zenith
Date: 2018-05-18

Adolf Hitler used the U.S. conquest, expansion, and genocide of Native Americans as a model for invading the Soviet Union, planning to do something very much like what the U.S. did in North America. 

The self-described "conservative" professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, John J. Mearsheimer, explains how the U.S. expanded from the Atlantic seaboard, its attempted annexation of Canada, and the slave states' desire to annex the Caribbean islands, and that Hitler saw what the U.S. did as precedent for his intended conquest and annexation of the prime regions of the Soviet Union. The U.S. was an apt inspiration for the Nazis, because not only was the U.S. genocidal and very militarily aggressive (it still is at least the latter), but also in Mearsheimer's words, "the United States had a voracious appetite for conquest and annexation." (I would add that these days, the U.S. has a compulsion for world domination. Like all imperialist entities.) Mearsheimer also mentions the virtual elimination of the native population.

For the first six months after the Third Reich and its allies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler referred frequently to the U.S. example. Hitler's plan for the Soviet Union was to depopulate the region west of the Ural Mountains by murdering three quarters of the population and making the rest slaves to German colonizers. In percentage terms, the U.S. outdid what Hitler intended, as the native population of what became the continental U.S. was reduced  by 90%, or an estimated 9 million souls at a minimum, assuming a population of 10 million when the European conquerers (aka "settlers") began arriving. But the population may have been as high as 18 million, meaning a reduction of around 16 million.

Of course, conquering a large, powerful, industrialized nation like the Soviet Union is quite a bit different from subjugating and annihilating a disparate group of relatively primitive and non-unified tribes. The two sides were a lot more equal in World War II than in the North American continent of earlier centuries.

Mearsheimer was a friend and protege of the late "political scientist" Samuel "Mad Dog" Huntington of Harvard, an imperialist strategist and intellectual who earned his nickname from those working with him while he was helping out the U.S. during its war on Vietnam. Mearsheimer is also friends with the prominent academic crackpot and fellow member of Huntington's orbit Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the inexplicably influential book "The End of History," which argued that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global political and economic system was fixed in amber and unchanged for the rest of time. An absurdity, but one that appealed to the mood of triumphalism among U.S. elites with the demise of their main enemy, the socialist Soviet Union. It is impossible for the world to ever NOT change over time. By the way, the Soviet Union collapsed primarily due to its own internal contradictions and irrationalities, not because Reagan "bankrupted" it with a huge arms spree, especially first-strike nuclear weapons.

Mearsheimer is a graduate of West Point who was in the U.S. military for ten years, including during the Vietnam War. So this is no "bleeding heart" "Marxist" or whatever epithet rightists might like to smear him with to discredit him. This clip is from a talk on youtube.com, "Lecture Mearsheimer Moscow-Offensive Realism in explaining the current and future US-China relations," October 17, 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReSWxNGtzjE