The Greatest Holocaust in History

Dedicated "For all those Indian lives unlived"

Genocide of Native Americans

The following narrative is by Arthur Barlowe (1584, p.108), describing American Indians.

'We found the people most gentle loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the Golden Age,…, a more kind and loving people there can not be found in the world.'

His description well fits our categories of Eastern cognitive styles: affiliative, personal, understanding, non-discursive. With predominance of the affective-cognitive belief system making one to marry for love, as contrasted with the cognitive-affective system typical of mental calculations prior to bestowing affection on the 'loved one.' Closeness associated with the tactile contact mode. Suspended critical appraisal and present time orientation, acting as limiting factors in carrying hatred 'beyond the grave.'

What are These People? Could these categories of thought provide us with at least partial explanation of the African slave trade resulting in deaths of millions of people? The near-extermination of the American Indian people? The Jewish Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis? The Gypsies Holocaust perpetrated by Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, Rumanians, and other Europeans during the Second World War? In the American Holocaust (1992, pp. 149-150) David Stannard says that this is

'a question many have asked, many times, during the course of the past millennium. What were those people whose minds and souls so avidly fueled genocide against Africans, Indians, Jews, Gypsies, and other religious, racial, and ethnic groups? What are they who continue such wholesale slaughter still today?'

Elie Wiesel (1985, Vol. 1, p.33) gave an answer to this haunting question with respect to Jewish Holocaust.

'All the killers were Christian. The Nazi system was the consequence of a movement of ideas and followed a strict logic; it did not arise in a void but had its roots deep in a tradition that prophesied it, prepared for it, and brought it to maturity. That tradition was inseparable from the past of Christian, civilized Europe.'

Sacheen Littlefeather

Sacheen Littlefeather

On March 27, 1973, a young woman took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, California, to decline Marlon Brando's Best Actor Oscar. She said that Marlon Brando cannot accept this award because of the treatment of American Indians by the film industry and the recent happenings at Wounded Knee.

...and after

Marlon Brando (1924-2004)

Marlon Brando In his autobiography Songs my Mother Told Me (1994, pp. 380-402) Marlon Brando, devotes several pages to the genocide of the American Indians, excerpted as follows:

After their lands were stolen from them, the ragged survivors were herded onto reservations and the government sent out missionaries who tried to force the Indians to become Christians. After I became interested in American Indians, I discovered that many people don't even regard them as human beings. It has been that way since the beginning.

Cotton Mather compared them to Satan and called it God's work - and God's will - to
slaughter the heathen savages who stood in the way of Christianity.

As he aimed his howitzers on an encampment of unarmed Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, an army colonel named John Chivington, who had once said that the lives of Indian children should not be spared because "nits make lice," told his officers: "I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians." Hundreds of Indian women, children, and old men were slaughtered in the Sand Creek massacre. One officer who was present said later, "Women and children were killed and scalped, children shot at their mother's breasts, and all the bodies mutilated in the most horrible manner. The dead bodies of females were profaned in such a manner that the recital is sickening.

The troopers cut off the vulvas of Indian women, stretched them over their saddle horns, then decorated their hatbands with them; some used the skin of brave's scrotums and the breasts of Indian women as tobacco pouches, then showed off these trophies, together with the noses and ears of some of the Indians they had massacred, at the Denver Opera House.

David Stannard

American Holocaust David Stannard in his scholarly American Holocaust (1992, p. 232) writes:

From the earliest days of settlement, British men in the colonies from the Carolinas to New England rarely engaged in sexual relations with the Indians, even during those times when there were few if any English women available. Such encounters were viewed as a "horrid crime" and legislation was passed that "banished forever" such mixed race couples, referring to their offspring in animalistic terms.

This British attitude can be contrasted with the the contemporary Canadian tongue-in-cheek answer to the question:

-When was the first French - Indian child born?
- Nine months after French landed in Quebec.

Holocaust Deniers

The estimates of the number of victims of the American Holocaust differ. However, these differences show remarkable similarity with the controversy surrounding the Holocaust deniers who do not deny that Holocaust occurred, but try to diminish its extent. Thus, for instance, R. J. Rummel in his 1994 book Death by Government estimates the number of victims of the centuries of European colonization as low as 2 million. Among the contemporary holocaust deniers is also Gary North, who in his Political Polytheism (1989, pp. 257-258) asserts:

Liberals have adopted the phrase "native Americans" in recent years. They never, ever say "American natives," since this is only one step away from "American savages," which is precisely what most of those demon-worshipping, land-polluting people were. This was one of the great sins in American life, they say: "the stealing of Indian lands". That a million savages had a legitimate legal claim on the whole of North America north of Mexico is the unstated assumption of such critics. They never ask the most pertinent question:

Was the advent of the Europeans in North America
a righteous historical judgment of God against the Indians? '

Millions

Holocausts A deluge of words was written on this topic. Hundreds of facets of this issue can be argued, but no amount of words can obscure the glacial reality of the fact that among the countless atrocities of the last centuries, by far the greatest were the genocide of the native Americans (magnitude of this holocaust is estimated by David Stannard in his American Holocaust, 1992, pp. 74-75, p.151) to be 100 million people for the hemisphere and 18 million for the area north of Mexico), deaths associated with the slavery trade (estimated to be 28 million people, cf., Stannard, p. 151) , and the holocaust of the Jewish people (estimated to be 6 million people). According to 1909 Census, the number of Cherokees was 369,035, Navajo 225,298, Sioux 107,321, Apache 53,330, Cheyenne 11,809 and Comanche 11,437. In the 1910, the total population of North American Indians was about 400,000, down from about 18 -19 million in 1492.

References

Barlowe, A. (1584) In Quinn, D. B. The Roanoke Voyages: 1584-1590. London: Haklyut Society, 1955.
Brando, M. (1994) Songs My Mother Taught Me. New York: Random House.
North, G. (1989) Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. Tyler, Tx: Institute for Christian Economics.
Stannard, D. E. (1992) The Conquest of the New World: American Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wiesel, E. (1985, Vol. 1, p.33) in Abrahamson, (Ed.) Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel. New York: Holocaust Library.

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THE CENTURY OF THE HOLOCAUST

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “holocaust” as follows: 1) A sacrifice wholly consumed by fire;

2) A complete or large-scale sacrifice;

3) A complete or wholesale destruction, esp. by fire; a great slaughter or massacre;

4) spec. The (period of the) mass murder of the Jews (or transf. of other groups) by the Nazis in the war of 1939 – 45.

On the basis of these definitions, the 20^th century qualifies eminently as the century of the holocaust. Let us take a look at a few of the major events of that 100-year span.

1) The Anglo-Boer War (1899 – 1902) in South Africa (in which the British, at great cost to both sides, seized the gold and diamond fields from the Boers) was significant in that it led to the invention of the concentration camp designed especially for women and children – an all-British idea which was subsequently developed by the National Socialists in Germany. In these concentration camps was an early holocaust of the century – the death of thirty thousand women and children from starvation, typhoid and measles. In proportion to later holocausts, the numbers don’t sound very impressive, but they constituted a significant proportion of the Boer population at the time.

2) Contemporaneous with the Anglo-Boer War was the Spanish-American War of 1898 –1902 in which some three or four hundred American soldiers were killed and 270 000 Filipinos died of wounds, disease or starvation. What both these wars of aggression had in common was, of course, greed.

3) Between 1914 and 1918, the First World War killed thirteen million soldiers and seventeen million civilians – indeed a holocaust which could have pleased only a Malthusian. During this period, to add to the slaughter, was the Turkish/Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in about 1915 – yet another holocaust to blot the pages of that century.

4) In the early years of the USSR under Lenin (1917 – 1923) it is estimated that about seven million people died during the civil war, either from starvation or military action. I should note here that numbers vary from five to ten million, depending on whose figures one accepts, so I have given an average. We can skip a few years to the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Josef Stalin collectivised the kulaks of the USSR, killing millions of them either by the sword or by disease and starvation throughout Russia and Siberia. In 1932-1933, Stalin also summarily appropriated all the grain in Ukraine and had this essential foodstuff transported to Russia or sold abroad for much-needed foreign goods. The result of this was mass starvation in Ukraine and the death of approximately five to seven million Ukrainians – a period and a holocaust known in Ukraine as the Holodomor.

5) It was only about three years later that Stalin began the great purges of 1936 – 1938, the Yezhovshchina, in which it is believed that about eight million Soviet citizens died either by execution or by disease and inanition in Siberia.

6) World War Two. The numbers of deaths vary slightly, but a generally acceptable figure is fifty-six million military and civilian dead. This is doubtless the greatest holocaust in history. As a footnote to it, we can mention that amongst the casualties were three gratuitous massacres – the devastation of Dresden by Sir Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris who killed between 40 and 70 000 civilians when the city posed no military threat to the Allies and refugees were streaming into it, fleeing from the advancing Russians; and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki ordered by President Truman one month after Emperor Hirohito of Japan had made a personal appeal to him for peace negotiations. The combined death toll of these two bombs was between two and three hundred thousand (immediate and short-term).

7) In the Asian theatre, the Japanese were responsible for the death of approximately five million people in China, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, Singapore and other East Asian countries.

THUS BY 1945, EVEN BEFORE MID-CENTURY, WE CAN REPORT A HOLOCAUST OF 120 MILLION PEOPLE.

Exact figures are difficult to obtain and vary widely from one authority to another, so generally I have averaged them out in an attempt to get a fairly balanced count.

8) In the late 1940s, in the Mao v. Chiang Chinese civil war, untold, unknown millions of Chinese were slaughtered. The estimates vary and an accurate count is probably impossible. In 1966, Mao, egged on by his lovely wife, initiated the Cultural Revolution in China, which led to a few more million dead – exact numbers unknown. Meanwhile, there was the Korean “Police Action” as Harry Truman nicely phrased it – a vicious civil war between North and South Korea which were in fact puppets of the USSR and the USA. Another few million dead Koreans – we don’t know exactly how many, but do know exactly how many white folk (Americans, Brits etc) were killed. Hardly had that slaughter been calmed when the French were badly beaten in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu and the US gladly took over from them in due course. The tragic irony of that unnecessary conflict is that it needn’t have happened at all and would not have, had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles not walked out of peace negotiations. It also could have ended in 1968, but this is not the place to discuss the idiocy of Robert McNamara and his Pentagon cronies before and after the Tet offensive. The Vietnam war gave rise to a new term –escalation – which proved to be apt, as Kissinger, President Nixon’s pro-consul to the world, extended the war into Laos and Cambodia, where, in the killing fields, an estimated two to three million people were massacred while back in Vietnam itself the US continued to devastate the country and kill off about three million Vietnamese.

9) Meanwhile, down in Indonesia, great danger presented itself to the United States – there was a chance that a government hostile to the US might take power, so in 1965, the US sent troops and military materiel to ensure that Suharto, their blood-stained friend, would be the dictator of the country. There was a holocaust of about half a million civilians.

10) In 1975 – 1978, the number of dead under the Pol Pot regime was between 1.6 and 1.8 million – about one-fifth of the population. This doesn’t include those millions already killed by Kissinger.

11) During that same period, approximately 100 000 civilians were murdered in East Timor – about 24% of the East Timorese population.

12) Probably the biggest killing field of the lot was the continent of Africa from Sudan to the borders of Zambia, and from Eritrea to West Africa. Countless millions were slaughtered or starved to death by sundry warlords and dictators – the syphilitic Idi Amin, the megalomanic Mobutu Sese Seko (one of whose close business associates for some time was the Reverend Pat Robertson who recently recommended – on two separate occasions - the assassination of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela), the attack by Rwanda and Uganda on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3.8 million dead), the ongoing disturbances in Darfur (400 000 dead) the civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis, the madman Robert Mugabe… the list is long and tiresome. I think it is fruitless even to attempt to count the number of Africans slaughtered in the last fifty or so years. The numbers are probably in the tens of millions.

By comparison, the Balkan massacres of the 1990s were numerically minor, while the Bush/Clinton/BushII/Blair murder of over a million Iraqis between about 1991 and the present, is a significant testimony to Anglo-American blood-lust (or is it just lust for oil?). Saddam Hussein murdered approximately 300 000 of his citizens – far fewer than the killers named above. And then we have estimates that over a million Iraqis and Iranians were killed in the long-drawn-out war between the two countries in the 1980s.

I have added up the numbers given above and present them with the caveat that they are not accurate but approximate and very conservative.

A BARE MINIMUM OF ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY MILLION HUMAN BEINGS WERE SLAUGHTERED DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

The death toll during the Chinese civil war and the cultural revolution, as well as the number of dead in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa are unreliable and are not included. There are also disputes about the death tolls in South Asia. I have no reliable figures on the number of dead in the India-Pakistan dispute and have omitted the relatively minor number of victims in the Balkans and Central America. All these figures probably add up to tens of millions, but WE ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH BLOOD DRIPPING FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Now, in that century of holocausts in which at least one hundred and forty million human beings were killed, amongst that number were approximately six million Jewish people (the official number accepted by World Jewry with few exceptions such as Professor Norman Finkelstein whose parents were Nazi victims).

The term “holocaust” as generally understood today was first used by Elie Wiesel in his imaginative autobiography first published in Yiddish (“Und Die Welt hot Geshvign”, 1956) and then in French, (“La Nuit,” 1958). He used the term in the sense given under 3) in the Oxford Dictionary: mass immolation by fire, reporting that people were placed on the edge of flaming pits and then pushed into them. Interestingly enough, he does not once mention gas chambers in this book. Since the end of the second world war, the multiple holocausts of the last century have remained un-capitalised, with one exception – the Jewish Holocaust.

Now some Western countries, led by the USA, have Jewish Holocaust Memorials, Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Days, Jewish Holocaust Laws (it’s forbidden by law in some countries even to question the fact that six million Jews were Holocausted). The politicians in these same countries make pre-election pilgrimages to the Jewish State to garner the Jewish vote. The children in these countries have classes in school devoted to the Jewish Holocaust. I am told that in some American schools, the children sing the Israeli national anthem. Many universities have programs in what are called Holocaust Studies.

So I ask myself questions:

Why are ONLY THE JEWISH PEOPLE memorialised and remembered so fondly in the West?

What about the Cambodians?

The Ukrainians?

The Russians?

The many nations of Europe?

The Laotians?

The Chinese?

The Africans?

The Latin Americans?

The Armenians?

The one hundred and forty million or more dead human beings throughout the twentieth century?

Are the Jewish people really

so SPECIAL?

so REMARKABLE?

so IMPORTANT?

so… SUPERIOR?

that they alone amongst all nations are worthy of Memorials, Remembrance Days, special school lessons about the Jewish 'Six Million'?

And if they are, can someone please tell me…

WHY?

Written and researched by Peter Kirsch, MD

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