Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we remember the terrible events memorialized on the day the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated. We don’t similarly memorialize the terrible acts that inspired Hitler to build those camps, because the country that did that was ours.
There was a country that carried out a highly successful process of genocide, efficiently exterminating a sub-population of inhabitants who were regarded as undesirable by the ruling class, the United States.
The idea of a prison camp – specifically Auschwitz, in Oświęcim, Poland – where Hitler’s soldiers could shoot, hang, poison, mutilate and starve men, women and children en mass was not an idea Hitler, the bigot, came up with on his own. In fact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer John Toland wrote that Hitler was inspired in part by the Indian reservation system – a creation of the United States.
“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
Good ol’ Yankee ingenuity. We practically invented ethnic cleansing and concentration camps.
While attending the annual Garifuna Film Festival held here in Los Angeles, we watched films about indigenous cultures, and saw the 1985 Academy Award-winning documentary Broken Rainbow, directed by Victoria Mudd, which discusses the history of injustice towards the Native American people. The film talked about The Long Walk of the Navajo, which was the 1864 deportation and attempted ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people by the U.S. government. 8,000 Navajos were forced to walk more than 300 miles at gunpoint from their ancestral homelands in northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to an internment camp in Bosque Redondo, which was a desolate tract on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico. Many died along the way. From 1863 to 1868, the U.S. Military persecuted and imprisoned 9,500 Navajo (the Diné) and 500 Mescalero Apache (the N’de). Living under armed guards, in holes in the ground, with extremely scarce rations, it is no wonder that more than 3,500 Navajo and Mescalero Apache men, women, and children died while in the concentration camp.
During the film I learned about something that shook me to my core that I had not heard before. I learned that the genocidal mentality and actions of the U.S. policy makers would find similar expression years later when the Nazis, under Hitler, studied the plans of Bosque Redondo to design the concentration camps for Jews.
I was thinking this just yesterday as I walked across campus. UMM has banners up on the lightposts marking our history as an American Indian boarding school, which make me very uncomfortable. There was an aspect of American policy that was more benign than murdering Indians…we just did our best to destroy their culture. I’m glad we’re not sweeping it all under the rug, but on the other hand, I don’t know that people see these banners as symbols of something for which we must atone.
Meet Zoe Todd, a young Métis woman who has a lot to say about the colonial history of North America. I wouldn’t call her a skeptic, but her understanding of these issues is deep and she’s unafraid to voice her anger in the face of academic disapproval. The world needs many more like her.
https://zoeandthecity.wordpress.com
Not only that, but the US also detained indiscriminately thousands of Japanese-Americans during the war (including George Takei, who has quite a bit to say about the matter). These weren’t death camps, but they were detaining people based purely on their ethnicity.
Remembrance Day 2015:
Coincidence? Hmmmm, me thinks not! ;-(
.
Seriously. I am struck by the synchronicity of this Holocaust Remembrance Day, and NASA Remembrance Day.
Sorry to troll. If it reads like I am trolling, sorry.
[ Might as well troll some more: ]
re “Navajo” (the Diné):
I talked (summer 2012) a little with a Navajo Guide (at Canyon De Chelly [pronounced “de shay”], where one can go only with a Navajo Guide) who told us that “Navajo” was what the Spanish called them, meaning “horse thief” (because one of them stole one horse); that they call themselves the Diné (meaning “the people”). He showed us a part of the canyon where many Diné took refuge from The March.
The U.S. was also on board wirh the eugenics movement. We were forcibly sterilizing long before the Holocaust. If you don’t think that’s significant, read about Action T4. There’s another direct line between American practices and the Nazi genocide.
Unfortunately, progressive and scientific movements were involved there, but we can’t flinch away when the finger points back at us. “Never again,” means learning all the lessons, especially the most painful ones.
The practice is much older than America. All the great empires of the ancient past used population relocation as a means to control resistant populations, and “relocation” frequently meant death for many, particularly the vulnerable. The British used concentration camps during the Second Boer War. More recently, the US essentially set up a concentration camp system in Vietnam…”village pacification” I believe was the euphemism. US/NATO forces have done it in Afghanistan.
Mankind has a long sordid history of this sort if thing. I didn’t know the Nazis were inspired by the British tactics in the Boer war or the American colonials against Native Americans. Its almost as if the Nazis really admired their ‘Anglo Brothers’ because they easily could have taken lessons from the Spanish or Portuguese or even the Dutch in how to brutally colonize and subjugate a population.
@3 twas brillig
The coincidence of Holocaust and NASA remembrance day is not too different from the coincident birthday problem/paradox. (its not really a paradox, just seems to be). The chances that any two remembrance days will be on the same day, if their days of the year are chosen at random, is not that unlikely. Almost certainly something will coincide given the large number of special days arbitrary organizations declare yet they only have 365 days to choose from. Even less than 365 because very few things happen to fall on the same day as Christmas Day or New Years Day – by choice. No one wants to share those days so it is actively avoided. I don’t see conspiracy because those two days coincide. Now if international Neo-Nazi celebration day was Jan 28th I’d say that was no coincidence.
In his book “Enemies” Tim Weiner implies that the nazis structured the gestapo along the lines of the FBI, because: USA! USA!
No, seriously :(
You can be damn sure that if the US was losing the war against the Japanese and could barely feed our own soldiers, the Japanese Americans in concentration camps would be starved, disease would run rampant, and bodies would have to disposed of en mass. I wouldn’t even be surprised if we would be more proactive by killing them before disease and starvation did.
It’s like asking who inspired walking on two legs. I really liked Patricia Churchland’s book about the evolution of morality but was a little disappointed that she went out of her way to deny that humans had ‘a gene for genocide’ It makes no sense that we wouldn’t. Evolution is about competition and natural selection is amoral.
To be fair to the US, concentration camps were used (and called “concentration camps”) during the Boer War by the British. Also, eugenics was a popular theory all around the globe until its horrific manifestation in Nazi Germany. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that we (internationally) made a commitment (such as it is) to individual human rights.
WRT my comment about the gestapo, you can map their marketing to that of Hoover’s FBI with scary accuracy. The nazi’s only innovation was the snappy Hugo Boss uniforms. The attempt to build a personality cult around Hoover, uh Himmler, was probably no accident. Hollywood tropes and glamour were used by the nazis all over the place. Leni Reifenstahl’s “triumph of the will” owes more to “birth of a nation” than the fact that they are both movies.
nomadiq @7 caught me:
Yes, I was being snarky and know there is no conspiracy behind the coincidence. That’s the meaning of “synchronicity”: “to perceive meaning in a random coincidence”.
The simile to the “Birthday Paradox” is not quite correct. The birthday paradox posits a random population of birthdays, but for 2 holidays with very similar names to occur on the same day, is a little different. Like modifying the birthday paradox to include: Two people named Remembra with the same birthday. The odds are a little different there than just 30 people giving one an even chance of two sharing the same birthday. ( The “paradox”, results from assuming that the problem is about requiring a matching birthday to a specific person, and disregarding that ‘any two people with a shared birthday’ is the problem’s requirement.) Sorry to run down this rabbit hole, I’ll stop typing now. [ I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date …]
In the ancient world, one had little choice for what to do with recalcitrant conquered peoples: genocide or slavery. There was not enough surplus to house and feed captives that weren’t serving some purpose. So it ought to be expected that as technology gave the wherewithal to build concentration camps, they would be built and used. In its time Australia was practically a colony on the moon… If humans ever conquer space it’ll probably be in the form of shipping undesirables offworld. :(
I doubt its genetic (pace Churchland) as much as it is practical.
The HBO mini movie “conspiracy” reenacts a meeting in Wannsee at which Reynard Heydrich (played glacially by Kenneth Branagh) decide how, exactly, to implement Hitler’s policies. It’s worth watching and was another drop in my overflowing bucket of loathing for humanity.
@nomadiq(#7):
You are correct about the Nazis (or rather Hitler) admiring the British. Reading Mein Kampf shows that he was an anglophile. And after kicking the Brits of the continent he hoped that he could make peace with them so both nations could face the combined threat of the Jews and the USSR under Stalin. Good thing that the British Bulldog really disliked Hitler for some reason (and it was a fierce dislike if the anecdotes of him wanting to declare war on the USSR for ending the war are to be believed).
@4, twas brillig
I’ve never heard anything about “horse thief,” I always heard it was derived from the Spanish for “raccoon.” I think I heard that it also meant “enemy,” but I don’t know the etymology behind that.
kevinalexander @ 10
There doesn’t need to be a gene behind every specific behavior, particularly not in a highly social, highly adaptable species like humans. Looking at genetics to explain complex, sustained behaviors with strong cultural motivations, like those involved in carrying out genocide, is a bit of a leap.
@14 Marcus- Just rewatched that this weekend. The actors are all stellar, though Firth and Branagh are the standouts. It’s just so chilling how effortlessly Heydrich bullies everyone in the room, and slowly impresses on everyone, no matter how well connected they think they are, that the SS is in charge.
BULL. SHIT.
Hitler did not study English or US history. He had very little knowledge of English at all. His death camps were not designed directly by him. The idea for them came indeed from the Boer war, which was still recent news when he served during WWI. He occasionally referenced the Armenian holocaust (carried out during WWI). It is likely that Soviet gulags (which Nazi delegations visited during their alliance with Stalin) were a major influence on the final design of all death, work or concentration camps (including the rationing for extra labor, etc).
Don’t you think that if there was any connection, any at all, between Hitler and USA, the Soviet Union would have used it as propaganda?! But they didn’t. Or do you think that Soviets, who had control over most of Nazi papers concerning genocide were so inept that they just happened to miss all the supposed inspiration from USA, and that only the Big White Pulitzer-winning American managed to piece the pieces? How come this brilliant breakthrough isn’t cited in other history books? Because the entire planet, former Soviet countries included, is biased in support of USA?
Also, lets not pretend that we have two quotes here. The Jewish Journal article is based entirely on Toland’s book. The only book to make this claim.
You know what this is? It’s reverse American exceptionalism. US conservatives think that all the good in the world comes from America and US liberals think that all of the evils in the world come from America. The only thing they agree on is that the universe revolves around USA. The genocide of Native Americans is horrible enough without linking it to link it to every genocide ever carried out.
Forcing this connection on this date is nothing short of despicable and stupid.
Oh, and the Gestapo was not based on the FBI. There already was a secret service in Germany, and there were plenty of secret services in Europe, all of which more efficient than the FBI.
You know what the original concentration camps were? They were ghettos. Those tightly packed neighborhoods, sometimes encircled by walls, filled with Jews and only Jews, that have existed in Europe for hundreds of years before Columbus was even born.
Russian Siberian prison camps and the Pale of Settlement predate the American reservation system. Ghettos go back to the Middle Ages. The idea for at least partially exterminating Jews, sparing the young and able-bodied and holding them in labor camps in perpetuity is laid out in the works of Martin Luther — a man whose writings had, shall we say, some influence on the development of European and specifically German thought. He also formulated these views long before American reservations were created. Ethnic cleansing took place throughout history. The idea that the imprisonment of Native Americans inspired the Holocaust is bizarre, to say the least. What inspired the Holocaust was Europe’s ancient, deep and pervasive culture of ethnic tribalism; its obsession with blood purity — ethnic and familial purity, not just racial. And the reason why “modern” prison camps arose when they did has less to do with America supposedly introducing the concept of ethnic cleansing into a heretofore ethnically harmonious world, and more with technological progress, which provided modern-era governments with tools that weren’t available to Trajan or Chenghis Khan.
None of this is meant to trivialize the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans. What I take issue with is this sort of reverse American Exceptionalism, which is just as ridiculous as the regular variety. Americans did not “invent” racism, ethnicentrism, genocide, forced population transfers or prison camps. Eurasia has a long and well-developed tradition in that department predating the founding of this country or even colonization.
AlexanderZ,
Thanks for the term ‘reverse American exceptinalism’. I’m going to use it from now on.
I’m not informed enough to know , but I’m suspicious every time I read about what other horrible thing Americans invented.
Recently saw the movie Conspiracy (2001) which was about the group of high level Nazi officers who formulated the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference. Very good film but there was one piece of dialogue I found troublesome. When they described how over the course of 1 year that 11 million human beings will be exterminated, one of the Nazis said “Darwin would be astonished!”
Given that PZ pointed out that it was good ol’ Christian Americans who influenced Der Fuehrer, it was very dishonest for the writers to put that statement in the script. Darwin was not to blame for the Holocaust. But, Kenneth Branaugh and Colin Firth did some fine acting.
Hey, Who Cares at 15 I wonder just what you are referring to when you suggest that the USSR ended the war against Germany before Great Britain wanted them to? The reason I ask is that the USSR didn’t end the war against Germany before everybody else did.
twas brillig (stevem) (re: #4): Try Google someday. You may like it.
Marcus Ranum:
Conspiracy is jaw-droppingly good. It’s so good that I don’t think I can bring myself to watch it again.
@25: That may have been a reference to World War I, which the Russians/Soviets did indeed leave early.
Some objections and nuance about the link between American History and concentration camps. Some debate. Back and forth about it. “Reverse American exceptionalism” invoked.
Dead silence on eugenics. That connection is rock solid. Much more recent. Much more direct. Nobody can argue with it. American eugenists at the time said things like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#Influence_on_Nazi_Germany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#Origins_in_the_wider_European.2FU.S._eugenics_movement
@13:
IC – I didn’t get that you were being snarky. And yes, the birthday paradox is not exact in this case. Agreed. It was used as a simplistic example of how ‘coincidences’ are not well registered in the human mind.
re @16 & @26:
Thanks for the corrections. I was just relating what I was told by a Diné. I did not verify. just trusted him, as knowing more about that than I, who is pretty ignorant of the Indigenous people.
Two points.
1) Please do not use a movie (Even if is based on facts) to back up a historical argument.
2) Not sure if Hitler really read much about the US West beyond the novels of Karl May.
Does the US really need to be responsible for everything? Now, apparently, you can just rewrite history so that something else can be exported from America, genocide. ‘Cause no one did it better, amirite!?
Fuck this is something stupid fucking bullshit. This is absolutely disgusting.
Maybe Americans can go and rewrite history so that their genocide in Puerto Rico is also directly inspired by the systematic extermination of American Indians.
Can anyone else think of some other horrific event in history we can blame directly on the US? Remember, it doesn’t even need to make any fucking sense!
JUST FUCKING MAKE IT UP.
Agreed. If you truly want to understand the practical consequences of the decisions made at Wannsee, watch Shoah. It will wreck you.
If you want to hate humanity less, read about the White Rose.
IIRC, they also detained a fair number of Germans in WWI.
PBS showed a very good, but heartbreaking documentary called Sun Kissed. It shows how because of so many people dying on the Long Walk, the Navajo have been genetically bottlenecked. As a result, they have a very high incidence of a rare disease, Xeroderma Pigmentosum, which causes serious mental disability, an often fatal sensitivity to sunlight, and death after only a few years of tormented life.
One more terrible burden we inflicted on those people.
If this statement is true and properly sourced, then it does not matter at all whether or not the US was the “first” power in history to “invent” or use these methods. It would still be the US (and the British) that inspired Hitler and the Holocaust specifically.
And it does not have to be Hitler himself who knew anything concrete about any of this for the use of these methods to count to have been “inspired” by US activities. It could just as easily have been whatever subordinate was tasked with coming up with the details who was so knowledgeable and influenced.
And indeed, Hitler himself need not have known much of anything at all about the details of those methods, other than the fact that they existed, to have count to be “inspired” by them. If all he knew was the standard pop-culture Hollywood version of these events that was percolated about the culture of that time, even third or fourth hand, even if totally ignorant of the real story of real details, said utterly inaccurate third hand familiarity can still count as his “inspiration” if indeed it was what he thought he knew that influenced his decisions.
“Who inspired the final solution?” Well, the Nazi playbook owes a great deal to what the Ottoman Turks did to the Armenians during WWI. Up to 1.5 million people were rounded up and exterminated albeit not in concentration camps but tens of thousands died on ‘death marches’ through what is now the Syrian desert until people literally dropped dead from dehydration and exhaustion. The IDEA that it was POSSIBLE to exterminate entire populations and how to do it efficiently, such as the use of vast infrastructural resources and packing people into cattle wagons, came from what the Ottomans did to the Armenians. Shamefully, successive Turkish governments still refuse to acknowledge this ever happened; different brand of Holocaust denial….
It’s almost like my comments are invisible to some people in this thread. If you find the notion that American ideas and policies directly inspired the Holocaust offensive and absurd, please stop typing and read about the American eugenics movement.
Eugenics was popular in many more places than the USA.
This is bullshit. Add me to the ‘this is reverse American exceptionalism’ list.
Ryan Cunningham, the argument put forth is not that American ideas and practices in eugenics were influential to other eugenicists contemporaneously. Eugenics was a popular notion and it was being practiced at the time. American ideas and practices were influential. No one, I think, has denied this and I doubt if anyone will. And, despite the truth of that fact, I might add, it represents only a small part of a much larger picture of the Holocaust. The influence of American eugenicists is not a pebble that started a rock-slide, it is a drop of water in an ocean.
The argument that was put forth links it to a campaign of genocide (ongoing it may be argued, but that fact is irrelevant to this discussion) against American Indians. That is offensive and absurd. It is not true. And it makes me very angry.
Reverse American exceptinalism. Thank you, AlexanderZ.
I gather you didn’t actually read any of my links, Daz. The link between the American and German eugenics movements is well established. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, directly funded eugenics programs around the globe, including Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics and Josef Mengele himself.
It’s one thing to be ignorant. It’s another to be willfully ignorant about something this important.
kevinalexander @10:
You think it makes sense for humanity to have a gene for genocide?! Are there any other horrible things humans do that you think are in our genes?
AlexanderZ @ 19:
Are you having fun swimming in hyperbole? Who are these US liberals who think that all the evils of the world come from USAmerica?
Germany had no heed to import ideas about concentration camps from the US. The German Empire operated extermination camps in what is now called Namibia in the late nineteenth century. Most of the European empires at the time ran them. One of the things that made The Final Solution stand out for western people is the fact that the Nazis used tactics that were commonly used on peoples in Asia and Africa in Europe.
While horrific, the Nazis hardly came up with the ideas they used, it was already common tactics in empire building.
Ryan Cunningham, those two statements that you think are connected might not actually be connected.
Also this:
is a true statement, even if it’s not a full statement.
As for the OP, it is bullshit.
Get off the stuff about eugenics. And, please, for the love of fuck, don’t try to make the claim that it’s anything other than a single (small, even) part of a much more complex history.
Tony, it might be hyperbole to generalise ‘reverse American exceptionalism’ to all liberals, but as American exceptionalism is, you know, a real thing, the concept is solid, never minding the nebulous ‘liberals’ who espouse it.
Heck, maybe it’s just plain old American exceptionalism just applied to something no one should want to make a connection to.
The point remains, and it’s not wrong, that this is invented history, bullshit.
I do not understand why people are accusing others of saying America “started” these horrible acts. Nobody is saying we started it, but we perpetuated and inspired others with such actions. I fail to see the outrage over criticizing America. America did shitty things – it’s not the ONLY place, obviously, that has done awful shit. But even the shitty things that have been done before America could have stopped at America’s shore – they didn’t. And Hitler may have taken inspiration from the US, even if an idea predated the country. This is in no way saying America did absolutely everything and I fail to see where people are even stating such.
English Wikipedia (links omitted):
and:
Navajo Wikiibíídiiya:
…Well. The title of the page is “Diné bizaad”, and the introduction uses no other term, but the next paragraph begins:
Judging from this and other occurrences, like on the main page, I conclude that the term is not generally seen as offensive, or at least as so offensive that it couldn’t occasionally be used to clarify which “people” is being talked about, even though it’s not the usual term and not a native word.
(The language doesn’t have a [v]; perhaps [b̥] is considered a closer approximation than, say, [w] or [m]. The accent indicates high tone, not stress like in Spanish, but it’s generally easy to interpret one as the other when words are borrowed.)
I don’t know enough Spanish to rule out that there might be a word navajó which means “horse thief”, but there’s neither “horse” nor “thief” in there…
========================
Ugh …for a better reading experience
Ryan Cunningham #42:
Uh, yeah I did, thanks.
And? It was an international movement. Quite why you wish to only focus on US links is, frankly, beyond me.
Yeah, it is. You should remedy that, when you’re done with your egotistical self-flagellation.
I’m not arguing that American eugenics caused the Holocaust or that it was the sole inspiration. A historical event that large doesn’t happen because of one person or event or idea. I’m arguing that American ideas and policies were a source of inspiration, and that some Americans were very much complicit. There’s not a clean idealogical separation between what the Nazis were advocating and what some Americans were advocating.
Responsibility for The Shoah is global. People from nations all over the world contributed. If we want to understand this event, we can’t just point to the Nazis as a few bad apples and move on. We can’t pretend it was a uniquely German problem in a time that has passed. The pernicious ideas that lead to genocide don’t stop at borders or oceans, and they don’t begin or end with a regime. They’re pervasive and persistent. Honoring heroes like the Oyneg Shabbos means we all need to take responsibility for our contributions big and small, we need to study the full historical scope, and we all need to stay vigilant against genocidal ideology in all forms.
Yeah, I’m still not getting where people are finding “America had a role in this” to equal “only America is to blame”. I think the focus on the US in this case is because PZ is American, America DOES have a huge influence, and the United States has a tendency of sweeping history away or whitewashing the shit out of it – which may also not be a uniquely American problem, but nonetheless is a problem with America. Every country deserves some scrutiny, nowhere is perfect, but we shouldn’t let that prevent us from analyzing a nation’s actions and history. I couldn’t say if Hitler definitely took inspiration from the US, it wouldn’t surprise me but he certainly had other places to look, but it is not wrong to wonder America’s role in genocide.
Americans were the first to implement a policy of forcible sterilization in the name of eugenics, and others followed. The first country to take direct policy action on eugenics was America. Yes, the U.S. was uniquely culpable on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_Integrity_Act_of_1924
NO ONE. No one here has done this.
You’re pretty frustrating considering you can write lucidly and appear to be capable of reading. You know exactly what the problem is that people have that’s been directly addressed in this thread and yet you’re talking about something entirely different.
K.R. Syncanna #53:
From the OP:
Please note the emboldened definite article.
#4 twas brillig: “I talked (summer 2012) a little with a Navajo Guide (at Canyon De Chelly [pronounced “de shay”], where one can go only with a Navajo Guide) who told us that “Navajo” was what the Spanish called them, meaning “horse thief” (because one of them stole one horse); ”
Well the definition is correct, the Navajo were actually quite active raiders back in the times of Spanish occupation, though they prefer to downplay it now.
Their own term for themselves is Dine, ‘The People’. Most American Indian tribes had names that meant ‘The People’, and names for other groups that simply meant ‘Those other people’.
Daz @56 Ah, I did not realize PZ said that, I stand corrected. He should have said “a” country to be more correct. So I do disagree with the use of that article to describe America’s involvement. As an aside regarding the comments section, I haven’t seen anyone claim America is THE country and only country to inspire it, although I may be overlooking it (not intentionally).
And to continue my comment (@58), I do NOT believe Ryan’s fact (@54) about the start of American Eugenics to be akin to stating only America is responsible for inspiring Hitler.
Well, K.R. Syncanna, eugenics aside (please, I hope), the ghetto being a rather old and established thing, it’s not a far stretch from that to concentration camps. Not only was the idea not unique to any one country it is something that had been practiced, without exaggeration, since antiquity. It’s tenuous at best to suggest that America played a roll in that at all, in the thoughts of anyone making plans for death camps. Certainly the systematic extermination of American Indians was not a direct inspiration.
It’s really hard to cast aside eugenics in a debate about Hitler, Thomathy. Now it is believable that Hitler extrapolated his ideas from ghettos, but it’s also believable that he saw some of what America did/was doing and found inspiration. Definitely not JUST from America, but America is on the list of countries that are likely to be paid attention to. That being said, you CANNOT take eugenics out of this honestly, I believe.
I’m afraid both practices probably emerged almost automatically as soon as human population and settlement levels reached a certain point. At any rate, both are recorded among the oldest surviving written documents of humanity.
What are you even talking about, K.R. Syncanna? Read that again.
I was not dismissing eugenics. I was, with some cynicism, hoping to put it aside for a moment while I discussed another thing entirely.
Hitler was not the monolithic planner of the Holocaust. He just wasn’t. And he certainly was not directly inspired (and I am being very deliberate in this) by the genocide of the American Indians.
I don’t believe that I can make a more plain and direct statement. If you want to argue about anything, argue against that statement, because I’m arguing directly against that notion as espoused in the OP.
@63
Okay, so Hitler was not alone in planning a genocide. I’m with you there. He did, however, play a role. How do you know he was not directly inspired by the genocide of the indigenous peoples of America? America may have been working with old ideas, but America kept those ideas alive, so it is not outrageous that he could have had inspiration. I do not know either way, but I wonder about the confidence in saying “no, America had nothing to do with that”.
K.R. Syncanna
“but it’s also believable that” “How do you know he was not”
Pretty tenuous, at best.
It’s a good thing absolutely no one has said that, then, isn’t it.
Oh, jesus christ. I’m not going to have a conversation where we try to imagine history and the interior of dead people’s minds.
This is a well-documented history, we don’t need to do any of that.
I must be having déjà vu. I’m pretty sure this has happened before.
@Daz, Thomathy is essentially denying America’s role as an inspiration. I was clumsy in my wording.
@66, you could link to sources about Hitler’s inspirations. I just want to know where you got this idea that America could not have directly influenced Hitler. It’s a rather large claim. I am not going to absolutely claim America DID, just so you know. But you, essentially, come off as saying “America did things other peoples have done before, therefore the US cannot have directly influenced Hitler” and I do not follow that logic. Do you have sources outlining where exactly he drew them from? Is America not on that list?
Tony! #44
Well, PZ is one. So is Toland and everyone citing him. That’s already quite a crowd, but there are plenty more – pretty much in any discussion with Americans you’ll see someone arguing that this or that is US-inspired when it obviously isn’t, regardless of whether the thing in question is good or bad.
I’m not the only one to notice this. Have you considered that your blindness to this phenomena is because of your own minor biases?
Mind you, I’m not calling anyone evil. I’m saying that people, particularly people from the wealthiest and strongest country in the world, have to be cautious when discussing the deaths of millions others.
Oh, and if you were wondering, the genocides of WWII isn’t a theoretical subject to me.
No, I’m not, and you know it! I’m angry and I’ve over-exaggerated.
You’re right that I have no right to lump all liberals (or even all conservatives) in this. Nevertheless, it’s a real phenomena, and I’d like to ask Americans to be more careful when they deem that their country is responsible for some major event.
_______________________
Ryan Cunningham #52
No, it isn’t. Neither Australian Aborigines nor the San people had anything to do with it – on the contrary, they themselves were victims of similar ideologies. Lumping everyone together like this is despicable.
WWII and its genocides are probably the most researched atrocities in human history. We know who gave which order and how events transpired. We can pin point many crimes to a single clerk behind a typewriter. Claiming otherwise is an unwitting attempt at re-writing history and (again, unwittingly) it plays into the hands of neo-Nazi groups. And saying something akin to “we’re all to blame” is the same as saying that no-one is.
Nobody is doing that!
The whole point of this remembrance day is to remind people from around the world which actions and which words can lead to horrible atrocities. If it were something unique to Germany the UN wouldn’t have made this a global remembrance day.
I encourage talking about the genocide of Native Americans. The lesson of the Holocaust is to make sure that no genocide will happen again and that no past genocide is covered up. My only problem is with PZ’s foolish and lazy attempt to retell history. I know that he meant to do good, but he should have done it differently. He could have said that “on this day we need to look on the crimes of our own country, here they are:…” but he didn’t. He chose to dabble in history.
And he should have known better.
AlexanderZ @68:
Are you certain that PZ is someone who thinks that all the evils of the world come from USAmerica? In the case of this post, I think you’re correct. But this is one case.
That’s quite likely and something I will try to keep in mind in the future.
@Ronald Couch(#25):
The Russians were the ones who took Berlin and found Hitler after he committed suicide. And like I said those are anecdotal stories, though it does fit with his pugnacious character.
I did nothing of the sort. I said that people all over the world were responsible, not that every single human was responsible. No, I didn’t list each person or nation individually, but interpreting “global” as my literally holding every single person on the planet responsible is lazy and intellectually dishonest. If you’re going to invent my position, you don’t really need me in the conversation. You can continue to have an argument with yourself, and I can move on to more productive conversations.
I’ll state my position one last time. Yes, Americans made unique and significant intellectual, economic, and political contributions to the Holocaust, especially through the eugenics movement. There is a tendency to underplay and forget the role we played in this country. We’re whitewashing and oversimplifying our history. We won the war. That’s what the victors do. We can’t afford to do that with the Holocaust. It’s too important.
Tony! #69
This is a feeling that has building up for a while. I can’t remember exact posts, but I do remember thinking that he inappropriately used a foreign disaster (in a few posts about Middle East) to start a discussion about US internal politics in a way that minimized the real problem. It’s a vague memory so I could be wrong.
I hope I’m wrong.
Thank you.
@moarscienceplz 26
I heard the same anecdote related by several Dineh when I was working with Dineh and Hopi opposing strip mining on tribal lands back in the 90s. It seemed a pretty prevalent view of the Dineh in the 4 corners region back then. I later asked several Spanish and Mexican friends and none of them thought it was a Spanish word. I nonetheless stopped using it since it was perceived by so many as a slur.
AlexanderZ and a few others have a strong point regarding American Exceptionalism. At least since WWII and the rise of the US as a superpower there has been a strain of jingoism that sees America as the center of the world. It puts blinders on people. Initially it was the US as the shining city on the hill, beacon to the oppressed (communists), inventor and perfector of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Not long after there was push back against that ahistorical nonsense, but too often that push back left America as THE center. Like every other large empire that has existed some amazing things have come out of our culture and so have horrors. None of that is unique to us, no matter how much we might think they are.
man oh man does this subject still generate controversy.
this time it seems to be set off by the article “the”. If the word was “a” would it have still generated the same reaction?
People have been doing this sort of thing for a very very long time thing what that sets this case off from previous cases was the industrialization of the process. That could be said for the war generally though.
I see very little moral difference between death camps and carpet bombing and fire bombing cities one is just a little bit more selective it is still pointless and massive death on an industrial scale.
There were no innocents nor winners only survivors.
uncle frogy
Tony @43
First question answer-Yes
Second question-Misogyny for one.
Look up the naturalism fallacy and remember that observation is not advocacy.
We have the ability to overcome our natures when necessary but it could start with admitting what the problem is rather than arguing endlessly over the cultural morass .
kevinalexander @76:
Do you have evidence to back your opinions?
Not to mention long afterwards. I had a patient who was sterilized by the Iowa state eugenics board in the 1950s. (Long before I met him. I like to think I would have at least said “guys, don’t do that” if I’d been around when it happened.)
In the Phoenix metro area, there is a street actually called “Indian School Rd.” It runs east to west, just north of downtown. There is a park, as well, and it’s called “Steele Indian School Park”.
At the main Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix, there is a really moving exhibit called “The Boarding School Experience”. I have seen it a few times. If anyone here ever visits Phoenix, I highly recommend it. The Heard Museum is a great little museum that features mainly American Indian artwork, although they have artwork from all over the world as well.
http://heard.org/exhibits/boardingschool/
Note that I now live in Vermont, as of October last year, and not Phoenix, but I lived near Indian School Rd. for most of my 15 years there. :)
kevinalexander @ 76
You think there’s a gene for misogyny? Do you even understand what genes are?
Did the US boarding schools kill and molest first nations kids by the thousands? The Canadian ones did. The molesting bit we figured out about in the 1980s and 90s; the killing bit has been coming out more recently.
numerobis
Yes, they did. AFAICT, there’s not really much difference between the US and Canadian versions, in intent or action (horrible and horrible, respectively)
Your argument IS a the “naturalism fallacy”. Look it up.
Go a bit further back with the Le Grand Dérangement. Ethnic cleansing of the round you up at gun point, ship you off to fates unknown often fatal, taking everything you own and giving it to our own kind variety. Lost 4 generations in my family tree that way when the English decided to replace Catholic French with Protestant Americans in Eastern Canada.
@7: “they easily could have taken lessons from the Spanish or Portuguese or even the Dutch”
Easily. This is how my compatriots did it when they ruled the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governorate_of_the_Banda_Islands#Massacre_of_the_Bandanese
This is how the responsible guy is remembered:
http://www.hartvannederland.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Jan-Pieterszoon-Coen.png
In case you want to see it yourself, it’s in this city:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoorn
Mellow Monkey @80
If you look at my first comment you’ll see that I put “a gene for…” in quotes. Of course I don’t think that there is literally a gene that causes this or that behaviour. The genes are information that, together with other factors informs the construction of the brain. Behaviour is what the brain does under the influence of the environment, said environment including the brain itself.
Misogyny, like it or not, is adaptive and so will likely be selected for. As I said before, evolution is about competition where the most intense competition is with members of your own species since they are using the same resources. Evolution is amoral, it uses whatever works. You can win a race by running faster than your competitor but you can also win by tripping them. One way to give your offspring an advantage over their competitors is to prevent the competitors from being born so it makes sense to to try to control others reproductive success by controlling their reproductive habits. In other words, attack them for having sex.
Other social animals do the same. Wolves come to mind.
Let me say one more time, description isn’t prescription. I’m not advocating the behaviour or claiming that it’s inevitable nor am I excusing it. I’m saying that we need an honest understanding of what we’re struggling against.
Is the upshot (of the opening paragraph of) the original post this: that Hitler was inspired to build the death camps of the Holocaust by the USA’s treatment of its indigenous people?
That sounds a bit sus. Is it (historically) correct? I’ve had a quick scout around and can’t seem to see any academic treatment of it (or pretty much any speculation about it at all)?
Is it possible PZ meant something like ‘Hitler wasn’t first in implementing a Final Solution, and the USA definitely did it before Hitler”?
[concentration camps]
The earliest description of such, that I am aware of, is by Thucydides – in his description of the aftermath of the Athenian campaign in Sicily, about 2500 years ago.
[US influence on Nazis]
At very least, the Bellamy salute.
[SA influence on Nazis]
South Africa overran the Germans in neighboring Namibia. Many Afrikaners and Germans had a lot of mutual respect, influence and interaction. And a common enemy in the British. Groupings like the Ossewa Brandwag and the Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging, owe(d) a big debt to commonalities in outlook with German authoritarians. They felt that South Africa should have sided with Germany, in both world wars.
There are genes that control the production and metabolism of neurotransmitters like adrenaline, oxytocin, and dopamine, that, within the context of a brain developmentally wired up in a certain way, in response to a certain set of environmental stimulants, will produce a certain range of emotional states, which, in another set of environmental stimulants (including the brain-states of other surrounding individuals) may predispose, statistically, an individual to engage in a range of individual behaviors that, within the environmental context of multiple other individuals and their behaviors, in combination with other ranges of behaviors, given a particular set of environmentally determined factors, in aggregate produce an end result which, in certain contexts, may be labelled, by yet other individual observers, as genocide (or misogyny).
Call such genes genes “for” genocide, with or without scare quotes if you wish.
I would not.
No, but far-right wingnuts have been fond of quote-mining him to make their Fuck-everyone-who’s-not-Us attitude sound scientish ever since the Origins was published.
We in Sweden were also early joiners of the eugenics movement.
BTW Darwin and Abe Lincoln were born the same year, some say the same day. The two persons of the century to have the greatest impact…
Yeah, hands up as another citizen of a eugenics pioneer (Aus). It’s amazing how quickly people start spouting apologetics when you bring it up. Seems it’s similar in the USA.
@2: Marcus:
Oh my!
Takei is a keeper.
;-)
I’ve never heard of this argument before but I’m skeptical. People tend to conflate labour camps/concentration camps with the death camps. The latter were designed and implemented as part of the final solution: the decision to systematically exterminate every single Jew in Europe under Nazi control that was made sometime between 1941-1942. I am not aware of any civilization ever constructing death camps of this calibre until the Nazis. They were not labour camps (although Auschwitz was unique in that it was both), the purpose was not to be worked to death or imprisoned, the purpose was death. Period. How else do you explain that out of the 900,000 people who went into Treblinka, only 45 survived? Most were dead within hours of their arrival. This is not just about scale but also purpose. The death camps were the final solution to the “Jewish question” which evolved from discriminatory laws, ghettoization, forced emigration, and finally genocide in 1941-1942 onwards. The final solution was not the same thing as reservations or labour camps. The Nazi concentration camps, such as Dachau were designed and used for political prisoners, not Jews. The only time Jews occupied them was after Kristallnacht (most were then subsequently released) and in the last year of the war when, as the Red Army advanced, they were forced to flee Auschwitz to Western Europe. The Nazis are part of a long history of antisemitism, racial discrimination, forced labour etc. to be sure, but some of what they did and proposed was unique to them. Finally, there is considerable debate as to how much Hitler knew about the Final Solution and what if any, orders he made. It is entirely possible that most of the decisions regarding the death camp were made without his supervision. This was to distant the fuhrer from this type of decision making and the possible repercussions or bad press. He spoke in vague terms as to what he wanted: mostly for someone to solve the “Jewish question” and his underlings worked with considerable freedom towards that end (see Ian Kershaw’s substantial and authoritative two-part biography for a good discussion on this topic). So if we want to know what inspired the creation of the death camps we should look at the bureaucrats of the SS who implemented it. Himmler made the decision to use gassing (first in vans that drove around with a hose connected to the exhaust and fed into the back) because the firing squads were too personal for the perpetrators (Himmler himself fainted and vomited after witnessing one). The death camps were a culmination of a process to distance the perpetrator from the Jewish victim but the ends and means were always the same: systematic extermination not detention. Auschwitz was admittedly different but using Jews for forced labour in this camp was a decision that was made by the camp commandant towards the end of the war when the labour was needed, even then there was a selection process and a significant number of arrivals at Auschwitz were herded straight to their deaths.
The eugenics connection is much more solid and some have argued that the Nazi “Euthanasia” program (which targeted undesirables originally, not Jews) was the first step along the road to the Final Solution. See Henry Friedlander’s “The Origins of Nazi Genocide” for that. He also challenges the claim that eugenics was “pseudoscience.” Certainly by today’s standards but not considered as such in the 1930s (according to him). Thus modern science might have its own stake in the origins of the Final Solution. Note: this is not an extension of that ridiculous argument that Darwin or evolution or science itself was responsible for the Holocaust.
Mellow Monkey @17
Your point is well taken. I put “a gene for…” in quotes because I don’t mean that there is literally a gene for this or that behaviour. What gets evolved is a tendency to a specific emotional response to a specific stimulus. The brain supplies the behaviour and the cultural is the confabulation to explain the behaviour.
In this case I’m pointing out that humans are instinctively aggressive and instinctively tribal and the combination is an instinctive aggressiveness to ‘the other’. That leads to genocide. There doesn’t have to be ‘a gene for’ genocide nor does there have to be a cultural impetus for it. It just happens as a consequence of simpler emotional responses in the absence of constraining factors such as civilization.
It’s a Lord of the Flies thing.