The New Yorker has a depressing roundup of various Hitler books. The United States seems to be getting a deserved roasting for acting as a role model.
The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.
America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.
We’re still really good at that. As the hearings for a new CIA director begin, we’re seeing more grand denials of responsibility for horrors.
And, of course, the entire Iraq war was another extension of the same ideology. Who-knows-how-many dead for the sake of material gain. For property.
And we still keep slaves. We keep more slaves now than we did before the Civil War. We just keep most of the most egregiously mistreated out of sight overseas, so as not to sully our aura of righteous innocence.
And we torture millions of people every day in our prisons and jails, with millions of USians on the outside doing everything they can to make things worse for those on the inside.
And… and I could go on like this forever. There is no evil too vile for the good ol’ US of A to have committed in the name of us all, for the sake of the few.
Every day brings new horrors to steal my breath and tear at my heart and yet, even knowing the price, I go on. I drift through every day knowing the truth, but too much a coward to even speak it aloud, afraid that the baleful eye of the rough beast might fall on me as well.
Today we consider a craven torturer to lead our chief agency of butchers, nation-destroyers, and overseas dungeon-builders. Why not? Tomorrow will be worse. Tomorrow will always be worse, until we stop lying to ourselves about who and what we really are.
“The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand. ”
But it was “Free Enterprise” in action, so it was O.K., right? Not like those dirty Socialist Nazis.
Not to deny the immorality of those policies, but some of the drop in native populations, there and elsewhere in the Americas, was the result of infectious diseases to which the natives had no immunity.
aziraphale @3,
Oh, well that’s all right then.
Except these were infectious diseases brought by the Europeans, who also were known to deliberately expose Native Americans to them. In order to kill them. So let’s not pretend those diseases weren’t part of an intentional genocide.
Also, “the natives,” wtf?
Same thin happened in Mexico which the Spaniards’ generally didn’t intend. They wanted the pre-conquest people for more or less serfs.
Maybe I’m not sensitized to whatever is supposed to be objectionable about it, but it means people who were born there. Confusingly, people usually want to refer to non-Europeans or say something about your ancestry, not so much your birthplace. I get that. But is there some other problem?
@6, consciousness razor,
To me, “the natives” smacks of the racist coloniser mindset – the modern, sophisticated conquerors vs the simple, primitive “natives.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in any other way.
@ 1 vucodlak
Today we consider a craven torturer to lead our chief agency of butchers, nation-destroyers, and overseas dungeon-builders.
Alternate candidate. Torquemada felt he could not morally justify working for such an organizantion.
Rather interesting account by an Al Jazzera journalist about his experiences in Guantanamo.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/guantanamo-prison-survivor-sami-al-hajj-shares-story-180505151911693.html
Al Jazzera has not been the USA’s favourite news organization though, to be fair, the US blows up reporters and news offices of other news agencies as well.
consciousness razor wrote:
In some places (like Canada), it’s often used with the same tone and intent as a racial slur.
CR:
It embodies the colonial mindset, it’s racist, and it’s dismissive as fuck.
We have a similar issue in Australia. The official position of the British Empire was that Australian Aborigines were to be accorded full protection of the law. There is a famous proclamation board (see http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/governor-arthurs-proclamation-aborigines) giving a cartoon explanation of equality before the law in Tasmania, but any reading of Tasmanian history reveals that in practice all a white settler had to do was claim an Aborigine had committed a crime (which included “trespassing” on land that the local tribes had walked for tens of thousands of years before the empire took it away) and the troopers would bustle off to kill or imprison them, whereas if a settler harmed an aborigine then police action would almost never result and certainly would not be prosecuted to the same extent.
It has been argued that Australia never had an official policy of genocide–the Crown specifically ordered peaceful co-existence, and several conservative commentators have tried to use this to dismiss genocide as a term for what happened in colonial Australia–but the practical workings of power meant that such noble ideals were rarely implemented “in the field”, as it were. And plenty of openly genocidal policies (the Black Line and subsequent resettlement of Tasmanians for instance) were enforced even by governors who had received direct orders from the Crown to treat aborigines as equals before the law.
It is terribly sad, but if you want to see horrifyingly nasty wilful ignorance at work, just check in on any Reddit or Quora thread about the treatment of aborigines in Australia and you will be regaled by any number of people arguing that there never was any significant oppression because (1) King George told everyone in the colonies to be nice and (2) there is a famous example where white settlers were hanged (for the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838), which apparently proves to their satisfaction that all mistreatment of aborigines was routinely prosecuted–
–this despite the fact that the hanging of the Myall Creek murderers is the only example in Australian history of colonials being prosecuted for a mass murder of aborigines, and that even a cursory reading of the history of the Myall Creek Massacre hardly shows imperial justice in a good light: it took two trials to gain a conviction (in the first trial, a juror stated that even though a murder had been committed by law, he was not going to send a white man to be hanged for killing aborigines); the second trial only gained convictions against 7 of the 11 murderers; and after the trial many powerful voices in the colony (including the now-progressive Sydney Morning Herald) decried the outcome as “judicial murder” of whites. This despite the fact that the murders had been planned a week in advance (to coincide with the station owner, who had a history of protecting the aborigines on his land, being away) and involved the beheading of several children with swords. It’s hard to imagine a more barbaric premeditated mass killing, and yet a large proportion of the colonial population thought the crime was not bad enough to be considered a murder purely because the victims were black.
Okay, I’ll just honestly say I didn’t and wouldn’t read it that way (as a white person). If you talked of “the Europeans” doing something, I wouldn’t have an issue or attribute it to any particular mindset. The comment had talked of a “drop in native populations,” and then makes a reference back to “the natives,” just as you’d uncontroversially and unremarkably refer to “the Europeans” as a group like I said. The whole thing definitely displayed ignorance (at best) about Europeans deliberately infecting these people; Crys T is certainly right about that.
But the term itself wouldn’t provoke a “WFT?” from me, which is why I wanted to try to understand how it was being interpreted, since that came as a surprise (given my admittedly limited/biased perspective). As you may already know, it’s the same Latin root word as nature, prenatal care, nation, and so forth — literally just “birth,” and I don’t see racism or colonialism in that. If it were substituted with an apparently equivalent phrase like “the people who were born there,” I’m assuming there wouldn’t have been a problem, because that looks completely innocuous and says nothing about sophisticatedness or primitiveness or anything of the sort. So if I’m supposed to substitute some other phrase for it which has those types of connotations, I simply don’t know what that would be or why it should be read that way.
Somehow I mispelled “WTF?” I’m getting tired.
quelle surprise
Terms have histories of use that are more important than etymology, and the history of “the natives” is not good.
And as a general rule, be wary of adjectives being used as nouns when talking about marginalised groups – eg. “the gays”, “transgenders”, “blacks”
consciousness razor,
The root or origins of a word say nothing about how it is used and understood today.
Take for example the n-word. It literally comes from the word “black”. Yet I hope you would see how it would be inappropriate, and outright racist for a white person to use this term.
#4 / Crys:
That’s not accurate. While there were some cases of biological warfare (as in 1767 at Fort Pitt – the famous smallpox blankets), the vast majority of native American deaths starting in the late 15th century weren’t intentionally caused. The excellent book 1493 covers the topic really well.
By the way, I think the issue with ‘native’ is whether it’s used as an adjective or a noun.
I understand that, much like the previous statement that “Terms have histories of use […]” This does not get me any closer to understanding how #3’s usage was offensive. If I’m to avoid saying something malignant or ugly or whatever in the future, then so far there’s been nothing useful which helps me recognize it. The word you’re objecting to in “the result of infectious diseases to which the natives had no immunity” does not pop out at me like the n-word would; there’s apparently nothing derogatory or even suggestive about how it was used.
It’s certainly important to point out the Europeans were partly responsible; correcting that factual matter is absolutely the right thing to do. That’s an easily-identifiable problem in the comment, and maybe that’s what gets people primed for seeing anything else. But it doesn’t look to me that the word was being used like a slur or hinting at an ugly attitude or what have you, so that’s not where I would focus any criticism. That’s honestly what my perspective is like right now, whatever it may be worth. I’d rather not draw discussion away from the main topic, so I’ll just stop writing, but I will appreciate it if anybody does have a way of explaining how it’s problematic.
#19 / Consciousness:
Well, the word jumped out at me when I saw it in a way that ‘the native people’ or ‘the aboriginal people’ would not have (but not nearly to the extent that the n word would have jumped out). And immediately the phrase ‘the natives are restless’ comes to mind. Although it clearly wasn’t the intent in the post, the word could and has been used to dehumanize people. Here, it feels to me more archaic than problematic.
No one asked for your opinion about where they direct their criticism. You asked, people answered, you word-vomited some more, people chimed in and elaborated. Your personal feelings on a subject that doesn’t effect you are irrelevant; the history of the term and its usage exists whether you acknowledge it or not. All this protracted waffling on your part is very self-centered and boring and blinkered.
I don’t think you will appreciate it, considering people already did and your blanket, overly long response is that these explanations fail to pass your personal sniff test. Nobody cares. No one said the word was used to intentionally hurt someone. Ignorance needs repeated checking. Move on and stop insinuating (with this talk of being “primed”) that people are looking to be offended.
The consequences of not changing your personal lexicon is your personal problem. I have a hard time believing you’ll forget people repeatedly saying that the usage here of “natives” is colonialist, racialist garbage, so it sounds like that problem isn’t so much one of remembering and “recognizing,” but one of feigned ignorance.
Crack open a history book and look upon several centuries of “ugly attitudes.” This is really elementary stuff. Your innocent posturing and whitewashing is embarrassing. Context matters and intent doesn’t, but it sure does look like you’re intentionally asking people to educate you and then ignoring the lessons you don’t like the sound of.
I think what Razor was looking for was a way to identify up front which terms might be problematical? Other than using an adjective as a noun, which a few of us have pointed out (e.g., illegal vs. illegal alien; native vs. native people), I don’t there is one in English without knowing the context of the word. Especially in this example, where ‘the natives’ was preceded by ‘the native population’…
Re “native”
My understanding is that “indigenous” is their preferred group noun,
I do want to be corrected if mistaken.
?
I’ve been completely open from the beginning about the possibility that I may just be blind about this particular case, because I know that’s certainly not unusual. I doubt it would help anybody to play along, as if I could really see what they were talking about. Believe me about that or not; nothing I can do about it.
If it’s racist and colonialist, as seems to be the consensus, then that’s everyone’s problem, not just mine. That’s why I want to understand the complaints.
You’ve assumed it has something to do with changing my lexicon, but it wasn’t my comment to begin with. I was looking for clarification about others’ comments, as you can see if you bother to read the fucking thread. If they don’t feel like offering clarification, fair enough. But the only thing for me to do is (1) ask about it sincerely or (2) shrug it off and pretend like it doesn’t really matter even though I believe it does. Maybe it was stupid of me not to pick the second one, but then whatever … I’m stupid. I can handle that better than failing to understand these people’s perspectives, which matter to me yet are clearly very different from my own.
If context matters, then so does reading the whole sentence for comprehension and not reacting to snippets of it with irrelevant noise.
Comment #3 is not to be found somewhere in a history book, and my impression of it is exactly that it wasn’t a case of someone exhibiting such attitudes (at least not ones I can detect, after looking pretty fucking hard for something). Pointing at other stuff, all over “history books” where such things can be found, doesn’t suggest to me that you’re finding it in the comment. Because you had to look elsewhere. In any case, the fact that somebody, somewhere, at some time, had such attitudes while using the term is not something I need to be educated about.
Sorry for another “overly long response,” if this counts, even though I did not ask for your opinion on the matter. But I have a feeling that you also wouldn’t want me to spend less time giving a shit about this stuff, so it’s hard to be very sorry that you’ve decided I’m in a lose-lose situation no matter what, nothing I could possibly say could be genuine, that I’m playing dumb but also need your dumbass “lessons,” etc. I would apologize for boring you again too, but I wasn’t doing any of this for your entertainment, asshole. So maybe I should save the apologies for somebody else.
That was precisely the meaning of your comment:
Again, your problem.