The Model the Nazi's Followed: From Columbus to Himmler

            The foregoing studies indicate that there is a fundamental relationship between systems of knowledge and belief and the atrocities that resulted from these beliefs. The pattern is clear and is repeated in the cases of Innocent the III, Columbus, Philip II, the Inquisition, Descartes, Locke, Newton, Darwin and the rise of  imperial, economic empires and corporate scientism and in the philosophies of history that supported murderous regimes.  For the remainder of this book I will apply the conclusions I have drawn earlier to three specific cases, Heinrich Himmler, Robert Oppenheimer and John von Neumann. I now turn to Himmler and the Third Reich, who bring many of these tendencies to fruition. My thesis is that the Nazi's were not the example of unique evil that they are often pictured to have been, but rather were following out tendencies that had already produced similar atrocities for Africans, Native Americans and others. Himmler was fulfilling a pattern of devotional sacrifice of the innocent on the altar of knowledge/power that was already very old  when he began building Auschwitz.

            The thesis that the Nazis were in fact continuing the tradition of atrocity and genocide already set up by the British, Dutch, French and Americans is developed In a new book by Sven Lindqvist called "Exterminate the Brutes". The Nazis ruthlessly colonized a section of southwest Africa, just as the British General Kitchener had killed 11,000 Sudanese, with only 8 British dying in the conflict in 1898. Lindqvist writes that the German murder of the Jews continued the "art of hastening the extermination of a people of 'inferior culture' " as exercised already by " Americans, British, and other Europeans".  The Germans were following a well established pattern. The genocidal effort against the Jews was not taken earlier in European history, despite the widespread hatred of them going back at least to Luther, because "the step from mass murder to genocide was not taken until the anti-Semitic tradition met the tradition of genocide arising during Europe's expansion in America,[the Native Americans], Australia, [the genocidal removal of the Tasmanians and most of the Aborigines], Africa, [the slave trade and the colonial wars] and Asia, {British atrocities in Bengal, India, China and elsewhere] ".[1] But despite Lindqvist's effort to expand our knowledge of the relation between the various Euro-American atrocities, he appears to still largely ignore the cultural and scientific support that acted as the knowledge bases and springboard for the atrocious uses of power.

            Ward Churchill, a Native American scholar writes that Hitler studied the atrocities committed against Native Americans, and found historical support in his effort to gain "living room" (lebensraum) and the "clearing of inferior racial stock". Hitler modeled his atrocities partly on 

the 1830 Indian Removal Act and subsequent military campaigns against the Indigenous tribes of the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Sonora Desert regions. Even the Nazi tactic of    concentrating "undesirables" prior to their forced 'relocation or reduction' was drawn from actual U.S. examples, including the internment of the Cherokee and other 'Civilized Tribes', before the          devastatingly lethal 'Trail of Tears' was forced upon them, and the comparable experience of the Navaho at Bosque Redondo during the period 1864-68. [2] 

            Comparing the mentality of the Nazi's to a specific example of an atrocity committed by the US against Native Americans, Churchill concludes that of the actions of men like Chivington and the Colorado Volunteers are identical in their essential features to the Nazi SS. He writes that like the SS, those who murdered  Indians at Sand Creek and elsewhere 

defined their enemy in purely racial terms, they understood war only in terms of the sheer annihilation of the racial enemy and they engaged in war because of the combination of abstract 'progress' on the one hand and a related desire for pure material gain on the other. The Colorado Volunteers thought of themselves as superior beings and thus found themselves to be entitled to that which their racial enemies possessed [their land especially]. For the SS it was the myth of the superman and the pursuit of lebensraum (living room) in Poland and the Ukraine.  For he Colorado Volunteers it was 'manifest destiny' and Colorado statehood. In both examples, the policy pursued was extermination of the indigenous population and its replacement by the racially superior stock of the invaders". [3]

            The forces and ideas that generated the Nazi holocaust had generated the American holocaust long before. The Nazi holocaust can be openly questioned, because the Nazis were the enemies of England and America, but the English and Americans are primarily responsible for the Native Holocaust, and thus it is not generally recognized as a holocaust.

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