| Manifest Destiny - as Compared to Hitler's Plan of a Master Race
In 1839, John L. Sullivan wrote of Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined to explain and excuse the necessary expansion of the United States and the right to property out west (property already allocated and promised to Native people via hundreds of treaties. Property given in trade for homeland east of the Mississippi... and in trade for thousands of lives lost in the journey west.) O'Sullivan who wrote of
"human equality," "morality," "liberty" and "human progress," laid the groundwork for an ideology that grew within the American non-Native community and government: that Indians are a conquered culture.
* Note: An estimated 4,000,000 non-Native Americans relocated to western territories between 1820 and 1850.
Just like Hitler and his plan for a Master Race, the United States imposed their personal beliefs and goals on innocent people who they deemed a nuisance - an obstacle of progressive civilization - by using sinister tactics (including creating laws against the "unwanted" race and rounding them up and removing them from their intended path) to aid in achieving their goal. With both the Manifest Destiny approach and the Master Race strategy, one group of people hoped to remove or exterminate another group of people they deemed "inferior" - and thereby creating laws and reasons for the genocide. These reasons were affirmed, by most, as valid rationales for the atrocious acts and
society eventually not only accepted it, they also encouraged it.
"Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion... That the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or conquest is due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace to the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of this world hold sway."
~President Theodore Roosevelt~ 1901
Why the Denial?
In the United States, Historical Truth is a misnomer. There can be no historical truth when all accounts are told by the victor - written to form a patriotic narrative that serves only the republic. After all, if the US government admitted the truth, they would open themselves up to liability, which then leads to responsibility, an apology, perhaps a bit of guilt and social stigma, and then, finally, restitution. This is not something the United States - nor most non-Native citizens - wishes to partake. They would rather believe the propaganda spewed over this continent for half a millennium, and refuse to change their thinking because if it's found that our government DID, in fact, systematically attempted to eradicate an entire race of people, then, we are not the nation we thought we were, our founding fathers were not so brave and brilliant, and the land in which we now live does not belong rightfully to anyone without Native blood. And then there's the most horrid thought of all: we would be no better than monster's like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and Pol Pot. And who in their right mind wants to be in the same category as such despicable madmen?
James Axtell, historian, wrote in 1992: "We make a hash of our historical judgments because we continue to feel guilty about the
real or imagined sins of our fathers and forefathers... [We] can stop flogging ourselves with our "imperialistic" origins and tarring ourselves with the broad brush of "genocide." As a huge nation of
law and order increasingly refined sensibility, we are not guilty of murdering Indian women and babies, of branding slaves on the forehead, or of claiming any real estate in the world we happen to fancy."
The United States today includes the Jewish Holocaust in their school textbooks, yet they exclude the American Holocaust. Memorials and museums are created to educate and remember the millions who died in
Germany - and the madman who led them to their deaths - yet, the American Indians receive no such recognition and seem to be a victim of patriotic amnesia.
America is guilty of hypocritical finger-pointing. We condemn those acts committed by others, while denying our own narcissistic
philosophies and actions that echo that which we berate. To do so not only brings shame upon every American who knows - and accepts - the historical truth of his or her country, but it also maintains the unjust Manifest Destiny attitude towards the Native people, allowing racism and cultural annihilation to continue as well.
Manifest Destiny of today: Thanksgiving, honoring Christopher Columbus, Federal Recognition Policies, corruption within
the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the 4+ BILLION dollars missing due to theft or mismanagment from BIA officials, reservation
property, usage of Indian names and images to sell products and to mascot sports teams, incorrect history in children's books, the "extinction" of tribes, Native portrayal in films, the debate over casino and taxes, poverty, imprisonment of Native leaders, theft of Native art and cultural items, treaty violation, mining on reservation land(ruining water and land), the denial of fishing and hunting rights, refusal to return land, graves desecrated, tribal interference, and continued relocation.
"Because of the slum housing conditions; the highest unemployment rate in the whole of this country; police brutality against our elders, women, and children; Native Warriors came together from the streets, prisons, jails and the urban ghettos of Minneapolis to form the American Indian Movement. They were tired of begging for welfare, tired of being scapegoats in America and decided to start building on the strengths of our own people; decided to build our own schools; our own job training programs; and our own destiny. That was our motivation to begin. That beginning is now being called 'the Era of Indian Power'."
~Dennis Banks~ 1992
Bibliography and sources of additional information:
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World New York: Oxford University Press, 1992
Mander, Jerry, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations," Sierra ClubBooks,
San Francisco, 1992
Olson, James and Wilson, R., Native American, In the Twentieth Century, University Press, 1988
Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997
The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., Through Indian Eyes, Pleasantville, New York/Montreal, 1995
J.M. Cohen, editor, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus London:
Penguin Books, 1969
Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper and Row, 1983
(Reprinting of this column is permitted as long as you republish the entire column. Be sure to include the author's byline.)
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