Manifest Destiny, Segregation, and Lebensraum

the NAs would torture people.[ long before whites came ]...not all, but more on a general basis than the whites..it was a ''custom''....so, what I'm saying is, don't make it sound like the whites were ''worse'' than the NAs.....so I double what Slip says about the NAs..the NAs just didn't have the technology/etc to conquer as much like the whites [ farming/domesticated animals<>more food/milk<.more people<>more time for the arts/crafts<>better weapons,etc!!] I'm sure some of you have read Guns Germs, and Steel

 

Who suggested it ever was simple?

 

A better parallel to the "trail of tears" would be the mass forced relocations of the Stalin era where the "declared" objective was not extermination ) . The numbers involved were much bigger in the USSR (the motivation in the USSR was consolidation of central power not simple racism) but there are lots of similarities otherwise. I wonder what would have happened at Stalingrad if the Germanic original population had still been there, by 1942 the Nazi policies were pretty clear, and the German army had to grab all it could just to survive, but those people may possibly not have been classed as "sub human". A pro German population my have made the defence more problematic and provided the Germans with efficient intelligence they sadly lacked.

The ruling on the ex Yougoslavia didn't surprise me, classing "ethnic cleansing" as genocide would be such a can of worms as to bring that the disappearance of the court would as such is more likely final outcome than any effect on the perpetrators. There are a number of current nation states that have ethnic cleansing in their recent history without a sufficient break in the form of government to distance themselves from "less enlightened times".

 

The Emmett Till case was one example of the situation. He walked into a store where a white lady was running the register. He not only spoke to her directly with eye contact which was prohibited,but touched her hand and said he was with white women before, and she was apparently appalled beyond belieft. and the non-fiction, cited book I read stated that African-Americans when buying stuff at a place where a white clerk worked were supposed to put the money on the counter and the product on the counter as to not touch the white person directly. He came from Chicago where things were different. He was then beaten, tortured, and shot by her husband and husband's friend and they were let off in court.

 

the one where they through him in a canal?....yes, wrong any way you look at it

 

Well the boer war seems to be an exception to the rule than (moderate)....asfaik they invented concentration camps there.

 

There is a list compiled somewhere of the top 10 most brutal crimes against humanity committed by the British Empire during their Imperialist push. And they are pretty brutal. But that was also in a more primitive time. The Nazis came to power in a modern, intelligent, cultured society, only Hitler and his clique ran in and were in the mindset of the middle ages.

 

The Polish historian Władysław Konopczyński has suggested that concentration camps originated in Poland during the Bar Confederation rebellion (1768–1772), when the Russian Empire established three camps for Polish rebel captives awaiting deportation to Siberia.
The English term originated in the reconcentrados (reconcentration camps) set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–1878), Cuban War for Independence(1895–1898), and by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902).
It was an idea of the time. However, that doesn't excuse the British Empire for the conditions prevailing in the camps in South Africa.
Once again, it's a case of individual representatives of a power/state (in this case, the British Empire) doing or causing harm wilfully or through blatant incompetence/ignorance to a group to achieve their own political agenda, not necessarily a deliberate act of the Empire as such. Once the scale of the disaster became known and understood within parliament and the public, steps were taken to alleviate the situation (albiet far too late).

One letter from November 1901 showed that officials seemed powerless to stop the rising death rates.
'I thought that we had begun to turn the corner and that after having reached unparalleled heights of mortality in October we should now show a heavy decline. Unfortunately, the figures have risen again alarmingly,' Lord Milner wrote.

 

While the USA's conduct concerning the indigenous people of the Americas was hardly soul-inspiring, it didn't quite come "up" to nazi standards. However, while not being put down on documents in our capitol, what happened was, by and large, a result of government policy. If you want to see Americans behaving like nazi einsatz gruppen, take a look at what we did in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war!

It was this theory of eugenics and the superiority of White, anglo-Saxons that was heavily borrowed from by the nazi ideologists in the 1930s and 40s.

 

In many cases they may well have been, however that doesn't mean that they had the right to do so unless you want to argue that "might makes right". One of the problems with it was also they made, in most cases, no real attempt to understand the culture that they were trying to replace. This resulted in frustration and irritation and eventually violence on both (or perhaps it is better to say all) sides.

 

It's sort of like the Rodney King case. IMO he did deserve a beating but the police don't have and shouldn't have the right to do it. In some places the Euroeans brought huge benefits. India for example the vast majority of Indians live better now than they would have had the British not been in charge. China on the other hand got the opium trade. Can't even defend that as buiseness vs government (in India the East India Company was not nearly the positive influence that the British government was) because the British government insisted on the right of the business to sell opium.

As you say Europeans haven't been the only people to do this and some of the others have been arguably worse at least in modern times.

 

The policies of the American government were an outgrowth of a misconstruing of Darwin's theories. These ideas were considered as facts by the largely Anglo-American men who ran the government and by most white Americans as well. As such, the treatment of the "Indians" was understood by all in the halls of power. Many in congress and in various administrations called for the total elimination of the native peoples. To many, they were "junk" in the way of progress and needed to be gotten rid of. A little different, but not much, from nazi policies.

 

As Lou stated above, there was never a systematic decree on a government level to annihilate the Native Americans. You cannot compare the "resettlement" of both Native Americans and Jewish people in the same sentence. The Nazi government began its rule imposing it's will upon the Jewish people from the onset and the rounding up, liquidation of the ghettos, and building of five extermination camps along with hundreds of concentration camps to fully and horrifically purge Europe.

While I agree the idea of lebensraum poses similarities, the strategies to accomplish those means we're very different. National Socialist dominion was not only to provide the Germanic people of room to conquer but indoctrinate their dogma as well.

The two events do not run parallel for long.

 

I think there were several parallels between the nazis and what we did. Both had a very similar ideological base and both had the goal of destroying another culture. The USA stopped short of industrialized murder, but our goal was to destroy the "Indian's" language, society, religion and way of life. If they were physically alive after this, then they could become potato farmers or whatever.
Our conduct towards the Filipinos was even more nazi-like-much more murderous.

 

the Jews weren't going out killing other tribes/torturing/etc.....whole different era...the NAs attacked sometimes, just because that was their culture...parallels?ok, yes, ......but a totally different era

 

You can characterize that as being like the Nazis if you please, but it was simply an outgrowth of Christian charity. It wasn't a smooth process but in the long term, they were proven right. Indians who adopted the white culture are now your neighbors and coworkers, those who didn't still live on the reservation, collect a monthly check and live with all the misery that being a ward of the state brings about.

There was no doubt that the stronger white culture was going to take the continent. It was an historical inevitability. All those "huddled masses yearning to be free" were showing up to farm and build railroads and factories. The Indians could pick up a plow or a hammer and join in, or stay on the reservation. The choice was theirs.

 

I don't think so. Much of the policy had been established well before Origin of the Species was published and certainly before it became well established. A big part of the problem is that many in Washington really didn't understand the Indians and those that did often were at least somewhat sympathetic toward them. Some of the elements of Indian culture were just so contrary to the prevalant culture in the states that conflict was inevitable.

 

Please, KB, I lived and worked on a reservation for 12 years. "Christian charity" my heinie! It was all about greed and getting land and resources. Read up some on what happened on the reservations and the BIA schools. I'll agree with lwd that the two cultures were pretty much alien to each other but given our "Christian Heritage" we could have done better. The French and later British in Canada didn't have near the problems we had. Of course the Spanish came pretty close to nazi ideals in their treatment of "untermench".

Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species" and later works were corrupted into eugenics which gave the rich and the powerful in the USA a "scientific" rationale for their actions. Even progressive thinkers such as Theodore Roosevelt believed in this stuff.