>When you say no evidence, why is it that you do not accord indigenous oral
>sources the status of "evidence" that you accord the European written
>sources ? The U of Col investigative report says that there are several
>indigenous oral sources that claim that small pox was spread deliberately in
>this specific epidemic. To me that is some evidence that that is true. I
>don't see why Indian sourced evidence doesn't get equal weight with European
>sourced evidence.
When you use oral traditions, there is still a convention for making it clear to the reader and for _honoring_ those oral traditions, by making them manifest in both the text of the work and in the footnotes.
It is incumbent on the scholar to make clear where the information comes from and under what conditions it was obtained. I need to know, if I want to use Ward churchill as a reference in my _own_ work what kind of objections such sources my come under so I can properly defend my argument against criticisms.
It's also important to give credit it to your sources.
WC didn't do that, and as the report said, in the context of a pattern of repeated subterfuge, he came of us making a retroactive claim about what inspired his earlier claims -- only in order to save his ass. I don't know about you, but if a feminist did that to women's oral traditions, couldn't be bothered to cite them and honor their contribution to the production of knowledge, I'd say she was pretty damn disrespectful.
Yoshie:
>But whether Hitler was inspired by American racial politics, including
>its policies toward American Indians, as well as other examples of
>colonialism elsewhere, doesn't stand or fall based on Churchill's
>scholarship or lack thereof. E.g., Jim Craven posted this excerpt
>from John Toland's biography of Hitler to a mailing list:
Yes, in fact, I have a bunch more. The problem with that quote is that it also talks about S. Africa. The goal is to find that Hitler was influence by the US.
I also have a quote that says something else, that it was about forced assimilation. The blood quantum was used to define Indians out of existence so that there'd be no such thing as Indians any more.
In other words, the issue is _contested_ and the problem with the way Churchill writes is that he writes as if there is no arguments and that he doesn't even have to address those arguments. Yoshie, you must know that this is a serious problem in academia -- were you to write as if there is one and only one way to see something. You can argue that there is, but that requires argument, not bold assertion as with the Znet essays.
He also does not seem content to let it just be about generalized claims, but about specific claims about the way that a genocidal Holocaust works. It's not just that people were murdered and targeted for extermination, but a specific way that it's done: it needs to be tied to nationalism and economic development. So, these authors, who don't get into that sort of thing, aren't good evidence for him. He needs t find it in direct government policy. He wants to speak to the general literature on the rise of fascism and genocide, a conversation we've had repeatedly on this list -- which is why this controversy was interesting to me as well.
Here are the quotes:
" . . . all governments would be held accountable to the standards of comportment established at Nuremberg. The nazi leaders were to stand forever as the symbol of the principle that international aggression would be punished, not rewarded . . . "
"A primary flaw in this otherwise noble-seeming U.S. posture on international human rights law was (and is) that no less prominent a nazi than Adolf Hitler had long since made it quite clear he had based many of his more repugnant policies directly on earlier U.S. conduct against Native America. Hitler's conception of -lebensraumpolitik - the idea that Germans were innately entitled by virtue of their racial and cultural superiority to land belonging to others, and that they were thus morally free to take it by aggressive military action - obviously had much in common with the 19th century American sense of "Manifest Destiny." Further, his notion of how to attain this "living room" -the "clearing of inferior racial stock" from their land base in order that vacated areas might be "settled by ethnic Germans" - followed closely from such U.S. precedents as the 1830 Indian Removal Act and subsequent military campaigns against the indigenous nations 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 Cherokees and other "Civilized Tribes" during the 1830's, before the devastatingly lethal Trail of Tears was forced upon them, and the comparable experience of the Navajo people at the Bosque Redondo during the period 1864 -68."
"Set the blood-quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed...and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens,the federal government will finally be freed from its persistent Indian problem." (Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West" p338)
"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the FINAL SOLUTION OF OUR INDIAN PROBLEM." (Department of Indian Affairs Superintendent D.C. Scott to B.C. Indian Agent-General Major D. McKay, DIA Archives, RG 10 series). April 12, 1910 (emphasis added))
According to James Pool in his "Hitler and His Secret Partners":
Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary.
He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government's forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations his hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large 'reservation' in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease. (p. 273-274).
And:
The next morning Hitler's 'plan' was put in writing and sent out to the German occupation authorities as 'The Fuehrer's Guidelines for the Government of the Eastern Territories: ' the Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we don't need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives And practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is sufficient... if they can count up to a hundred. At best an education is admissible which produces useful servants for us. Every educated person is a future enemy. Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As to food, they are not to get more than necessary. We are the masters, we come first.'
Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said: 'For them the word 'liberty' means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we'll obtain no sympathy...There's only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.' Having been a devoted reader of Karl May's books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as 'Redskins'. He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or 'Redskins'. 'I don't see why', he said, 'a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat from Canada, we don't think about the despoiled Indians." (James Pool, Ibid, pp. 254-255)
And from a speech by Heinrich Himmler (date not given):
I consider that in dealing with members of a foreign country, especially some Slav nationality...in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially good types. Therefore I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary, by robbing or stealing them... (Telford Taylor "Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials", Alfred A Knopf, N.Y. 1992, p. 203)
And from John Toland, preeminent biographer of Adolf Hitler:
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. 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. (John Toland, "Adolf Hitler" Vol II, p 802, Doubleday & Co, 1976)
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