Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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Obviously, under these definitions genocide has a long history in Asia and America in addition to and outside of Europe and Nazi Germany. According to James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, “Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his [Hitler’s] biographer, [Hitler] ‘often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of American extermination—by starvation and uneven combat as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies’.”⁵ In 1928 Hitler approvingly noted that white settlers in America had “gunned down millions of redskins” and had America in mind when he spoke of “living space” or Lebensraum in Eastern Europe.⁶

Genocide is a form of violence that involves killing. Battles and massacres are not necessarily genocidal events unless the battle is transformed into a massacre and the intentional killing evolves into a pattern targeting a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group. But genocide of the American Indian is part of the historical record, and as my dear friend and colleague from Fredonia State University, the late historian William T. Hagan, asserted, “Genocide is a term of awful significance, but one which has application to the story of California’s Native Americans” (and, I may add, the indigenous population of parts of the Greater Southwest in general).⁷