“The powerful and hard-hitting documentary, American Holocaust, is quite possibly the only film that reveals the link between the Nazi holocaust, which claimed at least 6 million Jews, and the American Holocaust which claimed, according to conservative estimates, 19 million Indigenous People.
It is seldom noted anywhere in fact, be it in textbooks or on the internet, that Hitler studied Americas Indian policy, and used it as a model for what he termed the final solution.
He wasnt the only one either. Its not explicitly mentioned in the film, but its well known that members of the National Party government in South Africa studied the American approach before they introduced the system of racial apartheid, which lasted from 1948 to 1994. Other fascist regimes, for instance, in South and Central America, studied the same policy.
Noted even less frequently, Canadas Aboriginal policy was also closely examined for its psychological properties. America always took the more wide-open approach, for example, by decimating the Buffalo to get rid of a primary food source, by introducing pox blankets, and by giving $1 rewards to settlers in return for scalps of Indigenous Men, women, and children, among many, many other horrendous acts. Canada, on the other hand, was more bureaucratic about it. They used what I like to call the gentlemans touch, because instead of extinguishment, Canada sought to remove the Indian from the Man and the Women and the Child, through a long-term, and very specific program of internal breakdown and replacement call it assimilation. America had its own assimilation program, but Canada was far more technical about it.
Perhaps these points would have been more closely examined in American Holocaust if the film had been completed. The films director, Joanelle Romero, says shes been turned down from all sources of funding since she began putting it together in 1995.
Perhaps its just not good business to invest in something that tells so much truth? In any event, Romero produced a shortened, 29-minute version of the film in 2001, with the hope of encouraging new funders so she could complete American Holocaust. Eight years on, Romero is still looking for funds.
American Holocaust may never become the 90-minute documentary Romero hoped to create, to help expose the most substantial act of genocide that the world has ever seen one that continues even as you read these words.”
Thanks Dr. Best. This has been on my mind lately. I am part native and my mother could never bring herself to discuss the issues. She always did seem to have an undercurrent of unspeakable rage. It must have been awful for her to even have me in school knowing that I was being assimilated into the circus of U.S. ‘culture’, to be told fairy tales masked as history lessons,though it was worse for her and her family. I am a vegan, and I have lately had the idea of helping propagate native food plants, and on my search I found the Mexica movement. I wonder what effect it is having on the people yet, but it is an important facet that should add wisdom and fuel to the occupy movement, assuming the people are ready to peel back all of the layers of sleep/conditioning they say they want to. I look forward to more of all you have to share. -Karen
thanks, glad you liked this 😉
Many thanks for this. Its about time this issue was aired. My blood boils when I learn what happened… it has since I was very young. We must never forget what these beautiful people suffered and what we owe them.
Absolutely, I recall Jerry Mander’s book, In the Absence of the Sacred, had a very good discussion of how the US used the “education” system to socialize young Native American children, to make them conform to US norms, and thereby strip away their historical roots and cultural identity in the most insidious ways.
The Australians followed a similar policy/procedure to the one followed by the Canadians. We should also keep foremost in our minds the other American invention that the Nazis borrowed, i.e. the assembly line, which Ford learned from the Chicago slaughter houses. The Nazis also learned about saturation propaganda from the American advertising industry. But I suppose this is all old news – except people like to forget it or to ignore it. Have you read Erich Fromm’s “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”?
That’s a huge book, and I only read parts of it many years back. Your remarks bring to mind the obvious but excellent comparison to Charles Patterson’s book, The Eternal Treblinka, which traced a technological development from the Chicago stockyards and mass disassembly lines of the late 19th century to Henry Ford’s automated mass production of cars, to the Nazis’ mass administration of genocide. Also, I believe in Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The Biotech Century, there is an excellent discussion of the “old” eugenics (blatantly racist, and crude technological) and the “new” eugenics (subtle racist and elitist goal to produce a superior white race through genetic modification, a la the movie, Gattaca. Rifkin establishes that by the 1920s, the US had sterilized tens of thousands of “undesirables” of one alleged sort or another; he adds that Hitler was keenly following these experiments, was directly inspired by them, and decided to carry sterilization and eugenics to the “final solution.” The US might have carried these crude eugenics policies to far more menacing extremes, were it not for World War II. But the new eugenics is alive and well and most menacing in itself…..
I am eager to see this documentary, but there is a slight caveat in the introduction. It says: “The Nazi holocaust, which claimed at least 6 million Jews”. I wouldn’ t deem it so politically fruitful, autonomy-wise, to identify the Nazi holocaust with the mass loss of lives only of Jews. The Nazi holocaust claimed massively the lives (and some times proportionately more so), of gipsies, homosexuals etc. and many millions of communists. The word Holocaust cannot be identified with “Soah”, just because mainly Zionists chose to “take the copyright” afterwards, in order to distort the reasons of the mass killing of Jews and of the social and political groups above for their own purposes. Besides, the American Holocaust is in a way another justifiable “deviation” from this kind of miserable “copyright”…
You’re absolutely right, leftists, gays, people from Poland, etc, were killed, not just Jews, a common mistake to exhaust the targeting just toward Jews; I didnt write that description, for the record, it was part of the YouTube post, and had to name attributed to, but thanks for pointing this out.
This is a good documentary series:
“American Experience: We Shall Prevail”
With depth, breadth and richness, Native American history is told through indigenous eyes in this revolutionary docudrama. Exploring five pivotal periods, the series spans 300 years of Indian adversity, resilience and self-determination.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weshallremain/the_films/episode_1_trailer
I wish this would get made, although I understand why it did not. I have been saying for years that what we did to Native Americans was same, if not worse, than what Hitler did in Nazi Germany.
I’m sure school kids today are being hoodwinked still… But I think back 50+ years ago to what I was being taught and I realize the total sham of my education. It takes so long to unlearn things, (if ever). Added to the new information about Native Americans comes the idea that most were hardly the “blood-thirsty”, animal-killers that they were portrayed as: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX6Wegv6qv0
The more I measure what those decades of John Wayne “hero worship” made me turn a blind eye to – The more enraged I become. A shiny apple to you Prof. Best – For teaching truth – yet again.
😉 A+