"American Holocaust": European Conquest

David E. Stannard (amazon.com); Xochitl, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

American Holocaust (David E. Stannard)

For four hundred years from Spain's assaults on the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux natives at Wounded Knee in the 1890s [to the treatment of Native Americans all over the U.S. today], the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America are enduring a firestorm of European violence.

During these centuries the native population of the western hemisphere has declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as author and historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning book, the European and white-American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas is the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.

Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast.

Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans and/or white-Americans went, they visited imported plagues and barbarous atrocities on the native peoples, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations.

What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians do such horrendous things to others.

Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign by Europeans and their descendants.

They have launched it in places [like the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Israel] and continue to wage it against the New World's original inhabitants throughout the Americas.

Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. More