I presume Hitler was the prime instigator of the H...

2006-09-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

I presume Hitler was the prime instigator of the Holocaust against the Jews. I doubt many Germans were thinking about genocide before he filled their minds with propaganda. They were merely following orders, going along—the "banality of evil" and all that.

So what matters here is Hitler's mindset, not the mindset of the average German. But I addressed your implied point—that Germans seemed to have a positive view of Indians—several times. Here's one of my responses:

Americans had a romantic view of Indians before Karl May wrote his books: The noble savage. Pocahontas, who saved Captain Smith. Squanto, who helped the Pilgrims. Chingachgook and Uncas, the faithful companions of Natty Bumppo. Sacagawea, the faithful companion of Lewis and Clark. Hiawatha. Minnehaha. Ramona.

This didn't change the overriding American view of Indians as savages, marauders, and killers. In fact, it helped cement it. We mythologized a few good Indians as paragons of virtue. We placed them firmly in the distant past, where they couldn't affect contemporary political policy. (Note that May's books are set in the early, pioneering phase of the American West, before the land was largely settled.)

We contrasted these few romanticized, legendary Indians with the unnamed and unlamented masses of Indian people. Who were these anonymous "braves," "squaws," and "papooses"? Well, they weren't larger-than-life heroes like Chingachgook or Winnetou, so they didn't matter. We could safely dismiss them as unworthy of our attention—inconsequential and irrelevant.

The good Indians were mostly gone except in our memories and stories (books, illustrations, movies). The remaining Indians didn't deserve anything because they weren't unnaturally brave and noble. In other words, they didn't live up to the imaginary standard set by the non-Indians' Indian heroes. They were good-for-nothing heathens, scalawags, drunks, and beggars.

This attitude toward Indians continues today. We see it most often in the mascot debate. We "honor" the Indians of yesteryear by depicting the most exceptional examples—the mighty chief, the fierce warrior, the beautiful maiden—and ignoring the rest. By freezing the Indians in amber, locking them up in a museum, we don't have to deal with their continuing reality. We especially don't have to deal with our role in their continuing reality: the genocide, the broken treaties, the generations of oppression and neglect.

May's books are more of the same. May focused on Winnetou as the exception to the rule. The superhumanly "good Indian" didn't tell us that all Indians were good. Paradoxically, it told us that most Indians were neutral or bad, because they didn't live up to the "good Indian" standard.

Writerfella here -- Oddly, Adolph Hitler's men...

2006-09-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

Writerfella here --
Oddly, Adolph Hitler's men of 'science' and eugenics claimed that the Native people of the Americas were Aryans. Some Native soldiers and airmen held prisoner in various Stalags during WWII reported that they seemed to get better treatment than their Caucasian counterparts.
In 1979, I met the father of a woman writer friend and he told me an interesting story. He was an 18-year-old private with the army units that released the last prisoners from concentration camps. In Bergen-Belsen, I believe, he was assigned to burn all the books and papers in the camp commandant's office. But as he gathered them up, he couldn't help noticing some of the books and papers were in English. And when he examined them, they were turn-of-the-century volumes and reports of the Bureau of Ethnology on Native reservations in the United States. He put aside a good number of books and papers, then burned the rest as ordered. He showed some of them to me and said that when he finally passes away, those books and papers will be sent to me.
What would papers like those do to your ongoing argument?
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'

Comments on Newspaper Rock: Hitler loved Aryan super-cowboy

I presume Hitler was the prime instigator of the H...

Writerfella here -- Oddly, Adolph Hitler's men...