I know that, after many years of planning, the Museum of the American Indian has now opened on the Mall in Washington. A fact that should be welcomed, like the opening of genocide museums and museums commemorating slavery, but when these primarily focus on the historical past without seeing how that past has shaped our present, I fear they become monuments of dry sterility. I also wonder if there really is an appetite among Americans today to confront the reality of their founding myths. To look far beyond the Pilgrim Fathers and Jamestown and New England to the culture, and subsequent genocide, of the peoples who were here for thousands of years before the settlers arrived. But this is just speculation about the curiosity, or lack of it, in the American people, so perhaps the attendance figures for different museums in Washington, taken from their own websites, should speak for themselves. These are the comparative figures for three museums in the nation’s capital in 2015:
The National Air and Space Museum: 6.9 million visitors.
The National Museum of American History: 4.1 million visitors.
The Museum of the American Indian: 1.2 million visitors.
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What, then, is the relationship in a society between accumulated historical silences and taboos, and subsequent thought and behaviour? Nothing in history can be regarded in isolation from what has gone before. The industrial methods of gas chambers and mobile gas vans used to murder on a vast scale in the Holocaust may have been entirely new, but the minds of the people who conceived these genocidal plans were formed in the early years of the twentieth century, influenced by all that was happening at that time.
When I began this research in the late 1990s, I was powerfully affected by the work of Daniel Goldhagen, who had just published Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The second chapter of this book examines the nature of historical anti-Semitism in Germany, and Goldhagen posits the development, in the late nineteenth century, of what he terms ‘eliminationist antisemitism’. He makes a very persuasive case, drawing on much research which had been done at that time. For instance, he cites that between 1870 and 1900, no less than 1,200 publications were concerned with looking at ‘the Jewish problem’, as it was termed – despite the fact that Jews comprised barely more than 1 per cent of the population at this time. He also quotes another significant study by Klemens Felden which examined fifty-one prominent antisemitic writers and texts they had written between 1865 and 1895, and found that more than half of these proposed ‘solutions’ to ‘the Jewish problem’ – nineteen of these ‘solutions’ calling for the physical extermination of the Jews.
By the beginning of the twentieth century there clearly existed an extremely virulent, widespread anti-Semitism within Germany, but it seems a serious limitation in Goldhagen’s analysis to look only within Germany’s borders for the seeds of Nazism and genocidal thinking. The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist takes a wider view, in his brilliant work on European colonialism, Exterminate All the Brutes:
Europe’s destruction of the ‘inferior races’ of four continents prepared the ground for Hitler’s destruction of six million Jews in Europe … European world expansion, accompanied as it was by a shameless defence of extermination, created habits of thought and political precedents that made way for new outrages, finally culminating in … the Holocaust.
It is these ‘habits of thought’ that Lindqvist returns to again and again. And such exterminist thinking was by no means confined to uneducated xenophobes – quite the opposite, it was actually at the heart of humanism and nineteenth-century ideals of ‘progress’. He finds it in the liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer, who writes in 1851: ‘The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness … exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way’; strikingly similar ideas can also be found in his contemporary, the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who writes in Philosophy of the Unconscious: ‘As little … favour is done the dog whose tail is to be cut off, when one cuts it off gradually inch by inch, so little is their humanity in artificially prolonging the death struggles of savages who are on the verge of extinction … The true philanthropist … cannot avoid desiring an acceleration of the last convulsion, and labour for that end.’
Lindqvist then makes the following argument – which I can still remember reading and being stunned by, at the beginning of my research – which challenges our societies to completely rethink the causation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century genocides:
The idea of extermination lies no farther from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar. That insight has been almost completely repressed, even by the Germans, who have been made sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination that are actually a common European heritage.
He also references arguments going on in Germany in the early 1990s regarding the unique nature (or not) of the Holocaust, and he then makes this critically important observation:
But in this debate no one mentions the German extermination of the Herero people in South-West Africa during Hitler’s childhood.fn11 No one mentions the corresponding genocide by the French, the British, or the Americans. No one points out that during Hitler’s childhood, a major element in the European view of mankind was the conviction that ‘inferior races’ were by nature condemned to extinction: the true compassion of the superior races consisted in helping them on the way.
All German historians participating in this debate seem to look in the same direction. None looks to the west. But Hitler did. What Hitler wished to create when he sought Lebensraum in the east was a continental equivalent of the British Empire. It was in the British and other western European peoples that he found the models, of which the extermination of the Jews is … ‘a distorted copy’.
We are part of a European culture, for which the extinction of peoples is not a recent phenomenon, but a pattern repeated over centuries. The first documented European genocide began in 1478 – that of the advanced Berber-speaking inhabitants of the Canary Islands (then ironically called ‘the Fortunate Isles’) – the Guanches. Within five years of Ferdinand and Isabella sending a military force from Spain, 78,000 of the 80,000 Guanches had been killed; Las Palmas surrendered in 1494, Tenerife in 1496. Lindqvist explains that bacterial infections, the disease that the indigenous people called ‘modorra’, was even deadlier than the soldiers and their guns:
Of Tenerife’s fifteen thousand inhabitants, only a handful survived. The forest was cleared, the flora and fauna Europeanized, the Guanches lost their land and thus their living. The modorra returned several times, and dysentery, pneumonia, and venereal disease ravaged. Those who survived the diseases instead died of actual subjugation – loss of relatives, friends, language, and lifestyle. When Girolamo Benzoni visited Las Palmas in 1541, there was one single Guanche left, eighty-one years old and permanently drunk. The Guanches had gone under.
A culture of systematic violence, exploitation and annihilation of indigenous peoples underlies so much of European thought and behaviour, in the same totally unconscious way that roots underlie a tree in blossom. We pride ourselves on our cities and culture and education, we learn about the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, we talk about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and our latest smartphones, unable to see that all the blossom on the tree is connected to the roots. Until we have the courage to face this deeply disturbing truth, and look our shared histories in the eye, unblinkingly, we will fail to live in the present – to live fully, to be aware of what surrounds us, where we come from and why we behave as we do.