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      6. The United States did not have to develop practices of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and concentration of people on reservations

      Jeffrey Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. His 2019 book, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, tells a complex and nuanced story of what overall and in many particular parts fits the UN definition of, as well as the popular conception of, genocide.¹⁴⁰

      In Ostler’s account, the U.S. government had a clear policy from the start, not just in 1830, of moving Native Americans west of the Mississippi, and enacted that policy. Yet, between the 1780s and 1830, the population of Native Americans east of the Mississippi increased. The formalized and accelerated policy of removal put in place in 1830 was driven by greed for land and racist hatred, not by any humanitarian impulse to help native peoples survive by moving them to better locations where they wouldn’t supposedly face inevitable demise. They would have survived better if left alone, rather than being forced on difficult journeys into already occupied lands and lands without the means to sustain them.

      Greed for land -- or what might be called Lebensraum -- really seems to have been the dominant motivation. Smaller groups of Native Americans in the East not occupying highly desirable territory were allowed to remain, and in some cases have remained to this day. Others that put up too great a fight were allowed to remain for a time. Others that adopted European ways of agriculture and all the trappings of what was called “civilization” (including slavery) were allowed to remain until their land became too desirable. The supposed failure of native nations to become “civilized” seems to have no more basis in reality as a motivation for expelling them than does their supposed dying out. Neither does the supposed need to make peace among them. Nations fought each other as they were driven into each other’s territories by the U.S. settler colonists.

      The United States did sometimes make peace between warring nations, but only when it served some purpose, such as facilitating the displacement of more people into their land. The work of empire was not the work of brute force alone. Much “diplomacy” was needed. Treaties had to be secretly made with minority groups within native nations. Treaties had to be secretly worded to mean the opposite of what it appeared. Leaders had to be bribed or coaxed into meeting, and then captured or killed. Carrots and sticks had to be applied until people “voluntarily” chose to abandon their homes. Propaganda had to be developed to whitewash atrocities.

      There was plenty of brute force. Ostler shows that U.S. officials developed the policy that “wars of extermination” were “not only necessary, but ethical and legal.” Causes of decline among Native peoples included direct killing, other traumatizing violence prominently including rape, the burning of towns and crops, forcible deportation, and the intentional and non-intentional spreading of diseases and of alcoholism to weakened populations. Ostler writes that the most recent scholarship finds the devastation caused by European diseases resulted less from Native Americans’ lack of immunity, and more from the weakness and starvation created by the violent destruction of their homes.

      The American War for Independence (for the independence of one elite from another at the expense of native and enslaved people) involved more destructive assaults on Native Americans than had the preceding wars in which George Washington had acquired the name Town Destroyer. The outcome of the war was even worse news. Assaults on native peoples would come from the U.S. government, state governments, and ordinary people. Settlers would push the conflicts forward, and in settled parts of the East where Native Americans remained, individuals would steal their land, kill, and harass them. There were groups like the Quakers who dealt much less cruelly with indigenous people. There were ebbs and flows, and every nation has a different story. But fundamentally, the United States intended to get rid of Native Americans and got rid of many of them and took most of the land they lived on.

      The Nazis, and pre-Nazi Germans, were impressed. The Nazis, as we have seen, resorted to mass murder when mass expulsion didn’t work. But they had resorted to mass expulsion only after successfully driving large numbers of Jews to voluntarily flee. Those who didn’t voluntarily flee the Reich could be driven into ghettos, starved, and made ill. They could be manipulated with false promises. They could be made to look like wild beasts. Non-Jews could be ordered to ride on Jews in the street as though they were horses, much as Native Americans in California could be made to eat from troughs like pigs.¹⁴¹ Once a population had been dehumanized and demonized, riots and lynchings could be set loose upon them.

      In a 2020 article about the removal of a Teddy Roosevelt statue in New York, Jon Schwarz wrote:

      “In a 1928 speech, Adolf Hitler was already speaking approvingly of how Americans had ‘gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousands, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.’ In 1941, Hitler told confidants of his plans to ‘Europeanize’ Russia. It wasn’t just Germans who would do this, he said, but Scandinavians and Americans, ‘all those who have a feeling for Europe.’ The most important thing was to ‘look upon the natives as Redskins.’”¹⁴²

      Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2018: “The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had ‘gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.’ When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind. . . . His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated—and, for the moment, rejected—the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.”¹⁴³

      That is the syllogism of Manifest Destiny. In 2011, Carroll P. Kakel published The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective. Kakel finds that Hitler frequently compared his war for Lebensraum with nineteenth century wars waged by the United States. He believed his mission inevitably destined the Slavic and Jewish peoples, or “natives,” to destruction along the lines of what had been done to the Native Americans. “A similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America,” he said of what Nazis called “the German East” or “the Wild East,” meaning the eastern provinces of Germany, Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.¹⁴⁴

      While there were numerous models of imperialist, colonialist, and genocidal campaigns by European nations that could inspire, and did inspire Hitler, it was the U.S. campaign against its natives that provided the clearest model, in Kakel’s view, of what Hannah Arendt later called “continental imperialism,” meaning expansion into lands adjacent to the imperial homeland, not across distant seas and continents. This sort of imperialism required extreme race hatred. Kakel finds virtually identical language to that of the Nazis in U.S. justifications of westward expansion for “living space” for “white” settlers “cleansing” the territory. The Nazis spoke of “massacres” and colonial “settlement” of the “Wild East” by “Aryans.”

      Friedrich Ratzel, the Social Darwinist who coined the term Lebensraum, published a book by that title in 1901, and promoted eastward settler-colonialism, citing the North American example, as well as the examples of southern Brazil, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Ratzel had traveled to the United States and was not only inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” of U.S. history, but corresponded with Turner and U.S. historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, as well as Halford Mackinder in Great Britain and Rudolf Kjellén

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