From: LewRockwell
January 31, 2014
In my Fall 2010 Independent Review
article entitled “The Culture of Violence in the American West: Myth
versus Reality,” I noted the creepiness of the fact that General William
Tecumseh Sherman referred to the U.S. Army’s twenty-five year campaign
of genocide against the Plains Indians, which he was in charge of for
the duration, as “the final solution to the Indian problem” (Cited in
Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman,
p. 260). It is creepy because it reminds one of Adolf Hitler’s “final
solution” rhetoric. I did not claim in my article that Hitler literally
plagiarized General Sherman or was even familiar with Sherman’s “final
solution” rhetoric, but scholarship that has been brought to my
attention suggests that he may well have been.
The scholarship is cited in a June 18, 2013 article in the jewishjournal.com Web site by Lia Mandelbaum entitled “Hitler’s Inspiration and Guide: The Native American Holocaust.” Citing the books Adolf Hitler by John Toland and Hitler’s Rise to Power
by David A. Meier, Mandelbaum writes that “it shook me to my core” when
she “learned that the genocidal mentality and actions of the U.S.
policymakers [from 1862 to 1890] would find similar expression years
later when the Nazis, under Hitler, studied the plans of [“The Long Walk
of the Navajo”] to design the concentration camps for Jews.”
The
“Long Walk of the Navajo,” also known as the Bosque Redondo, was the
January 1864 deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Navajo Indians who
were forced at gunpoint by the U.S. Army to walk more than 300 miles
from their ancestral lands in northeastern Arizona and northwestern New
Mexico to a concentration camp known as Bosque Redondo in eastern New
Mexico. This took place in the dead of winter. Hundreds died along
the way of the forced march, including many women, children, and the
elderly. In the succeeding four years the U.S. Army would imprison
almost 10,000 Navajo in concentration camps where they lived “under
armed guards, in holes in the ground, with extremely scarce rations,”
writes Mandelbaum. At least 3,500 of them died in the camps.
In his book, Adolf Hitler
(p. 202), John Toland wrote that “Hitler’s concept of concentration
camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed,
to his studies of English and United States history.” Hitler “admired
the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the
wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of
America’s extermination – by starvation and even combat – of the red
savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
Hitler was apparently “very interested in the way the Indian
population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the
United States government forced them to live on the reservations.” And
the Nazis did force hundreds of prisoners in their concentration camps
on death marches where many of them starved or froze to death.
Adolf Hitler was infatuated in his youth with tales of the American
West. “His favorite game to play outside was cowboys and Indians,”
wrote David A. Meier in Hitler’s Rise to Power. He read 70 of novels about the American West
by the German author Karl May, who “had never been to America” and
“invented a hero named Old Shatterhand, a white man who always won his
battles with Native Americans.” Hitler “continued reading [May’s
novels] even as Fuhrer,” wrote Mandelbaum, even referring to the
Russians as “Redskins” during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and
ordering his military commanders to read May’s books.
The U.S. government’s war of genocide against all the Plains Indians,
not just the Navajo, would indeed be a “good” example for any
psychotic, murderous tyrant like Adolf Hitler. It was prosecuted by all
of Lincoln’s generals, including Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, and
various other “Civil War luminaries” such as John Pope, O.O Howard,
Nelson Miles, Alfred Terry, E.O.C. Ord, Edward Canby, Benjamin Garrison,
and Winfield Scott Hancock, wrote John Marszalek in Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order
(p. 380). Sherman and Sheridan adopted the motto, “The only good
Indian is a dead Indian” as their armies murdered at least 45,000
Indians from 1864 to 1890, including thousands of women and children
(See Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival).
The survivors were placed in concentration camps euphemistically called
“reservations,” where many of their descendants remain to this day.
Lincoln’s generals were not shy about announcing their intentions to
commit genocide. John Pope announced that “It is my purpose to utterly
exterminate the Sioux . . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild
beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can
be made” (David Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians, p. 87). “All
the Indians will have to be killed or be maintained as a species of
paupers,” General Sherman announced, calling his policy “a racial
cleansing of the land” (See Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman,
p. 264). “Sherman gave [General Phil] Sheridan prior authorization to
slaughter as many women and children as well as men Sheridan or his
subordinates felt was necessary when they attacked Indian villages,”
wrote Fellman (p. 271).
So it is not a stretch to believe that Adolf Hitler, who fancied
himself to be a serious student and admirer of U.S. military history
from the Lincoln regime to the end of the nineteenth century, would have
been “inspired” by Lincoln’s maniacal, murderous, genocidal generals
like Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer, as the historians John Toland
and David A. Meier maintain. Indeed, Hitler was a rabid admirer of
Lincoln’s compulsion to destroy state sovereignty and of the military
tactics (i.e. waging total war on civilians) that he employed to achieve
it. On page 566 of the 1999 Mariner/Houghton Mifflin edition of Mein Kampf Hitler
repeated Lincoln’s historically false and absurd argument from his
first inaugural address that the states were never sovereign. “The
individual states of the American union . . . could not have possessed
any state sovereignty of their own,” wrote Hitler, paraphrasing
Lincoln. He did this to make his own case for the abolition of states’
rights or federalism in Germany and the creation of a centralized,
monopolistic state.
The arguments in favor of states’ rights that were being made in
Germany, wrote Hitler, were “propagated by the Jews” and should
therefore be dismissed. “The mischief of individual federated states . .
. must cease,” the dictator bellowed. “A rule basic for us National
Socialists,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “is derived: A powerful
national Reich.” The only real difference between this statement and
Lincoln’s theory of the American union is that Hitler referred to a
“national Reich” whereas Lincoln, ever the master of slick political
rhetoric, called the same thing “the mystic chords of union.” MORE
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