The Mirror We Won’t Look Into
It’s Better to Just Believe What We Want
We have a blind spot when it comes to American history. I suppose every nation has a blind spot when they think of their own history. What looks acceptable, or maybe unfortunate in our own past, looks monstrous and inhuman when we see others do the same thing.
Ever since the beginnings of the American experiment, we were idealists. This was to be the “city on the hill,” the place where people could be free of tyranny. After the American Revolution, we had the first republican government, a government of and by the people—something unheard of in Europe, where censorship, religious tyranny, and arbitrary arrest still ruled the day.
Once Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, Americans now had room to expand, and we did. It was our God-given right, our destiny, that our nation was to expand and grow, and prove to be a moral exemplar to others of the virtues of a republican government.
As far back as 1785, the government started giving land away to settlers in the west. Many presidents added new land giveaways including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Of course, there were native peoples living on these lands, but that was not considered much of an issue, as they would be replaced with Americans.
This sentiment, that America was destined by God to expand west, was called Manifest Destiny. John O’Sullivan coined this term in 1845, calling for “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
So far, this is the history many of you learned in school.
But what maybe you didn’t know is that the Nazis in part based their invasion of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Western USSR on the American westward expansion.
Hitler admired America’s Manifest Destiny in his infamous Mein Kampf. In the book he laid out his plans for the annexation of lands to the East and the murder of the millions of people who lived there to make room for Germans.
The concept was called Lebensraum (living space), the German equivalent to the American Manifest Destiny idea.
Like Manifest Destiny, the German people needed land to expand into. The land to the East had great reserves of timber, minerals and fertile farmland. The only problem was that the targeted land (in Poland and parts of Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States and the western USSR) was already populated by Slavs, Jews and Romani, whom the Germans considered inferior peoples. Hitler’s plan was to clear the land for the German people by the killing, starvation or removal of the thirty million people already living there. Generalplan Ost, the Nazi government’s official plan, stated that “many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or migrate to Siberia.”
In Poland, where the Germans perhaps did the most damage, it is estimated that 17 to 18% of the population was killed by the Nazis during their four-year occupation.
When the Swedes (and the Russians and the Tartars) attacked Poland in the 17th century, it is estimated that 40% of the population was killed.
For perspective, it is also estimated that during the 19th century that 90% to 95% of the Native American population was killed, although by far the majority of it was due to starvation and disease.
Genocide is as bad as it gets. That is how I see it. Smaller or larger genocides, it doesn’t matter. But people don’t put things into perspective. We Americans have a blind spot when it comes to our own history.
How different is the Nazis’ inhuman plan to kill millions of Slavs, Jews and Romani so that they could inhabit their land than the American plan to clear the land of Native Americans and colonize what is now the United States?
The answer is, if we are willing to be honest, that there is little difference here.