Leaving World War II Behind. David Swanson

were on their way to a “reservation” near Lublin, in Poland. “They left here aboard special trains last night for their new and permanent homes in an area described as being similar to an American Indian reservation. It was understood that this was the first of a series of mass migrations that eventually may include all Austrian, or perhaps all German Jews.”¹⁶¹

      The reason that concentration camps were described as being similar to American Indian reservations was not that they were identical or served the same purpose, but that they were similar and were inspired by them. It was Spain, in Cuba, that had first used something it called concentration camps. The United States had condemned that outrage and then duplicated it in the Philippines. Britain and Germany had used similar camps under similar names in Africa.¹⁶² Hitler was aware of all of these precedents.

      Some 50 to 60 million indigenous people were killed -- intentionally or by disease (or by intentional deprivation combined with disease) in the Americas. Some 10 to 12 million of those were north of Mexico. And this was over a comparatively very long period of time.¹⁶³

      Some 70 to 85 million people were killed worldwide in WWII. Of that total, 19 to 28 million deaths were due to disease or famine. Also of the same total, 50 to 55 million were civilians. Of the military deaths, some 5 million were prisoners of war. Still from within the same total, 20 to 27 million of the dead were from the Soviet Union, 15 to 20 million from China, 6.9 to 7.4 million from Germany, 5.9 to 6 million from Poland, 3 to 4 million from the Dutch East Indies, 2.5 to 3.1 million from Japan, 2.2 to 3 million from India, 1 to 1.7 million from Yugoslavia, 1 to 2.2 million from French Indochina, 0.6 million from France, 0.5 million from the Philippines, 0.5 to 0.8 million from Greece, 0.5 million from Romania, 0.4 to 0.5 million from Italy, 0.4 to 0.5 million from Korea, and 0.4 million from each of Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States.¹⁶⁴

      Some 6 million Jews were killed, many of them in death camps, by the Nazi Holocaust. An equal or even greater number of non-Jews were similarly killed in the camps or by execution or deliberate famine, including Roma, homosexuals, the handicapped, political opponents, religious dissenters, and others. Millions more were killed as part of a racially-motivated war, including Soviet and Polish civilians and prisoners of war.¹⁶⁵

      Some 5 to 8 million died of violence or disease (or deprivation combined with disease) in the Congo under the rule of Belgium, 1885 to 1908.¹⁶⁶

      Some 2.7 to 5.4 million died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a result of the Second Congo War (1998 to 2008).¹⁶⁷

      Some 1 million were killed by the 2003-begun war on Iraq.¹⁶⁸

      Some 34,000 to 110,000 people were murdered in the Herero and Namaqua genocide.¹⁶⁹

      Some 480,000 to 600,000 people were murdered in the Dzungar genocide.¹⁷⁰

      Some 3.8 million died violent war deaths in the U.S. war on Vietnam, not counting the dead in Laos or Cambodia.¹⁷¹

      Some 0.4 to 1.5 million were killed or expelled in the Circassian genocide.¹⁷²

      Some 450,000 to 750,000 died in the Greek genocide.¹⁷³

      Some 1.5 million were killed in the Armenian genocide.¹⁷⁴

      Some 1.5 to 2 million died in the Cambodian genocide.¹⁷⁵

      Some 390,000 died, 380,000 of them on the Ethiopian side, when Mussolini’s Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935, yet not a single person at one of my events has ever asked “But what about Mussolini?”¹⁷⁶

      This is a small sampling. We could add other types of horrors to it.

      As of this writing, some 0.7 million people, and rising fast, have died from coronavirus.

      Those who die from poverty on a wealthy planet dwarf all of these numbers. According to UNICEF, 291 million children under age 15 died from preventable causes between 1990 and 2018.¹⁷⁷

      How do we compare such horrors?

      I’m not sure why that has to be a difficult question, why the very question should offend us or threaten our sense of identity. We compare various horrors by looking at all the similarities and differences among them. Ignoring some atrocities does not help us better appreciate others.

      While no two horrors are the same, some came before others and set precedents. Hitler believed the world’s failure to seriously protest the Armenian genocide gave him license to commit his own.¹⁷⁸

      While genocide in Western Europe was unusual, genocide committed by Western Europeans was not. Prior to “settling” the United States, some of the early settlers had previously “settled” Ireland, where the British had paid rewards for Irish heads and body parts, just as they later would for Native American scalps.¹⁷⁹

      Hitler’s war on the Slavic East was planned to violently kill and starve vast numbers of people. It did kill many more people than were killed in the Holocaust. The war, considering all sides, killed several times what the Holocaust killed, and killed mostly civilians. Most of the members of the militaries killed on all sides were low ranking draftees.

      Why in current U.S. culture is the immediate go-to example of evil “Hitler” or “the Holocaust”? I mean, why isn't that one of dozens of possibilities? Why is it almost always the one and only example of ultimate evil? Why, for that matter, is there a U.S. Holocaust Museum featuring a Holocaust in Germany, and the more recently built Washington, D.C., museums of “The American Indian” and “African American History and Culture,” but no museum of U.S. Genocide and Slavery? Is it “relativizing” something sacredly and supremely and separately evil to mention U.S. slavery in the same sentence with the Holocaust? Why? Isn’t it exactly as nonsensical to claim that it is “relativizing” something sacredly and supremely and separately evil to mention the Holocaust in the same sentence with U.S. slavery? Aren’t both things hideous enough to demand respect for irrational attitudes toward them?

      Isn’t the current U.S. practice of separating immigrant families and locking up children in cages, or the sheriff in Texas who recently set up what he called a concentration camp for Latinos and was pardoned for his crimes by President Donald Trump, combined with centuries of similar precedents reason enough to not always -- perhaps just sometimes -- reach over to Germany to find an example of evil public policy?

      WWII had long precedents but occurred in just a handful of years. It is, as a chapter yet to come will establish, the worst thing that humanity has done to itself and the earth in any short period of time. Probably just the European or Pacific half of it alone would also meet that threshold. But WWII was committed by numerous nations and was much larger than the Holocaust.

      How necessary was the developed Euro-American model of racist extermination to the development of Nazism and to the ability of the Nazis to justify their statements and attract more followers? Well, we can’t run an experiment in which Europeans don’t assault the globe, in order to see whether Germany still invades Poland. But I think the preceding pages have shown the connections between Nazism and what came before it to have been critical to its creation. The next chapter covers some additional things without which WWII could not have happened: raw materials, war supplies, and money.