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| Bodies of Sioux Indians being unceremoniously piled into a mass grave hacked into the frozen Dakota soil after the tragedy at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890 |
He was said to be fascinated by the conflict of cowboys and Indians in North America, avidly reading adventure stories of the Wild West.
One of his particular fascinations was how camps in America contained and eventually changed the Indigenous people of its lands.
And it is this idea, of containing people, scrubbing away their identities by replacing their names with numbers and breaking their spirit with beatings if they veered from the rules that can be seen in the horrific concentration camps later created under the Nazi regime.
It is impossible to point to any one factor to determine what caused Hitler to take certain actions. But he was drawn to the conflict of the American 'Cowboy and Indian' and merged this with his twisted epic vision of an Aryan German Empire - aka the Third Reich. (more...)
I am put in mind of what my father told me about how he, his brother, and his sister were beaten in school in Alberta for speaking in the Polish language.
“Campbell was an ordinary-looking man, but he was extravagantly costumed in a uniform of his own design. He wore a white ten-gallon hat and black cowboy boots decorated with swastikas and stars. He was sheathed in a blue body stocking which had yellow stripes running from his armpits to his ankles. His shoulder patch was a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln’s profile on a field of pale green. He had a broad armband which was red, with a blue swastika in a circle of white.”Sorta makes sense:
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
More cringe worthy than Cowboys n Indians is Wops n Wahoos courtesy of the Ratpack from back in the day when the Mafia laundered its drug money through Hollywood... and gave the CIA a cut to fund its covert operations.
Aw come on, are you kidding? This movie was from back in the day when people had a sense of humor. There's nothing evil or harmful in that clip, and please don't give me that harmed Native Americans, etc. If people worried half as much about honoring God as they did where their great grandfathers came from, we'd all be in a lot better shape.
ReplyDeleteMy mother's family came to America in 1621. When they got here and set up homesteads, they would find human heads and hands in trees, a warning from the local Indians. A man would be out in the field plowing, the next minute, he was chopped up. As tempting as it is for people outside America to see it as all bad white men beating up on all good brown men, that was not the case. And may I remind that nowhere in history did it happen that a new group politely asked a residing group to leave over tea.
"WOPS" means "with-out papers". Hardly a devastating insult.
You're going to hurt yourself if you bend this far to make a point about racism.
You're a couple of centuries off on what you think this post is about. The early settler conflicts were insignificant compared to the slaughter of the civil war and the native genocide that followed it. From that point forward, warfare took an entirely different character. Also, very soon afterword, the toxic ideologies that brought about Naziism began to take shape on both sides of the Atlantic. Was Hollywood involved? Follow the link "The Gipper and the Underground Reich". You'll be appalled at what you learn. A key aspect of Nazi brainwashing is to normalize, desensitize, and make killing banal. I knew a cohort of ratline kids -- sons and daughters of wartime Nazis -- during my underground years. They were quite the party crowd. They also assisted Henry Morgentaller establish his abortion clinic down the road. Great fun. And, the issue isn't racism. It's eugenics. The Nazis were perfectly happy to ally with the Turks and Japanese in their genocidal schemes.
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