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IV

I want to return to Deborah Lipstadt’s book, or at least the first half of it, the part I said I considered in some respects brilliant. Early on, she makes the point that Holocaust denial does not begin with denial, per se. Rather, she says, it begins with what she refers to as “minimization.” The minimizers’ strategy is based on three main considerations. First, quantity counts, in terms of psychological impact. It’s irrational but true that the larger the scale of an atrocity, the greater its effect on public consciousness, even though, qualitatively, it may be identical to things that happen on a smaller scale. The second point is that the minimization strategy is gradual. By taking things a step at a time, you can lead people along at a manageable pace, planting doubts about the accuracy and integrity of standard data, undermining the basis of responsible Holocaust interpretation and thereby creating a certain receptivity to “alternative interpretations.” Now combine these two things?a greatly reduced bodycount and the space in which to advance interpretations ?and you end up with the third, which is a basis upon which to try and explain the whole thing away. In other words, as they put it in U.S. foreign policy circles, “plausible denial.”

Now let me pose a question. How many Indians were there in North America the day that lost Italian seaman washed up on a beach in the Caribbean, half a world away from where he thought he was, and got himself known as the “Great Navigator” ever since? What I was taught is that in the whole continent north of the Río Grande, including Greenland, there were one million people in 1492.86 It’s worth noting that the official estimate was doubled a few years ago, and that there are a few daring souls in the Smithsonian-sanctioned milieu of “responsible” scholars who are even hinting that there were as many as three million,87 but the one million figure constituted Official Truth from the early-30s till the mid-80s, and, needless to say, there are a lot of “experts” out there who cling to it still.88

A word about why I connect the Smithsonian Institution to Official Truth. Let’s begin with the fact that it’s a taxpayer-funded enterprise administered under the central government of the United States. Its purpose is to serve as the ultimate authority on historical/anthropological matters. It’s the source to which the government itself turns when questions come up along this line; it maintains the database from which all accredited school texts derive; it’s the most convenient locus of information for reporters and other media “researchers” to turn to when they need quick, succinct answers (which is the only variety they’re ever interested in anyway). Ask a question, get an instant answer: How many Indians were there?—One million; Where did they come from?—Across the Bering Strait land bridge; When did they come?—15,000 years ago (plus or minus 15 minutes); How did they live?—They were squalid Stone Age hunter-gatherers wandering nomadically about the landscape at the bare margins of subsistence, waiting hopefully, millennium after millennium, for Europeans to show up and improve their quality of life.89

The main reason Smithsonian interpretations are touted as being so credible is that they are supposed to be completely science-driven.90 With that in mind, we’d do well to interrogate the sort of science underpinning the famous one million estimate of precolumbian population in North America. I’m going to cut to the chase right now. There is none. For those of you interested in the details, see the chapter titled “Widowed Land” in Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of America.91 He runs it down in excruciating detail. But, basically the story is that the first wave of Euroamerican historians sanitized the record by halving the total numbers of Indians initially reported by the incoming settlers in each of the Atlantic Coast colonies. The next wave then cut the “estimates” of their predecessors, and so on. This had happened five times, I think, by the late 19th century, so that if the original reports were that the colonists had counted, say, 200,000 Indians in the area of Massachusetts in 1620, that count had been arbitrarily cut to 100,000 a generation later, and 50,000 a generation after that. By the time you arrive at the end of the process, you’re measuring Indians by the handful.91

Enter now American anthropology in the form of James Mooney, who sets out at the turn of the century to make an overall estimate of the number of Indians living in North America in 1492. How does he go about it? He extracts the demographic estimates from each of the then-current U.S. regional histories, arranges them in a neat little column, and adds them up. The sum came to a little over one million, so that’s what he advanced as his estimate.92 Mooney then died, and Alfred Kroeber, heir apparent as dean of Americanist anthropologists, took issue with the estimate because he considered it too high. Kroeber very publicly insisted that Mooney’s numbers should be reduced by ten percent across the board, to total a little under a million,93 and this presented the Smithsonian with a dilemma. Here they had a much-revered and recently-deceased anthropological “giant” positing one number, and his replacement positing another. How untidy. So the institution resolved the matter by simply splitting the difference between the two.94 Scientific?

Now let’s have a look at the results that accrue when somebody does adhere to a scientific approach. First, here’s the method. It was developed during the early-60s by a group of nonanthropologists at U/Cal Berkeley—mainly Woodrow Borah and Sherburne Cook, but Carl Sauer weighed in as well—who were interested in the size of the Mesoamerican population at the time Cortés showed up. They took the Spanish records concerning the amount of acreage the native people had under cultivation at the time the first conquistador arrived, and combined that with crop types, which were also recorded. Then they added meteorological records over a ten-year period, and from that they computed an average gross annual yield of agricultural foodstuffs. Since the quantity of those foodstuffs necessary to sustain an average human being for a year is known, all they had to do then was divide the gross yield by the individual nutritional requirement, and they had a pretty solid estimate of agricultural carrying capacity. Expand that by the quantitative protein inputs from livestock, fishing, hunting, aquaculture, and so on, and you have a reasonable population estimate.95 It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s obviously a lot more scientific than arbitrarily slicing archival estimates in half time after time, until they “sound right.”

In fact, Borah and Cook correlated the results of their computations with the relevant archival documents in central Mexico—mission records concerning births, deaths and baptisms, for example—and determined that their estimates were much closer to the counts discernible in the original material than to what was being put out as Official Truth, circa 1970. What was their estimate? That there were about 25 million Mesoamerican Indians in 1530, which is about five times what the Smithsonian was claiming as a “maximum.”96 It’s worth noting that they followed up by using the same methods to recompute the estimates of the indigenous population of Española in 1492—the Smithsonian had it pegged at some ridiculous number like 45,000—and came up with as many as 8 million people on that one island.97 During the ‘70s, Henry Dobyns applied the Borah/Cook method to analyzing the Timucuan population of the Florida panhandle region. What he came up with was around 800,000 people for the year 1500.98 He then started crunching numbers for other regions. In his book, Their Number Become Thinned (1983), he advanced a “maximal population estimate” for preinvasion North America of 18.5 million.99

There’s one more researcher worth mentioning here, a Cherokee demographer named Russell Thornton. He looked at Dobyns’ estimates and more-or-less said, “Great. That’s how many people could have been here, but I’m more interested in how many people there most likely were.” So, beginning in the mid-80s, he reworked Dobyns’ calculations, using “mediators”—his operating assumption was that cultural factors would have served in virtually every case to keep native population at a level well below carrying capacity—and ended up with a “probable” preinvasion population for North America of 12.5 million.100 Anyway, where we end up here is with a science-driven set of estimates ranging from 12.5 to 18.5 million.

I’m not really in a position to determine, between Dobyns and Thornton, who’s closer to correct. But I do have a pretty solid precedent for how you’re supposed to go about resolving such questions in the United States. Let’s just split the difference and call it “science.” Absent a lot more evidentiary material, or access to H.G. Wells’ time machine so that we can go back and do a headcount, that’s probably as close as we can come to accuracy. This is why I use 15 million as a working number these days, along with David Stannard, Kirkpatrick Sale and others.101 The Smithsonian of course describes such estimates as “controversial”102—unlike the vacuousness of its own preposterously low count—but it’s precisely the weight of evidence deployed by the “dissidents” that has finally forced first a doubling, and now apparently an incipient tripling, in the number conceded as Official Truth.

The implications of this should be rather obvious, but let’s break a few things out anyway, just to make sure they’re clear. In 1890, the U.S. conducted a complete census of American Indians for the first time. I can take issue with the way the count was made because the U.S. rather than Indians decided who qualified as an Indian, but for our purposes here we can simply accept the total, which came to a little over 237,000, as correct.103 And, for reasons of arithmetical convenience, let’s round the number upwards to a quarter-million. Now, take the standard one million estimate of preinvasion native population size and juxtapose it to the quarter-million survivors, and what do you get? A population decline of 75 percent?staggering in its own right. There was a poster, popular in the mid-60s, pointing out that that’s a reduction as severe as even the highest estimate of Jewish population loss during the Holocaust.104 By Hilberg’s calculation, the loss to European Jews was more like two-thirds of their population, or about half the worldwide Jewish population.105 With North American Indians, it’s important to remember that what we’re talking about is the worldwide population, and 75 percent is an absolute low estimate.

What happens when you shift to the Smithsonian’s newly- proffered estimate of two million? The percentage of decline, measured against the 1890 census count, goes up to 87.5. At three million, which is the estimate presently being enshrined as Official Truth, it reaches the low-90s. By the time you get into the science-driven stuff, it doesn’t really matter whose data you use, you still end up in the upper 90th percentile range. If you go with Dobyns’ maximal estimate, the population reduction is 99 percent. If you go with Thornton’s much more conservative number, it’s 96 percent. If you’re a nice middle of the road kind of guy like myself and elect to split the difference, you end up with a reduction of 97.5 percent. I find this last number very instructive, and obviously not just because I prefer moderation in all things. No, it’s because there’s a caveat in the 1890 census report, observing that within the U.S. portion of North America, all of which was in the possession of native people when the invasion began, circa 1600, only about 2.5 percent of the land remained in Indian hands as of the time the report was prepared.106 So, there you have: 97.5 percent of the native population is gone and 97.5 percent of the native land went right along with it. I submit that it’s impossible to attain a closer statistical correlation than that.

I think the correlation has remarkable explanatory power because of the way it connects effect and cause in relation to the American Indian population collapse. It goes like this: People weren’t getting on boats in Liverpool and Bristol and wherever else they were coming from for the specific purpose of killing Indians. Oh, there may have been a few who did—there’s a certain number of outright psychopaths in any group—but the vast majority were coming for land, or in some cases the resources in the land—gold, silver and such—which amounts to the same thing, because you’ve got to have the land in order to get to the resources within it. And it didn’t take them long to figure out that, contrary to the myth of terra nullius—the fable that North America mostly consisted of “vacant land” open for harmless taking—there were a lot of Indians here.107 So, to get the land, they had to get rid of the Indians. It was really that simple.

Various expedients were attempted towards this end. Indians were forever being pushed “beyond the frontier” into areas the incoming settlers… You know, I’m tired of that euphemism when it’s used in this context; these people weren’t settlers, they were invaders, pure and simple. I mean, they weren’t “settling” anything because the land was already settled. They came in and set up shop on preexisting native town sites, took over fields already under cultivation, utilized preexisting native road networks… The nazis’ Office of Race and Resettlement—that’s actually what they called it—employed exactly the same euphemism—”settlers”—to describe the “ethnic Germans” who took over Polish farmsteads during World War II.108 The U.S. had a formal policy during the 1830s to “remove” all Indians east of the Mississippi and dump them in the West, in what Zebulon Pike had described as a “Great American Desert,” land at the time deemed useless to “civilized” people. It’s interesting, given the rationale employed, that the people thus disposed of consisted mainly of members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles—of the Southeast.109

So forced relocation was tried on a mass scale, and other means were tried, but the upshot was that the rapaciousness for land on the part of the invaders was such that, in the end, there was no place left to push the Indians. The invaders, in effect, wanted it all, announcing in fact that it was their “Manifest Destiny”—a divine right, in other words—to possess it.110 And so the native population had to be drastically reduced; Indians had to be liquidated. I’ve radically altered the chronology here—liquidation was occurring right along—but I’ve done so in order to emphasize a direct correspondence between U.S. Indian policy during the 19th century and nazi policy in eastern Europe a half-century later.111

The nazis’ “Generalplan Ost,” as they termed it, called for the “clearing” of vast expanses of the western USSR—primarily the Ukrainian “breadbasket,” but most of Byelorussia as well—of its resident Slavic population, and “resettlement” of the whole area with ethnic Germans. “Superior breeding stock,” as the latter were sometimes described in internal documents. As for the Slavs, as many as 30 million were to be pushed beyond the furthest boundary of German expansion. Another 30 million or so were to be liquidated, a lot of them by a combination of wartime attrition and direct killing, the remainder through a combination of slave labor, starvation and epidemic disease.112 Raphaël Lemkin described this last as the imposition of “slow death measures,” no different in their effect from the direct killing methods applied by the nazis’ Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) against the Jews and Gypsies.113 So much for the distinction Steven Katz, Yehuda Bauer and other exclusivists have sought to draw (in trying to disallow the Slavs from sufferance of genocide) between being pressed into slave labor and being killed immediately. A lot of Jews were worked to death,114 while whole Slavic peoples—the Slovenes, for example—were marked for more immediate and direct means of eradication.115 Far more important than the techniques employed in accomplishing the goal, is the fact that the nazis intended all their victims to end up in the same place: Gone.

What I’m driving at, though, is that the whole process—using a combination of mass relocation and liquidation to clear conquered territory of its presumptively inferior population so that it can be completely repopulated by the presumptively superior conquerors— undertaken by the nazis in eastern Europe was, taking into account differences in the technology available to carry it out, pretty much identical to that undertaken by the U.S. with regard to American Indians. And this was no accident or coincidence. U.S. Indian policy and the concomitant articulation of Manifest Destiny doctrine served as templates upon which the Hitlerian “Lebensraumpolitik” was set forth and the Ostplan formulated. Think I’m exaggerating? Ask Adolf Hitler. It’s right there in Mein Kampf, when he discusses the need for Germany to have an empire and then rejects each of the “overseas” models developed by other European powers as being inappropriate for the new Reich he has in mind. He’s pretty explicit about his desire to create a copy of the “continental bloc” established by the U.S.116 He said to all intents and purposes that he viewed the Jews, the Gypsies and the Slavs as being just so many Indians, subject to extermination in the name of progress. Is there a reason not to believe he knew his own mind on the matter, and thus not to take him at his word?

V

It’s argued that the virulence of Hitler’s antisemitism, and that of the nazis more generally, was such that it stands apart from anything else in history. On what basis? Because Hitler referred to Jews as “filth”? Because Himmler referred to Jews as “lice,” and Goebbels commissioned films depicting Jews as rats and other vermin?117 All of that’s true, certainly, and the implications speak for themselves. But does anybody really believe it’s unique? Does anyone really want to try and explain to me—or better yet, a 6-year-old little Indian girl—how Hitler’s reference to Jewish “filth” is different from the scene in John Huston’s The Unforgiven, where the mother of Natalie Wood’s fiancé, upon discovering that Natalie may be of Kiowa “blood,” starts screaming at her that she’s a “squaw” because of the “red filth” flowing in her veins?118 You know what “squaw” means? Well, the little girl is apt to. It’s the Mohawk word for female genitalia.119 There’s an inventory of 2,000 Hollywood westerns and about 10,000 TV segments to work with here.120 It’s true that John Huston wasn’t head of state when he made The Unforgiven, and neither was John Ford when he made The Searchers, but I seem to recall that both films won Academy Awards for best picture in the years they were released.121

You’d think, in the face of what I’ve been laying out, that somewhere along the line at least one of the major Jewish exclusivists might have had a revelatory experience and come to the conclusion that, “Oh my god, I’ve been wrong, we’ve got a lot in common with American Indians, and it would be in everybody’s interest, my own people’s most of all, if I were to use my standing as a recognized Holocaust scholar to point it out.” But it’s never happened. Not once, that I’m aware of. Quite the opposite. I was talking about silence a few minutes ago, and Lipstadt is a good example of it, but it’s more than that. Steven Katz, for instance, actually took time out from his busy schedule preparing The Holocaust in Historical Context to write a side essay, “The Pequot War Revisited,” in which he contended that the Pequot people of present-day Connecticut suffered “at most, cultural genocide,” because only half of them were physically exterminated during the 1637 “war” conducted against them. Moreover, he concludes, there are still a few people of Pequot descent alive today, so what happened “couldn’t” have added up to genocide.122

No, I’m not kidding. I really wish I were.

Katz was way low on the proportion of Pequots killed—Connec- ticut colony declared them officially extinct after the Mystic Massacre, in which about 800 were slaughtered in a single night123—but even if he weren’t, by his own estimate they suffered a proportional fatality rate only ten percent less than that of the Jews during the Holocaust. Should we therefore adduce that Jews, too, experienced “at most, cultural genocide”? That the Holocaust didn’t “really” add up to genocide because there are still “Jewish-descended individuals” like Katz himself living in places like Israel and New York? I’ll spare you my usual commentary about insanity, while nonetheless pointing out that this is an example of holocaust denial, actively so, no less callous than that spewed by the worst of the neonazis.

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