Kill anything that moves. Take no prisoners. In California, hunting Indians was both legal and profitable. $5 a head, 50 cents a scalp. In 1849 the American government paid more than a million dollars to Indian hunters. ibid.
Make America Great again, he said. When exactly was it great? I mean really great? And for whom? ibid.
In the beginning, the slaves had to clean the cotton with their bare hands. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney would change everything. But Cotton also destroyed the soil, while using slaves’ bodies like a commodity became the most lucrative enterprise around. More profitable than all lands, banks, railroads, factories and gold products put together. Slaves were used as collateral for mortgage, a newly developed tool of commerce. ibid.
By 1890, disarmed, held in concentration camps, their children taken away half-starved, the Lakota and Dakota survivors found a new resistance: ghost dancing. ibid.
Wounded Knee Massacre: East Indians killed: 300; Survivors: 51 (4 men, 47 women), Army casualties: 25 dead. ibid.
Frank Baum: The pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends on the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better in order to protect our civilisation follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the Earth. The fact is, the Native Americans are still here, and this is still their home … The real fight remains the fight for self-determination and restitution. ibid.
As writer James Baldwin says, ‘There is scarcely any hope for the American dream. Because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence will wreck it.’ ibid.
Lost souls on a pile of human confusion. The absence of any trace of empathy and genuine humanity is unbearable. The nightmare is buried deep in our consciousness. So deep that we do not recognise its ghosts. ibid.
The limits of superiority: privilege makes you vulnerable, and panic blended with ignorance and bigotry creates anger. Limitless and blinding anger. Everyone else becomes the enemy. The fortress becomes a prison. Everyone else looking in at you. ibid.
So educated Europeans today know how children die when the whip of debt and bombs whistle over poor countries. It is not knowledge that is lacking … Imperialism is a biologically necessary process that according to the laws of nature leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. ibid.
This knowledge is a fundamental prerequisite. That is why the narrator can tell his story as he does in Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness. He has no need to count the crimes Kurt committed. He has no need to describe them. He has no need to produce evidence. For no-one doubted it. ibid.
But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee: Deuteronomy 20:17
And the Lord God of Israel delivered Sihon and all his people into the hand of Israel, and they smote them: so Israel possessed all the land of the Amorites, the inhabitants of that country. Judges 11:21
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions. Storyville: Final Account, Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor, BBC 2022
In 2008 filmmaker Luke Holland embarked on a journey to find and interview witnesses to the crimes of the Third Reich. ibid. caption
Bernburg was one of six euthanasia centres in Germany and Austria. Approximately 14,000 individuals, regarded by the Nazis as ‘not worthy of life’, were murdered here. ibid.
Kristallnacht 9-10 November 1938: Some 1,400 synagogues and places of worship were destroyed. Over 7,000 Jewish properties and cemeteries were damaged. Many Jews were murdered. 30,000 were imprisoned. The event caused a major Jewish exodus. ibid.
I still have the smell of the crematorium in my nose. When you saw the smoke going up, like when you burn car tyres, then someone said, They have put some more in.’ ibid. survivor
You could see the smoke from the ovens. You knew what was going on. ibid. neighbour
The Gospel of Genocide … the Nazis called this the Final Solution. Nazi Gospels, Military Channel 2012
When you think about the mass redundancies, the starvation, the poverty, the literal raping of a country through third world debt, that is violence on a huge scale: it’s genocide. Guy Taylor, globalisation campaigner