American Holocaust Quotes

“The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World

“The first Europeans to visit the continents of North and South America and the islands of the Caribbean, like the Nazis in Europe after them, produced many volumes of grandiloquently racist apologia for the genocidal holocaust they carried out. Not only were the “lower races” they encountered in the New World dark and sinful, carnal and exotic, proud, inhuman, un-Christian inhabitants of the nether territories of humanity—contact with whom, by civilized people, threatened morally fatal contamination—but God, as always, was on the Christians’ side. And God’s desire, which became the Christians’ marching orders, was that such dangerous beasts and brutes must be annihilated.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Should Indian adults attempt to use the California courts to bring such killers to justice, they invariably were frustrated because the law of the land prohibited Indians from testifying against whites. Even some otherwise unsympathetic settler newspapers observed and protested this situation (to no avail), since in consequence it encouraged and legalized the open-season hunting of Indians. As one San Francisco newspaper put it in 1858, following the unprovoked public murder of an Indian, and the release of the known killer because the only eyewitnesses to the event were native people: the Indians “are left entirely at the mercy of every ruffian in the country, and if something is not done for their protection, the race will shortly become extinct.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Columbus was, in most respects, merely an especially active and dramatic embodiment of the European—and especially the Mediterranean—mind and soul of his time: a religious fanatic obsessed with the conversion, conquest, or liquidation of all non-Christians; a latter-day Crusader in search of personal wealth and fame, who expected the enormous and mysterious world he had found to be filled with monstrous races inhabiting wild forests, and with golden people living in Eden. He was also a man with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culture had wrought.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“A simple comparison between the inducements that were given the early Spanish and the early British New World settlers reveals the fundamental difference between the two invasions: the Spanish, with the repartimiento, were awarded not land but large numbers of native people to enslave and do with what they wished; the English, with the “headright,” were provided not with native people but with fifty acres of land for themselves and fifty acres more for each additional settler whose transatlantic transportation costs they paid.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“The people of this island and of all the other islands which I have found and seen, or have not seen, all go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they make for that purpose. They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrous timid. . . . [T]hey are so artless and free with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Just twenty-one years after Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Columbus says he decided to send “two men up-country” to see what they could see. “They traveled for three days,” he wrote, “and found an infinite number of small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance.”35 People without number—but nothing of importance. It would become a motto for the ages.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“almost all Americans would properly applaud President Walesa’s long-overdue acknowledgment of and apology for the horrors that were perpetrated against Jewish and other European “worthy” victims in Poland’s Nazi extermination centers during forty ghastly months in the 1940s, they by and large continue to turn their backs on the even more massive genocide that for four grisly centuries was perpetrated against what their apathy implicitly defines as the “unworthy” natives of the Americas.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“the long delay, and the obvious reluctance of the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention” derived from “fear that it might be held responsible, retrospectively, for the annihilation of Indians in the United States, or its role in the slave trade, or its contemporary support for tyrannical governments engaging in mass murder.” Still, Kuper said he was delighted that at last the Americans had agreed to the terms of the Convention.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“For among the many things that warfare does is temporarily define the entire enemy population as superfluous, as expendable—a redefinition that must take place before most non-psychopaths can massacre innocent people and remain shielded from self-condemnation. And nothing is more helpful to that political and psychological transformation than the availability of a deep well of national and cultural consciousness that consigns whole categories of people to the distant outback of humanity.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Elie Wiesel is right: the road to Auschwitz was being paved in the earliest days of Christendom. But another conclusion now is equally evident: on the way to Auschwitz the road’s pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and of North and South America.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“As with Hispaniola, Tenochtitlán, Cuzco, and elsewhere, the Spaniards’ mammoth destruction of whole societies generally was a by-product of conquest and native enslavement, a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end in itself. And therein lies the central difference between the genocide committed by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because it made economic sense.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“And on April 30th, one month later, a royal decree was issued suspending all judicial proceedings against any criminals who would agree to ship out with Columbus, because, the document stated, “it is said that it is necessary to grant safe-conduct to the persons who might join him, since under no other conditions would they be willing to sail with him on the said voyage.”130 With the exception of four men wanted for murder, no known felons accepted the offer. From what historians have been able to tell, the great majority of the crews of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María— together probably numbering a good deal fewer than a hundred—were not at that moment being pursued by the law, although, no doubt, they were a far from genteel lot.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“This, then, was the Old World on the eve of Columbus’s departure in 1492. For almost half a millennium Christians had been launching hideously destructive holy wars and massive enslavement campaigns against external enemies they viewed as carnal demons and described as infidels—all in an effort to recapture the Holy Land, and all of which, it now seemed to many, effectively had come to naught. During those same long centuries they had further expressed their ruthless intolerance of all persons and things that were non-Christian by conducting pogroms against the Jews who lived among them and whom they regarded as the embodiment of Antichrist—imposing torture, exile, and mass destruction on those who refused to succumb to evangelical persuasion. These great efforts, too, appeared to have largely failed. Hundreds of thousands of openly practicing Jews remained in the Europeans’ midst, and even those who had converted were suspected of being the Devil’s agents and spies, treacherously boring from within. Dominated by a theocratic culture and world view that for a thousand years and more had been obsessed with things sensual and sexual, and had demonstrated its obsession in the only way its priesthood permitted—by intense and violent sensual and sexual repression and “purification”—the religious mood of Christendom’s people at this moment was near the boiling point. At its head the Church was mired in corruption, while the ranks below were dispirited and increasingly disillusioned. These are the sorts of conditions that, given the proper spark, lend themselves to what anthropologists and historians describe as “millenarian” rebellion and upheaval, or “revitalization movements.”125”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Such brutishness was beyond the English capacity for tolerance. Especially when the vulgarians in question occupied such lovely lands. So, as they had for centuries, the English waged wars to pacify and civilize the Irish.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“On the very day that Columbus finally set forth on his journey that would shake the world, the port of the city he sailed from was filled with ships that were deporting Jews from Spain. By the time the expulsion was complete between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews had been driven from their homes (their valuables, often meager, having first been confiscated) and then they were cast out to sea.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“In the symbolic, economic, and familial spheres the Iroquois were matriarchal, that is, female dominated. Iroquoian women headed the family long-house, and much of the economic and ceremonial life centered on the agricultural activities of women. Men were responsible for hunting, war, and intertribal affairs. Although women appointed men to League positions and could veto their decisions, men dominated League deliberations. This tension between male and female spheres, in which females dominated village life and left intertribal life to men, suggests that the sexes were separate but equal, at least during the confederacy. Before the confederacy, when the individual nations stood alone and consisted of a set of loosely organized villages subsisting on the horticultural produce of women, females may have overshadowed the importance of males.35”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Contrary to a notion that has become fashionable among American historians, the concept of race was not invented in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century. Indeed, systems of categorical generalization that separated groups of people according to social constructions of race (sometimes based on skin color, sometimes with reference to other attributes) and ranked them as to disposition and intelligence, were in use in Europe at least a thousand years before Columbus set off across the Atlantic.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“A traditional Eurocentric bias that lumps undifferentiated masses of “Africans” into one single category and undifferentiated masses of “Indians” into another, while making fine distinctions among the different populations of Europe, permits the ignoring of cases in which genocide against Africans and American Indians has resulted in the total extermination—purposefully carried out—of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“The European habit of indiscriminately killing women and children when engaged in hostilities with the natives of the Americas was more than an atrocity. It was flatly and intentionally genocidal. For no population can survive if its women and children are destroyed.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Here, the modern requerimiento pressures Indians either to leave the reservation and enter an American society where they will be bereft and cultureless people in a land where poor people of color suffer systematic oppression and an ever-worsening condition of merciless inequality, or remain on the reservation and attempt to preserve their culture amidst the wreckage of governmentally imposed poverty, hunger, ill health, despondency, and the endless attempts of the federal and state governments at land and resource usurpation.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“scholar of the history of race and racism, Pierre L. van den Berghe, places Roosevelt within an unholy triumvirate of the modern world’s leading racist statesmen; the other two, according to van den Berghe, are Adolf Hitler and Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s original architect of apartheid.)147 For the “extirpation” of the “lower races” that Hall and Roosevelt were celebrating drew its justification from the same updated version of the Great Chain of Being that eventually inspired Nazi pseudoscience.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“it could not and would not happen so long as Christians “continued to believe that natural man was totally corrupt, that suffering and subordination were necessary parts of life, and that the only true freedom lay in salvation from the world.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“For while those like Señor Coma of Aragon were drawing a parallel between darkness of flesh and commitment to cannibalism—while Columbus and others were expounding on an opposite relationship (but one with identical consequences) involving light skin, intelligence, and closeness to God—still more Spaniards were locating evidence for the Indians’ alleged inferiority within their very biology, in what was said to be the “size and thickness of their skulls,” writes J.H. Elliott, “which indicated a deformation in that part of the body which provided an index of a man’s rational powers,” and which could be used to support the increasingly popular idea that the Indians were made by God to be the “natural slaves” of the Spanish and, indeed, of all Europeans.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Given the shortage of women in California during these early years of white settlement, “a likely young girl” might cost almost double that of a boy, because, as the Marysville Appeal phrased it, girls served the double duty “of labor and of lust.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“The first colonial leaders, however, would have none of this. Most of them were military men, trained in the Irish wars. Whatever they thought of the Indian way of life, they never failed to regard the Indians themselves as peoples fated for conquest. As a counterweight to that relative handful of writers who were praising the native peoples and their governments, these British equivalents of the conquistadors viewed”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“No sooner were the ships unloaded, however, than sickness broke out among the crews. It quickly spread among the natives, who had come to greet the ships with gifts of fish and fruits, “as if we had been their brothers,” recalled one of the men on board.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of Their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as Their Highnesses may command. And we shall take your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, travelling on the sand. I saw one man get off his horse, at a distance of about seventy-five yards, and draw up his rifle and fire—he missed the child. Another man came up and said, “Let me try the son of a bitch; I can hit him.” He got down off his horse, kneeled down and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World