[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
My other thought is, if the Armenians, the Kurds, and the various tribes of Bantu, Aboriginal Australians and American Indians had anything near the political clout and presence in the media that Jews have, we would never be allowed to forget their stories, either.[/quote]
True, but it wasn’t just the Jews I was talking about. The Europeans went to the “undeveloped” countries like Africa, Australia, Middle East, India, and made them into colonies. Germany, Japan and Italy were merely following suit. Italy went into Ethiopia, but the mistake the Germans made was trying to colonize parts of Europe itself while going after parts of the British Empire along with Japan. The colonization or quest for Lebensraum and extermination of local inhabitants, ie Poles, Russians, Czechs, ect, along with Jews, of course, made their crime seem the worst in history to date.
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Sure, but Stalin and Mao killed many times more of their own people than Hitler killed Jews, Poles, Czechs, Catholics, Russians and Catholics combined, and yet if anyone wants a poster boy for genocide, good old Adolf is the one everyone thinks of. That, my friend, is a successful marketing campaign.
Incidentally, Lebensraum is just the German equivalent of “elbow room”, the unofficial slogan of Manifest Destiny, which is of course where he got the idea. Nobody thinks ill of Andrew Jackson or Alexander or… for that matter, your own namesake, but their policies weren’t all that different. Hitler had the benefit of technology, but the drawback of opponents with similar technology.[/quote]
A false moral equivalency. Manifest destiny entailed the opening up of the West to exploit natural resources; beaver, timber, gold, buffalo, wild longhorn etc. The motivations of wagon trainers in the old West was not the same as the Wehrmacht’s military conquest of Russia and the einsatzgruppen’s deliberate extermination of the civilian population.[/quote]
Those weren’t the only reasons. Conquest of the west was also considered a fore gone conclusion and it would either be by the U.S., Mexico or other potentially hostile nations. It was believed, and probably rightly so that the Native American lands were going to be colonized and the native population marginalized, by somebody if not the U.S. After all, the annexation of Texas was the beginning of the westward expansion. Greed, though a part of the many reasons for it was not the only reason for it. While the Native Americans got screwed, screwing them wasn’t the primary motivation. As much as anything else, security was a much a motivation as monetary and land conquests.
The idea that the western U.S. was going to be conquested, either by the U.S. or another powerful empire is probably not far off the mark. The idea that if the U.S. had not come in and take it, that the Native Americans would simply have lived in peace even unto today seems really unlikely. The Natives, living in small individual nations of their own, not united themselves in sum, gave them little chance of defending that amount of land from a well armed, well trained empire. And the question then becomes would they have been better off? There’s no way to know.
I think the chances of the west remaining unclaimed like that was unlikely to stand. The Natives being treated better by a different conquesting nation is also not likely. Of course these are ‘what ifs’, but national security was a motivating factor of westward expansion.