American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
by David E. Stannard
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Book Summary Information
Author: David E. StannardEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1993-11-18
ISBN: 0195085574
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
Book Review: Reverse Parody
Summary: 3 Stars
"In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue...and discovered America. Now, some argued Columbus actually discovered the West Indies, or that Norsemen had discovered America centuries earlier, or that you really can't get credit for discovering a land already populated by indigenous people with a developed civilization. Those people are communists. Columbus discovered America." Jon Stewart, America the Book
Jon Stewart lampoons the archetypal heroic view of Columbus' quest for conquest. It is easy to argue that Americans have a more nuanced view of history and see Columbus for the complex figure he was. But if this were really so, Stewart's satirical ruse would not ring true. That it does opens the door for historians to argue an extreme contrarian view, something University of Hawaii Professor David E. Stannard achieves rather eloquently in American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.
"I am become death, the shatterer of worlds," quotes J. Robert Oppenheimer from Hindu holy book Bhagavad Gita during the initial testing of an atomic bomb at Trinity, New Mexico. He could foresee the death and destruction that would be wrought into this world now that man had split the atom and harnessed nuclear power. Stannard argues a similar ominous foreboding enveloped the New World four and a half centuries earlier as Christopher Columbus and the European settlers would become no less shatterer of worlds, bringing death to, becoming death in, the New World.
Stannard offers a different lens from which to view the glorious European settlers and the simplistic savages to whom these brave white men brought Christianity. What were these `savages' like? They were hardly monolithically `savage.' The peoples of the Americas numbered around "145,000,000 for the hemisphere as a whole and about 18,000,000 for the area north of Mexico." When Rome was conquering Greece, the North American Adena culture had been flourishing for a thousand years. The Mayan empire stretched for 100,000 square miles and lasted 1000 years, with scholarly estimates listing the population at "ten to thirteen million just for the Yucatan portion of the empire, an area covering only one-third of Maya territory."
Stannard contrasts the glories of pre-Columbian American civilizations with his portrait of the degradation of European civilization. He outlines the plagues and diseases running rampant through fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. It is not enough for Stannard to highlight the desecration of Native American civilization by European peoples, as horrible as it was. All of Europe's sins, none of her contributions, are highlighted, and only the glories of Native American civilization are highlighted, with quick dismissals of less than savory episodes. He seems almost apologetic about the notorious Aztec human sacrifice rituals, saying "Perhaps as many as 20,000 enemy warriors, captured in battle, were sacrificed each year...however, in the siege of Tenochtitlan the invading Spaniards killed twice that many in a single day," as if to say murder only counts when perpetrated by white people.
Cultural destruction and annihilation, a trait sadly common to all victorious conquerors in human history--from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Genghis Khan--is treated as if it somehow flows inherently from the nature of European and Western Culture. European Christian religious beliefs are contrasted and condemned against the native spiritualities of the early American peoples. Stannard connects "the idea of the Great Chain of Being that categorized and ranked all the earth's living creatures" with man above animals--an idea "central as well to medieval Christian thought" --as somehow leading the Europeans to see the Native Americans as less than human, instead of just recognizing that destruction of other cultures is just something victorious nations have done, as awful as it is.
The destruction of native cultures by the European invaders is a topic in need of serious inquiry and, yes, exploration. Yet Stannard turns off the average reader by turning this into a simplistic Garden of Eden tale, starring the native peoples as Adam and Eve and the Europeans as the serpent bringing down Paradise. A better book would have highlighted the flaws of Christopher Columbus and the European settlers while not downplaying their positive qualities and ignoring the natives' negative traits. It seems we have gone from one stereotype--the terrible savage red man--to a complete opposite stereotype--the noble earth loving Indian falling helplessly to the big bad European. To really do the natives justice is to highlight their great cultures in all their complexity; the great periods and agricultural systems as well as the horrific human sacrifice.
Summary of American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
For four hundred years--from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s--the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched--and in places continue to wage--against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.
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