American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World | 
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Product Description
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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Customer Reviews:
• Intellectual Holocaust 16 March, 2008
Stannard's 'American Holocaust' is both patently offensive and absurd in its appropriation of the term "Holocaust". The title attempts to draw a parallel between the horrors inflicted by Nazi Germany upon millions of Jews (and others) in specifically constructed death camps - in the space of just a couple of years - with the exploration and settlement of the entirety of the Americas over the span of centuries by disparate, disconnected groups of Europeans.
It is also virtually worthless as a history book. It reads more like the worst kind of half-baked screed found on myriad blogs as opposed to what one would expect to find in a scholarly work. He selectively uses (and omits) facts. He waxes nostalgic for cultures like the Aztec, which were horribly brutal. He downplays the fact that native civilizations routinely engaged in warfare with one another (which he tries to mitigate by imbuing such killing with a more "honorable" patina) and took captives for their own purposes - including slavery and human sacrifice. He also completely ignores the fact that the Hawaiian people - who were never the subject of warfare waged by Europeans - lost exactly the same percentage of their population as did the native populations of the Americas, simply by virtue of contact. All of this can only lead one to the conclusion that he has some agenda other than historical accuracy in mind.
Certainly, we must come to grips with the reality of what happened when a European population descended upon the American continent and its native peoples that, unfortunately, had zero resistance to the diseases that accompanied them. From the aforementioned fact concerning the rapid decline of the native Hawaiian population post-contact, we know that fully 90-95% of the deaths of native peoples were brought on by diseases - the same diseases that even Stannard acknowledges ravaged Europe's populations. (SEE ALSO: Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 by Noble David Cook). Genocide? That would imply that Europeans - who stumbled upon the Americas quite by accident - both understood and systematically used disease as a weapon (which, in very isolated instances, they did with small pox). But the fact remains that both Europeans and Natives of the Americas died by the millions from the exact same causes. That the Europeans had developed some immunities to the diseases was hardly somehting that they understood or planned. That the remaining ~5% of Native Americans were simply overwhelmed by waves of immigration and superior technology over the course of hundreds of years is indeed sad, but it does not constitute genocide as the word is properly understood.
To be sure, white expansion across the American continent displaced Native tribes from their ancestral homelands. And, the value system of the Europeans was vastly different from that of Native Americans. But, of course, the Europeans did not have a modern understanding of race or any progressive ideas about cultural sensitivity. How could they? Indeed (like the natives of the Americas), they had been killing one another for centuries! The British hated the Irish; the French hated the British, etc., etc., etc., with each firmly believing in the superiority of his particular "race" (as they understood the word). Thus, their attitudes when confronted with beings wholly outside of their experience can only be properly understood when one understands their history, mindset and worldview.
But one surely has to wonder how the outcome might have differed had not the disease factor been so decisive in decimating native peoples. They had such overwhelming numerical superiority that they could have easily turned back any invading army, as the Aztecs in fact did initially with Cortez - until the disease factor gave Cortez the upper hand.
No, in spite of many specific instances of savagery on the part of Europeans (as dutifully recorded by - guess who? - those very same Europeans!) and racial attitudes the modern mind finds abhorrent, I'm afraid the truth of the decimation of native peoples is ~95% the fault of diseases.
Any claim to the contrary is simply factually incorrect.
P.S.
QUOTE: "...although the first people the Spanish confronted, the Tlaxcaltecs, could easily have defeated the conquistadors, they saw in them instead potential confederates against their traditional adversaries." (p. 75)
COMMENT: Huh? You mean Native peoples actually allied themselves with those filthy Spaniards to help them kick the rear ends of other Native peoples, when they could instead "easily have defeated the conquistadors"?
In this one small passage, Stannard acknowledges a fact that proves conclusively that: (1.) Natives, from the very beginning, formed alliances with Europeans for purposes of making war on other Natives and (2.) Absent such help -- and the disease factor -- the tiny European armed forces alone could have been quickly and easily defeated.
So much for Stannard's thesis.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A13D1WTFEMS9VH
• Reverse Parody 17 July, 2008
"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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A37YE2WSA1GUOF
• History Repeated 16 February, 2008
After much urging from friends, I've finally read Stannard's American Holocaust. It's a captivating book that gives a background into history that has been retold and written in the favor of the conquerors but has down played and in some cases, completely looked over, the devastating effects of their enterprise on the peoples of the New World, some of which still echo today. It's a sobering account based on much research of just what the title implies, a holocaust. I think very few books take into account the diversity of the people that lived in the America's or their populations prior to Columbus. Stannard does an excellent job in painting that picture. He even acknowledges inter-tribal warfare and the existence of empires but he also points out how these stand in contrast with what these notions were in Europe at the time and how they developed differently than in America. Many cynics will say that this book is a "revisionist" history written by a "liberal" scholar. Many history "buffs" will be unsettled from the comfortable vantage point from which they view history. I challenge them to go through American Holocaust's bibliography and read these texts themselves and discern a different view point.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1RTN02TASGTQ5
• In Answer To Conservative Pseudointellectuals... 23 September, 2007
All of the big words and "references" in the world won't change history for you, unfortunately. I notice that among the people who did not like this book, they all pretty much said the same thing: That Stannard didn't paint an accurate picture of the natives of the western hemisphere. That he didn't acknowledge cannabalism (he did), that he didn't acknowledge human sacrifice (he did - to the tune of 20,000 per year in the Inca capital), and that he didn't acknowledge inter-tribal warfare and cruelty (he most certainly did). One of the reasons I liked this book so much was its extensive reference section (with explanations as to most of the references, so if you have any questions about something...LOOK IT UP). It'd do you all some good, rather than blindly naysaying whatever doesn't fit your racist little mold. Does it really MATTER whether or not native peoples practiced unsavory rituals? They're all dead.
In any case, the book was superb and whatever your views are regarding the native peoples mentioned in the book, one point remains irrefutable: They were exterminated. It was deliberate. It was planned, sanctioned, supported, and financed by every exploratory realm in Europe and by the American government throughout it's short and brutal history. You all know it.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A15N6JR093TBIJ
• Eye Opener 15 May, 2008
this book is amazing, it opens ur eyes to a whole new light on history of the americas u never would of known unless u went out of school and researched this topic on your own. shows who the real moraly uncivilized savages wer. everyone native to the "americas" and caribean should read this book and learn the TRUTH about columbus and european invasion.
- Reviewed by customer ID: ACM8SM3MZY1U9
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