The International Politics of Denial of Genocide-1 Native Americans in North America: A Prolonged Eradication Campaign's Victims

The International Politics of Denial of Genocide-1

Native Americans in North America: A Prolonged Eradication Campaign's Victims-

Denial of ‘genocide’ is not simply a matter of avoiding or simply forgetting the truth of a historical crime. Denial is essentially seen as a final, well-planned and long-lasting stage of that crime. When a powerful state systematically exterminates a specific population and then denies responsibility for that crime, it becomes a second murder of the memory and existence of the victims. This politics of denial transforms physical violence into a form of psychological oppression. Standing in the 21st century, this type of politics has taken on a more complex, subtle and institutional form. The modern state no longer simply lies outright. Rather, it uses tactics such as concealing information, creating debates about statistics and presenting structural crimes as ‘the spread of civilization’ or ‘inevitable historical destiny’. The main goal of this denial is to give structural and legal immunity to the perpetrators by hiding their identities. The way the United States, one of the world's most powerful nations, continues to deny the centuries-long systematic genocide of indigenous peoples on its own soil is a classic example of this structural injustice. This is the first installment of this series, titled 'The Global Politics of Genocide Denial'.

The period of the extermination of the indigenous peoples of North America was not a matter of one or two years. It was a process that lasted from the late fifteenth century until the twentieth century. The extermination campaign took its most horrific form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

At the time of the arrival of Europeans, the population of thousands of independent and diverse indigenous groups in North America was between 5 million and 10 million. However, by the 1890s, this number had dramatically decreased to only 237,000. This means that in the space of a few centuries, about 95 percent of the indigenous peoples were wiped out.

The massacres of Native Americans in American history have never been officially recognized as genocide by the US government. The main explanation for the horror of this devastation is the 'Virgin Soil Theory'. This theory claims that a large number of Native Americans died from infectious diseases that came with the Europeans after their arrival, and that no one in particular played a role in this. But new demographic research and historical studies have proven this theory completely wrong. Russell Thornton, in his famous study 'American Indian Holocaust and Survival', has shown with detailed statistics that not only disease, but also policies such as systematic warfare, eviction from land, and food shortages worked together. Thornton's research proves that Native Americans were not naturally immune to disease; rather, they were weakened by the systematic destruction of their main food source, 'bison' or buffalo, under state sponsorship. In other words, the epidemics were not merely natural disasters, but rather a weapon of colonial aggression.