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American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World

American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $19.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Power of Knowing
Review: If, like "a reader" from New York, NY, you find that this work is "utter garbage," that's fair I guess. The most powerful thing, for me, however, about this material is the response it receives from others.
The spectrum of discourse can be found here, among the reviews.
The truth is that Native Americans were here first, in large numbers, and after the Europeans arrived, their culture, way of life, and people were "reserved" on patches of the land they formerly inhabited. If someone came along and tried to do that do present-day Canada, Mexico, and the US, we would see fighting on a scale not seen sicne the Second "World War." But we justify it somehow in our minds; to me, I think that we find ways to make genocide of Native Americans "okay" so as to avoid the psychic split that must occur in a human mind that has become fully aware of the evil that was involved in establishing this land for non-Natives.

Therein lies some of the reviewer response you will find. Read the book. Then read ten others. In the end analysis, you will return to the same place I inhabit; a place of amazement at how our leaders break breath to speak at all without first falling to their knees in begging for forgiveness for the evil that has taken place.

And I'm not even Native American. Wonder what they think...

Simply amazing.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A true account of Indian suffering at the hands of european
Review: In breif I will have to say that my maternal grand mother was of Native American desent. However my paternal grandparents were of Euripean desent. There have been very vivid memories in my mind from the time when I was a child and made to believe that everything that had to do with being Indian was negative. From my point of veiw I never fully understood why would any one would be less human just for being an Indian. This book has widen my scope and has help me to get a clear picture of what the European mentality was towards Indians when they came to America. It has also helped me to feel proud of who I am furthermore my nine year old doughter looks just like my beloved grand mother, and often looks at tv. commertials and asks me the question why are most of the kids in the comertials white? Why cannot they be brown? "see Iam a brown girle". I tell her that being brown is just fine and that she has been blessed with her Great Grand Mothers features and should by all means feel proud of it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Stannard Should Be Standard Reading
Review: Most classical histories of the arrival of Colombus or the "settlement" of the Americas are nothing at all like the holocaust Stannard documents in this stunning book. This is a blood-curdling tale of conquest and colonization. And yet for all that, Stannard only gives of a glimpse of what was lost! The sad truth is that we only possess a sketchy outline of the many unique and beautiful pre-Colombian cultures that were obliterated in the Euroamerican invasion. A must read for all living Americans.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Connected Holocausts
Review: My one quibble with this book is that it only chronicles destruction - it does not discuss the long and continuing resistance of Native American people and cultures. In places like Vermont, the Abenaki continue to live in the shadows of their white neighbors, learned to use guitars and fiddles so we wouldn't be arrested for drum playing, and quietly suffer through continuing discrimination (there are several stores, where I could walk in and wait as long as the store is open, and not be served). A dirty little secret of the Democratic Party, which continues to hold the governorship of Vermont, is that it runs on a platform of never recognizing the Native People of Vermont - whether or not we gain federal recognition. (For fair comparison, I should note that the Republican Party wants to remove sovereign status from all Native Nations.) This is rascism, and Vermont history is completely whitewashed. The few times the Abenaki are mentioned in Vermont history textbooks that are sanctioned for use in the schools, we are constantly labeled as murderers and thieves. Never mind, of course, that we were murdered and raped in large numbers by European settlers who were stealing our crops and land.

Besides the continuing tribal resistance, there are very important modern movements of resistance that are pan-Indian, and embrace Hispanics and sympathetic whites and others, such as the Seventh Generation Project in Minnesota, and Tonatierra in Arizona.

The worst critique most people have come up with about this book is that its count of native peoples in the Western Hemisphere is inflated. That is hardly the case. If you check the research of modern anthropologists and professors in American Indian Studies Departments, you find out that the numbers have been consistently undercounted up until the modern day, and that the "accepted figures" taught in school were based on very little evidence.

There was native-on-native violence, and I agree that this has been somewhat glossed over. However, that is almost refreshing compared to the historically inaccurate painting of native peoples as bloodthirsty barbarians found in most of the older histories. Spanish conquerers are known to have over-counted the number of humans sacrifices made by the Aztecs, while not mentioning their own human sacrifices to God in the form of the Spanish Inquistion and the many bloody Christian sectarian wars being fought in Europe at the time. I cannot imagine the victims feel any worse about being sacrificed on an altar instead of a battlefield, and both are sacrificed in great pain in the name of a God or gods.

The rest of the critiques I have seen are rascist nonsense. One particular reviewer said that it only showed the "indian side of the story". First of all, Indians are inhabitants of India, I am Native American or American Indian, at least to outsiders, just as only blacks are allowed to use the inflammatory n-word with each other in single-race company. Secondly, the vast majority of histories only tell the white side of the story, so reading the "other side" should be informative. Thirdly, sir, to be mildly insulting, you sound like a stereotypical holocaust denier in your critiques - and I do mean of both the American and the European Jewish. There are very few books that only tell Hitler's side of the story - and none of them are accepted as valid scholarship. The same should hold true in modern histories of what happened in Native America.

I make this comparison for good reason - that being that Hitler is documented as having said that he based his final solution for the Jews on the U.S. government's final solution of the "Indian problem". In the thirties, this was continuing - with the Vermont Eugenics Project and other rascist eugenics projects that specifically targeted Native Americans and African Americans to be surgically castrated. Several of my grandmother's cousins were caught and targeted in that net. It continued in the 60s, when the BIA-run hospitals were discovered to be using saline solution instead of vaccines on our infants, experimental surgery on our people, and to be basically castrating women during C-sections so they could not have any more children. And it continues today, with uncapped Uranium deposits on Navajo land out west doing irreparable genetic damage to the people, with the Superfund site that magically "ends" at the border of the Akwesasne Reservation in Upstate New York and Canada, and many others (Winona LaDuke wrote an excellent book covering this continuing devastation in detail).

I highly suggest reading Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, in addition to this book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Connected Holocausts
Review: My one quibble with this book is that it only chronicles destruction - it does not discuss the long and continuing resistance of Native American people and cultures. In places like Vermont, the Abenaki continue to live in the shadows of their white neighbors, learned to use guitars and fiddles so we wouldn't be arrested for drum playing, and quietly suffer through continuing discrimination (there are several stores, where I could walk in and wait as long as the store is open, and not be served). A dirty little secret of the Democratic Party, which continues to hold the governorship of Vermont, is that it runs on a platform of never recognizing the Native People of Vermont - whether or not we gain federal recognition. (For fair comparison, I should note that the Republican Party wants to remove sovereign status from all Native Nations.) This is rascism, and Vermont history is completely whitewashed. The few times the Abenaki are mentioned in Vermont history textbooks that are sanctioned for use in the schools, we are constantly labeled as murderers and thieves. Never mind, of course, that we were murdered and raped in large numbers by European settlers who were stealing our crops and land.

Besides the continuing tribal resistance, there are very important modern movements of resistance that are pan-Indian, and embrace Hispanics and sympathetic whites and others, such as the Seventh Generation Project in Minnesota, and Tonatierra in Arizona.

The worst critique most people have come up with about this book is that its count of native peoples in the Western Hemisphere is inflated. That is hardly the case. If you check the research of modern anthropologists and professors in American Indian Studies Departments, you find out that the numbers have been consistently undercounted up until the modern day, and that the "accepted figures" taught in school were based on very little evidence.

There was native-on-native violence, and I agree that this has been somewhat glossed over. However, that is almost refreshing compared to the historically inaccurate painting of native peoples as bloodthirsty barbarians found in most of the older histories. Spanish conquerers are known to have over-counted the number of humans sacrifices made by the Aztecs, while not mentioning their own human sacrifices to God in the form of the Spanish Inquistion and the many bloody Christian sectarian wars being fought in Europe at the time. I cannot imagine the victims feel any worse about being sacrificed on an altar instead of a battlefield, and both are sacrificed in great pain in the name of a God or gods.

The rest of the critiques I have seen are rascist nonsense. One particular reviewer said that it only showed the "indian side of the story". First of all, Indians are inhabitants of India, I am Native American or American Indian, at least to outsiders, just as only blacks are allowed to use the inflammatory n-word with each other in single-race company. Secondly, the vast majority of histories only tell the white side of the story, so reading the "other side" should be informative. Thirdly, sir, to be mildly insulting, you sound like a stereotypical holocaust denier in your critiques - and I do mean of both the American and the European Jewish. There are very few books that only tell Hitler's side of the story - and none of them are accepted as valid scholarship. The same should hold true in modern histories of what happened in Native America.

I make this comparison for good reason - that being that Hitler is documented as having said that he based his final solution for the Jews on the U.S. government's final solution of the "Indian problem". In the thirties, this was continuing - with the Vermont Eugenics Project and other rascist eugenics projects that specifically targeted Native Americans and African Americans to be surgically castrated. Several of my grandmother's cousins were caught and targeted in that net. It continued in the 60s, when the BIA-run hospitals were discovered to be using saline solution instead of vaccines on our infants, experimental surgery on our people, and to be basically castrating women during C-sections so they could not have any more children. And it continues today, with uncapped Uranium deposits on Navajo land out west doing irreparable genetic damage to the people, with the Superfund site that magically "ends" at the border of the Akwesasne Reservation in Upstate New York and Canada, and many others (Winona LaDuke wrote an excellent book covering this continuing devastation in detail).

I highly suggest reading Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, in addition to this book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This book shows that the fittest DON'T survive!
Review: Rather than repeat the excellent points made by so many of those who have already reviewed "American Holocaust", I would like to point out that this book made me ashamed to be a Christian clergyman. Those who invaded "the New World" were supposed to represent civilization and the best religion on earth. The truth is that - compared to the people they found in the Americas -they were barbarians; but better-armed barbarians, and so they prevailed. It's not the "fittest", the most civilized, or the most godly who survived, but the most cruel, vicious, violent, unprincipled, and immoral.

I've designed a web site, called " http://www.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/AmericanHolocaust " to help promote this book and its message to as many people as possible. If you liked this book, please email this link to all your friends.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Mayan women eaten by dogs (greyhounds)
Review: The book is a detailed analysis of the great brutality and massacre practiced in the Americas. Whatever the causes behind a massacre is, it is unacceptable. The book gives a whole lot of information in a novel style. The events in the book is sometimes very disgusting and unbearable. His accusation of Turks for massacring Armenians does not rely on strong evidences but rather on some books of Armenian authors. As a whole the book shows the background of the prosperity and power of todays. I strongly recommend this book to be read.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: a leap too far
Review: the book tells a different story, true. but it tells it with such one sided-ness that it loses almost, if not all credibility. my history classes did not romanticize the idea of conquest. it was ugly, people died. they did not focus on a native point of view, but they also did not support the conquistadors views of savages, sub-human people either. it was a stupid excuse to do what they did, but wars are not built on intelligence, they are based on greed. it compares european conquest (or greed) to the tradegies of wwii (pure hatred) and thats a far leap.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Powerful
Review: There is obviously a great deal of debate about this book and it's subject matter. Many feel that it finally tells the truth about the past 500 years of death, disease, and oppression that has been inflicted on the native inhabitants of this land. Others feel that it is left-liberal revisionist history intended to promote white guilt at having conquered the continent via notions of Manifest Destiny. Regardless of which side one is on, one fact is undeniable: a whole lot of Indians died at the hands of Europeans. Whether through disease, starvation, gun or sword, the "Indian Problem" was ultimately solved by eliminating the problem altogether. The renants of these once great tribes from across the entire North American continent were herded onto dusty reservations and left to rot, where they still languish to this day. One has but to delve a little into history to glean the truth of the situation. Starting with the Spanish in the Caribbean and ending with the slaughter at Wounded Knee, Indians fought a losing battle against a technologically advanced invader and eventually paid the ultimate price. While the validity of the "Black Legend" of the Spanish in the New World can be debated endlessly, the truth is that entire civilizations were destroyed in the name of God and King. The Conquistadores, the encomiendas, the brutal extermination of entire cities were real. Later, the French, English, and the Americans committed their fair share of brutal injustices. This is not to say the Indians themselves did not committ horrible atrocities against whites who fell into their hands. There are many tales of torture and executions of white captives at the hands of enraged Indians. But in the end it was the Europeans who carried out a war of attrition against their neighbors in a greedy attempt to usurp their lands. And as a note to another reviewer below, whites did indeed willfully infect Indians with disease as seen in the case of British general Jeffery Amherst during Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763 when he urged his commanders to distribute blankets tainted with smallpox to many of the noncombatant Indian refugees in the areas around the settlements in an effort to extirpate them completely! But the crux of the issue is that the Europeans, often aided by other Indian tribes lured by false promises of reward and friendship, carried out a long and intentional campaign to remove what they saw as the native nuisance, to sweep away what they saw as a savage race of hethens to make way for a glorious new civilization. If nothing more, this book should motivate you to explore these important histories on your own and make your own judgement.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A THOROUGHLY RESEARCHED, EYE-OPENING EXPERIENCE.
Review: This book brings to light much of what we, as a nation, prefer to keep in the dark. Specifically: our ancestors were merciless, genocidal murderers. As a student of American History I was impressed by David Stannard's thorough research and relentless documentation. Much of the information is taken directly from logs and journals of the early 'explorers' and conquistadors. Their words will shock you in their blunt intensity and after reading this book you may never think of 'colonialization' the same way again. You will probably feel, as I now do, that celebrating 'Columbus Day' is tantamount to celebrating Hitler's attempted genocide of the Jews.


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