How do sociopathic leaders get away with mass murder? Take Adolf Hitler for instance. He was guilty of mass murder, but he is not one of the ones who got away with it. Yes, he set up the machinery of mass destruction and got away with operating it. But in the judgment of history he has been exposed as a mass murderer. If didn't take his life in a Berlin bunker, he would have been haled before the court at Nuremberg and tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. So, in the eyes of posterity, at least, he cannot be said to have gotten away with it.
If you want to beat a rap like mass murder, you have to get up pretty early in the morning. If you want to sugarcoat the pill of genocide so that it goes down easily, you have to be a far more savvy and powerful politician than Hitler ever was. You have to convince people that you are noble and well-intentioned and that it is all in a good cause. You have to work overtime to brand the victims as the bad guys. And at the same time you have to go all out to glamorize the perpetrators as the good guys. You have to turn the whole thing into an epic struggle between good and evil - a thrilling adventure full of drama and suspense. And of course you have to churn out an endless stream of books and films that romanticize the ugly subject of genocide and make it seem as normal as childbirth by representing it as the birth pangs of a New World.
If you can do that, well, you can consider yourself home free. You have successfully covered up the greatest crime of the century. You can be said to have made genocide - the granddaddy of all crime - pay. And if all that is true, that means that right now there are people out there enjoying our respect and arousing our admiration who are, in the final analysis, no better than Hitler. That means that there are cultural icons on a par with the Nazis who enjoy our trust and bask in our acclaim and stand out as legendary role models for our kids.
It kinda makes it hard to tell your heroic friends from your villainous enemies. I mean, in the 20th century there were all these God-fearing patriotic Americans who volunteered to fight in the Good War. It was an epic struggle between good and evil, and the great villain of the piece was Adolf Hitler. We are all familiar with Hitler’s M.O by now. He was a pathological liar whose word could not be trusted. He made treaties and promises but had no intention of living up to any of them. He set out to dominate the continent of Europe armed with a grandiose sense of destiny, yet stooped to all kinds of trickery and force to pull off his blatant land grabs. And worst of all, he targeted an innocent people for genocide, rounding them up and throwing them into concentration camps where they perished by the millions.
But where did Hitler come from? He wasn’t born evil, was he? I mean, we know that he had a rageholic of a father who beat the daylights out of him at least once a day. But besides that, what else could have transformed the innocent boy into a genocidal maniac? What influential books did he read? Whose crazy footsteps did he follow? What served as his sick role model?
To be sure, Hitler the man did terrible things in the 20th century. But first and foremost he was a child of the 19th century. Was there a power in the 19th century that blazed a path of conquest for him to emulate? A jingoistic power that made repeated treaties and promises of peace but failed to honor any of them? A rapacious power that refused to stay within its borders and grabbed an entire continent as its prize? An arrogant power that armed itself with the myth of a grandiose destiny and used trickery and force to pull off its blatant land grabs? And last but not least, a bloodthirsty power that rounded up innocent peoples and slaughtered them in a systematic policy of genocide, until the only survivors left were sickly specimens in de facto concentration camps?
If you know the answer to that question, you know the truth. You know that Hitler had a sinister guiding star. And that guiding star was our own Uncle Sam. Long before the Fuhrer claimed it as his manifest destiny to conquer the Europe, our leaders invested themselves with a Manifest Destiny to conquer America. Long before he used trickery and force to push for his dream of continental expansion to the East, they did the same thing with regard to the West. Long before he came across as a pathological liar because he broke all his treaties and promises with White Europeans, they did the same thing with Red Indians. And worst of all, long before he targeted an indigenous population of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs for genocide, they did the same thing with an indigenous population of Sioux and Cherokee and Iroquois. And while the world was justly horrified by the ravaged specimens of humanity that survived the war of extermination in Hitler’s camps, there is nowhere near the same level of outrage over the demoralized survivors of the U.S. war of extermination who were herded into glorified camps known as Reservations
All this is historical fact. Any schoolboy can look it up. The United States gets all virtuous over its fight against Hitler - and such is the power of indoctrination that its citizens forget that their government is guilty of the same atrocities as the Nazis! Our side likes to paint Hitler as a madman for thinking in grandiose terms of overrunning a continent and using duplicity and force to get his way and launching a systematic campaign of genocide. And we conveniently forget that We the People and our homegrown leaders have the same shade of blood on their hands. As a matter of fact, if there were an honest-to-goodness accounting of the Native Americans butchered in the path of U.S. expansion - estimates run from less than ten million to fifty million - our leaders in Washington would be haled before some tribunal just like Nuremberg and held no less guilty of crimes against humanity than the captured Nazi leaders.
So you think you're one of the good guys? You think you can tell a villain when you see one? Don’t be too sure. In the decade right after America emerged victorious from World War II, a new medium called television took the country by storm. TV Westerns were all the rage in the 1950s. Little boys dressed up as the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers, complete with plastic guns and Stetsons, and swallowed hook, line and sinker the dominant myth. Cowboys and cavalry kept order at the point of a six-shooter. Indians were savages lurking behind every bush and rocky boulder, waiting to wreak mayhem.
Well, think of one of those boys growing up immersed in this Western mystique. He devoured books that hyped the morality play of the Wild West. He loved playing Cowboys and Indians as a kid. He lived vicariously through stories of tough two-fisted white men meting out their brand of vengeance on Indian savages. Television may not have been invented in his day, but he was weaned on the literary equivalents of Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel. Who is he? John Wayne? Andrew Jackson? No, we know him as Adolf Hitler.
We like to think that Hitler was an evil seed, but when you look at his childhood, he was just a regular old German kid. He grew up obsessed with the novels of Karl May, Germany’s answer to Zane Grey. May had never been to America but he made the Western his special genre, cranking out stories about a swaggering white hero called Old Shatterhand who was murder on Indian savages. Hitler never tired of reading about this bloodthirsty hero as a kid, in candlelight and even in moonlight. In fact, he was still reading these stories in his final days in the bunker. And as his surprised generals could tell you, his fantasy world would sometimes get the better of him and he would catch himself referring to the Russians as Redskins.
So where does that leave us? We started out by wondering how anyone can get away with mass murder. Well, here's the key. In order to get away with mass murder you must have a culture that goes gaga over its perpetrators. You don’t find Hollywood's dream factories glorifying the Holocaust or presenting its architects as worthy role models for kids to emulate. But the film vaults are bulging with Hollywood classics that enshrine the Western hero as a worthy role model for children and spin his campaign of extermination against indigenous peoples as a noble cause to identify with and even embrace and emulate. You will never find American kids playing Nazis and Jews in their backyards. But you will find them playing Cowboys and Indians.
That is how you know you have arrived. Your version of genocide doesn’t carry the same level of stigma as the other guy’s. Our own City of the Angels shows how easily it can be done. On the Westside of Los Angeles is a famous museum dedicated to exposing the horror that was Nazi Germany by sensitizing people to the full magnitude of the Holocaust. And on the Valley side, at the foothills of Griffith Park, there is another famous museum dedicated to celebrating the mystique of the American West - and it does just that without ever really shocking us into recognizing the full magnitude of the holocaust perpetrated against its indigenous peoples.
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