Israeli Chivingtons and Baums

Some of you may have heard of John Chivington and the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864:

John Milton Chivington (January 27, 1821 – October 4, 1894) was a former Methodist pastor who served as colonel in the United States Volunteers during the Colorado War and the New Mexico Campaigns of the American Civil War. In 1862, he was in the Battle of Glorieta Pass against a Confederate supply train.

Chivington gained infamy for leading a 700-man force of Colorado Territory militia during the massacre at Sand Creek in November 1864. An estimated 70–163 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho – about two-thirds of whom were women, children, and infants – were killed and mutilated by his troops. Chivington and his men took scalps and other body parts as battle trophies, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia.

The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War conducted an investigation of the massacre, but no charges were brought against Chivington or other participants. The closest thing to a punishment Chivington suffered was the effective end of his political aspirations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chivington

But I'll bet few of you realize that L. Frank Baum, author of the popular children's novel The Wizard of Oz, was a fierce advocate for the extermination of Native Americans:

He was a devoted family man, apparently a sensitive and kind individual, and he wrote books that were forerunners of today's concerns with diversity. But in his newspaper he twice advocated genocide of Native Americans.

From 1888 to 1891, nine years before he published the first of his fourteen Oz books, Baum lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He edited a newspaper during the terrible time of anti-Indian feeling leading up to the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee. He twice wrote editorials calling for the extermination of the entire Sioux Nation. Baum was not alone in his horrifying calls for genocide. Many historians believe that it was newspaper-induced hysteria that led to the massacre.

Baum's books are a sharp contrast to this call of genocide. Difference is valued in his stories; he describes groups of creatures with different characteristics and beliefs who work out the logistics of living together in respect and harmony. Oz is a multicultural kingdom. How could someone with such a vision have called for the mass murder of an entire group of people?

The fabric of Oz is love, the emotional connection, life-form to life-form, that creates respect, recognition and acceptance. Baum didn't practice that with the Lakota. Instead he abstracted these people, stripped away their humanness, and turned them into a concept, a "vanishing race", thereby setting up the conditions to think them out of existence.

The gift that Baum gives us is the mirroring of ourselves. Genocide happens not only because of the action of evil people, but also because of the inaction of the good-hearted. Baum knee-jerked the "right," acceptable, normal, main-stream reaction during the fabricated Indian scare of 1890, and was, thereby, one more agent of the genocide. Had he stood up to the government, had he questioned, as a good journalist should, the reports of "Indian uprisings," and had he been joined by journalists around the state and country, the massacre might never have happened.

http://www.dickshovel.com/roeschbaum.html

A similar sad disaster is playing out today in Gaza. Bibi NetanYahoo, his manhood threatened by his inability to destroy the sovereign nations of Syria and Iran, is taking out his frustrations on the hapless, nearly helpless population of Gaza. In this endeavor, he and his IDF are the spitting image of John Chivington and his Bloodless 3rd Colorado Cavalry who reveled in the slaughter of unarmed men, women, and children 150 years ago.

And what about people like Dr. Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli scholar and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University? He apparently is telling his fellow Israelis in articles and on live TV and radio, that raping Palestinian mothers and sisters is more than an acceptable tactic to finish the genocide of Gaza:

http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/07/academic-sic-calls-for-raping-all-palestinian-women-stars-of-david-sickness/

He is joined by Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked, who published on Facebook a call for genocide of the Palestinians which received thousands of "likes":

It is a call for genocide because it declares that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”

It is a call for genocide because it calls for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes

Back in the days of Chivington and Baum, Americans used to justify the slaughter of Indian women and children with the phrase "nits make lice". In their calls for violence and genocide of the Palestinians, Dr. Kedar and Ms. Shaked are echoing L. Frank Baum and others whose words urged the rape and slaughter of American Indians.

These Israeli Chivingtons and Baums should remind us that a holocaust does not happen merely because good people do nothing. It happens because people who represent the best their society has to offer, including clergy, politicians, and academics, demand that the slaughter take place. It happened that way in Colorado in 1864, it happened that way in Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s, and now it's happening that way in Gaza.

And the rest of us did not stop it then, and sadly it doesn't look like we're going to stop it now.