Letters from the Desk of the Editor: Letter 1
Andrew Jackson.
I watched a documentary piece today on Andrew Jackson on the History Channel. Some people say he was a great man. Some people called him a devil. I heard one Native American woman call him Hitler and she compared the Trail of Tears to the holocaust.
Why?
Why? Do you realize what you’re actually saying? Yeah, it sucks , what happened to your people. It’s a travesty against human nature. I’m not arguing that, not by a long shot. But the man wasn’t Hitler and there is a huge gap between the two and between the fates of the two peoples.
First of all, you weren’t being summarily executed. You were forced to move and many people died during that move and it is horrible, but you were not being executed simply for your race. And believe me when I say, it would have been possible and, especially, for this monster as you call him, it would not have been too hard for the armies of the United States, the same armies that forced them to move, to simply have had you lined up and shot, babies, children, old women- but they didn’t. What the Americans did was no different from what the Romans did in Africa and throughout Europe, what the Egyptians, the Persians, what every empire has done as it expanded. Does that make it alright,? No. But it doesn’t make it genocide either.
Second, you were given an opportunity to leave or follow the rules of the State that were in place and your people sat there, hats in hands, convinced that they could stay and not change. And like I said, it is sad, horrible what happened along that trail but your people were given options and unfortunately for them, they chose poorly. America was changing into an empire, into the country that it is now and unfortunately, your people refused to change with it. Is it a travesty that treaties were broken? That people were killed? No one is arguing that but, again, it is a far cry from genocide.
And I suppose I’ll make this my final point. I’ve been to Aushwitz. I’ve seen mass graves. I’ve sat down and talked to an old man who had been there once, as a boy, who’d been experimented upon, who’d seen his own brother turn into a living skeleton before being herded into a gas chamber, and that was the last time he saw his brother, but he saw the smoke taken off into the wind.
I suppose what I’m saying is… I’ve been to Aushwitz, and I’ve been to Oklahoma and while Oklahoma might not be a far cry from hell, it’s a far cry from Aushwitz.