A free-verse poem about whether Americans could be compared to the Nazis of World War II. |
I was born in 1944 during World War II. I grew up being told how morally bankrupt the Nazis were. How could anyone hold themselves so superior that murdering millions of innocent, defenseless people became acceptable behavior? Pictures of the concentration death camps filled me with revulsion and contempt for the Nazis. What monsters the Nazis were! Barely human! Later I learned that to purify the Aryan Race, at first undesirable people who were judged not good enough, pure enough were kept from reproducing by being sterilized at government order. This gave way to mass murder in the millions. I felt certain that my people, my fellow Americans were made of better fabric than those Nazi bastards. I felt smug in our nation’s righteousness. Also while I was growing up, I loved Western movies. I learned that Indians out west were worthless, murdering savages. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” However, along the way in my education, I became aware that the White Man had repeatedly lied to the Indian tribes, broke treaties made and kept in good faith by the Indians, had as an official government policy the denial of all legal rights to Indians. Hell, there was even a bounty paid for the scalps of Indians, just like for the hide of wolves. Our government referred to the Indians as a ‘problem’ that could be fixed only by driving tribes from their native lands, including slaughtering Indian women and children while they slept and calling it a military victory, decimating the buffalo so Indians would starve, confining Indians to barren, unproductive lands on reservations where Indian agents cheated them and starved them, and finally sending their children to schools where they were forced to wear White Man’s clothes and speak White Man’s language in order to destroy their culture and heritage ... and we called the Indians the savages! What a shameful chapter in American history. I have read that Adolph Hitler once said he much admired how America had taken care of its problem with its undesirable Native Peoples. Just imagine. Adolph Hitler admired how America mistreated and killed our Indian tribes. Maybe we ARE capable of acting like Nazis! But, hey, that was way back in the late 1800s. We are a different, better class of people today. Then today, 8 November 2011, comes reports that some thirty states in America once had eugenics laws that allowed the sterilization of people judged as a drain on society. Most states stopped the practice after the decades of the 1930s and 1940s. Most states regained their bearings. But not North Carolina! No, they continued for decades sterilizing mostly black girls as young as nine years old. Nine years old! Between 1929 and 1974 (1974!), the state of North Carolina sterilized 7,600 poor, mostly black, people in order to improve the genetic make-up of their population. These were fellow Southerners committing such atrocities! I might have expected it from Yankees … but Southerners! Oh yeah, we did have the KKK and a tradition of lynching uppity black men in the South, didn’t we? Hmmm, I reckon we Americans may not be that far removed from the Nazis after all. Please check out my ten books: http://www.amazon.com/Jr.-Harry-E.-Gilleland/e/B004SVLY02/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0 |