Is Genocide Inevitable Under Fascism? Let's Take A Look-See

Herero survivors 

Can you point to Namibia on a map? Señor Trumpanzee couldn't even pronounce it at a meeting with African leaders. But when he was a dumb little Trump, failing all his classes, it was much easier to find Namibia on a map-- because it had a different name, a name with an excellent hint: South West Africa. Presumably even a dumb little Trumpanzee could figure that out on a map. I collected stamps so I was always interested in other countries. Other has ever interested Trump except himself. In 1882 Chancellor Otto von Bismark gave a German merchant "protection" to set up in southwest Africa. Two years later the German flag was flying over the territory. Once diamonds, gold, copper and platinum were discovered, German settlers and military units started moving in in significant numbers. By 1886, Hermann's pappy, Heinrich Ernst Göring, was appointed Commissioner. He created a dual legal system there, one for whites and one for non-whites, leading to clashes and eventually to a series of full scale wars, which became a wars of extermination, also a way for the Germans to grab all the native peoples' land and to use them as slaves (calling them terrorists). The worst of the genocides-- with an actual Vernichtungsbefehl-- an extermination order-- came in 1904 against the Herero people and then the Nama. The Germans developed a string of concentration camps to lock up-- and exterminate-- the natives. The Germans were kicked out of South West Africa in 1915 and fter World War I, it became a protectorate of South Africa, In 1990 an independent country, Namibia, or, as Señor T likes to call it, Nambia.

Yesterday I met a Catholic priest while I was waiting for a prescription to be filled at a Von's. He said he reads DWT but I didn't get the idea that he's progressive. He asked me a really strange question, especially for a man of the cloth. He wanted to know if I thought all of Trump's supporters should be consigned to Hell. I said it wouldn't be fair to punish people who were addicted to drugs or people with really low IQs, pretty typical Trump supporters, but the conscious ones, for sure. I couldn't tell if he agreed with me or not, but he certainly took Hell more literally than I do. I got back to him with a question about the Germans in South West Africa. During the genoicide German researchers back in Berlin wanted dead bodies or just heads to experiment on. Basically they wanted to prove, scientifically, that Africans are inferior beings, Untermenschen. What the Germans did in South West Africa was a precursor to what they did some years later in Europe, particularly to Jews, Roma (gypsies), gays and Russians. But what I asked my new priest friend is if what the German's actually proven was that they themselves are Untermenschen for the way they interacted with other mensche. I couldn't get an answer out of him on that either but he seemed touched when I read him a translation of General Lothar von Trotha's extermination order:

The Herero are no longer German subjects. The Herero people will have to leave the country. If the people refuse I will force them with cannons to do so. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, with or without firearms, with or without cattle, will be shot. I won’t accommodate women and children anymore. I shall drive them back to their people or I shall give the order to shoot at them.

You know how competent the Germans can be. They killed 80% of the Herero, many by shooting them but also many by preventing them from having any access to water, even poisoning wells. Holocaust?

Yesterday, The Times of Israel published a story about the descendants of the murdered Herero are trying to get a formal apology and reparations from Germany.

Germany on Wednesday handed back human remains seized from Namibia a century ago after the slaughter of indigenous people under its colonial rule, but angry descendants slammed Berlin for failing to properly atone for the dark chapter.

Herero chief Vekuii Rukoro, whose ancestors were among the tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people massacred between 1904 and 1908, said the handover ceremony should have taken place not in a Berlin church, but a German government building.

He also accused Berlin of taking too long to formally apologize for what is often called the first genocide of the 20th century.

...Many were murdered by German imperial troops while others, driven into the desert or rounded up in prison camps, died from thirst, hunger and exposure.

Dozens were beheaded after their deaths, their skulls sent to researchers in Germany for discredited “scientific” experiments that purported to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans.

In some instances, captured Herero women were made to boil the decapitated heads and scrape them clean with shards of glass.

Research carried out by German professor Eugen Fischer on the skulls and bones resulted in theories later used by the Nazis to justify the murder of Jews.