The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective by Kakel Carroll P. III Dr

Author:Kakel, Carroll P., III, Dr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Frontier Genocide

Introductory note

Central to the existence of empires, the ‘frontier’ constitutes a site of imperial politics at the edge of empire, a site crucial to both national security and national prestige. An important spatial feature of territorial empire, it also serves as a springboard for future expansion and/or a defensive barrier for consolidating the expansion previously obtained.1 In the era of the modern nation-state, the ‘frontier’ can function as a marker of national identity, as an instrument of state policy, as an ‘imagined community’ (part of a nation’s political beliefs and myths), or as a term of discourse (whose meanings can change over time). In some historical contexts, it functions as an emotional and psychological divide, as well as a political-geographical line.2 Under settler colonialism, the ‘frontier’ was no longer an intercultural zone of contact but was, instead, perceived as new ‘living space’ into which settlers could continually migrate without regard to indigenous ways of life or to indigenous lives. The coming of ‘frontiers’, to be sure, brings a terrific ‘unsettling’ to indigenous peoples, along with a reordering of power, lands, and resources.3

In a world historical context, the ‘frontiers’ of empire often erupt in violence, warfare, and bloodshed, as the ‘frontier’ becomes the site of widespread and brutal killing, uprooting, and destruction.4 In the academic literature on ‘violence’, scholars have traditionally defined and characterized ‘violence’ as the use of force with an intention to inflict bodily harm, with an emphasis on inter-state war and war-making (against both combatants and non-combatants). In more recent studies, however, scholars have broadened the concept of ‘violence’ from physical harm and killing to other forms of violence used by the modern nation-state in both metropolitan and colonized ‘living space’ (including coercion, a more ‘measured’ use of force, and various forms of social control).5

As comparative historian Charles S. Maier notes, empire’s ambitions, its territorial agenda, and its problematic frontiers ‘create an intimate and recurring bond with the recourse to force’ and extreme political violence. As a result, these imperial projects, he observes, ‘claim their toll of those who resist and often those who are merely in the way’. For the most part, empire’s zones of violence, he claims, almost always lie outside the metropole itself – beyond the ‘frontiers’, in the colonial periphery. For those in the metropole, then, the violence and bloodshed were far away and often not visible. Thus, it was, he says, both ‘easy and necessary to look away from violence erupting at the periphery’. In modern times, he concludes, empires ‘depend upon distance’ and upon ‘rendering violence remote’.6

In many settler-colonial contexts, genocide is closely linked to the processes of imperialism and colonialism.7 In the broader scope of human history, I would not necessarily argue for (or subscribe to) an overdetermined link between settler colonialism and genocide. I do, however, share Patrick Wolfe’s reasoned view that, for ‘alien’ and ‘unwanted’ indigenous populations, ‘settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal’. To be sure, there can be genocide in the absence of

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