ABSTRACT

The Holocaust, that is, the intentional murder of European Jewry during World War II, is historically and phenomenologically unique. The Native American people have been the subject of exploitation, despoliation, rape, violence, and murder since the arrival of Columbus. This centuries-long record of subjugation and abuse is incontrovertible and tragic. After American independence, between 1787 and 1820, eleven denominational and interchurch groups created missionary agencies, the most active being the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, an interdenominational group with a predominance of Presbyterian and Congregational missionaries founded in 1810. After the Civil War, President Ulysses Grant's "peace policy", begun in 1869, encouraged still more intensive missionary activity under the leadership of the Quakers. Turkish policy reproduces medieval procedures of cultural homogenization, not modern procedures of physical genocide. In the Shoah, the focused object, given its racial determinants, was physical genocide.