And is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian? Is it more afflicting to him to leave the graves of his fathers than it is to our brothers and children? Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous.
--President Andrew Jackson 8 December 1829
By the time it was taken up as part of the ideology of Third Reich in the 1930s, Lebensraum was a relatively new term for an old concept, that of Ostsiedlung. The latter was, itself, merely the realization of a universal and even more antiquated notion: conquest.
Granted, though a bloody proposition, the ‘settling east’ of the Germans of the 12th and 13th Centuries—the Teutonic Order in their ranks—was a far cry from manner of world building the Nazis attempted in the 20th Century. It wasn’t the advance of a state, and it was by no means an action that was particular to the German people. And the Germans of that era aren’t often repudiated for having pursued it. Ostsiedlung was a pale shadow of the Roman expansion, a mock imperialism, if you will… nothing on the order of Hitlerism, however. Still, it set a precedent. It became part of an identity, a ‘spirit’ that would eventually include the famous Protestant work ethic and a remarkable talent for speculative thinking.
The word itself—Lebensraum—was coined by German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel in 1901. For Ratzel, the geopolitical state was more than just a legal entity or lines on a map. It was an organism. Its borders weren’t demarcations so much as a skin or membrane: the dynamic, physical margin of a life form that was always either expanding or contracting, depending on its state of health. Expansionism, colonialism—aggression, in fact—naturally, these symptoms implied a state of geopolitical bonne santé. On the other hand, with Ratzel’s conception of state health, an issue was raised. What was to be made of cases of aggression that radically exceed the bounds of reason, of good health… that seem to take on the aspect of a cancer? Malignant growth is as much a sign of the imminent decline of the organism as military defeat or isolationism, is it not?
Case in point: the Third Reich. How else but as a case of inoperable geopolitical cancer would the Ratzelian geographer presume to describe Nazi Germany? Not all growth is good growth. Aggression isn’t always a sign of good health. That said, it behooves us to put the question to the Lebesraumers of our day: is there ever a case in which bona fide aggression is healthy? Cancerous or not, every case of aggression since Nuremberg has invited a dreadful question: to what extent do aggression and colonialism actually imply a people’s inclination to go over the top, geopolitically speaking, to become sufficiently violent as to be associated with Napoleonic France, Shaka’s Zulu Empire, Georgian or Victorian England, or, indeed, Nazi Germany?
Here is a question that must haunt any thinker of a mind to participate in the building of an empire.
The Final Solution—the fruit of Aktion T4, the Third Reich’s infamous euthanasia program, which claimed the lives of 275,000 mentally ill Germans, including one Aloisia Veit, cousin to Hitler himself—with little controversy, it’s deemed the most egregious case of genocide in human history. And yet the subject of its genesis remains, not only a matter for conjecture, but a hot topic. A hot topic indeed…
The Final Solution, was it simply a scheme hatched by a talented madman augmented by a state-of-the-art PR department? Were a generation of Germans effectively tricked into participation?—scared into participating?—mesmerized by Hitler’s remarkable persona? Not even a decade had passed between the Reichstag Fire and the implementation of the Final Solution. Could the mechanisms of totalitarian social control have been that effective that quickly? Was Hitler that good at his craft? This seems implausible. Was this generation, then, to blame? or (if there really is such a thing) the German race? Was the Holocaust, indeed, the expression of a people’s depravity, and Hitler merely a symptom? This theory puts the burden of accountability where it makes sense to put it, but is wanting for a coherent etiology. (It’s tantamount to George W. Bush asserting the existence of an ‘Axis of Evil’ or explaining the actions of al-Qaeda on 9-11 to an ill-disposition to what we call ‘freedom’—‘freedom envy’, for lack of a better word¹.) Such theories explain very little, and usually eventuate in ignominious labeling and thought-terminating clichés. Frankfurt School theories tend to finger sociological bugbears like authoritarian parenting, sexual repression, and a culturally specific bent for obedience to authority. Yet, where such theories have merit and are interesting (Erich Fromm, in particular, analyses both Hitler and the authoritarian personality type brilliantly), they are highly speculative and, for the most part, don’t provide a political ontology.
In the case of the Final Solution, the question ‘How could this happen?’ remains largely unanswered.
So, what if we were to formulate an answer based, not on race theory, mass psychology, or dubious clichés, but on Ratzelian geopolitics? What if we sought it in the dynamics of geopolitical aggression? Could the Holocaust be credibly understood as consequence of Ratzelian ‘growth’? After all, part and parcel of the Third Reich’s expansionism was the removal of the Jewry of Eastern Europe (to Madagascar according to Eichmann’s plan). When such couldn’t be accomplished by deportation, wasn’t mass murder the logical next step? When unwanted peoples can’t be removed, how else but via extermination is Lebensraum to be created?
For obvious—and some not obvious—reasons, it is difficult for us to take up the latter question. This difficulty is compounded by our unwillingness to even try to understand the Holocaust. After all, how can we frame this act as anything but a gratuitous crime against humanity, in light of which a handful of rightfully comminated heads were noosed at Nuremburg. It is an obscenity—is it not?—even to suggest there was more to the Final Solution than Hitlerian madness wrought on bad people. We are compelled to call its authors evil and be done with the matter. On the other hand, for less than obvious reasons, doing so must leave us with an uneasy feeling. If localizing evil in Nazi Germany—in Nazis themselves—and dismissing Hitler as a monotesticular madman is effective as warding off gesture, it is a delusive one.
We kid ourselves when we try to project the drive for Lebensraum on ‘bad guys’ or ‘rogue nations’. We lie to ourselves whenever we attempt moralistically to disavow ties to the likes of Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Moralists who are themselves morally conflicted—or else poor ethical thinkers—always wax indignant at efforts to resist such a disavowal. They, too, lie—to themselves and to the rest of us. (Indeed, more often than it is a sign of stupidity, protesting the unjust application of moral equivalence is a sign of bad faith, of cautiously dissembled ideological ruse and a morally conflicted position.)
It was an American, Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials, who introduced to post-war geopolitics the weighty expression ‘supreme crime of a war of aggression’. And—notwithstanding the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, and numerous Third World proxy wars—it is the stated position of the United States that wars of aggression are not to be tolerated, that actors involved with the perpetration of the supreme crime must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (unless, of course, they’re U.S. Presidents). If hypocritical, it’s a sound legal and ethical position. But how authentic is it? How sound is American moral authority on this subject? In what ways have we better managed our nation’s hunger for Lebensraum as compared to other nations?
Those among us who speak of ‘American Exceptionalism’ must be willing to speak to this.
Der Hunger nach Lebensraum, in plain American English, is Manifest Destiny. Coined circa 1845 by pundit John L. O’Sullivan, the latter term is as close a correlate to the former as is to be found in the history of ideology. (O’Sullivan first used the term in an essay advocating for the Anschluss of Texas, an action that—to no-one’s surprise—resulted in the Mexican-American War. That said, the idea to which the term was applied—and the bulk of the ideological framework supporting the cause of what we now call American Exceptionalism—had its origins in policy and doctrine established in the years 1809-1829, policy and doctrine that, I would suggest, constituted a sort of Thermidorian reaction to Jeffersonian democratic theory.) Granted, Manifest Destiny was never imbued with as much explicit theory as was loaded into the concept of Lebensraum by Ratzel and Nazi ideologues. When John L. O’Sullivan or President James K. Polk anointed we Anglo-Americans as inheritors of the North American Continent, neither went so far as to postulate the notion of a master race and to base it in ethnological theory as did Nazi ‘Race Pope’ Hans F. K. Günther. (To the extent that such notions have been taken up by fringe groups in the United States—White Supremacists, for example, whose notion of Christian Identity, or ‘CI’ is analogous to that which was propounded by Günther—they have yet to enter the level of authentic public discourse.) All the same, as was the case with Lebensraum theory, with the development of the theory of Manifest Destiny, the seeds of a Zeitgeist were sown. A population, over time, learned a mindset, a worldview (eine Weltanschauung). This worldview included the following: 1—that the continent is ours; 2—that our claim has been willed by Providence (a subtler, more Deistic way of saying ‘Gott mit uns’ or ‘nobiscum deus’); and 3—that American expansionism is, for this reason, the work of God.
Simply put, we learned to accept the belief that God had signed on to the plunder of the Mexicans and the Indians. If the mission of the Teutonic Order was Ostsiedlung, ours was taming the Wild, Wild West. Unwittingly, some 146 years after this worldview was given birth, President George H.W. Bush managed to encapsulate the spirit validating Manifest Destiny in four simple words. (In doing so, he revealed the extent to which it still informs American thought.) Those words: “What we say goes.” So, has history vindicated God’s decision in our case? Was our conquest of the north of Mexico and our removal of Native American nations justified in a way that Hitler’s plunder of Europe was not? If so, how? What is good as opposed to bad plunder?
Making the Devil’s Advocate argument for the logical equivalence of Nazi plunder with that of any aspiring empire in history (let alone ours) is an exhausting and largely pointless exercise. If the ethical valence of aggression doesn’t shift depending on whether it is prosecuted a ‘good and sane’ or a ‘bad and irrational’ actor, the radical nature of violence of the Third Reich renders such an argument moot. Of course, the manner in which Holocaust victims were disposed of matters to any consideration of the gravity of the crime. Of course, such distinguishes the Holocaust from any other act of genocide. With the advent of Nazi Germany, something new was added to the metaphysical reality of warfare and conquest, something that clearly did not exist before, even during the greatest excesses of World War I. (Truth be told, the Third Reich wasn’t alone in participating in it: consider the radically violent nature of the bombing of Dresden, the bombing of Tokyo—the use of nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Thus, to equate Manifest Destiny with Hitler’s radical conception of Lebensraum or the Native American genocide to that of the Ashkenazim during the Third Reich is to perhaps risk misrepresenting each of these terms. (And in a way that has nothing to do with orders of magnitude or Adolph Hitler’s biography.) Each needs to be framed in its proper context if it is to be adequately understood.
That said, we do well be wary of the common temptation to shield our history as a conquering—and genocidal—nation from a literal reductio ad Hitlerum. Allow me to repeat myself. The claim of absolute moral superiority is no less delusive than that of absolute moral equivalence. The way of the American apologist is also ridiculous.
The United States, in 1845 had designs on Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California; Hitler’s Germany, by the late 1930s, had developed an appetite for Europe, an appetite whetted by revanchism and its Leader’s inimitable megalomania. The United States, circa 1830, was grappling with the question of what to do with her natives, specifically the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama; the Third Reich, roughly a century later was preparing to answer die Judenfrage. That the history of the German approach to its problems is emblazoned in our memory is hardly surprising. The crimes of the Third Reich are epochal and the legacy of a failed nation. That we tend to overlook or airbrush 19th Century American history, this also is less than surprising. The ‘crimes’ of the burgeoning American Empire, read in the context of Western history, are—or were, then—typical of ascending superpower, and are the record of a successful nation. They were merely a phase, a chapter in the adolescence of Washington’s Infant Empire. (Were they not?)
So, how do we do justice to our development, to the so-called crimes of our development? How do we best frame a discussion of Polk’s War and Jackson era Indian removal, of the famous Trail of Tears?
Here, we have an advantage dissidents of the Third Reich would have lacked in attempting to critique Hitler and the history of the Germanic peoples. (And it’s plausible that lack of this advantage had much to do with what the budding German Empire made of itself.) The First Amendment, a deep-seated cultural disdain for censorship and—notwithstanding the nibbling attacks on it by the reigning Presidential Administration and three or four of its recent predecessors—the codified principle of the free flow of information related to the actions of the United States Government… As long as it’s with legally acquired information, we are entitled to publish inconvenient facts with respect to the nation and its history. If some of these facts seem undeniable, for instance,
• the fact that, from its outset, in the Red Stick War and in General Andrew Jackson’s assault on Fort Gadsden (a.k.a. ‘Negro Fort’), which precipitated the first of the three Seminole Wars, the United States’ conquest of Spanish Florida was racially motivated; the act that it was prosecuted in order to preclude an African-American insurrection, to secure slaveholder’s property rights over black slaves in the Southeastern United States, and to further the notion of Manifest Destiny (a.k.a. American Exceptionalism)…
• the fact that in April of 1846, the United States provoked war with Mexico in order to give President James K. Polk a pretext for invading California, the fact that said war was not less racially motivated than the conquest of Florida…
• the fact that, together with the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines and Shaka Zulu’s assaults on South Africa and Zimbabwe, actions of the United States taken against the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern United States (including the Seminole Wars of 1814-19, 1835-42, and 1855-58, and Jackson-era removals of the Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations) constituted genocide on a scale comparable to that of the great ethnic cleansings of the 20th Century²…
consider how we might be given to interpret these facts—to read this history—had the First Amendment not been in place or had the modern PR industry been invented, not at the turn of the 20th century—as a reaction to the Progressive Era—but during the Administrations of Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, when U.S. policymakers were beginning to feel the need to steer public policy and the public discourse away from Jeffersonian democratic theory and in a direction favorable to Madison’s ‘opulent minority’. (Had one or both of the latter been the case, one has to wonder if American expansionist policies might not have eventuated in the taking of the whole of Mexico—as well as the annexation of Central America—and if American slavery might not have persisted well into the 20th Century.) Free speech and a free press have, indeed, served us well. It’s with a critical eye that we size up a character like Andrew Jackson, the United States’ first truly bellicose Commander-in-Chief, a man who, throughout his career as conqueror and a politician, earned a reputation for flouting international law for his own and the nation’s aggrandizement. Had America lacked a free press—or had Jackson had an Eddie Bernays or Joseph Goebbels—Old Hickory might well have escaped the ill-effects of a problematic reputation, and perhaps become our Napoleon. As it stands, we’re obliged to question such a Commander-in-Chief—to question such leadership—not to mention the spirit of his negotiations with the Five Civilized Tribes of the American South.
‘Spirit’ is the word I choose here—mostly, for lack of a better one. ‘Spirit’, a word with which I mean to encapsulate, at once, the behavior of the actor (Jackson), his ideological and religious leanings, as well as his nationalistic disposition. ‘Attitude’ would work, given its late 20th Century and present day usage. It makes for a hard-boiled grabber.
A general, a president, a sharp knife… a Commander-in-Chief with an attitude… it takes a bad ass to turn out a kick-ass nation.
Reagan’s City on a Hill, no less. Were I bad screenwriter, I might settle for ‘attitude’. But the word is too characterological. It smacks too much of the man’s personality, of an individual pathology. I feel the need to convey something of the extent to which Jackson’s actions were less about Jackson than the idea of which this Commander-in-Chief seems to have been an embodiment: that of Manifest Destiny. Thus, I refer to the “spirit” of Jackson’s approach to his nation’s Indian problem. ‘Spirit’ suffices. On the other hand, spirit isn’t Geist.
In speaking of the ‘spirit’ of the Age of Manifest Destiny, we largely fail to communicate the political and ontological connotations the German word brings with it. And, remember, it’s a political ontology we’re after. It’s not in a psychological but a politico-ontological context that we want to frame the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes and the Mexican-American War. We aren’t assigning blame or calling out world historical villains. We simply need a credible answer to the vexing, yet less than scientific question, ‘How could this happen?’ How is it that the morality of a people allows it to carry out genocide? For, clearly, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a village to wipe out another village, at least when we’re talking about an era that predates weapons of mass destruction. Even Hitler—given the advanced technology and the Wehrmacht he had at his disposal—even he couldn’t have brought about the Holocaust without the complicity and the participation of the German people. And not even the most sophisticated propaganda, not even the greatest PR effort known to man, could have tricked the latter into mass murder against its will. Which is why both individual and mass psychology are, to some extent, irrelevant to the search for answer our question. From the standpoint of individual psychology, the reader has reason to scorn the comparison of actors like Hitler, Stalin and Dick Cheney with the likes of Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, Cecil Rhodes, King Leopold II of Belgium, Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush, and Mao Zedong. Though each bears responsibility for mass killings and can be credibly dubbed a world historical villain, apple-to-apple comparisons are ludicrous. What’s more they’re largely a waste of time and breath.
It’s neither a mens rea nor a case of mass psychosis that we’re investigating. It’s something on the order of what philosophers call ‘ethical substance’.
In the mid-1930s, during Hitler’s methodical rise to power, the philosopher Heidegger made a famous speech in which he referred to the “historical, spiritual [geistig] mission” of the Volk (i.e. of the German people). A month later came the Night of the Long Knives. Two months later—as Napoleon had 130 years earlier—Hitler effectively crowned himself Emperor. If none of these moments actually decided what was to take place in the decade to come, and all were indicative of a certain Ratzelian ‘growth’ of the relatively new German nation, if asked which of the three—or if any of them—truly betrayed how far the Third Reich was going to be willing to go in order to pursue the most radical conception of Lebensraum (global Empire), I’d be inclined to choose the first. Why? Because any Hitler could have been Hitler during the Third Reich. (Jackson could have been Hitler. Polk could have been Hitler. Given a little more talent, as Reich Chancellor in Nazi Germany, either Dick Cheney or General Curtis Lemay might have done worse!) Indeed, any ambitious adventurer with both the talent to fill a vacuum of power and a radically destructive personality could have led the Third Reich’s campaigns of aggression and genocide. If a necessary condition to events like genocide and radical acts of aggression, the Leader isn’t sufficient. But, then, neither are those led. What is both sufficient and necessary to the event is a perfect storm of ethical substance. The situation of the everyman—of ‘das Man’—must be such that no amount of fear and outrage and no level of threat or moral compunction is able to delegitimize either the role of Leader or the notion of one’s duty to country. The sanctity of the ‘spiritual’ mission Heidegger alludes to in the Rectorship Address must be absolute. (Simply put, one must exist in a society ripe for political fascism.) In such a situation, those being led to mass murder must do mass murder. Those being led to fight a war of aggression must fight—or at least support—said war of aggression. No questions asked… at least at the level of public discourse.
This is where a people needs its gods. It needs to hear its “Gott mit uns” or “One Nation Under God” or “Allahu Akbar!”. The greatest extremes of human behavior tend to require a base level of divine inspiration. (To lesser and subtler acts of violence, anonymous voice of authority will do—for instance, that which, I submit, commands behind the veiled invocation ‘Live Free or Die!’.) Imbued with something of the divine, the executive order carries more force than even force of law. This is why ideology matters. Indeed, ideology is the fascist’s point of access to the extra-legal force brought to bear by the divine.
Yet, ideology is not something the ambitious fascist can install on his own or have put in place overnight. (Here’s the rub for any would-be 21st Century CEO/Philosopher King or American Emperor.) It’s created over generations, with respect to—if not in competition with—existing traditions, and requires institutions (legal, religious, literary, educational, and so on and so forth). Not even a Hitler could invoke Germania… if Germania weren’t already an ideal and if he lacked rudimentary institutional support.
Which is why, when asked to explain how it is—in roughly twenty years—the United States made the transition from a Jeffersonian to a Jacksonian state, I’d be disinclined to take as my starting point either Jackson or Jefferson—at least in so far as concerns either’s role as a statesman (or fascist). Instead, I’d look to the American ideology, or, rather, to the latter’s sources. I’d look to the notion of American Exceptionalism and to its foundations in Natural and Constitutional law.
It so happens there is a single Supreme Court Case that provides us with an avenue to formulating such an explanation. (If nothing else, it’s an excellent start.)
Consider Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823).
It’s a SCOTUS decision familiar to anyone who has studied international law, and for good reason. The principle it embodies is the essence of colonialism. (It’s only fitting it was given precedent by an American court!) It’s known as the Discovery Doctrine. It’s had much to do with the creation of the Third World as such—as an uncanny reflection of the geopolitical failings of the West for the past 200-250 years. And, I would submit, the reasoning it reflects persists in the ongoing efforts toward financial globalization pursued by the G-7 and a handful of powerful multinational corporations.
By the controversial logic of the Discovery Doctrine, subjects of a recognized sovereign power may ‘discover’ territories deemed terra nullius, i.e. territories not under the protection of another recognized power. The long and the short of ‘discovery’ is that native or ‘aboriginal’ occupants of such territories—of ‘no-man’s-lands’—are, from the moment of discovery, effectively dispossessed of them. (That is, if possession of land even occurs to said occupants as an ontological possibility! According to the ethos of some indigenous populations, that which the European might call terra nullius is rightly terra omnibus. Ownership of land, if even conceivable, is ownership in common. Strictly speaking, land can’t be possessed³.) If they had certain rights of occupancy—what was sometimes called a ‘right of soil’—they can’t own land, not as a subject of a recognized power can. (Herein lies the tragedy of commons in terra nullius.)
Truth be told, the natives of North America’s no-man’s-lands suffered from subhuman status. Much as did Jews, Roma, and anyone else who fell into the category of Lebensunwertes Leben under the auspices of the Third Reich. What they lacked—indeed, in a manner that would make sense to any Right Hegelian—was proper recognition. Unrecognized, they remained in a legal and ethical terra nullius perfectly comparable to that of the territories they occupied—and defended, in many cases. The reality of their situation—in some cases—made ethnic cleaning inevitable. In the United States circa 1800, it made Indian removal an inevitability.
Why an inevitability? I mean, given the power of early American ideals, of Jeffersonian ideals…
By turn of the 19th Century, notwithstanding Jeffersonian democratic theory—not to mention the assiduous efforts by some the Five Civilized Tribes to assimilate to life in the Southeastern United States circa 1800 (some tribe members actually owned slaves and converted to Christianity!)—the ideology of American Exceptionalism was already well entrenched and ripe for implementation by the time Jefferson took office. (It was the fruit both of Natural Law theory as developed by Grotius and others and of the ethos of the conquistador.) It was Jefferson himself who largely mapped out the removal of the Five Tribes… Jefferson who, for all his high-sounding ideals and noble intentions, was not less of an acolyte of Manifest Destiny than was John Quincy Adams or the executive who actually signed off on the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson. Ultimately, Jeffersonian democratic theory, though not unimportant to the framing of the U.S. Constitution—and though a noteworthy advance on previous European democratic thought—was not compatible with the American ideology, either in Jefferson’s day or in what has followed since. Imbued by the spirit of American Exceptionalism—ironically enough—it seems, Jefferson himself was primed for a reaction against it. Actions taken by Jefferson as President (the Louisiana Purchase, for instance)—and, certainly, letters laying out his plans for Indian removal—would seem to attest to this. Understand that, in and of itself, Thomas Jefferson’s Thermidorian reaction to himself was neither a validation of Manifest Destiny nor an augur of the victory of the spirit of American Exceptionalism over American reason or American morality. It doesn’t allow us to designate Jefferson as the architect of the ethnic cleansing of the Five Tribes, any more than Andrew Jackson’s signature on the Indian Removal Act of 1830 allows us to construe him as such a figure. Jackson was but a man of action, a man afforded a plan; Johnson v. M'Intosh was but a single SCOTUS decision, one made with respect to case that did not directly concern either the probity or Constitutionality of ethnic cleansing in the United States. The Indian Removal Act, the destruction of Negro Fort, the Treaties of Dancing Rabbit Creek and New Echota… in themselves, none of these steps taken toward genocide were as consequential as the context in which they occurred, the context by virtue of which they were rendered a possibility.
Allow me to repeat myself… to do so a second time… Any Hitler could have been Hitler during the Third Reich. History, geopolitics, and the German Ideology made this so. Likewise, in Early 19th Century America, any Jackson could been Jackson, and any Jefferson reversed himself—indeed, to the point of ethical and political inversion—given the Ratzelian hunger of the young republic and the afflatus of its muse.
Notes:
1—“America was targeted for attack because we are the brightest beacon for freedom in the world.”
2—To put the Trail of Tears in perspective, the number of Cherokee that died as a result of the removal of the Cherokee nation in 1838 was the equivalent of over 75 million Americans today. (N.b.—to put this figure itself in perspective, the number of Ashkenazi Jews murdered during the Holocaust was equivalent to roughly 211 million, the number of Tutsi killed in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 to 224 million.)
3—I think here of the ethos of the Iroquois Confederation (among a number of other Native American nations) as regards ownership of land. Though beneficiaries of both an advanced economy and a sophisticated understanding of the democratic process (a participatory and particularly egalitarian process), the Iroquois had no correlate for ownership of land and legal title.
© 2013 Gentil Aquitaine. All rights reserved.
**PDF of Lebensraum in Context**
