It is in this vein that future comparisons of the Itsembambaga and Shoah need to examine the role of established churches in countenancing, if not fostering, genocide. While (in)action of the Vatican during the Holocaust is still roundly debated in ecumenical circles, German Protestant complicity is less commonly debated. Even more relevant to the apparent aberrational participation of Hutu clergymen in the Rwandan genocide is the Žfirst full-length exploration of the German Christian Movement, chillingly self-described as “a people’s church as a community of race and blood” and comprised of ‘storm troopers for Christ.’ Students of genocide await comprehensive, scholarly treatment of the role of the church during the Itsembambaga, harbingers of which can be found in journalistic accounts. Radical Hutus’ ‘Ten Commandments’ of racial extermination (their chosen expression) is paradigmatic of the dangers of para-theology. It is important to recall the foremost pre-Darwinian account of The Origin of Species—Genesis—not because it embodies any scientiŽcally useful anthropogeny, but because racist-driven genocides are compulsively steeped in ancient, mythic notions of blood lines and national origin. This is as true for Kosovo today as it was six decades ago for Nazi Germany and Ž five years ago for Interahamwe-led Rwanda. The truth value of primordial myths is irrelevant to their mobilizational potential. In fact, the less subject to verification the belief, the more unshakeable it may be. Regrettably, Adolph Hitler may indeed have been correct when he wrote that ‘The broad mass of a nation … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.’ When it comes to state-sanctioned mass murder, scholars and academics need to suspend their usual bias of analysis through logic and reason, and stretch to understand both the supernatural and the superevil.

A problem for the Americans all along, however, resided in their intent to prosecute the nazi leadership for waging aggressive war(s) for the purpose of acquiring Lebensraum (living space) at the expense of peoples they considered untemnenschen (subhuman). The sticking point was that from at least as early as the publication of Mein Kampf in 1925, Adolf Hitler had been at pains to explain that he based the nazi Lebensraumpolitik (policy of territorial expansion) on the United States’ design of militarily expropriating American Indians during the nineteenth century. As historian Norman Rich has summarized Hitler’s thesis: ‘Neither Spain nor Britain should be the models for German expansion, but the Nordics of North America, who had ruthlessly pushed aside an inferior race to win for themselves soil and territory for the future. To undertake this essential task, sometimes difficult, always cruel-this was Hitler’s version of the White Man’s Burden.’ So well-known was the correlation between United States and nazi expansionist policies by the war’s end that graduate students were embarking upon studies of it. Plainly, if the United States wished to assume moral high ground at Nuremberg and dispense anything more than mere victor’s justice, it was vital that the country do something concrete to distinguish the contours of its own process of expansion from that pursued by the men in the defendants’ dock. In essence, it was understood that the whole historical pattern of US territorial growth needed to be placed, post hoc, on a footing that could be projected as consisting of acquisition by purchase rather than conquest, and the sooner the better.

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August-September 2023: Etymology isn't Destiny merch and an academic article about lingcomm