In his book Nation, State and Economy, published in 1919, Ludwig von Mises wrote of how nineteenth-century imperialist powers often preceded their wars of “conquest, subjugation, and extermination” with the dehumanization of their victims through massive propaganda campaigns which then continued during the wars and beyond. He noted that German, British, and American imperialist powers had waged wars against what they called “the lower races” — people who are supposedly “not ready for self government and never will be.” Mises highlighted British imperialism in India and the Congo and American imperialism against “the Asiatic peoples” of the Philippines and elsewhere.
The U.S. government’s twenty-five year war of genocide (1865-1890) against the Plains Indians should be added to this list. General William Tecumseh Sherman was the commanding general of this “war” for the duration. (How ironic that his parents included an Indian name, Tecumseh, when they named him). “The Indians give a fair illustration of the fate of the negroes if they are released from control of the whites,” said Sherman as quoted by biographer Michael Fellman in Citizen Sherman. Sherman, wrote Fellman, called for “a racial cleansing of the land” by killing off as many Indians as possible. “All the Indians will have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers,” said Lincoln’s favorite general. Fellman notes that Sherman gave his subordinate, fellow Civil War “hero” General Phil Sheridan, “prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men” when attacking Indian villages. It would be too time consuming to distinguish between them, said Sherman.
When the Filipinos finally separated from the Spanish empire the U.S. government engulfed them into the American empire by killing at least 200,000 of them (as many as a million according to some historians) during the 1899 Philippine Insurrection. In his biography of Teddy Roosevelt entitled Bully Boy, Jim Powell wrote of how Roosevelt “justified” the mass murder of Filipinos by calling them “Chinese half breeds, savages, barbarians, a wild and ignorant people.” A “lower race,” in other words.
The conquest and subjugation of Hawaii occurred in the early 1890s when the U.S. government sent soldiers to Hawaii who literally held the Hawaiian king at bayonet point and forced him to sign a new constitution that disenfranchised all Asians as “an inferior race” and empowered wealthy American land owners like James Dole, who then founded the Dole Fruit Company. Hawaii was formally annexed in 1898. In a well-received 1895 speech in Boston, the eugenicist President Teddy Roosevelt bloviated that “I feel it was a crime against the white race that we did not annex Hawaii three years ago.”
This brief historical sketch brings us to how the American and Israeli militaries of today have adopted this nineteenth-century demonization and war of extermination against what they consider to be another “lesser race,” the Palestinians. A May 21, 2025 headline in the French publication Le Monde declares that “In Israel, rhetoric dehumanizing Palestinians and calls for eradicating Gaza have become commonplace.”
The dehumanization of Palestinians by “government ministers, lawmakers, military experts, and public figures,” writes journalist Luc Bronner in Le Monde, has been used “to justify the mass killing of Palestinians civilians, especially women and children, the destruction of entire cities, the concentration of more than two million people in conditions deemed unlivable by international organizations, incitement to forced emigration, and the blockade of food and humanitarian aid to the point of famine.” More than 53,000 Palestinians have been killed, “a majority of them women and children,” and “over 60% of buildings have been destroyed.”
All of this was supported by Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defense minister, who called all Palestinians “human animals.” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich gushed that in a few months “Gaza will be totally destroyed.” Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has been calling for the dropping of nuclear bombs on Gaza and destroying the remaining food sources there because all the Palestinians “need to starve.”
Nissim Vaturi, the charming president of the Knesset has called for a genocidal war that would “wipe Gaza off the face of the Earth.” Major General Giora Eiland also called Palestinians “human animals” and called for making Gaza “unlivable” while denouncing all the women of Gaza as “mothers, sisters, or wives of Hamas murderers.” A recent article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (May 20) wrote that “Starving Gazan babies aren’t a problem as long as there are no photos of them” that others around the world can see.
In short, the twenty-first century Holocaust that is occurring in Gaza has its roots in the ways of war of mid-to-late nineteenth-century American imperialism. It is being “justified” by a modern-day version of Teddy Roosevelt-style eugenicist “lower race” theory, with the implication that the promulgators of this theory must then think of themselves as some kind of master race.
