Ok so being of Mexican heritage, and being that I have recently begun looking into the details of my ancestry, I have come across a question which has had me disgruntled and for lack a better word upset. What my question entails is why the extermination of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and the various tribes that they entail, are perhaps overlooked in the world history texts whereas modern events such as slavery in America, the holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide are brought up frequently and explained in much more detail.
In other words, without devolving into an argument of one peoples pain being worse than another, it is hard for me to accept and embrace the sentiment that the extermination of the Jews (which failed mind you), is any more important than my ancestors who were just as much people as Jews in Germany, or Africans in early America.
I would appreciate a historical explanation for why and how it is that when Hitler attempts to remove a people it is evil, yet when Cortes and the Spanish affiliates successfully exterminate the pure blood indigenous tribes it is seen as 'conquest'?
For me, this is less of a historical question and more of a philosophical, perhaps psychological question. There are a few things to consider.
I agree that some genocides have more "momentum" then others in our consciousness. The Jewish genocide obviously sticks out, the Armenian one is mostly unknown to average Americans. I think it's more interesting to use the Armenian one here because of how close in time it is to the Jewish Holocaust, compared to the slaughter of indigenous populations, and how much more compacted in time it was.
The term "genocide" itself was not coined until 1944. This must have implications with its associations to the Holocaust.
The similarity of the people is no doubt a factor. The Jewish Holocaust was occurring in "the West," where everyone considered themselves civilized, where the Jews, while maybe looked at as different, where still part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The effects of the Holocaust permeated throughout Western Europe and American not only on the basis of "look at the horrors the Nazi's committed," but also on the basis of "how could WE allow this to happen." Essentially to people just like "us." Other such genocides are by contrast far removed from this psychological sphere.
Finally, it is important to understand how time has affected our consciousness of how we perceive mass death and enslavement. The extinction of indigenous populations in the 16th century in America was not viewed the way it is viewed now. As the discourse on colonialism suggests though, we don't even have to go that far back. As recently as the early 20th century, when anthropology was coming into bloom, there was still a large cultural distinction, an "Other" when presented with difference. Something like Rwanda would likely not have affected us as profoundly a century ago as it would now. And even today, we (the international collective "we") did very little. At least, relative to how we react to the historical Jewish Holocaust, and the claims that we will never again allow such atrocities. In the end, the idea of the "Other" still persists, and it affects our actions and our discourse on present and historical events, even if we are not consciously aware of it.