We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children… During an assault [on Indians], the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female or even discriminate as to age. —Cited in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 358; cited in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 379. It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so and even if it requires a campaign lasting the whole of next year. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made. — Major General John Pope, who led the Union forces, to Colonel Henry Sibley in David A. Nichols, “The Other Civil War: Lincoln and the Indians,” Minnesota History 44, no. 1 (1974): 4.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51