BLOODIEST ETHNIC CLEANSING IN HUMAN HISTORY
OhmyNews International, South Korea
Oct 18 2005
Once again someone reveals that hatred of America does not need to be
based on facts. It is demonstrated by this provocative but baseless
statement.
“America started with the bloodiest systematic ethnic cleansing in
human history,”
This is just a blatant lie.
Stevo could be just making stuff up or he could be trying to blame the
United States for everything that happened in the Americas (North and
South) from the day the first Spaniards found the Caribbean islands
in 1492.
There are no solid number on how many native people lived in the
America prior to the arrival of the Europeans, but here is the
conclusion from an article that examines various estimates.
By 1650, records suggest that only 6 million Indians remained in
all of North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Subtract 6
million from even a conservative estimate of the 1492 population
-like Denevan’s consensus count of 54 million – and one dreadful
conclusion is inescapable: The 150 years after Columbus’s arrival
brought a toll on human life in this hemisphere comparable to all of
the world’s losses in World War II.
It is undeniable that the European Conquerors were brutal. It is
debatable as to whether or not their brutality was much different
than other societies at the time.
There were massacres of the native populations, but most of the deaths
were due to disease that came with the Europeans. There are cases
where disease was deliberately spread, but much of it was just the
natural result of interaction between two distinctly different peoples.
To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important
reason for the Indians’ catastrophic decline-namely, the spread
of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This
phenomenon is known by scholars as a “virgin-soil epidemic”; in North
America, it was the norm.
The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was
smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that
deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease;
in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers
included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus,
bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was
apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was
probably introduced into North America by Europeans.
About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous
enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry,
concludes Alfred Crosby, “but the invisible killers which those men
brought in their blood and breath.” It is thought that between 75 to
90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.
That text came form long and fairly comprehensive article titled
“Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?” (Guys like Stevo will
love this, it has lots of gory detail about atrocities committed by
European colonists).
Ok, that was mostly background, now to Stevo’s claim that “America
started with the bloodiest systematic ethnic cleansing in human
history”. The United states of America we know today didn’t take
shape until the 1800s. The United States formed from as a cluster of
rebellious British colonies along the East Coast of North America in
1776. By this point in time the native populations had been decimated
by nearly 300 years of diseases that came with the first European
arrivals. The simple fact is there were not enough Native American’s
left in the territories claimed by the US to allow the US to commit
“the bloodiest systematic ethnic cleansing in human history”. With
only a few million Native Americans left the US could not possiblly
have done what Stevo claims.
Pol Pot cleansed his nation of about 1.7 million people he deemed
unfit to live and the Ottomans cleansed about that many Armenians.
The Japaese deliberately slaughtered millions of Chinese. Hitler
systematically killed 12 million. If you count the effects of disease
the Spanish may have killed over 20 million by conquering the Inca
Empire.
If someone wants to criticize the US for the genocide that killed
hundreds-of-thousands to millions of Native Americans, that’s fine.
The Criticism is deserved. However before anyone levels baseless
allegations about the “the bloodiest systematic ethnic cleansing in
human history” they should at least check a few facts. That is unless
they are deliberately exaggerating and lying. In that case they are
just fraudulent individuals.
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