My basic point was that people from around the world have been subject to diseases that have wiped out large shares of various populations. It was not restricted to the new world. The leftists who love to condemn Europeans for every ill in the world refuse to recognize that millions of Euros have been killed either by disease or invaders from the east and south.
I quite agree. It is probable the proportion of those killed by these diseases in the Old and New Worlds are roughly the same. It’s just that in the Old World these deaths were spread out over perhaps ten thousand years and in the Americas they were concentrated in a century or three.
But you are quite correct that the normal liberal anti-Western meme that these are “European diseases,” as if their impacts on American natives is somehow white people are morally responsible for the deaths they caused.
Actual fact, of course, is that at the time nobody knew the mechanism by which these diseases were spread. In fact, both Europeans and natives thought in general that they were caused by spirits. Which if you think of germs as malevolent invisible entities that can be appeased by rituals involving proper sanitation, isn’t all than far off.
So once the populations of the two hemispheres began to mingle, the spread of diseases between them was quite inevitable and outside either group’s control or responsibility. In fact, after initial contact, most disease spread was from one native group to another, rather than directly from Europeans to natives.
Even today it would be quite difficult to prevent such a catastrophic population drop in a virgin field population suddenly exposed to multiple pathogens to which it has no immunity.
It is also probable that calling them “European diseases” is not only an attempt to project guilt but also technically inaccurate, as most if not all of them are Asian or African in origin. Which is why I’ve referred to them as Afro-Eurasian diseases.
Quite true, except it should be noted that Europeans have for the last thousand years or so been much better at killing Europeans than anybody else has.
However, from about 800 to the mid 900s Europe was invaded from multiple directions: Scandinavians from the north, Muslims from the south and southeast, Magyars and Bulgars from the east and northeast.
These invasions often apparently overlapped, with the Magyars raiding clear into France, and the Northmen getting into the Med.
In response to this situation of constant invasion, Europeans apparently developed a unique societal defense mechanism of heavy cavalry based on the feudal system.