Posted on 09/19/2007 4:58:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Few opinions I've expressed on air have produced a more indignant, outraged reaction than my repeated insistence that the word "genocide" in no way fits as a description of the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American settlers.
I've never denied that the 400 year history of American contact with the Indians includes many examples of white cruelty and viciousness --- just as the Native Americans frequently (indeed, regularly) dealt with the European newcomers with monstrous brutality and, indeed, savagery. In fact, reading the history of the relationship between British settlers and Native Americans its obvious that the blood-thirsty excesses of one group provoked blood thirsty excesses from the other, in a cycle that listed with scant interruption for several hundred years.
But none of the warfare (including an Indian attack in 1675 that succeeded in butchering a full one-fourth of the white population of Connecticut, and claimed additional thousands of casualties throughout New England) on either side amounted to genocide. Colonial and, later, the American government, never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality.
Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the New World.
UCLA professor Jared Diamond, author of the universally acclaimed bestseller "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," writes:
"Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600's, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River (page 78)....
"The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus rank top among the killers." (page 212).
"As for the most advanced native societies of North America, those of the U.S. Southeast and the Mississippi River system, their destruction was accomplished largely by germs alone, introduced by early European explorers and advancing ahead of them" (page 374)
Obviously, the decimation of native population by European germs represents an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime. Stories of deliberate infection by passing along "small-pox blankets" are based exclusively on two letters from British soldiers in 1763, at the end of the bitter and bloody French and Indian War. By that time, Indian populations (including those in the area) had already been terribly impacted by smallpox, and there's no evidence of a particularly devastating outbreak as a result of British policy.
For the most part, Indians were infected by devastating diseases even before they made direct contact with Europeans: other Indians who had already been exposed to the germs, carried them with them to virtually every corner of North America and many British explorers and settlers found empty, abandoned villages (as did the Pilgrims) and greatly reduced populations when they first arrived.
Sympathy for Native Americans and admiration for their cultures in no way requires a belief in European or American genocide. As Jared Diamond's book (and countless others) makes clear, the mass migration of Europeans to the New World and the rapid displacement and replacement of Native populations is hardly a unique interchange in human history. On six continents, such shifting populations – with countless cruel invasions and occupations and social destructions and replacements - have been the rule rather than the exception.
The notion that unique viciousness to Native Americans represents our "original sin" fails to put European contact with these struggling Stone Age societies in any context whatever, and only serves the purposes of those who want to foster inappropriate guilt, uncertainty and shame in young Americans.
A nation ashamed of its past will fear its future.
One of the most urgent needs in culture and education for the United States of America is discarding the stupid, groundless and anti-American lies that characterize contemporary political correctness.
The right place to begin is to confront, resist and reject the all-too-common line that our rightly admired forebears involved themselves in genocide.
The early colonists and settlers can hardly qualify as perfect but describing them in Hitlerian, mass-murdering terms represents an act of brain-dead defamation.
The reason you don't hear so much about Inter Tribal atrocities is because it is both more lucrative and fashionable to beat on the White man.
“The reason you don’t hear so much about Inter Tribal atrocities is because it is both more lucrative and fashionable to beat on the White man.”
Being a white man is a crime in today’s lib world.
for later
I’ve always been interested in the term “genocide” and often wonder why the word isn’t preceeded by the word “attempted”, as genocide alone would seem to mean that there are none left.
THE BEST WEBSITE ABOUT THE AMERICAN WEST
Gathering all the best American historians on the subject
AND THIS ARTICLE
“The genocide myth”
http://custer.over-blog.com/article-11602057.html
And reality tv shows.
In the 1850s, the American government tried to move the Indian tribes in the Upper Midwest to land west of the Mississippi, and white settlers protested, so strenuously, in fact, that the Washington politicians backed down.
At that time, the Indians provided settlers, through trade, with necessary food items, especially during the long winter months. These tribes learned about free enterprise from the French voyagers over a 300 year period. When settlers arrived, they found an Indian community ready and willing to trade resources for gold, silver and white man inventions.
Additionally, the treaties in the 1830s paid indians allotments for the land they deeded to Washington. These annual payments included silver and gold coin, needed for commerce in the early settler outposts. This reason alone was a primary motivation for settlers to resist Indian displacement.
Today, these Indian descendants are some of our best entrepreneurs in this area, active in small business and the resource industry. It’s unfortunate that the socialists in Lansing today are trying to destroy their capitalist spirit.
There’s much about Indian relations not taught in schools.
I’d like to see a chapter on how socialists destroy Indian people.
Never mind that the tribal "owners" were both genetically and centuries separated from the remains in question. For more enlightenment on that mindset, Google "Kennewick Man".
In any event, he showed me remains from the archives carbon dated from the 1400's (before any known white man had ever set foot in North Dakota). They showed the presence of TB, a disease supposedly brought by the white man. The guy was a scientist and not in the least bit political, but it was his opinion that the agitation over remains was strictly a political issue raised to halt scientific study of these and other studies which might cast doubt on the popular shibboleths of this era.
the original address is http://www.custerwest.org
and there is an article by a Law professor on the “genocide” myth
How can you play cowboys and Indians if the Indians are poor victims? That’s no fun.
Note:
How Lincoln’s Army ‘Liberated’ The Indians...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo40.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo40.html
Sad part is that since most social science types know nothing about biology there is very little mentioned about how diseases have affected human history throughout the years. So perhaps the neglect of how diseases were mainly responsible for the de-population of the Indian populations is due (in part) to political correctness but probably mainly through ignorance of even basic biology by historians and political scientists.
Colonel Bouquet did pass infected blankets to the Hurons besieging Fort Pitt. Of course, if you're besieged by people who intend to torture you to death, as Chief Pontiac's Indians had done to the garrisons of Fort Sandusky and Fort Presque Isle, and tried to do to the garrison at Fort Le Bouef on their way down to Fort Pitt, one might be tempted to use any available means to prevent that from happening.
This wasn't the first instance of Indians taking home infected blankets, but it is probably the most notorious. In 1755, the Indians that slaughtered the survivors at Fort William Henry also pillaged the sick and wounded in the infirmary and dug up and scalped the corpses of the dead, some of whom died of smallpox.
It's kind of hard to feel too much "ethnic guilt" for that.
So, is the story of whites giving “gifts” of smallpox infected blankets to eradicate them a myth?
The idea of white 'genocide' was something cooked up by those who hate America.
Yellow fever decimated native American populations on more than one occasion. The native Americans had never been exposed to it so there was no natural immunity.
Oops, Kenton just answered it!
Where are the artefacts?
Where are the skeletal remains of the supposedly tens of thousands of “Native Americans” done in by the diseases of the “White Man?”
I’m skeptical; but I’m not a denier. So far, physical evidence for the the “Old World Germ” theory is scant, IMHO.
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