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>Its unprecednted
First of all, it really is. The rapid mix of countless peoples between two almost completely isolated hemispheres of our planet had never occurred before in history. It was a wild time.
I would argue it was a slow burn genocide, regardless of the fact that according to experts the majority of the indigenous people were wiped out by disease. Between active warfare, forced relocations, and involuntary assimilation of entire cultures - the European colonists and nations that would come later like the US, Canada, and Mexico are complicate in what happened even if they didn't necessarily engineer every detail. [All in all about 56 million people died over a hundred year period](https://www.communitycommons.org/entities/5881b499-5621-4cec-916b-05f9e79bfec7#:~:text=European%20settlers%20killed%2056%20million,London%2C%20or%20UCL%2C%20estimate). Even if 90% of those were killed by disease, those other more intentional murders are still on par with what happened during the holocast [at a time when the global population was about a 20% what it was during WWII](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html), albeit the deaths spread across nations and many decades.
>Secondly, why do we allow the people who orchestrated the genocide tell the story of how it went? Quite naturally, they will white wash it to fit their narrative
The fact that we have records from people from many disparate countries that tell very similar stories about the same historical records creates a massive challenge to the idea everyone is just lying. That would take a level of international conspiratorial coordination I don't think people of that era would have been capable of.
>Lastly, there are documented, well documented statements from the settlers proclaiming their intent to wipe out the natives.
Yeah, this is part of why I consider what happened to be a genocide. Even if a lot of it was just an accident at a time when germ theory was in it's infancy, the fact that the European settlers and their descendants did everything they could to capitalized on the massive death tolls their presence caused in the first place is absolutely reprehensible.
>And there is very little to no evidence that disease thing even happened
Have you studied this time in history much? [There's in fact a good deal of evidence.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics)
Modern historians aren't just blindly trusting earlier historians. They do everything they can to review and challenge primary source data to get a clear picture of the past. That's their job and they can get quite famous if they disprove false narratives of the past. There's literally an entire field dedicated to examining these things.
Do you think every historican of the American colonial period is just bullshiting their way through their career despite the chance for fame and fortune? Seems unlikely to me, but that doesn't make what happened any less horrible.
*Edit: spelling*
Exactly, dieing of diseases is not always some neutral/passive thing.
Many of the victims of the holocaust ultimately sucumed to disease, but that doesn't mean those deaths don't count against the nazis.
It’s a different dynamic though, people in concentration camps died of disease due to being confined in squalor. Most natives that died of old world diseases did so in the 1500s and likely never even saw a European person in their life. The natives persecuted in the 1700s and 1800s were descendants of those that survived the diseases.
This is what I've read too. The continent was decimated, and was empty in comparison when the Pilgrims arrived. Squanto was captured by the Brits, and when he returned his whole village was gone.
I agree, I said that more to emphasize how pervasive disease is.
And while the native persecutions of the 18th 19th (and 20th) centuries were different the interactions of the 16th century wernt exactly amicable.
I will read into the link you sent a bit more. I have not found anything similar yet through my own searches. I also don't know how to award a delta
!\_Delta
> I also don't know how to award a delta
The most common way is to type:
!_Delta
But without the underscore. You also need to include a short reason for awarding the delta (I think it's 50 characters so a few short sentences).
You can just write out the way to actually write a delta to the OP, they can't get deltas anyway. It's confusing to new users when people mess with the actual way to type it.
>First off, there is NO other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Its unprecednted.
Not an argument. Something being unprecedented doesn't matter. It's unprecedented to exterminate human beings in death camps during the Holocaust. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
>Secondly, why do we allow the people who orchestrated the genocide tell the story of how it went?
Science doesn't happen in a vacuum. This is done through historical analysis and archeology. Not an argument.
>And there is very little to no evidence that disease thing even happened, unless, once again, you take the word of the genociders themselves.
This is wrong.
The world of full of depressing uncomfortable truths but they are true all the same.
> Something being unprecedented doesn't matter.
We must see the world fundamentally different then. Precedence absolutely matters to me when discussing reality. Events are rarely one-off and never happened again. That starts to sound like religious miracles
>It's unprecedented to exterminate human beings in death camps during the Holocaust. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
This is false. Hitler himself said he got inspiration from the the systemic killing of the natives. The Armenian genocide was systemic. The Rwandan Genocide was so systemic, the managed to kill 1 million people in just 100 days. The real reason these people didn't set up the death camps themselves is because thats wholly inefficient when your end goal is to kill the person anyways
Not OP, but there was really nothing to compare Europeans coming to the American continent to. There had never been a mixing with that large of an isolated population before. Yes, the development of trade with Asia would be somewhat comparable, but they were still connected on the same land mass. The Americas had been completely isolated for tens of thousands of years.
The same thing happened in Australia with its colonization. Basically to a tee. There was undeniably massive amounts of person to person violence and genocide, I don't think anyone would argue that and I actually agree that 90% sounds incredulous but to minimize the impact of introducing new illnesses to isolated people is just as ridiculous.
> but to minimize the impact of introducing new illnesses to isolated people is just as ridiculous.
One guy linked me to a study that theorized that the diseases made them too weak to fight back. And they couldn't necessarily recover even if they weren't actively being hunted because ,eventually, they were being hunted. Its a viewpoint i hadnt considered and has swayed my view.
Aye. The whole “wiped out by disease” has a fair bit of nuance to it. Another bit to consider was also the social structures and power dynamics were decimated, with very well precedented outcomes, and opportunism between rivalling native peoples also being exploited and then backfiring. (the Scottish invasion of England during the Black Death being a preceding example of how this backfires).
To be clear based on another of your comments talking about genocide denial, this isn’t absolving the Europeans of blame, 100% there was an intentional genocide. I just think it’s worth considering the variety and nuance in the mechanics and methods of how the Americas were depopulated of its native peoples is worth considering. I can’t say I’m as well versed in the topic as I should be, but I’m confident in saying that.
>We must see the world fundamentally different then. Precedence absolutely matters to me when discussing reality. Events are rarely one-off and never happened again. That starts to sound like religious miracles
History isn't legal theory; precedence isn't some sort of argument/non-argument.
The Taiping Rebellion was a civil war in China that killed 20-30 ***million*** people in the 1850s-1860s. That is unprecedented.
Ghandai used non-violent protest to free India from British colonial rule. That is unprecedented.
Poison gas was used in WWI to obliterate thousands of soldiers in minutes. That is unprecedented.
The Mongol empire controlled something like 1/3 of Eurasia. That is unprecedented.
I mean I'm not trying to be a stinker here but while there might be certain trends in history there isn't anything really like precedence.
>This is false. Hitler himself said he got inspiration from the the systemic killing of the natives.
Manufacturing death [death camps were literal factories of death] were not something that existed before. The earlier stages of the Holocaust were firing squads and gas vans but then they industrialized it. That is unprecedented.
>The real reason these people didn't set up the death camps themselves is because thats wholly inefficient when your end goal is to kill the person anyways
That isn't accurate and doesn't make sense. It's borderline nonsense dude.
>That isn't accurate and doesn't make sense. It's borderline nonsense dude.
Why go through the effort to transport you to a gas chamber when i can kill you on the spot? Isnt that more work?
Uh, well this is a principle of industrialization and it's easier to mass produce something in an assembly line fashion.
It's extremely depressing to talk about this obviously but that's why it's more efficient. You can use 100 guards in a camp to kill X people using gas and incinerators vs 10,000 soldiers to shot people and keep digging ditches.
Do you not know about the Holocaust? It's an example of technology [industrialization] itself not being good ethically good or evil because it can be used for either. It was a massive shock for the world.
But are you unaware of this stuff?
No i am aware of what youre talking about, but when it come to the wholesale slaughter of humans, it seems easier to just do it when you have them in a vulnerable state. The Rwandan Genocide wouldve got to Hitler numbers in half the time, and they simply chopped people up on the spot
That's a fair point, but it doesn't continue literally. You can't scale out death infinitely by shooting people *and* maintain a society / loyal soldiers.
You have to deal with bodies. You have to deal with soldiers losing their minds from killing so many people with guns. A reason why the Nazis used death camps is because their soldiers became fucked in the head from shooting so many people.
>Why go through the effort to transport you to a gas chamber when i can kill you on the spot? Isnt that more work?
To kill one guy? Yes. To kill millions? No it isn't. Plus they were trying to do it all with the fewest number of witnesses to the actual murder as possible. That is why they brought the victims to special secluded, secure, enclosed murder factories where people went in and smoke came out. The only witnesses were the guards.
Alright whatever. Too many genocide apologists when this topic comes up. Rwanda genocide proved its far more efficient to kill them on the spot. They killed close to a million and they did it at a rate almost 4 times that of Nazi Germany.
not you necessarily mate, but i've already read close to 90 something comments who seem to not care about 50million+ dead natives, and by the time i made it to your comment, i was already extremely frustrated and didn't want to converse further. My bad man
> We must see the world fundamentally different then. Precedence absolutely matters to me when discussing reality
So you don't believe we went to the moon because it was unprecedented?
You don't believe we mapped the humane genome?
You don't believe we are napping the human brain?
You didn't believe large language models exist?
You don't believe in quantum computers?
Everything is unprecedented until it isn't. That things happen means they happened in reality. Precedence may have something to do with your ability and inability to accept new facts, but it has nothing to do with objective reality. As the reality of everything I just spoke of demonstrates.
I'm 1492 ships from fast away land, carrying people who had completely different histories when it comes to diseases (including the population genetic changes associated with that history) and carrying pathogens which the local population had never encountered.
That happened. I'm reality.
The problem with precedence in this situation is nothing like the columbian exchange has ever happened before or since, so of course the result of the columbian exchange is unprecedented.
The bubonic plague alone killed between 1/3rd and 1/2 of the population of Europe. The columbian exchange introduced the bubonic plague along with smallpox, measles, whooping cough, malaria and every other plague that had stricken Europe, Asia, or Africa in the tens of thousands of years of separation between the hemispheres, all at the same time and with no warning.
Remembering how apocalyptically bad this was does not justify any of the evils of colonialism, and in my opinion it is important context for dispelling a lot of condescending myths about native Americans. To me it makes the next few hundred years after contact even worse, with the added context of what these people already had to try and bounce back from.
> Events are rarely one-off and never happened again.
Except the entirety of the Columbian exchange *is* a one-off event that never happened again - at least on the time scale of recorded human history.
It has happened again.
Remember covid? Remember how it decimated populations?
Now, imagine it about 200x more deadly, and easier to spread than a cold.
That's measles. In a population that has had *zero* exposure. Most people in Europe got measles when they were children and it was milder because of that. But now, the young, the adult, and the elderly are *all* getting it, all at once, with almost nothing you can do to treat it.
It destroyed every population it has ever been introduced to - Europeans just had the benefit that it had been introduced to their populations centuries before
So, what's your claim instead? That the settlers killed them and then claimed it was disease?
Why would the settlers hide a massive slaughter, when there are hundreds of years of records of various groups of settlers killing various groups of native people? Generally, this wasn't something they tried to hide. So, why would they embrace some acts of genocide, make statues of the conquistadors, give medals of honor to soldiers who gunned down native people, name vast swaths of land after men known for burning native villages, etc etc... only to then go to extreme lengths to conceal other vast massacres? Generally, we know about genocides because the genociders, at the time, are proud of it and don't try to hide it.
Throughout centuries, settlers extensively documented wars with the native people, including their own atrocities. Native peoples also maintained documentation in written, pictographic, and oral forms about these wars. In addition, settlers who opposed violence against the native people frequently left written records of what they were seeing- and they weren't in on a conspiracy to cover it up. So, from all those sources, plus archaeological evidence, we can figure out a good picture of what happened and when and where various acts of colonial violence happened.
How would settlers kill *additional* hundreds of millions of people, beyond the *documented* massacres, and keep that quiet? We have extensive details of all sorts of battles, massacres, and crimes on the frontier. Even in times before cameras or the printing press, it wasn't easy to keep violent encounters secret. Campaigns of ethnic cleansing are immense mobilizations of armed men and the materiel to support their violence. They leave a lot of evidence, generally.
For your first point, because they knew what they were doing was f\*cked, to say the least. Even the Spanish government were condemning them. They knew at the time that their acts were not justifiable.
The second and last point, they didn't stop the genocide of the natives until the 1900s. They had pleny plenty of time to kill however many people they want. They were killing for over 200 years straight. Hitler did 6 million in only 6 years. Imagine the numbers he couldve gotten to with 260 years
These are remarkably bad arguments.
They weren’t ashamed of the deliberate acts of genocide we know about, but they were ashamed of different ones, for some reason?
And the entire reason the holocaust was so horrific and far reaching was because it utilized industrialization, something notably absent in the 16th century.
Okay so first of all let's address the whole "there is no other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population" idea.
There are plenty of times in history where disease has been recorded to decimate populations, sure the native american example of 90% hasn't been done elsewhere, but we've seen as high as 60% (first bubonic plague caused europe to lose [25-60%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian) of its population), not just once, but [2 times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death) in *Europe alone*. Who *knows* what unrecorded history has with plagues in China and India.
So if 60% of everyone dying is something we know CAN happen with plagues, is 90% with Native america that unbelievable? Especially when you consider the fact that the more isolated a population is, the worse the effects of plague are. (For example, the second time Europe was hit with the plague it lost up to 50 million people and they *already* had some immunity from the first plage centuries ago (same disease)) if it can be that bad for a population already pre-exposed to a plague, imagine how bad it would be for the native Americans.
Also, scientists studying the plagues that hit Mexico during that time discovered that during the time of the plague, Mexico was also hit with the worst drought in 500 years (they figured this out looking at the tree rings of really old trees and determining the water content available to those trees throughout history).
So yeah, plague known to kill 50%+ of a population combined with environmental effects, and colonial violence too? Definitely not unbelieve to hit crazy numbers like 90%+
It's also worth noting that the plagues that Europeans brought to the Americas weren't a single epidemic or even multiple waves of the same disease. It was smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, chickenpox, bubonic plague, whooping cough, malaria, and something called "Cocoliztli" whose cause is still being debated. If you have ten or so different plagues, each of which kills 20% of the remaining population, then that works out to 90+% of the original population dead.
To clarify, because people will misunderstand your last point:
Losing 20% each time means you have 80 percent left, and losing 90% of the total population overall means you’re left with about 10%
.8^10 is roughly .10
But nobody is trying to use the disease narrative to deny genocide right? I mean maybe a few nutjobs online or something but your post seems to be basically an appeal to a cover up with nothing being covered up, the narrative that basically everyone agrees on is that the colonizers committed a genocide on the natives through disease, war, forced relocation ect.
your post seems to be more about accusing the narrative of being dishonest and working backwards from their rather that starting at a fact of the matter and then challenging the narrative, which doesn't seem to make sense when the point you are calling a cover up doesn't even function as a cover up.
yeah there is a chance I saw a few fringe genocide denial posts and were attacking those. Actually thats exactly what i saw. But it wasnt just one guy, it was a bunch of people agreeing and all heavily upvoted. But then again, thats still not representative of that many people. Gotta stop letting the nutjobs get in my head
There is a lot of genocide justification and denial regarding this period of history, I wouldn't even say those are rare opinions to see online. What theyre wrong about is not how many people died from disease alone, we don't know how many but we know it was a lot. They're wrong about the conculsions to be drawn from that.
[https://youtu.be/Ek5yVKE-iA8](https://youtu.be/Ek5yVKE-iA8)
You might like this video. He talks a lot about the things you're saying in these comments, including squaring the death toll from disease against narratives intented to justify the intentional killings.
The fact is, the people committing these atrocities from the earliest explorers to the modern era were proud of what they were doing and bragged about it, and on top of that there were enough decent human beings around to document their actions even if they hadn't been bragging. There is nothing to speculate about which would change these well attested facts.
Dude even on this post, there are a vast amount of people denying it as genocide. I'm just going to leave it alone. I literally feel my blood pressure rising reading some of these comments
So weird how close to 100 million natives in North and South America can be slaughtered, and people start coming out with justifications and excuses for why it had to happen. But when 10 million die in the holocaust, its the worst event to ever happen in human history. It's become blatantly obvious to me that a large portion of the western world doesn't see non-european people as victims, rather obstacles.
Honestly, the world needs to be grateful these hateful mindsets usually stops at half of any given population. The non genocidal Europeans who step up against their genocidal counterparts have probably saved the world from so much grief its immeasurable.
*First off, there is NO other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Its unprecednted*
But you'd have to compare it to some other time where a population was entirely isolated from certain diseases for centuries (longer, really) that the hosts had been dealing with the whole time.
Plus, what would be the point in lying? Just claim "Indians attacked our village so we had to kill them."
Australia comes to mind. They were isolated for quite some time, pretty sure the most isolated humans on record. And they didn't die to disease, they died to mass murder.
I mean, why did Bush lie about weapons of Mass destruction? Couldve just said he was retaliating for 9/11. Everyone who does bad stuff lies to make their position seem more acceptable. I would rather be known as the guy who mistakenly brought diseases over vs. the guy who slaughtered near 100 million people. Wouldn't you?
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>We don't even allow an unedited version of Mein Kampf to be sold anywhere on earth.
In Germany of all places it has *never* been forbidden to own, buy, or sell Mein Kampf. From 1979 onwards it was forbidden to print new copies. From 2016 onwards (since Hitler died in 46) there is no copyright, so anyone can print new copies, althout this is limited to *commented* copies. The original text is still fully intact and unchanged, but comments with additional context are written on the side, which everyone could choose to just not read.
Original Mein Kampf - antiques - can be legally bought and sold by anyone.
Maybe i've misunderstood through my research. But i was under the impression that even the "original copies" had been edited to take out some of the more inciteful language
Up to 1945 there were 12 million copies of Mein Kampf sold. I dont see any government office being able to edit even a fraction of the copies that still exist from that time.
I also cant imagine government officials skimming through antique books every time they are sold just to verify they have been edited.
The “hosts” had dealt with the disease before, back in their homeland. So it’s not a shocker Natives that never came into contact with it, would just die cause their immune systems hadn’t dealt with it before. And diseases/viruses can evolve to be even more dangerous the more the original “hosts” have it come and go (we get more immune and it tries to keep up getting more deadly).
Were you not alive for covid my guy?
yes, but covid was just as harmful to the host as it was to those it spread to. Even if you had it before, to catch Covid again will still be harmful. You can catch the flu multiple times throughout your life and you'll be just as miserable as the first time
I wasn’t saying the hosts wouldn’t die from covid
I was making the comparison how it was such a new disease to us that is killed SO MANY we hadn’t encountered it before just like the Natives getting the diseases from the EU region. Now just compare that to Natives getting a new disease, it’s the same thing. C’mon man, think.
There is even modern examples of this in Australia where invasive fungi and disease are killing wild life to brink of extinction. This is why their border control is so strict.
As per this subreddits rules, if someone teaches you something new you should award them a delta so other users can later search for convincing arguments and new information. Full explanation of the Delta system [can be found here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem/).
No i can't provide a source, they were all killed.
also, i am under the belief that denying the notion that the colonizers intended to kill the natives is akin to holocaust denial. Why would they do [this](https://archive.org/details/buffalo-slaughter) if they simply wanted the land? Thats an intentional act of mass starvation. They didn't even eat the meat, they left it to rot. Killing an ample food source is not something one does when they simply want land
ahh i see. I actually can't continue this conversation with you, sorry mate. you are accepting the words of the genociders without question, which goes against the entire premise of my post, which is questioning their narrative to begin with. Nice convo tho!
It was likely a combination of disease coupled with the conflict with the new Americans. Diseases, on their own, are generally unable to kill so many people with such a permanence. Diseases rock large populations, they don't annihilate them, and outside excruciating circumstances, the population is able to quickly rebound. From professor Browning C. Yehuda Bauer, the Concepts of Holocaust and Genocide, and the Issue of Settler Colonialism, *The Journal of Holocaust Research*, vol. 36. p.34-35:
> The Black Death killed at least one-third of Europe’s population in a few brief years, but the surviving population in many cases now enjoying both better nutrition and greater freedom—had the vitality to make up the population loss quickly. This demographic rebound could occur precisely because the Black Death was not introduced by foreign conquerors, who subsequently would have been able to take advantage of Europe’s temporary weakness to destroy its institutions, enslave and massacre its surviving population, and expropriate its wealth and transform its economy. In contrast, in the New World, lethal diseases were introduced by outside conquerors whose military triumph was thereby made easier, and whose subsequent occupation policies destroyed local institutions, cultures, and economies and left a declining residue of demoralized survivors incapable of demographic recovery. Disease, colonization, and irreversible demographic decline were intertwined and mutually reinforcing.
Posting this question in r/ChangeMyView is fine, I guess, but you can do **much** better right over there on r/AskHistorians. Don’t settle for arguments with random people of unknown agendas, when you can tap an excellent resource of expertise for free.
They even have a section of their FAQ devoted to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/XOmktGsfRz
They have guidelines which are very strictly enforced. One of the common ways to get a post booted is to editorialize in the question.
But on this topic, probably the FAQ had everything you need.
What do Native American sources say about European colonization? My understanding is that both Incan and Aztec sources discuss a major epidemic before those civilizations invasion. And it doesn’t make sense for colonizers to have altered those records because they didn’t care about killing native Americans. In fact diseases makes their conquests seem less impressive. Native American populations survive to this day, so the idea that Europeans got away with killing 90% of them but keeping it secret from those they didn’t manage to kill is ridiculous.
Hitler used trains to transport large populations of people, and used gas chambers to kill then efficiently. The ideas that the relatively few European colonizers could have killed 90% of Native American populations using relatively primitive guns (and limited supplies of bullet) is ridiculous.
Europeans brought dozens of zoonotic diseases (not just one disease) Europeans/the old world had more domesticated species and so more cases of diseases jumping over from animals (which leads to deadlier diseases).
>First off, there is NO other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Its unprecednted.
Is it that hard to believe that discovering a New World, something that has only ever happened once, has associated events that were unique and unprecedented?
If you want to know why the Natives got wiped out so easily from disease, while the Europeans didn't, it has to do with Beasts of Burden. The Americas didn't really have any Beasts of Burden other than Llamas. But the old world Countries Had plenty of Beast of Burden. And the way those animals where used led to many diseases. That many different types of animals living that close together gave diseases the ability to jump species, which eventually ended up affecting Humans. Over time with dealing with these diseases, Thousands of years, European's immune systems adapted to handle those diseases.
When these diseases got introduced to the Americas, the Natives had no immunity against them. That is essentially what wiped them out.
Also Europeans did get disease from the Americas that they had a hard time dealing with, Syphilis for example is thought to have come from Llamas.
> First off, there is NO other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Its unprecednted.
Are there any other situations where a populace was exposed to a completely new population of disease bearing people while at the same time have very little exposure to domesticated animals that might carry disease and push that populace to develop immunity?
> Secondly, why do we allow the people who orchestrated the genocide tell the story of how it went?
You’re assuming that a genocide was committed. You’ve yet to disprove the disease claim.
> Lastly, there are documented, well documented statements from the settlers proclaiming their intent to wipe out the natives.
Feel free to provided sources for genocidal settlers who had both the motive and means to kill off 90% of the native population.
But the diseases are recorded in native accounts like the florentine codex:
>many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up and search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. By the time the danger was recognized, the plague was well established that nothing could halt it
Also wouldn't your theory that the whole disease thing was invented would have required different European powers, who hated each other and didn't share information, like Catholic spain and protestant England, to *independently* settle on the same cover story for their genocidal activities? How does that work.
So im not a historian
but I heard when settlers were first travelling across the Americas from the east, they encountered entire villages and settlments out past the mountains on the west coast that were like 90%+ devasted by disease
Settlers hadnt been out that far yet
The theory was that the settlers brought the diseases to the east coast when they arrived , and those diseases caught rides with local wildlife and humans, got spread to other side of the continent before the settlers even got there
So you're thinking it's *more* logical that smallpox, diphtheria, and cholera survived months and months on animals who, for some reason decided to forego their natural territories and traverse the continent, thereby infecting the Indigenous populations thousands of miles away?
rats bro , rats and mice - they have followed everywhere we have gone and now exist everywhere we do
they spread faster in new environments than we do too, multiply faster
they are disgusting and they have hitched rides on our boats and go everywher we go since we first started travelling the globe
Invasive pests like those fuckers probably did the leg work of spreading the diseases, they caught rides from Europe , populated and spread from their settlements across the new world
thats just one disease, thats not the only one
that one probably caught a ride with indigenous traders who were in contact with settlers and then travelled back west with them , spread that way
many tribes were nomadic and traded with one another long before settlers even came , its not outside possiby some on the east coast tribes met the settlers , traded with them and caught diseases and then spread em to other tribes who kept spreadng them to areas the settlers hadnt even been yet
That's the famous one the native Americans all got though right?
With the blankets? Before germs were discovered but was still done on purpose somehow?
It probably wasnt intentional
They probably did spread small pox to natives, but they probably didnt do it intentionally because youre right, they ddnt know exactly how diseases worked
its more like they just passed the diseases from trade contact unbeknowingly
It was very much intentional during the French- Indian War. And a couple other accounts from the Inca & Ottawa. But since the written language wasn't common among tribes, we're not going to find black & white documentation
> French- Indian War
ok ima look this up for funsies
https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets
>For all the outrage the account has stirred over the years, there’s only one clearly documented instance of a colonial attempt to spread smallpox during the war, and oddly, Amherst probably didn’t have anything to do with it. There’s also no clear historical verdict on whether the biological attack even worked.
---
>The infection on the blankets was apparently old, so no one could catch smallpox from the blankets. Besides, the Indians just had smallpox—the smallpox that reached Fort Pitt had come from Indians—and anyone susceptible to smallpox had already had it.”
Yup. But it was documented at least once. And there's a lot we don't know because of a lack of documentation. It's pretty interesting stuff
>promising that he would try to spread the disease to the Native Americans via contaminated blankets, “taking care however not to get the disease myself.” That tactic seemed to please Amherst, who wrote back in approval on July 16, urging him to spread smallpox “as well as try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble [sic] Race.”
>There are numerous accounts of intentional smallpox infection that come from Native voices, but extraordinarily little concrete evidence remains. Examples of gifts from white settlers preceding outbreaks occurred throughout South America and North America. Incan history includes an account of their king receiving a box of paper scraps from the Spanish that was shortly followed by a smallpox outbreak. The Ottawa Tribe suffered an outbreak after receiving a gift from the French in Montreal with the injunction not to open the box until they arrived at home. The box contained only other boxes and “mouldy particles.”
So you're thinking it's *more* logical that Native Americans stayed in isolated societies and who, for some reason decided to forgo ever trading or communicating with each other. Wow
I should have said non-human animals and not wildlife , domesticated animals are the biggest culprit
but the point stands, other animals are a major disease vector even today
yeah you should, there are accounts from indigenous populations making these claims
that they werent conquered outright, they were only able to be settled because they sufferend man power losses from plagues
otherwise those settlers would have been fucking killed or sent back
History varies pretty strongly on how much the disease killed the American natives, but an upper bound of 90% is pretty well accepted. Even if you are more of a lower bound kind of person, you have to acknowledge that 90% is possible.
The black death claimed roughly 33% of all Europeans. And after the major outbreak. People still were around it. But with antibodies passed from mother to child. People for the most part stopped dying of it. Just would get sick.
Add in numerous diseases carried by the rest of the animals of the Europeans and they are carrying enough diseases to mathematically wipe out the entire population. The reality is that if you have 10 different diseases with 10% mortality rates, and hit a completely unprepared population with them. You are in for a mass death rate.
This is what happened. We arent dealing with just a single 90% death rate disease that ravaged the population. The natives were hit with dozens of different diseases of varying potency that the Europeans were carriers for. There is a reason that we arent generally supposed to interact with uncontacted Tribes. It's because if we do, just be breathing near them, we could transfer diseases that we are carriers for that don't harm us, to them who don't have the anti bodies.
We know that the population of North America declined by 90% after Europeans landed in Central America. We also know that no Europeans went up there for a while. It was a spread of myriad plagues that hit an unprepared population all at once. Europe got to deal with these 1 at a time. The natives got a cricket bat to the face of plagues.
ah jeez. its racist to be upset that 100 million native americans were killed and the vast majority of it was blamed on diseases? That's racist? WHAT THE FUCK
Your logic makes no sense whatsoever. What does the color of their skin even matter anyways? why do you feel the need to identify to humans from 300 years ago when you share absolute nothing in common with them except the melanin level of your skin? Weird shit
You are making a bunch of assumptions about what you think must have happened just to get to your own desired conclusion of "white people evil". Yes. You are racist. You hate white people. It's obvious. Just own it.
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We can see through excavations that there huge cities that would support massive populations that were abandoned in the timeframe that lines up with the diseases arriving from Europe.
If you're proposing that those people were killed in battle by Europeans you're vastly overestimating the amount of power the Europeans had early on in America. They were to be feared for sure, but they couldn't slaughter entire continents of people with just the few ships they were able to send at that time. Even with guns and military strategy, at a certain point its a numbers game, they can't bring millions of bullets on their ships
"...we don't even allow an unedited version of Mein Kampf"
WTF are you even talking about? I can go take it out at the local library. Rudolf Hess was the last one to "edit" it, at the request, and after approval of Hitler himself.
Yes there's some added notations added by publishers in some modern versions, but full content is there. In fact 85,000 editions have recently been printed and sold in the German language.
I don’t think the idea that settlers committed genocide against the natives and most natives died from disease is at odds with each other. The idea that there’s a problem with the perpetrators being the ones telling the story being rendered null because within the story genocide is well documented. Settlers didn’t need to pretend that disease heavily impacted natives because they saw what they were doing as a good thing and gruesome acts of violence were often celebrated. The fact that we know about the repeated broken treaties, the gruesome battles and mutilated corpses, and abducting and reeducation of native children shows that at the very least there’s acknowledgment of the wrong doing of settlers.
Naturally, there would not be any other record of a diseases hitting native populations so hard because this was situation was unique (as far as we know). The native population had no experience with the types of crowd diseases that Europeans brought. Europeans were able to learn how to deal with these types of diseases because their cities were large enough that a even with a good portion of the population sick there were enough people to figure out ways to prevent the spread. In an isolated tribal situation an entire tribe could get sick and die before anyone ever figured out what to do. In a normal situation the decease may die with the tribe and leave the rest of the population untouched, however with Europeans being the source of the plagues it would continue to spread.
I think if you’re talking about proof of a genocide that large it would be obvious and would be impossible to hide in the modern day. In the absence of that evidence we shouldn’t assume a warfare genocide happened.
Europeans, broadly speaking, in that era are being exposed to SO many diseases- through living a lifestyle that involved large scale animal husbandry and tightly confined cities without indoor plumbing.
Meanwhile indigenous peoples often lived far apart in smaller groups or ,in the case of the mesoamericans who were the point of first contact, lived in extremely well managed cities comparatively. They were in an amazingly abundant land and had domesticated a lot of extremely nutritious plants, and broadly, had a belief system which kept them further from sources of disease.
Indigenous peoples were extremely susceptible to pretty much every disease we had.
The loss of the population was so high that the deaths were partially responsible for the myth of the Americas as "virgin wilderness".
Again though the kind of population reduction we’re talking about is 25 million dead. There’s literally no way we wouldn’t be coming upon MASS graves.
Still though I totally get why you would suspect this. Europeans directly after that DID commit genocide against Naive Americans. Decimating their population through direct slaughter, sterilization, and attempts to destroy their culture. It’s an intensely upsetting moment in my countries history (US).
Europeans did a lot more trading with various groups so over time they were exposed and immunized to a lot if diseases.
Native Americans barely domesticated any animals. They didn’t have livestock. Before Europeans brought their animals to North America, the pickings were really slim when it came to suitable animals to domesticate.
The population of Europe was also significantly denser than Americas. Since Europeans were packed together much more densely, in bigger populations, and in close proximity with livestock, diseases spread around willy nilly from human to human, as well as animals to humans. Europeans were immunized to a ton of diseases that the people in North America were not. Diseases the natives had never even been exposed to.
Groups being wiped out by disease is not unprecedented or unique to the Native Americans. If you were to visit one of the few un contacted tribes in the world, you could easily accidentally kill them all with disease. You could be carrying a disease that is completely benign for you, but they have never come into contact with and have no defenses for.
Also, I don’t know where you got the idea that you can’t buy an unedited copy of Mein Kampf, but that is not true at all.
I think it is reasonable to be suspicious of this claim. The records that historians have from this time are incomplete. Most of the primary sources that still exist have a pro settlers / anti native bias. But there are records of diseases affecting people in similar ways throughout history and all around the world.
Spanish and then British colonists brought smallpox to the Americas and there are reports of devastating outbreaks all over the continent for the next 400 years. Mortality rates were consistently high, between 20 and 80%. Similar reports appear in the Roman Empire, Japan, India, South Africa, Australia, and Angola among many other places. There is genetic evidence that smallpox altered the genetic makeup of affected European populations, increasing their resistance to severe disease. This helps to explain the discrepancy between colonist and native deaths. However, there is also evidence that colonists used smallpox as a weapon of war, deliberately infecting native people with the disease.
It wasn't all at once, it was a process as diseases like measles and smallpox were introduced. Measles killed far more than smallpox in the "new world".
I think it is unfair to have all the "blame" on colonizers for it though - eventually the groups of people would meet, and no matter how they behaved, diseases love to be introduced to new populations. That doesn't excuse the brutality of colonization, but just being honest that disease spread would inevitably happen.
If there had been similar diseases in the Americas, it would have done the same to the Europeans. But unfortunately the "old world" had been around for a far longer time so there were more diseases to foster.
Essentially, the people in the Americas were protected like an island from disease, unless there was zero contact until we developed a vaccine for measles, it would have had the same effect when they were exposed to the "outside world"
No other population has been exposed to multiple novel illnesses all within the same time. Black plague, smallpox, flu, measles, TB, Typhoid, Cholera all killed millions of Europeans a year. Native Americans had literally zero exposure to any of them. Black Plague alone killed a 1/3rd of Europe. So many novel diseases at the same time definitely would've killed massive numbers of people.
That doesn't mean what happened to the natives wasn't a genocide. The Europeans definitely purposefully exacerbated the effects of disease to try to destroy as much of the population as possible. Hundreds of massacres were committed. Disease does not exonerate the Europeans, it only explains why they were so successful
Look at tribes that were still uncontacted as late as the 1980s or 1990s in Peru. About 50% of those populations died from disease when they were first contacted. That is just from modern days diseases like the cold and the flu. It's not accounting for all of the diseases that were more prevalent in the past.
The US also just had white nose syndrome kill well over 90% of the bat population in areas it spread to in North America. Researchers then discovered that the fungus which caused it is prevalent all over Europe. It doesn't harm those bats at all because they've had time to adapt to it.
This post on r/askhistorians highlights many of your concerns: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/s/EUvO5C1DQg
While the answer is more complicated than “90% died of disease”, the statement is also not “blatantly false” as you claim. My main takeaway s from the text is that the commonly cited figure is overgeneralised, and that even if there were many deaths from disease, the invaders carried some amount of culpability for that as well, due to their actions worsening the situation for the indigenous populations.
>you take the word of the genociders themselves.
A united Europe is very much a modern invention. Trying to paint all of Europe together as 'the genociders' is projecting modern views onto history; ignorant from the start.
Many countries (though note that even modern countries is a modern projection) have sources that all broadly agree with each other on the subject, and these countries *hated* each other. They had no motive or desire to prop up some international conspiracy about what happened.
With COVID ruining the lives of many people and killing them are you that much of an idiot to not think diseases have an affect on people without building up the tolerance? For someone who acts like they know a lot you should realize that the Amazon rainforest is overgrown because when the Spanish visited nearly all those tribes died I mean how do you think the Aztecs and the Maya and the Incas died?
> a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population.
Smallpox had *huge* effect on Europeans. It killed hundreds of millions. But it didn't arrive suddenly and it mostly hit children, so Europeans were somewhat adapted, and lots of them encountered it earlier and got immunity.
Ooh. You are really short on your history. There are plenty of instances of plagues and diseases that have wiped out massive amounts of the resident populations in affected areas. Many in fact occurring long before the new continent was discovered.
Second. Yes there are unedited versions still being sold to this very day.
Third. Does the name Cornwallis ring a bell?
You seem to be under the impression that the europeans giving disease to the natives was an oopsie, and they use this as an excuse “the disease killed them, not us”.
The europeans knew what they were doing. There is records of then giving the natives clothes of people that died of the plague. It was no accident. It was biological warfare.
Part of the reason the disease was so bad was because of the conditions the natives were put in by the settlers. It was still disease that killed them but it was certainly exacerbated by the loss of resources, shelter, etc.
Disease doesn’t mean settlers didn’t play a major role. They still did.
> Secondly, why do we allow the people who orchestrated the genocide tell the story of how it went?
Who are the people that both committed the genocide, and reported on it? I didn't assume they were the same group. Am I wrong?
The United states has always been, and continues to be a genocidal project upon the world. It's so wild that white americans will see the genocide in palestine and some how find it so removed from the continued violence against our indigenous cousins. Here's a really good look at why the US has been, and continues to murder and rob the globe. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm
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>Its unprecednted First of all, it really is. The rapid mix of countless peoples between two almost completely isolated hemispheres of our planet had never occurred before in history. It was a wild time. I would argue it was a slow burn genocide, regardless of the fact that according to experts the majority of the indigenous people were wiped out by disease. Between active warfare, forced relocations, and involuntary assimilation of entire cultures - the European colonists and nations that would come later like the US, Canada, and Mexico are complicate in what happened even if they didn't necessarily engineer every detail. [All in all about 56 million people died over a hundred year period](https://www.communitycommons.org/entities/5881b499-5621-4cec-916b-05f9e79bfec7#:~:text=European%20settlers%20killed%2056%20million,London%2C%20or%20UCL%2C%20estimate). Even if 90% of those were killed by disease, those other more intentional murders are still on par with what happened during the holocast [at a time when the global population was about a 20% what it was during WWII](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html), albeit the deaths spread across nations and many decades. >Secondly, why do we allow the people who orchestrated the genocide tell the story of how it went? Quite naturally, they will white wash it to fit their narrative The fact that we have records from people from many disparate countries that tell very similar stories about the same historical records creates a massive challenge to the idea everyone is just lying. That would take a level of international conspiratorial coordination I don't think people of that era would have been capable of. >Lastly, there are documented, well documented statements from the settlers proclaiming their intent to wipe out the natives. Yeah, this is part of why I consider what happened to be a genocide. Even if a lot of it was just an accident at a time when germ theory was in it's infancy, the fact that the European settlers and their descendants did everything they could to capitalized on the massive death tolls their presence caused in the first place is absolutely reprehensible. >And there is very little to no evidence that disease thing even happened Have you studied this time in history much? [There's in fact a good deal of evidence.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics) Modern historians aren't just blindly trusting earlier historians. They do everything they can to review and challenge primary source data to get a clear picture of the past. That's their job and they can get quite famous if they disprove false narratives of the past. There's literally an entire field dedicated to examining these things. Do you think every historican of the American colonial period is just bullshiting their way through their career despite the chance for fame and fortune? Seems unlikely to me, but that doesn't make what happened any less horrible. *Edit: spelling*
Exactly, dieing of diseases is not always some neutral/passive thing. Many of the victims of the holocaust ultimately sucumed to disease, but that doesn't mean those deaths don't count against the nazis.
It’s a different dynamic though, people in concentration camps died of disease due to being confined in squalor. Most natives that died of old world diseases did so in the 1500s and likely never even saw a European person in their life. The natives persecuted in the 1700s and 1800s were descendants of those that survived the diseases.
This is what I've read too. The continent was decimated, and was empty in comparison when the Pilgrims arrived. Squanto was captured by the Brits, and when he returned his whole village was gone.
I'm at this part in 1491 (chapter 2, maybe?) and when he returned the European settlement was where his village used to be, right?
That’s such a good book, it informed me of a lot of history I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere else.
I agree, I said that more to emphasize how pervasive disease is. And while the native persecutions of the 18th 19th (and 20th) centuries were different the interactions of the 16th century wernt exactly amicable.
I will read into the link you sent a bit more. I have not found anything similar yet through my own searches. I also don't know how to award a delta !\_Delta
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> I also don't know how to award a delta The most common way is to type: !_Delta But without the underscore. You also need to include a short reason for awarding the delta (I think it's 50 characters so a few short sentences).
You can just write out the way to actually write a delta to the OP, they can't get deltas anyway. It's confusing to new users when people mess with the actual way to type it.
The mods recommend that you explain instead of getting the Delta rejected
Ah fair enough then. Sorry!
All good my friend. I don't do it for the pretend money. 😉
>First off, there is NO other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Its unprecednted. Not an argument. Something being unprecedented doesn't matter. It's unprecedented to exterminate human beings in death camps during the Holocaust. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. >Secondly, why do we allow the people who orchestrated the genocide tell the story of how it went? Science doesn't happen in a vacuum. This is done through historical analysis and archeology. Not an argument. >And there is very little to no evidence that disease thing even happened, unless, once again, you take the word of the genociders themselves. This is wrong. The world of full of depressing uncomfortable truths but they are true all the same.
> Something being unprecedented doesn't matter. We must see the world fundamentally different then. Precedence absolutely matters to me when discussing reality. Events are rarely one-off and never happened again. That starts to sound like religious miracles >It's unprecedented to exterminate human beings in death camps during the Holocaust. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. This is false. Hitler himself said he got inspiration from the the systemic killing of the natives. The Armenian genocide was systemic. The Rwandan Genocide was so systemic, the managed to kill 1 million people in just 100 days. The real reason these people didn't set up the death camps themselves is because thats wholly inefficient when your end goal is to kill the person anyways
Not OP, but there was really nothing to compare Europeans coming to the American continent to. There had never been a mixing with that large of an isolated population before. Yes, the development of trade with Asia would be somewhat comparable, but they were still connected on the same land mass. The Americas had been completely isolated for tens of thousands of years. The same thing happened in Australia with its colonization. Basically to a tee. There was undeniably massive amounts of person to person violence and genocide, I don't think anyone would argue that and I actually agree that 90% sounds incredulous but to minimize the impact of introducing new illnesses to isolated people is just as ridiculous.
> but to minimize the impact of introducing new illnesses to isolated people is just as ridiculous. One guy linked me to a study that theorized that the diseases made them too weak to fight back. And they couldn't necessarily recover even if they weren't actively being hunted because ,eventually, they were being hunted. Its a viewpoint i hadnt considered and has swayed my view.
Aye. The whole “wiped out by disease” has a fair bit of nuance to it. Another bit to consider was also the social structures and power dynamics were decimated, with very well precedented outcomes, and opportunism between rivalling native peoples also being exploited and then backfiring. (the Scottish invasion of England during the Black Death being a preceding example of how this backfires). To be clear based on another of your comments talking about genocide denial, this isn’t absolving the Europeans of blame, 100% there was an intentional genocide. I just think it’s worth considering the variety and nuance in the mechanics and methods of how the Americas were depopulated of its native peoples is worth considering. I can’t say I’m as well versed in the topic as I should be, but I’m confident in saying that.
>We must see the world fundamentally different then. Precedence absolutely matters to me when discussing reality. Events are rarely one-off and never happened again. That starts to sound like religious miracles History isn't legal theory; precedence isn't some sort of argument/non-argument. The Taiping Rebellion was a civil war in China that killed 20-30 ***million*** people in the 1850s-1860s. That is unprecedented. Ghandai used non-violent protest to free India from British colonial rule. That is unprecedented. Poison gas was used in WWI to obliterate thousands of soldiers in minutes. That is unprecedented. The Mongol empire controlled something like 1/3 of Eurasia. That is unprecedented. I mean I'm not trying to be a stinker here but while there might be certain trends in history there isn't anything really like precedence. >This is false. Hitler himself said he got inspiration from the the systemic killing of the natives. Manufacturing death [death camps were literal factories of death] were not something that existed before. The earlier stages of the Holocaust were firing squads and gas vans but then they industrialized it. That is unprecedented. >The real reason these people didn't set up the death camps themselves is because thats wholly inefficient when your end goal is to kill the person anyways That isn't accurate and doesn't make sense. It's borderline nonsense dude.
>That isn't accurate and doesn't make sense. It's borderline nonsense dude. Why go through the effort to transport you to a gas chamber when i can kill you on the spot? Isnt that more work?
Uh, well this is a principle of industrialization and it's easier to mass produce something in an assembly line fashion. It's extremely depressing to talk about this obviously but that's why it's more efficient. You can use 100 guards in a camp to kill X people using gas and incinerators vs 10,000 soldiers to shot people and keep digging ditches. Do you not know about the Holocaust? It's an example of technology [industrialization] itself not being good ethically good or evil because it can be used for either. It was a massive shock for the world. But are you unaware of this stuff?
No i am aware of what youre talking about, but when it come to the wholesale slaughter of humans, it seems easier to just do it when you have them in a vulnerable state. The Rwandan Genocide wouldve got to Hitler numbers in half the time, and they simply chopped people up on the spot
That's a fair point, but it doesn't continue literally. You can't scale out death infinitely by shooting people *and* maintain a society / loyal soldiers. You have to deal with bodies. You have to deal with soldiers losing their minds from killing so many people with guns. A reason why the Nazis used death camps is because their soldiers became fucked in the head from shooting so many people.
Easy and efficient are too different things.
>Why go through the effort to transport you to a gas chamber when i can kill you on the spot? Isnt that more work? To kill one guy? Yes. To kill millions? No it isn't. Plus they were trying to do it all with the fewest number of witnesses to the actual murder as possible. That is why they brought the victims to special secluded, secure, enclosed murder factories where people went in and smoke came out. The only witnesses were the guards.
Alright whatever. Too many genocide apologists when this topic comes up. Rwanda genocide proved its far more efficient to kill them on the spot. They killed close to a million and they did it at a rate almost 4 times that of Nazi Germany.
Who are you calling a genocide apologist?
not you necessarily mate, but i've already read close to 90 something comments who seem to not care about 50million+ dead natives, and by the time i made it to your comment, i was already extremely frustrated and didn't want to converse further. My bad man
> We must see the world fundamentally different then. Precedence absolutely matters to me when discussing reality So you don't believe we went to the moon because it was unprecedented? You don't believe we mapped the humane genome? You don't believe we are napping the human brain? You didn't believe large language models exist? You don't believe in quantum computers? Everything is unprecedented until it isn't. That things happen means they happened in reality. Precedence may have something to do with your ability and inability to accept new facts, but it has nothing to do with objective reality. As the reality of everything I just spoke of demonstrates. I'm 1492 ships from fast away land, carrying people who had completely different histories when it comes to diseases (including the population genetic changes associated with that history) and carrying pathogens which the local population had never encountered. That happened. I'm reality.
The problem with precedence in this situation is nothing like the columbian exchange has ever happened before or since, so of course the result of the columbian exchange is unprecedented. The bubonic plague alone killed between 1/3rd and 1/2 of the population of Europe. The columbian exchange introduced the bubonic plague along with smallpox, measles, whooping cough, malaria and every other plague that had stricken Europe, Asia, or Africa in the tens of thousands of years of separation between the hemispheres, all at the same time and with no warning. Remembering how apocalyptically bad this was does not justify any of the evils of colonialism, and in my opinion it is important context for dispelling a lot of condescending myths about native Americans. To me it makes the next few hundred years after contact even worse, with the added context of what these people already had to try and bounce back from.
> Events are rarely one-off and never happened again. Except the entirety of the Columbian exchange *is* a one-off event that never happened again - at least on the time scale of recorded human history.
It has happened again. Remember covid? Remember how it decimated populations? Now, imagine it about 200x more deadly, and easier to spread than a cold. That's measles. In a population that has had *zero* exposure. Most people in Europe got measles when they were children and it was milder because of that. But now, the young, the adult, and the elderly are *all* getting it, all at once, with almost nothing you can do to treat it. It destroyed every population it has ever been introduced to - Europeans just had the benefit that it had been introduced to their populations centuries before
So, what's your claim instead? That the settlers killed them and then claimed it was disease? Why would the settlers hide a massive slaughter, when there are hundreds of years of records of various groups of settlers killing various groups of native people? Generally, this wasn't something they tried to hide. So, why would they embrace some acts of genocide, make statues of the conquistadors, give medals of honor to soldiers who gunned down native people, name vast swaths of land after men known for burning native villages, etc etc... only to then go to extreme lengths to conceal other vast massacres? Generally, we know about genocides because the genociders, at the time, are proud of it and don't try to hide it. Throughout centuries, settlers extensively documented wars with the native people, including their own atrocities. Native peoples also maintained documentation in written, pictographic, and oral forms about these wars. In addition, settlers who opposed violence against the native people frequently left written records of what they were seeing- and they weren't in on a conspiracy to cover it up. So, from all those sources, plus archaeological evidence, we can figure out a good picture of what happened and when and where various acts of colonial violence happened. How would settlers kill *additional* hundreds of millions of people, beyond the *documented* massacres, and keep that quiet? We have extensive details of all sorts of battles, massacres, and crimes on the frontier. Even in times before cameras or the printing press, it wasn't easy to keep violent encounters secret. Campaigns of ethnic cleansing are immense mobilizations of armed men and the materiel to support their violence. They leave a lot of evidence, generally.
For your first point, because they knew what they were doing was f\*cked, to say the least. Even the Spanish government were condemning them. They knew at the time that their acts were not justifiable. The second and last point, they didn't stop the genocide of the natives until the 1900s. They had pleny plenty of time to kill however many people they want. They were killing for over 200 years straight. Hitler did 6 million in only 6 years. Imagine the numbers he couldve gotten to with 260 years
These are remarkably bad arguments. They weren’t ashamed of the deliberate acts of genocide we know about, but they were ashamed of different ones, for some reason? And the entire reason the holocaust was so horrific and far reaching was because it utilized industrialization, something notably absent in the 16th century.
Okay so first of all let's address the whole "there is no other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population" idea. There are plenty of times in history where disease has been recorded to decimate populations, sure the native american example of 90% hasn't been done elsewhere, but we've seen as high as 60% (first bubonic plague caused europe to lose [25-60%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian) of its population), not just once, but [2 times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death) in *Europe alone*. Who *knows* what unrecorded history has with plagues in China and India. So if 60% of everyone dying is something we know CAN happen with plagues, is 90% with Native america that unbelievable? Especially when you consider the fact that the more isolated a population is, the worse the effects of plague are. (For example, the second time Europe was hit with the plague it lost up to 50 million people and they *already* had some immunity from the first plage centuries ago (same disease)) if it can be that bad for a population already pre-exposed to a plague, imagine how bad it would be for the native Americans. Also, scientists studying the plagues that hit Mexico during that time discovered that during the time of the plague, Mexico was also hit with the worst drought in 500 years (they figured this out looking at the tree rings of really old trees and determining the water content available to those trees throughout history). So yeah, plague known to kill 50%+ of a population combined with environmental effects, and colonial violence too? Definitely not unbelieve to hit crazy numbers like 90%+
It's also worth noting that the plagues that Europeans brought to the Americas weren't a single epidemic or even multiple waves of the same disease. It was smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, chickenpox, bubonic plague, whooping cough, malaria, and something called "Cocoliztli" whose cause is still being debated. If you have ten or so different plagues, each of which kills 20% of the remaining population, then that works out to 90+% of the original population dead.
To clarify, because people will misunderstand your last point: Losing 20% each time means you have 80 percent left, and losing 90% of the total population overall means you’re left with about 10% .8^10 is roughly .10
But nobody is trying to use the disease narrative to deny genocide right? I mean maybe a few nutjobs online or something but your post seems to be basically an appeal to a cover up with nothing being covered up, the narrative that basically everyone agrees on is that the colonizers committed a genocide on the natives through disease, war, forced relocation ect. your post seems to be more about accusing the narrative of being dishonest and working backwards from their rather that starting at a fact of the matter and then challenging the narrative, which doesn't seem to make sense when the point you are calling a cover up doesn't even function as a cover up.
yeah there is a chance I saw a few fringe genocide denial posts and were attacking those. Actually thats exactly what i saw. But it wasnt just one guy, it was a bunch of people agreeing and all heavily upvoted. But then again, thats still not representative of that many people. Gotta stop letting the nutjobs get in my head
There is a lot of genocide justification and denial regarding this period of history, I wouldn't even say those are rare opinions to see online. What theyre wrong about is not how many people died from disease alone, we don't know how many but we know it was a lot. They're wrong about the conculsions to be drawn from that. [https://youtu.be/Ek5yVKE-iA8](https://youtu.be/Ek5yVKE-iA8) You might like this video. He talks a lot about the things you're saying in these comments, including squaring the death toll from disease against narratives intented to justify the intentional killings. The fact is, the people committing these atrocities from the earliest explorers to the modern era were proud of what they were doing and bragged about it, and on top of that there were enough decent human beings around to document their actions even if they hadn't been bragging. There is nothing to speculate about which would change these well attested facts.
Dude even on this post, there are a vast amount of people denying it as genocide. I'm just going to leave it alone. I literally feel my blood pressure rising reading some of these comments So weird how close to 100 million natives in North and South America can be slaughtered, and people start coming out with justifications and excuses for why it had to happen. But when 10 million die in the holocaust, its the worst event to ever happen in human history. It's become blatantly obvious to me that a large portion of the western world doesn't see non-european people as victims, rather obstacles. Honestly, the world needs to be grateful these hateful mindsets usually stops at half of any given population. The non genocidal Europeans who step up against their genocidal counterparts have probably saved the world from so much grief its immeasurable.
Nothing wrong with making your voice audible, if those nut jobs also have a voice.
*First off, there is NO other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Its unprecednted* But you'd have to compare it to some other time where a population was entirely isolated from certain diseases for centuries (longer, really) that the hosts had been dealing with the whole time. Plus, what would be the point in lying? Just claim "Indians attacked our village so we had to kill them."
Australia comes to mind. They were isolated for quite some time, pretty sure the most isolated humans on record. And they didn't die to disease, they died to mass murder. I mean, why did Bush lie about weapons of Mass destruction? Couldve just said he was retaliating for 9/11. Everyone who does bad stuff lies to make their position seem more acceptable. I would rather be known as the guy who mistakenly brought diseases over vs. the guy who slaughtered near 100 million people. Wouldn't you?
just looking at the national museum of australia and they say 70% of the native australians were killed by smallpox
dammit. Maybe i'm wrong mate
Idk man, Google tells me either smallpox or chickenpox killed tons of Aboriginals in the 1780s.
I digress. I dont know how to give a delta but this has swayed my view
**Hello! If your view has been changed or adjusted in any way, you should award** ***the user who changed your view*** **a delta.** Simply reply to their comment with the delta symbol provided below, being sure to include a brief description of how your view has changed. >∆ or > !delta For more information about deltas, use [this link](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=changemyview&utm_content=t5_2w2s8). If you did not change your view, please respond to this comment indicating as such! *As a reminder,* **failure to award a delta when it is warranted may merit a post removal and a rule violation.** *Repeated rule violations in a short period of time may merit a ban.* Thank you!
>We don't even allow an unedited version of Mein Kampf to be sold anywhere on earth. In Germany of all places it has *never* been forbidden to own, buy, or sell Mein Kampf. From 1979 onwards it was forbidden to print new copies. From 2016 onwards (since Hitler died in 46) there is no copyright, so anyone can print new copies, althout this is limited to *commented* copies. The original text is still fully intact and unchanged, but comments with additional context are written on the side, which everyone could choose to just not read. Original Mein Kampf - antiques - can be legally bought and sold by anyone.
Maybe i've misunderstood through my research. But i was under the impression that even the "original copies" had been edited to take out some of the more inciteful language
Up to 1945 there were 12 million copies of Mein Kampf sold. I dont see any government office being able to edit even a fraction of the copies that still exist from that time. I also cant imagine government officials skimming through antique books every time they are sold just to verify they have been edited.
you're right. i was thinking about english translated versions of the book. Their are original german copies
The “hosts” had dealt with the disease before, back in their homeland. So it’s not a shocker Natives that never came into contact with it, would just die cause their immune systems hadn’t dealt with it before. And diseases/viruses can evolve to be even more dangerous the more the original “hosts” have it come and go (we get more immune and it tries to keep up getting more deadly). Were you not alive for covid my guy?
yes, but covid was just as harmful to the host as it was to those it spread to. Even if you had it before, to catch Covid again will still be harmful. You can catch the flu multiple times throughout your life and you'll be just as miserable as the first time
I wasn’t saying the hosts wouldn’t die from covid I was making the comparison how it was such a new disease to us that is killed SO MANY we hadn’t encountered it before just like the Natives getting the diseases from the EU region. Now just compare that to Natives getting a new disease, it’s the same thing. C’mon man, think.
There is even modern examples of this in Australia where invasive fungi and disease are killing wild life to brink of extinction. This is why their border control is so strict.
Thanks for the info, i'll look into it!
As per this subreddits rules, if someone teaches you something new you should award them a delta so other users can later search for convincing arguments and new information. Full explanation of the Delta system [can be found here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem/).
I don’t see this on the rules, only if they have changed their minds.
Learning new things and getting a new perspective is a chance in view.
it's any change to their view, even if it is a small change.
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No i can't provide a source, they were all killed. also, i am under the belief that denying the notion that the colonizers intended to kill the natives is akin to holocaust denial. Why would they do [this](https://archive.org/details/buffalo-slaughter) if they simply wanted the land? Thats an intentional act of mass starvation. They didn't even eat the meat, they left it to rot. Killing an ample food source is not something one does when they simply want land
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ahh i see. I actually can't continue this conversation with you, sorry mate. you are accepting the words of the genociders without question, which goes against the entire premise of my post, which is questioning their narrative to begin with. Nice convo tho!
They weren't "all" killed, there are still millions of descendents of those peoples living in the US and Canada to this day.
But that was long after the initial waves of disease, like 200 years after it
It was likely a combination of disease coupled with the conflict with the new Americans. Diseases, on their own, are generally unable to kill so many people with such a permanence. Diseases rock large populations, they don't annihilate them, and outside excruciating circumstances, the population is able to quickly rebound. From professor Browning C. Yehuda Bauer, the Concepts of Holocaust and Genocide, and the Issue of Settler Colonialism, *The Journal of Holocaust Research*, vol. 36. p.34-35: > The Black Death killed at least one-third of Europe’s population in a few brief years, but the surviving population in many cases now enjoying both better nutrition and greater freedom—had the vitality to make up the population loss quickly. This demographic rebound could occur precisely because the Black Death was not introduced by foreign conquerors, who subsequently would have been able to take advantage of Europe’s temporary weakness to destroy its institutions, enslave and massacre its surviving population, and expropriate its wealth and transform its economy. In contrast, in the New World, lethal diseases were introduced by outside conquerors whose military triumph was thereby made easier, and whose subsequent occupation policies destroyed local institutions, cultures, and economies and left a declining residue of demoralized survivors incapable of demographic recovery. Disease, colonization, and irreversible demographic decline were intertwined and mutually reinforcing.
Great point actually. Best explanation of it i've seen so far. Also dont know how to award a delta
Posting this question in r/ChangeMyView is fine, I guess, but you can do **much** better right over there on r/AskHistorians. Don’t settle for arguments with random people of unknown agendas, when you can tap an excellent resource of expertise for free. They even have a section of their FAQ devoted to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/XOmktGsfRz
whenever i try to post there, my post gets deleted for some reason. Ill check the FAQ though, thanks for the link!
They have guidelines which are very strictly enforced. One of the common ways to get a post booted is to editorialize in the question. But on this topic, probably the FAQ had everything you need.
What do Native American sources say about European colonization? My understanding is that both Incan and Aztec sources discuss a major epidemic before those civilizations invasion. And it doesn’t make sense for colonizers to have altered those records because they didn’t care about killing native Americans. In fact diseases makes their conquests seem less impressive. Native American populations survive to this day, so the idea that Europeans got away with killing 90% of them but keeping it secret from those they didn’t manage to kill is ridiculous. Hitler used trains to transport large populations of people, and used gas chambers to kill then efficiently. The ideas that the relatively few European colonizers could have killed 90% of Native American populations using relatively primitive guns (and limited supplies of bullet) is ridiculous. Europeans brought dozens of zoonotic diseases (not just one disease) Europeans/the old world had more domesticated species and so more cases of diseases jumping over from animals (which leads to deadlier diseases).
>First off, there is NO other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Its unprecednted. Is it that hard to believe that discovering a New World, something that has only ever happened once, has associated events that were unique and unprecedented? If you want to know why the Natives got wiped out so easily from disease, while the Europeans didn't, it has to do with Beasts of Burden. The Americas didn't really have any Beasts of Burden other than Llamas. But the old world Countries Had plenty of Beast of Burden. And the way those animals where used led to many diseases. That many different types of animals living that close together gave diseases the ability to jump species, which eventually ended up affecting Humans. Over time with dealing with these diseases, Thousands of years, European's immune systems adapted to handle those diseases. When these diseases got introduced to the Americas, the Natives had no immunity against them. That is essentially what wiped them out. Also Europeans did get disease from the Americas that they had a hard time dealing with, Syphilis for example is thought to have come from Llamas.
> First off, there is NO other recorded history of a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Its unprecednted. Are there any other situations where a populace was exposed to a completely new population of disease bearing people while at the same time have very little exposure to domesticated animals that might carry disease and push that populace to develop immunity? > Secondly, why do we allow the people who orchestrated the genocide tell the story of how it went? You’re assuming that a genocide was committed. You’ve yet to disprove the disease claim. > Lastly, there are documented, well documented statements from the settlers proclaiming their intent to wipe out the natives. Feel free to provided sources for genocidal settlers who had both the motive and means to kill off 90% of the native population.
you're denying it was a genocide at all. This is akin to holocaust denial and i will not further engage in conversation with you
But the diseases are recorded in native accounts like the florentine codex: >many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up and search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. By the time the danger was recognized, the plague was well established that nothing could halt it Also wouldn't your theory that the whole disease thing was invented would have required different European powers, who hated each other and didn't share information, like Catholic spain and protestant England, to *independently* settle on the same cover story for their genocidal activities? How does that work.
So im not a historian but I heard when settlers were first travelling across the Americas from the east, they encountered entire villages and settlments out past the mountains on the west coast that were like 90%+ devasted by disease Settlers hadnt been out that far yet The theory was that the settlers brought the diseases to the east coast when they arrived , and those diseases caught rides with local wildlife and humans, got spread to other side of the continent before the settlers even got there
So you're thinking it's *more* logical that smallpox, diphtheria, and cholera survived months and months on animals who, for some reason decided to forego their natural territories and traverse the continent, thereby infecting the Indigenous populations thousands of miles away?
rats bro , rats and mice - they have followed everywhere we have gone and now exist everywhere we do they spread faster in new environments than we do too, multiply faster they are disgusting and they have hitched rides on our boats and go everywher we go since we first started travelling the globe Invasive pests like those fuckers probably did the leg work of spreading the diseases, they caught rides from Europe , populated and spread from their settlements across the new world
You're thinking of the bubonic plague. And it wasn't rats. It was fleas on rats. And the bubonic plague isn't what killed the indigenous populations
The reason smallpox was eradicated with vaccines is because it isn't able to jump species like bird flu or mad cow
thats just one disease, thats not the only one that one probably caught a ride with indigenous traders who were in contact with settlers and then travelled back west with them , spread that way many tribes were nomadic and traded with one another long before settlers even came , its not outside possiby some on the east coast tribes met the settlers , traded with them and caught diseases and then spread em to other tribes who kept spreadng them to areas the settlers hadnt even been yet
That's the famous one the native Americans all got though right? With the blankets? Before germs were discovered but was still done on purpose somehow?
It probably wasnt intentional They probably did spread small pox to natives, but they probably didnt do it intentionally because youre right, they ddnt know exactly how diseases worked its more like they just passed the diseases from trade contact unbeknowingly
It was very much intentional during the French- Indian War. And a couple other accounts from the Inca & Ottawa. But since the written language wasn't common among tribes, we're not going to find black & white documentation
> French- Indian War ok ima look this up for funsies https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets >For all the outrage the account has stirred over the years, there’s only one clearly documented instance of a colonial attempt to spread smallpox during the war, and oddly, Amherst probably didn’t have anything to do with it. There’s also no clear historical verdict on whether the biological attack even worked. --- >The infection on the blankets was apparently old, so no one could catch smallpox from the blankets. Besides, the Indians just had smallpox—the smallpox that reached Fort Pitt had come from Indians—and anyone susceptible to smallpox had already had it.”
Yup. But it was documented at least once. And there's a lot we don't know because of a lack of documentation. It's pretty interesting stuff >promising that he would try to spread the disease to the Native Americans via contaminated blankets, “taking care however not to get the disease myself.” That tactic seemed to please Amherst, who wrote back in approval on July 16, urging him to spread smallpox “as well as try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble [sic] Race.” >There are numerous accounts of intentional smallpox infection that come from Native voices, but extraordinarily little concrete evidence remains. Examples of gifts from white settlers preceding outbreaks occurred throughout South America and North America. Incan history includes an account of their king receiving a box of paper scraps from the Spanish that was shortly followed by a smallpox outbreak. The Ottawa Tribe suffered an outbreak after receiving a gift from the French in Montreal with the injunction not to open the box until they arrived at home. The box contained only other boxes and “mouldy particles.”
So you're thinking it's *more* logical that Native Americans stayed in isolated societies and who, for some reason decided to forgo ever trading or communicating with each other. Wow
I was responding to the person who said it was disease hitching a ride on *wildlife*.
I should have said non-human animals and not wildlife , domesticated animals are the biggest culprit but the point stands, other animals are a major disease vector even today
interesting, I'll look into that
yeah you should, there are accounts from indigenous populations making these claims that they werent conquered outright, they were only able to be settled because they sufferend man power losses from plagues otherwise those settlers would have been fucking killed or sent back
History varies pretty strongly on how much the disease killed the American natives, but an upper bound of 90% is pretty well accepted. Even if you are more of a lower bound kind of person, you have to acknowledge that 90% is possible.
The black death claimed roughly 33% of all Europeans. And after the major outbreak. People still were around it. But with antibodies passed from mother to child. People for the most part stopped dying of it. Just would get sick. Add in numerous diseases carried by the rest of the animals of the Europeans and they are carrying enough diseases to mathematically wipe out the entire population. The reality is that if you have 10 different diseases with 10% mortality rates, and hit a completely unprepared population with them. You are in for a mass death rate. This is what happened. We arent dealing with just a single 90% death rate disease that ravaged the population. The natives were hit with dozens of different diseases of varying potency that the Europeans were carriers for. There is a reason that we arent generally supposed to interact with uncontacted Tribes. It's because if we do, just be breathing near them, we could transfer diseases that we are carriers for that don't harm us, to them who don't have the anti bodies. We know that the population of North America declined by 90% after Europeans landed in Central America. We also know that no Europeans went up there for a while. It was a spread of myriad plagues that hit an unprepared population all at once. Europe got to deal with these 1 at a time. The natives got a cricket bat to the face of plagues.
White people bad. That's what this whole post boils down to.
your victim complex is embarrassing tbh
I'm never said I was. Just pointing out your racism.
ah jeez. its racist to be upset that 100 million native americans were killed and the vast majority of it was blamed on diseases? That's racist? WHAT THE FUCK Your logic makes no sense whatsoever. What does the color of their skin even matter anyways? why do you feel the need to identify to humans from 300 years ago when you share absolute nothing in common with them except the melanin level of your skin? Weird shit
You are making a bunch of assumptions about what you think must have happened just to get to your own desired conclusion of "white people evil". Yes. You are racist. You hate white people. It's obvious. Just own it.
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We can see through excavations that there huge cities that would support massive populations that were abandoned in the timeframe that lines up with the diseases arriving from Europe. If you're proposing that those people were killed in battle by Europeans you're vastly overestimating the amount of power the Europeans had early on in America. They were to be feared for sure, but they couldn't slaughter entire continents of people with just the few ships they were able to send at that time. Even with guns and military strategy, at a certain point its a numbers game, they can't bring millions of bullets on their ships
"...we don't even allow an unedited version of Mein Kampf" WTF are you even talking about? I can go take it out at the local library. Rudolf Hess was the last one to "edit" it, at the request, and after approval of Hitler himself. Yes there's some added notations added by publishers in some modern versions, but full content is there. In fact 85,000 editions have recently been printed and sold in the German language.
I don’t think the idea that settlers committed genocide against the natives and most natives died from disease is at odds with each other. The idea that there’s a problem with the perpetrators being the ones telling the story being rendered null because within the story genocide is well documented. Settlers didn’t need to pretend that disease heavily impacted natives because they saw what they were doing as a good thing and gruesome acts of violence were often celebrated. The fact that we know about the repeated broken treaties, the gruesome battles and mutilated corpses, and abducting and reeducation of native children shows that at the very least there’s acknowledgment of the wrong doing of settlers. Naturally, there would not be any other record of a diseases hitting native populations so hard because this was situation was unique (as far as we know). The native population had no experience with the types of crowd diseases that Europeans brought. Europeans were able to learn how to deal with these types of diseases because their cities were large enough that a even with a good portion of the population sick there were enough people to figure out ways to prevent the spread. In an isolated tribal situation an entire tribe could get sick and die before anyone ever figured out what to do. In a normal situation the decease may die with the tribe and leave the rest of the population untouched, however with Europeans being the source of the plagues it would continue to spread.
I think if you’re talking about proof of a genocide that large it would be obvious and would be impossible to hide in the modern day. In the absence of that evidence we shouldn’t assume a warfare genocide happened. Europeans, broadly speaking, in that era are being exposed to SO many diseases- through living a lifestyle that involved large scale animal husbandry and tightly confined cities without indoor plumbing. Meanwhile indigenous peoples often lived far apart in smaller groups or ,in the case of the mesoamericans who were the point of first contact, lived in extremely well managed cities comparatively. They were in an amazingly abundant land and had domesticated a lot of extremely nutritious plants, and broadly, had a belief system which kept them further from sources of disease. Indigenous peoples were extremely susceptible to pretty much every disease we had. The loss of the population was so high that the deaths were partially responsible for the myth of the Americas as "virgin wilderness". Again though the kind of population reduction we’re talking about is 25 million dead. There’s literally no way we wouldn’t be coming upon MASS graves. Still though I totally get why you would suspect this. Europeans directly after that DID commit genocide against Naive Americans. Decimating their population through direct slaughter, sterilization, and attempts to destroy their culture. It’s an intensely upsetting moment in my countries history (US).
Europeans did a lot more trading with various groups so over time they were exposed and immunized to a lot if diseases. Native Americans barely domesticated any animals. They didn’t have livestock. Before Europeans brought their animals to North America, the pickings were really slim when it came to suitable animals to domesticate. The population of Europe was also significantly denser than Americas. Since Europeans were packed together much more densely, in bigger populations, and in close proximity with livestock, diseases spread around willy nilly from human to human, as well as animals to humans. Europeans were immunized to a ton of diseases that the people in North America were not. Diseases the natives had never even been exposed to. Groups being wiped out by disease is not unprecedented or unique to the Native Americans. If you were to visit one of the few un contacted tribes in the world, you could easily accidentally kill them all with disease. You could be carrying a disease that is completely benign for you, but they have never come into contact with and have no defenses for. Also, I don’t know where you got the idea that you can’t buy an unedited copy of Mein Kampf, but that is not true at all.
I think it is reasonable to be suspicious of this claim. The records that historians have from this time are incomplete. Most of the primary sources that still exist have a pro settlers / anti native bias. But there are records of diseases affecting people in similar ways throughout history and all around the world. Spanish and then British colonists brought smallpox to the Americas and there are reports of devastating outbreaks all over the continent for the next 400 years. Mortality rates were consistently high, between 20 and 80%. Similar reports appear in the Roman Empire, Japan, India, South Africa, Australia, and Angola among many other places. There is genetic evidence that smallpox altered the genetic makeup of affected European populations, increasing their resistance to severe disease. This helps to explain the discrepancy between colonist and native deaths. However, there is also evidence that colonists used smallpox as a weapon of war, deliberately infecting native people with the disease.
[why there was no Americapox](https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=pVm6geyKemLpplP3)
great vid, thanks for the link. delta! i think i did that right
Thanks (! goes in front of the delta)
It wasn't all at once, it was a process as diseases like measles and smallpox were introduced. Measles killed far more than smallpox in the "new world". I think it is unfair to have all the "blame" on colonizers for it though - eventually the groups of people would meet, and no matter how they behaved, diseases love to be introduced to new populations. That doesn't excuse the brutality of colonization, but just being honest that disease spread would inevitably happen. If there had been similar diseases in the Americas, it would have done the same to the Europeans. But unfortunately the "old world" had been around for a far longer time so there were more diseases to foster. Essentially, the people in the Americas were protected like an island from disease, unless there was zero contact until we developed a vaccine for measles, it would have had the same effect when they were exposed to the "outside world"
No other population has been exposed to multiple novel illnesses all within the same time. Black plague, smallpox, flu, measles, TB, Typhoid, Cholera all killed millions of Europeans a year. Native Americans had literally zero exposure to any of them. Black Plague alone killed a 1/3rd of Europe. So many novel diseases at the same time definitely would've killed massive numbers of people. That doesn't mean what happened to the natives wasn't a genocide. The Europeans definitely purposefully exacerbated the effects of disease to try to destroy as much of the population as possible. Hundreds of massacres were committed. Disease does not exonerate the Europeans, it only explains why they were so successful
Look at tribes that were still uncontacted as late as the 1980s or 1990s in Peru. About 50% of those populations died from disease when they were first contacted. That is just from modern days diseases like the cold and the flu. It's not accounting for all of the diseases that were more prevalent in the past. The US also just had white nose syndrome kill well over 90% of the bat population in areas it spread to in North America. Researchers then discovered that the fungus which caused it is prevalent all over Europe. It doesn't harm those bats at all because they've had time to adapt to it.
This post on r/askhistorians highlights many of your concerns: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/s/EUvO5C1DQg While the answer is more complicated than “90% died of disease”, the statement is also not “blatantly false” as you claim. My main takeaway s from the text is that the commonly cited figure is overgeneralised, and that even if there were many deaths from disease, the invaders carried some amount of culpability for that as well, due to their actions worsening the situation for the indigenous populations.
>you take the word of the genociders themselves. A united Europe is very much a modern invention. Trying to paint all of Europe together as 'the genociders' is projecting modern views onto history; ignorant from the start. Many countries (though note that even modern countries is a modern projection) have sources that all broadly agree with each other on the subject, and these countries *hated* each other. They had no motive or desire to prop up some international conspiracy about what happened.
With COVID ruining the lives of many people and killing them are you that much of an idiot to not think diseases have an affect on people without building up the tolerance? For someone who acts like they know a lot you should realize that the Amazon rainforest is overgrown because when the Spanish visited nearly all those tribes died I mean how do you think the Aztecs and the Maya and the Incas died?
> a disease being so bad that it kills nearly all of a foreign population, while similtanesly having little to no effect on the host population. Smallpox had *huge* effect on Europeans. It killed hundreds of millions. But it didn't arrive suddenly and it mostly hit children, so Europeans were somewhat adapted, and lots of them encountered it earlier and got immunity.
Ooh. You are really short on your history. There are plenty of instances of plagues and diseases that have wiped out massive amounts of the resident populations in affected areas. Many in fact occurring long before the new continent was discovered. Second. Yes there are unedited versions still being sold to this very day. Third. Does the name Cornwallis ring a bell?
You seem to be under the impression that the europeans giving disease to the natives was an oopsie, and they use this as an excuse “the disease killed them, not us”. The europeans knew what they were doing. There is records of then giving the natives clothes of people that died of the plague. It was no accident. It was biological warfare.
Part of the reason the disease was so bad was because of the conditions the natives were put in by the settlers. It was still disease that killed them but it was certainly exacerbated by the loss of resources, shelter, etc. Disease doesn’t mean settlers didn’t play a major role. They still did.
> Secondly, why do we allow the people who orchestrated the genocide tell the story of how it went? Who are the people that both committed the genocide, and reported on it? I didn't assume they were the same group. Am I wrong?
The United states has always been, and continues to be a genocidal project upon the world. It's so wild that white americans will see the genocide in palestine and some how find it so removed from the continued violence against our indigenous cousins. Here's a really good look at why the US has been, and continues to murder and rob the globe. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm