The political devolution of Alexander Cockburn

[William S. Lear]

On Tue, October 27, 1998 at 03:38:16 (EST) boddhisatva writes:
>...
>	The "fact" (really an estimate) that there were fifteen million
>indigenous people before Columbus compared with the numbers reported in
>1890 does not, on its own, indicate genocide on a massive. Obviously there
>was both war and genocide against native people, but it is entirely likely
>that disease was the main cause of native deaths.  Influenza epidemics
>regularly killed ten percent of stricken populations, smallpox was in the
>thirty percent range, plague as high as forty percent.  Add to that the
>"childhood" diseases and a population could easily be reduced to ten or
>twenty percent of its original size and very quickly.  

As Russell Thornton notes in *American Indian Holocaust and Survival:
A Population Survey Since 1492* (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987),
it was disease that killed most of the native populations.  However,
to blithely poke this into the "non-genocide" compartment is not quite
so easy.  I've said this before: if you put people into slave labor
camps, destroy their means of subsistence, wage racist war upon them,
and they just happen to die of diseases you introduced (sometimes
purposefully), you are not off the hook for having killed them.  Jews
who died in Auschwitz from disease and illness were just as much
victims of genocide as those who were gassed and carted into the
ovens.

Bill