What scholarship do you have in mind, Brett? I have read David Stannard's "American Holocaust", Francis Jenning's "Invasion of America", as well as works with a more specific focus such as Margaret Kennedy's "The Whiskey Trade in the Northwestern Plains States". The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the genocide against the North American Indian looks worse in comparison to that perpetrated against Armenian, Jew, Gypsy or Hutu. Part of the problem with this discussion is that "Bhoddi" does not back up his genocide apologetics with any citations. That has the effect of statements like "One can only surmise that many Jews died from common infectious diseases such as cholera, rather than gas chambers." This is what Faurisson argues, and "Bhoddi" adopts the same methodology for the question of our own holocaust.
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>But, as "Bhodi" pointed out in his initial post, most people already agree
>that what happened to native americans was tragic and awful (especially on
>this list), so its hard to say that it could be used as an apology for the
>real crimes that were committed.
No, this is wrong. The issue that I have been dealing with is the social Darwinist component of dogmatic Marxism, which allowed Lewis Henry Morgan to be simultaneously a big influence on Engels and the ideological justification for the genocidal Indian residential schools at the turn of the century. Most Marxists retain a tinge of social Darwinism. In "Bhodi's" case, we are dealing with a social Darwinist who has a tinge of Marxish jargon. Social Darwinism regards the conquest of the Indian as a necessary evil in attaining "civilization" and overcoming "barbarism". I have been writing articles to establish that this garbage not only gives Marxism a bad name, it is not even Marxist.
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>To a large extent plagues suffered by native americans were NOT the fault
>of the colonists.
To a large extent? What are your citations? For some specifics, I refer you to the following passage in "American Holocaust":
"Recently, an analysis has been conducted on data from more than 11,000 Chumash Indians who passed through the missions of Santa Barbara, La Purisima, and Santa Inies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Perhaps the most complete data set and detailed study ever done on a single mission Indian group's vital statistics, this analysis shows that 36 percent of those Chumash children who were not two years old when they entered the mission died in less than twelve months. Two-thirds died before reaching the age of five. Three of four died before attaining puberty. At the same time, adolescent and young adult female deaths exceeded those of males by almost two to one, while female fertility rates steadily spiraled downward. Similar patterns--slightly better in some categories, slightly worse in others--have been uncovered in another study of 14,000 mission Indians in eight different Franciscan missions. [LP: These missions functioned more as prisons than anything else. Indians were converted at gunpoint.]
"In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained their Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more natives into their confines to compensate for the huge numbers who were being killed once they got there. This was a pattern that held throughout California and on out across the southwest. Thus, for example, one survey of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics showing that at one time an astonishing 93 percent of the children born within its walls died before reaching the age of 10--and yet the mission's total population did not drastically decline.
"There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. The most common causes were the European-introduced diseases---which spread like wildfire in such cramped quarters--and malnutrition. The personal living for Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregated common rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit more space than was allowed a captive African in the hold of a slave ship sailing the Middle Passage. Married Indians and their children, on the other hand, were permitted to sleep together--in what Russian visitor V.M. Golovnin described in 1818 as 'specially constructed cattle-pens.' He explained:
I cannot think of a better term for these dwellings that consist of a long row of structures not more than one *sagene* [seven feet] and 1 1/2-2 *sagenes* wide, without floor or ceiling, each divided into sections by partititions, also no longer than two *sagenes*, with a correspondingly small door and a tiny window in each--can one possibly call it anything but a barnyard for domestic cattle and fowl? Each of these small sections is occupied by an entire family; cleanliness and tidiness is out of the question: a thrifty peasant usually has a better-kept cattle-pen.
"Under such conditions Spanish-introduced diseases ran wild: measles, smallpox, typhoid, and influenza epidemics occurred and re-occurred, while syphillis and turboculosis became, as Sherburne F. Cook once said, 'totalitarian' diseases: virtually all the Indians were afflicted by them."
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)