[PEN-L:36] Re: Indigenous peoples and death by "accidental" infection

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

Louis,
    Oh, I probably shouldn't get into this, but I do think 
this is overdone.  It would seem that you imply that most 
European immigrants to the Western Hemisphere were fully 
(or at least partly) aware when they got on a boat to come 
here that they were carrying diseases which the Native 
American Indian population did not possess resistance to.  
I find this highly unlikely.  There was an awful lot of 
very unfortunate accident in what happened.
     Of course there were instances of conscious spreading 
of disease with overt genocidal motives, the famous giving 
of smallpox-ridden blankets being the most notorious such 
example.  And plenty of European colonizing leaders engaged 
in genocidal acts in many other ways.
     I think the sign of the incongruity here is that 
indeed the Spanish would just as soon not have had the 
Indians of the Caribbean die off.  What was the benefit to 
them?  None.  They had to pay Portuguese slave traders to 
bring in African slaves who had sufficient disease 
resistance.  And of course there were areas where there was 
either a sufficiently large Indian population base and/or 
rate of intermarriage with the colonists so that many 
people of Indian ancestry survived, if sometimes with their 
cultures no longer intact, Mexico being the prime example.
      There is no question for me that the net effect of 
what has happened to Indians has been genocidal.  But a 
significant portion of this was pretty unconscious and 
essentially accidental, if "convenient" for the invaders.
Barkley Rosser 
On Wed, 09 Sep 1998 13:29:42 -0400 Louis Proyect 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> When the subject of how Indians died first came up on PEN-L, many people
> argued that it was an accident. The invaders did not know that they would
> cause the death of millions of Indians from diseases like smallpox,
> measles, etc. Ward Churchill's "A Little Matter of Genocide" puts this
> argument into the trashcan where it belongs. It is one thing to argue that
> Columbus had no idea that the pigs he brought over with him would cause an
> influenza epidemic among the Taino, it is another thing when the causal
> relationship between invasion and disease has been well-established. If
> there was an ounce of humanity among the colonists, they might have said
> something like "As Christians we understand that God loves all mankind. Our
> poor brothers are dying when we are in their midst.. Let us remain in Europe
> until a cure is found for the epidemics."
> 
> Get real.
> 
> The "Christians" saw the disease as a weapon against the infidel and used
> it in the same way that Hitler used the gas chambers. It was a weapon of
> genocide. A Jesuit wrote in 1570: "Our Lord having chastised it with six
> years of famine and death, which has brought it about that there is very
> much less [native] population than usual."
> 
> The colonists also understood that there was a relationship between the
> conditions that indigenous peoples were kept in and their susceptibility to
> disease. Slave-labor, deliberately induced famines, population transfers
> all had the effect of reducing one's immune system. The death of Indians in
> these conditions were just as "accidental" as the deaths of Jews at
> Auschwitz from tuberculosis or pneumonia. The colonists even understood
> that conditions had to be meliorated slightly in order to preserve Indians
> for the slave-labor brigades. Pedro de Alvardo desperately needed a native
> labor force to process his quota of gold for the Crown in 1533 so he
> suspended work in the mines until a measles epidemic could wind down. He
> wrote: "Because measles has struck the Indians I order those who hold
> encomiendas and repartimientos [categories of slave labor], on punishment
> of forfeiting them ... to care for and cure their charges without engaging
> them in any activity, FOR EXPERIENCE HAS SHOWN in other similar epidemics
> that much territory has been depopulate."
> 
> This is equivalent to Eichmann calling off work for a day or so, so as to
> allow the workers at Auschwitz to regain some strength in order to finish
> up some work on making Nazi boots.
> 
> Churchill says:
> 
> "Absolution from genocidal intent has always been retroactively bestowed on
> the early invaders, their own myriad statements to the contrary
> notwithstanding, by virtue of their lacking any genuine 'scientific
> knowledge' of microbes and epidemiology, understandings unavailable until
> the late nineteenth century. Such reasoning is obfuscatory at best. I, for
> one, being virtually illiterate in both ballistics and chemistry, have
> never acquired a proper scientific understanding of how a .357 magnum
> handgun actually works. Were I to take such a weapon and fire it pointblank
> at someone, I doubt very much that the argument of my very real scientific
> ignorance would stand me in especially good stead at my subsequent murder
> trial. All that would be required in the mind of the prosecution, judge,
> jury, and appeals courts would be that I had an average common-sense
> understanding of the cause and effect involved with what I did. On this
> basis they would all find me to be criminally culpable, and quite properly so."
> 
> Louis Proyect
> 
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]