According to historian David Stannard, over the course of more than four centuries from the 1490s into the 1900s, Europeans and white Americans "engaged in an unbroken string of genocide campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas." The indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced massacres, torture, terror, sexual abuse, systematic military occupations, removals of indigenous peoples from their ancestral land, allotment, and a policy of termination.
According to historian David Stannard the principle causes of depopulation in the new world were disease, starvation and the birth rate, which "were a blueprint for extinction. And that is precisely what happened." I supplied the quotes where he said just that. Fortunately for you your skepticism allows you to ignore what he said when it fails to support your arguments.
You want want to focus on diseases being the cause of the Native Americans demise?
In the 1700s, British militia like William Trent and Simeon Ecuyer gave smallpox-exposed blankets to Native American emissaries as gifts at Fort Pitt, "to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians", in one of the most famously documented cases of germ warfare. Historians have noted that, "history records numerous instances of the French, the Spanish, the British, and later on the American, using smallpox as an ignoble means to an end."
What you quote here is from an article from 1945. It was not written by historians, it was written by a husband and wife team, "professors of bacteriology and chemistry respectively" as part of their attempt "to answer their personal question as to vaccination of their own child." So what we have here is 75 year old speculation by two vaccine quacks.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/286308I'd think that a self-described "skeptic" would be leery of the conclusions they came to, especially conclusions that are loosely paraphrased in a crowd sourced encylopedia, which crowd sourced encylopedia according to Wikipedia's article about Wikipedia has been accused of factual unreliability and "systemic, gender, and racial biases among the editorial community."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_WikipediaFor smallpox was more feared by the Indian than the bullet: he could be exterminated and subjugated more easily and quickly by the death-bringing virus than by the weapons of the white man." The British High Commander Jeffery Amherst authorized the intentional use of disease as a biological weapon against indigenous populations during the Pontiac's Rebellion, saying, "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race". So to suggest that the majority of Native deaths that occurred was via disease means what exactly? Mission accomplished? Seems about right.
Thank you for copying and pasting from Wikipedia an account of the single documented occurence of weaponization of small pox in the new world. One that I already cited. Should you be able to come up with a second documented account I'd be delighted to read it.
Native American Studies professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Native American
stupidities studies professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz who was spawned from "a mother that Dunbar believes to have been partially Native American." Oddly, first she claimed her mother was Cheyenne and then when that claim was debunked she started claiming to be Cherokee. She does have pretty high cheek bones, so my guess is that her mother is Elizabeth Warren and her father is Ward Churchill.
says, "Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide."
Too bad you did not quote the next sentence from the wikopedia article you are citing as authoritative:
"Some historians disagree that genocide, defined as a crime of intent, should be used to describe the colonization experience. Stafford Poole, a research historian, wrote: "There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them. It is a good propaganda term in an age where slogans and shouting have replaced reflection and learning, but to use it in this context is to cheapen both the word itself and the appalling experiences of the Jews and Armenians, to mention but two of the major victims of this century."
Question: as a self described skeptic, why is paragraph 14 of this wikipedia article a quotable authoritative and true statement and paragraph 15 so not authoritative and true that you failed to mention it?
Historian David Stannard writes that by the year 1769, the destruction of the American aboriginal population down to just one-third of one percent of the total American population of 76 million was the most massive genocide in world history.
One paragraph after the quote that you copied and pasted from wikipedia, this quote appears:
"The colonization of the Americas killed so many people it resulted in climate change and global cooling."
Question, and it might be a trick question: do you believe that the "genocide" that occurred in the New World is responsible for "global cooling." Or is global cooling something you're skeptical about?
Stannard also estimated that up to 65 million Africans died due to Slavery.
I’m not attempting to re-write history, we have governments for that. There are two sides to every story, I’m just trying to bring to light the different perspective of written history, not just His-story. I’ve heard of selective hearing, but selective historians?
What about what you're doing - cherry picking quotes that support your position - is not selective?