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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: jttmab who wrote (129857)4/23/2004 6:06:37 PM
From: Bilow  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
Hi jttmab; Re: "A really good tidbit is if you can find the estimated native American population before the white man showed up and contrast that with the native American population of today. I've seen the estimates and it clearly shows the level of genocide that occurred."

In addition to CobaltBlue's comment on the universality of miscegenation, I should mention that the vast majority of the reduction in native American population occurred due to disease, and happened before almost any of the US was colonized.

The Spanish brought smallpox, influenza, and measles soon after 1492. The next century saw those diseases run from one end of the new world to the other. Those diseases so depopulated both North and South America that when the pilgrims arrived 130 years later at what would become the United States, the region was already quite underpopulated.

You can blame bad Spanish hygiene, but since the whole world was pretty ignorant on that sort of thing at the time, it seems to me it should be largely blamed on an inevitable accident. You certainly can't blame it on a genocide in the sense of using edged weapons to kill something like a hundred million people (if I recall the figures right). No one has arms that strong. Western weapons were barely better than bows and arrows.

The same thing happens whenever long secluded populations get exposed to the germs of a much larger population.

-- Carl
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