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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (129943)	4/24/2004 12:46:11 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Go back and re-read what Bilow posted about how smallpox was disseminated in the Americas. Not just one incident with blankets. There's a chapter or so about it in this book: amazon.com I just searched the term "smallpox" in JSTOR, a database of scholarly journals, in just the history sub-database, and turned up over 1000 articles. Picking one more or less at random, I read that some scholars estimate that in 1519 the population of Mexico was about 25 million, while in 1600 it was about 1 million, mostly due to smallpox. In Hispaniola, the population of Taino Indians (an Arawak tribe) may have been as low as 1 million or as high as 8 million in 1492. Regardless, by 1514, there were 26,000 Taino; by 1517, only 11,000, and by 1542, only 200. Again, mostly due to smallpox. Smallpox was so deadly to Native Americans that descriptions of the disease remind modern day readers of descriptions of Ebola. People died within hours of infection, bleeding from every orifice. It's airborne, doesn't need physical contact to spread. Many of the ones who survived the disease died of famine. Europeans are semi-resistant to smallpox. If smallpox were to break out again, perhaps as many as 70% of unvaccinated persons of European ancestry would survive. biomath.medsch.ucla.edu

To: jttmab who wrote (129943)	4/24/2004 11:06:56 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi jttmab; Re: "It's hard to find examples of where the white man did anything other than attempt to exterminate the American Indians. Reservations were not prime property and tribes were relocated to territories that they were unfamiliar with." There is some truth to this. People generally take better care of their friends and relatives than strangers. But on the other hand, it's hard to find examples of where any human ethnic group did anything other than attempt to exterminate other ethnic groups. And the prehistory of the American Indians is rife with warfare between the various tribes: Acoma Pueblo Known as Sky City, Acoma Pueblo was strategically built on top of a 357-foot sandstone mesa many hundreds of years ago for effective defense against raiders. Spanish conquerors learned of this defensive stronghold when they entered New Mexico in the 1500s. Acomans claim that their 70-acre village is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the U.S. ... nmmagazine.com Most of the rest of the American (as opposed to South or Central American) fortress cities have long been claimed by the elements, but the presence of defensive fortresses like Acoma is another little piece of proof that man's inhumanity to man runs deep in the veins of all. -- Carl