I'm looking for a situation in history similar to the Holocaust

Setanta is right that deadly microbes travel (and kill) faster than do settlers.

It is interesting to compare elements of the Russian expansion into the Caucusus in the 18th thru 20th century with the settlement of North America. Both involved stark cultural clashes and different ways of life, but the Russian settlement of Slavs & Cossacks in the region was generally done forcibly - neither those killed or expelled or those who replaced them were volunteers. Everything was done at the initiative of a government. The systematic expulsion of the mostly Moslem Circassians from the Western Caucusus in the 1860s and 1870s involved the systematic and forced displacement of about 2.5 million people from the Caucsus highlands who, following the Ottoman defeats, were mostly resettled in the Ottoman Empire - most ending up in western Anatolia - among the Armenian population there. The movement caused the deaths of about one million Circassians, and the memory of it very likely influenced events forty-five years later when, following the Anglo French invasion of Gallipoli and the British incitement of rebellion among the Arabs, the Ottomans retaliated against the Armenians.

All of this illustrates an often repeated cycle in history in which the oppressed themselves become the oppressors of others in the name of saving themselves from further oppression. The victimization of Jews in Europe indirectly led to the victimization of Palestinians in the Middle East - and that will lead to further tragedies of which we may yet be unaware.

Is it just a cycle of history, or a learning curve? Did European Jews learn that not being the "timid Jew" was the only way to have one's own country survive? Cycle of history sounds like a common notion that people accept, but without any logical reason.

Separate studies involving population dynamics amonf Amerinds were don in the 2000-2005 period by Fegundes and Mabry. The findings were that, fromMDNA and nDNA,there were 9 separate initial Amerind Groups initially arriving from Asia. Then 3 other groups , later arrived. One was the Innuits and two others were Origin indeterminate. (possibly European). Arrivals couldnt be confirmed but left the door open for 16000+. These 9 gene groups developed into 3 to 11 haplotypes and up to 3 clades eaxch. That was a lot of raw dispersion genetic material. Mabry, by genotypic typing, discovered the "bottlenecks that occured in the populations. From the genetic groups and intitial population estimates, it was calculated that 35 to 50 MILLION Amerinds lived in the N and S Americas. (Two other studies, using additional genetic data came up with 90 million).
Mabry then showed that post contact, the populations of Amerinds declined dramatically due to contact with diseases from
1Blacks that arrived via Slave traders via Caribbean islands, and by direct contact with the Europeans.
1521--the population N aand S America was estimated at less than 5 million

1622--the total Amerind population was slightly less than 2 million.

The depraved indifference that "enabled" the diseases (yellow fever, measles, smallpox) was not considered an issue of any consequence by the original European settlers and conquerers. After all, these were mere savages.

MABRY says


"Smallpox was in Hispaniola by 1518. Las Casas said that only one thousand survived the epidemic. It reached Mexico in 1520 when Pánfilo de Narváez arrived. Between the time of Moctezuma's death and La Noche Triste in 1520, smallpox raged in Tenochtitlán. Leaders died within hours of Cortez' retreat. The Aztecs were beaten by smallpox long before they were beaten by Cortez. By 1520, smallpox had also spread to Guatemala. By 1525 or 1526, it was killing people in the Inca empire. Pizarro and his men found a population devastated by this deadly disease . The Spanish were immune, giving credence to their claims of superiority. Both the Spanish and the Amerinds saw the smallpox pandemic as divine punishment for the Amerind way of life. Stunned acquiescence to Spanish "superiority" was seen as the only possible response.
Other diseases were also devastating. Measles were in Mexico and Peru by 1530-31. Typhus may have come to the New World by 1546. There was an influenza epidemic in 1558-59; the European epidemic lasted from 1556 to 1560 and killed 20% of England's population. The Amerinds also had to withstand diphtheria and mumps epidemics. A German missionary in 1699 observed "The Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost." Breath instead of smell would have been more accurate! The Amerinds were also inflicted with the African diseases of yellow fever and malaria." Obviously, the vectors of these last two required some more time for settling in before any major epidemics.

The AMreinds were considered as subhumans who , if not useful as servants, could be wiped out passively with contact as the means of dispersive vector.

LAter activities in the US, from the Battle of TAll OAks to the Indian Removal ACt, were mop ups of a population that was almost anihilated .

Historic evidence shows clearly that the deaths of millions of Indians was not an innocent consequence of settlement by Europeans. It was a kind of battle plan in a time when disease vectors were not recognized but things like "tempers and vapours and contamination " were.

Wars, coomon among the AMerinds, were not for the annihilation of whole bloodlines, even the "ar of succession" that set quoted earlier in the Inca empire, didnt result in great death and body counts. The populations understood the need for citizens and slaves. The practices of blood sacrifices were not done in vast numbers to threaten a population. In fact the population growth rates were steady and increasing during the millenia before contact. Weapons that were available werent ones of MAss destruction. However, spread of diseases by contact was, and disease was used (passively) as a tool by Europeans. Gen Stewart is the only one who was identified to have spread smallpox by infected blankets given to Indian villages and then just standing back. Our own history denies this , and its now considered revisionist to try to say otherwise.

The remaining popultions of the Seminoles, Choctaws,Muscogee, Chikasaw Cherokee, and Seminole, are examples of how we , consciously removed and, marched out of their sovereign lands (granted initially to the Indians by earlier treaty) only to hve them die in high percentages on the way to and in Oklahoma. Then we carefully sliced up these remaining landholds and expropriated them.And this was going on until the 1970's.

Depraved indifference is a felony no matter. We as mericans dont have a clear social conscience because our manifest destiny sets up some high sounding principals.

None of that supports a contention that there were any concerted program of genocide carried on by European powers. None of that supports a contention that Europeans knowingly used disease as a tool to conquer the Amerindians.

Deloria also believed that dinosaurs and humans may have lived at the same time, and that the stegosaurus possibly still existed in the 19th century.

Wrong Deloria dys. Phil Deloria is a recognized expert in Anthropolgy and Amerind culture . Youre thinking of Vine Deloria, who is < Admittedly, a nutcase. The fathers reputation as a berserker for Indian culture is well recognized. Yeh he has nutcase ideas about **** that we make fun of gunga for believing. HOWEVER, Phil Deloria is a bit embarrased about his fathers beliefs but he still loved his pappa.

SET, experts disagree with you strongly. As I said, the charge is primarily depraved indifference followed by the US program of planned "resettlement" under the Indian Removal Act. We went from depraved indifference to an active participation in a "final solution" of remaining Indians beginning with TAll Oaks and then Indian Removal under JAckson. Id say that the US post 1830 was more complicit in seeking a holocaust style solution than justbeing accused of mere depraved indifference like the earlier settlers.

Ok FM, I'm embarrased as well as wrong, I knew Vine when I was teaching at CU, quite a likeable nutcase. Very charismatic. Russell Means had more credibility.

By the way, your Mr. Marbry contradicts Prescott and other historians i have read on when smallpox arrived in Mexico. Bernal Diaz, who accompanied the Grijalva expedition to the Yucatan coast in 1518, and who was therefore included in the Cortés expedition, does not mention smallpox, and later Nahuatl (or Toltec, if one prefers) writers (Amerindians who converted to Christianity and became priests or monks) do not mention it, but they do pointedly mention that diseases devastated the conquered Aztec empire--which is to say, that they raged there after the conquest. That more than two thousand Spaniards and many thousands of Toltec warriors required nearly two years to fight their way across Tenochtitlan is hardly consonant with a claim that smallpox had wiped out the population of the city before Cortés conquered it. Additionally, later writers including Nahuatl/Toltec priests and monks claim that smallpox was already known in Mesoamerica before the arrival of the Cortés expedition. Modern commentators who are wedded to the politically correct view (expressed in its most extreme form by Howard Zinn) claim that half the population of Mesoamerica was killed in the 1520 epidemic, but the historical sources simply don't support such a claim. Confronted with the account of Bernal Diaz, who was there, many simply say (without providing any justification) that it is probably false that Diaz did not see smallpox. Confronted with Nahuatl accounts which claim that smallpox was already known in Mesoamerica and that there was no devastating epidemic in 1520, modern scholars wedded to the politically correct view simply say (without providing any justification) that this was probably false, and inspired by a desire to please their new Spanish masters. What is clear is that all 16th centruy sources agree that the 1531 and 1541 epidemics, which probably were not smallpox, were the ones which devastated the old Aztec empire and destroyed the population of Mexico. (Those epidemics may well have been influenza, which came in with Spanish domestic fowl, and spread to the Mexican turkeys, one of the few animals domesticated in pre-Columbian times--but no one knows for certain, and it likely can never be known. It is certain that Nahuatl observers gave a different name to the disastrous pandemics of the mid-16th century than they gave to smallpox.)

Without regard, however, to whether or not any of that is true (and i consider your source suspect), none of the contentions on either side support a claim of a wide-spread and deep-dyed plan of genocide on the part of the Europeans. None of these contentions support a claim that Europeans knowingly used disease as a tool to destroy the conquered populations. Your source quotes las Casas. Bartolomé de las Casas was a vigorous and effective advocate for the rights of the conquered peoples of the new world, and it was at his instigation that the Indies Commission of the Inquisition was established to investigate the treatment of native populations, and as a result, provides excellent records from the 16th century onward. Prescott used those sources, and, in fact, because of the destruction of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Prescott had access to records and documents which no longer survive. I suggest to you that far from having a plan of committing genocide on the native population of the new world, it was in the interest of conquistadores to have plenty of living indios to form the repartimientos, the corvée labor force of their haciendas. They may have been harsh, but little different from how they would have treated peons in Spain. They had no motive to kill of the native population, and good reason to keep them alive, especially with the Inquisition looking over their collective shoulder, thanks to las Casas.

So, i return to my orginal position that i see no reason to believe that there was any wide-spread and deep-dyed plan of genocide concerted by European powers, nor any reason to believe that the early colonists of the Americas knowingly used disease as a weapon against the aboriginal inhabitants. If the standard view of historians that up to 90% of the aboriginal population died within the first century to century and half after contact is correct, there were precious few left upon which to practice genocide. This remains a case of show me the evidence.

I agree to a limited extent with the charge of indifference, but i would hardly call it "depraved." Referring to what policies the United States government followed, and which i am not attempting to whitewash or excuse, hardly addresses the epidemics which destroyed tens of millions (if estimates of the pre-Columbian population are correct) of aboriginal inhabitants before the United States even existed, and which had almost ended before the English-speaking colonists had barely gotten a foothold on North American soil.

I would not call the attitude of the earliest settlers "depraved indifference." I would call it active hostility. Both Virginia and Massachusetts were attacked by local tribes during the period of prorogued Parliament of Charles I and the subsequent civil wars in England, and the colonists just barely held on "by the skin of their teeth." Thereafter, their program was one of basically destroying the tribes in their way. Apart from their disastrous relations with the Iroquois Confederacy, the French got along well with Amerindians they encountered, and they used them effectively in their ongoing border wars with the English colonists, especially the Migma (formerly known as Mic-Mac) tribes of Accadia (now New Brunswick and Maine). This hardly endeared the Amerindians to the Americans. The Iroquois kept faith with their English allies, but carried that too far, and remained loyal to King George, and more specifically to the royal agent, William Johnson. Johnson died in 1774, but his son Guy Johnson remained a loyalist, and during the American Revolution, although the Iroquois Confederation was officially neutral, all but the Oneidas remained loyal, keeping faith with their revered white friend, William Johnson. Most of the Confederation was destroyed after Washington sent Sullivan to drive out or exterminate the tribes. The Mohawk followed their leader Brant into exile in Canada, where the white man is today busily cheating them out of as much of the land they were granted as they can steal. The survivors of the Iroquois Confederation (who had participated in massacres in New York and Pennsylvania and particularly in the notorious Wyoming Valley massacre) followed the Mohawk to Canada and were absorbed into their reserves, where they remain to this day. They fought with the English in the War of 1812, further endearing the Americans to their Indian neighbors. Pontiac's War after the end of the French and Indian war built the love between white man and red in the Ohio Valley. Andrew Jackson first made his military fame not at New Orleans, but during the 1813 Creek War, when the Creek civil war, abetted cynically by the English, spilled over into a war with the United States. Once again, small wonder the the love bond between American and American Indian was so much more tightly woven. It was good old Phil Sheridan who was quoted in an Oregon newspaper in the 1850s as saying that the only good Indian he had ever seen was dead.

Nothing i have referred to suggests for a moment that i consider the United States innocent in its relations with the aboriginal tribes. The question of the destruction of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas, however, has nothing to do with United States, which did not even come into existence until most of that population had already been destroyed, which is why i have been speaking of the Spanish, and to a lesser extent, of the French. I suggest to you that we are speaking at cross-purposes here.

MAybe yer right about my stretch of terms but:

Im always looking at intent. SInce de la CAsas "History of the Indes" he defined the use of cruelty and as a measure of control on the indigenous populations of MEso America.So when Cortes got whupped in Tenochtitlan I he did leave some of the dying and leftover crap as he took off. (Was this with knowledge aforehand about germs and disease?), I think, like early folks suspected that there was an external cause for disease, they could xontrol its spread by certain practices (some of which could be harnessed to actually enhance the spread of the sicknesses).

In the CAlusa Campaigns, de Avilles was known to have allowed disease ed slaves to enter into the camps of Carlos II (was this a "tool" to spread disease?)
When Coronado ivaded the Tiguex he had all the inhabitants turned out to live among the slaves (many of whom were sick). Coronado then had an easy time as the body count mounted.

(A lot of this comes form Nies work on the Indian "time line" type works she did and from looking through Sahaguns writing and de la CAsas (translated) works, as well as the compilations of Thoms and White (et al).
I believe that, when we fast forward 200 years to Pontiacs war, you maded the comment that the Ohio was "open to sttlement". I agree. The reason why was that the Delaware and Shawnee were given "gifts" of diseased blankets and the resultant epidemic spread through the Ohio in a matter of a few years leaving it part of the "pristine myth" ALso, the Tuscaroras wars had a similar incident in the 17(teens) in which the British defeated the(then sickened) Tuscaroras in NC (before they migrated to join the Iroquois Confederacy).

It was georgeob? who said that "disease was what all the Indians had in common with the Europeans. I am a bit incredulous as to how the population was so annihilated in 3 sub continental areas without "engineering assistance".
Always good gettin swatted aroun d for my beliefs and strong opinions . Im still stickin with the depraved indifference charges. There are several known incidents of disease culturing to say that the Europeans did NOT do any of this population control on purpose.

Look up the Armenian massacre by the Turks during WWI.
It was smaller in scale(1.5 million) but just as brutal,

You don't have to go back very far in history books for that one,,,

The artificial famines in the Ukraine during the 30s (Holodomor), the activity of the Ustasha in Croatia during WW-II, the Turkish genocide campaign against Armenians, the genocide in Rwanda (which SlicKKK KKKlintler didn't give a rat's ass about), the ongoing treatment of Christians in the muslim world generally.

Pavlik Morozov was a "hero of the CCCP(TM)" for ratting out his own family and other villagers for hoarding grain i.e. for trying to stay alive in the Ukraine around 1932. The kid's grandfather killed him at age 14 with an axe and he became a martyr of communism with pioneer lagers named after him, all for playing his part in murdering more Russians than Hitler and the Germans ever managed to kill in WW-II.

Mark

Interesting.

I can read in this thread similar events that happened in the past, where entire populations were practically erased from the map.

The reason why these other events are not "popular" is because the descendants of the victims are not crying babies, and they just let it go.

On the other hand, the entire world is pissed off when a small group of people is using all communication media to still play being victims of the atrocities of a war that ended 70 years ago!. Lol.

______________________________________

Lets go religious to explain why the atrocities happened from the biblical point of view.

The god of the bible knows that these people are just a bunch of liars claiming 6 million deaths.

The religious evidence is that their own god never prophesied such a thing.

There is not a single former biblical event, and there is not a single word of a calamity of this kind in their book.

But, their biblical prophecies mention that when Israel becomes great again, then, and only then, it will be a great calamity.

So far, if someone caused the WW2 atrocities against Jews, that was their own god.

Here is the explanation based if former similar biblical events.

In the past, the biblical god used Nebuchadnezzar to punish the disobedient "chosen" people.

Since 1918, after England took the territory of Palestine under its jurisdiction, it was a call for all Israelites to return back to the Holy Land.

But, they didn't obey, because Palestine was a land full of sand and rocks, while Europe was the best place to live with plenty comfort.

Here is when their god went piss off and used Hitler -his servant- to remove them from Europe, and cause their diaspora to everywhere in the world.

Without their former richness, many opted for traveling to Palestine after the war was over.

As we can notice, Nebuchadnezzar didn't kill millions but caused them to move from their comfort, and Hitler did exactly the same.

Of course, many died in WW2, as it happens in any war, but from here, the "victims" are clearly exaggerating their suffering. They just want to take advantage besides of covering up that it was their own god and no other the one who forced them to go and live in Palestine.

The biblical god never asked for human holocaust, and Hitler never gave it to this god.

The historical agreement between Nebuchadnezzar and Hitler is enormous, Nebuchadnezzar forced the "chosen people" to move from the Holy Land to Europe (beyond the Euphrates) and Hitler practically forced them to move from Europe back to the Holy Land.

The circle of life.