stannard american holocaust

¶ … American Holocaust' (1993), David Stannard claims that a genocide happened to the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America on a huge scale by the early inhabitants of America inhabiting this land following Columbus' discovery.

For four hundred years, from the Spanish assault against the Arawuk people in 1490 to the Sioux massacre by the U.S. Army in the 1890s, 'savages' endured deathly plagues imported by white people, racism, slavery, bigotry, cruelty, and mass murder that, countless times wiped out significant numbers of their population. Under the aegis of imperialistic expansion, so-called pious Christians and Europeans (English, French, Dutch, and Spanish) wiped out scores of natives.

When Columbus landed on the isle of the Americas in 1492, it is estimated that there were over 8 million native inhabitants. By 1496, from one third to a half had been decimated by murder, slavery, disease, and torture until by 1535 they were extinct.

Come the onset of the 20th century, and approximately 150 million 'savages' had been wiped out by "modern" Europeans on the basis that they were an ungodly, inferior race.

Hitler was said to have based his extermination program on the "Indian problem." In the 1930s, eugenics projects included systems where Native Indians and African-Americans were specially singled out surgically neutered and castrated. One such program was the Vermont Eugenics Program. In the 1960s the Bureau of Indian Affairs was found to be using saline solution instead of vaccines on native Indians, experimenting on Native Americans, and neutering native women during C-sections so that they would lose their childbearing capacities.

Most controversially, Stannard maintains that this underhanded genocide still continues today with uncovered uranium deposits on Navajo lands in the American Southwest that causes genetic damage to the inhabitants, and American financial non-profit resources that abstain from helping or extending themselves to the natives.

Ward Churchill, another historian, describes the decimation of 12 million Native Americans in 1500 to 237,000 in 1900 as a "vast genocide . . . The most sustained on record" whilst the American Indian: The First Victim (1972) maintained that American civilization had originated in "theft and murder" and "efforts toward . . . genocide."

In the Conquest of Paradise (1990), Sale condemned the British and American people for pursuing a genocidal program for more than four centuries (Lewy, 2004).

It was not only masssacre; epidemics were introduced by the White people too, one of which was smallpox that destroyed entire tribes at one go. Measles, influenza, syphilis, bubomic plague, typhus, and cholera were only a few of the other plagues that the "visitors" bequeathed to the inhabitants already living on this soil. Approximately 75 to 890% of the deaths of American Indians resulted from these pathogens.

There was forced relocation of Indian tribes. The removal of the Cherokee from their homeland in 1838 -- an experience that was later called the Trail of Tears -- annihilated thousands.

That the U.S. government deliberately infected Indians with deathly pathogens is doubtful; only one or two inconclusive cases support that. Unsubstantiated, too, is the report that the Puritans conducted deliberate massacre against the Pequots (a particularly brutal Indian tribe). Sometimes, self-preservation and revenge for the scalping endured by the Indians took a toll (Lewy, 2004).