Bosnian Scholar fears Muslim Holocaust

[michael_ital]

Good points, and I agree 110%. Which is why I mentioned the fear factor in Hitler's actions.

[Grant]

This is a lengthy article that refutes most of the genocide charges against the US. It is worth reading the whole thing:


http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html

"It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century. Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject speak of an inflated "numbers game"; others charge that the size of the aboriginal population has been deliberately minimized in order to make the decline seem less severe than it was.

The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the ethnologist James Mooney proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5 million, nearly five times as high as Mooney’s, while Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the aboriginal population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the present territory of the United States at about 10 million.

From one perspective, these differences, however startling, may seem beside the point: there is ample evidence, after all, that the arrival of the white man triggered a drastic reduction in the number of native Americans. Nevertheless, even if the higher figures are credited, they alone do not prove the occurrence of genocide.

To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important reason for the Indians’ catastrophic decline—namely, the spread of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known by scholars as a "virgin-soil epidemic"; in North America, it was the norm.

The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans.

About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby, "but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath." It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.

To some, however, this is enough in itself to warrant the term genocide. David Stannard, for instance, states that just as Jews who died of disease and starvation in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, Indians who died of introduced diseases "were as much the victims of the Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs." As an example of actual genocidal conditions, Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as "furnaces of death."

But right away we are in highly debatable territory. It is true that the cramped quarters of the missions, with their poor ventilation and bad sanitation, encouraged the spread of disease. But it is demonstrably untrue that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were unconcerned with the welfare of their native converts. No matter how difficult the conditions under which the Indians labored—obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical care, corporal punishment—their experience bore no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos. The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the diseases that afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they could do for them. By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghettos, and quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and medicine; unlike in Stannard’s "furnaces of death," the deaths that occurred there were meant to occur.

The larger picture also does not conform to Stannard’s idea of disease as an expression of "genocidal war." True, the forced relocations of Indian tribes were often accompanied by great hardship and harsh treatment; the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to territories west of the Mississippi in 1838 took the lives of thousands and has entered history as the Trail of Tears. But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and sometimes after only minimal contact with European traders. True, too, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of divine providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that Europeans did not come to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases.

Or did they? Ward Churchill, taking the argument a step further than Stannard, asserts that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the way the great bulk of North America’s native population disappeared: "it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed." In brief, the Europeans were engaged in biological warfare.

Unfortunately for this thesis, we know of but a single instance of such warfare, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the British garrisons west of the Allegheny mountains. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw as the Indians’ treacherous and savage modes of warfare, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote as follows to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt: "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race."

Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst's suggestion, but whether he himself carried it out is uncertain. On or around June 24, two traders at Fort Pitt did give blankets and a handkerchief from the fort’s quarantined hospital to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his journal: "I hope it will have the desired effect." Smallpox was already present among the tribes of Ohio; at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak in which hundreds died.

A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense "'trade blankets' to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota." He continues: Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter’s. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to scatter and seek "sanctuary" in the villages of healthy relatives.

In this way the disease was spread, the Mandans were "virtually exterminated," and other tribes suffered similarly devastating losses. Citing a figure of "100,000 or more fatalities" caused by the U.S. Army in the 1836-40 smallpox pandemic (elsewhere he speaks of a toll "several times that number"), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival.

Supporting Churchill here are Stiffarm and Lane, who write that "the distribution of smallpox- infected blankets by the U.S. Army to Mandans at Fort Clark . . . was the causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40." In evidence, they cite the journal of a contemporary at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.

But Chardon's journal manifestly does not suggest that the U.S. Army distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on the inadvertent spread of disease by a ship's passenger. And as for the "100,000 fatalities," not only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers, but he too points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter's as the cause. Another scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also refuted the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.

Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of the United States government at this time to vaccinate the native population. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program continued in force for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on the part of some officials. Still, as Thornton writes: "Vaccination of American Indians did eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox."

To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians; neither can the large number of deaths as a result of disease be considered the result of a genocidal design."

http://www.answers.com/topic/native-american


Contemporary Life

In the 1890s the long struggle between the expanding white population and the indigenous peoples, which had begun soon after the coming of the Spanish in the 16th cent. and the British and French in the 17th cent., was brought to an end. Native American life in the United States in the 20th cent. has been marked to a large degree by poverty, inadequate health care, poor education, and unemployment. However, the situation is changing for some groups. New economic opportunities have arisen from an upswing in tourism and the development of natural resources and other businesses on many reservations. With the passage of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, many tribes began operating full-scale casinos, providing much-needed revenue and employment. An increasing interest among the general population in Native American arts and crafts, music, and customs has also brought new income to many individuals and groups.

The first tribal college opened on the Navajo reservation in 1968; by 1995 there were 29 such colleges. A number of Native American radio stations now broadcast in English and native languages. Although there have been Native American newspapers since the early 1800s, there has been an increase in all types of native periodicals since the 1970s, including academic journals, professional publications, and the first national weekly, Indian Country Today. Many of these publications are now produced in cities as more Native Americans move off reservations and into urban centers. Over the years many Native Americans have bitterly objected to the disturbing of the bones of their ancestors in archaeological digs carried out across the country. These concerns brought about the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990). Under its terms some 10,000 skeletons had been returned to their tribes by the end of the 20th cent., and efforts to repatriate and rebury other remains were ongoing. In 1990 the Native American population in the United States was some 1.9 million, an increase of almost 38% since 1980. Oklahoma, California, Arizona, and New Mexico have the most Native American inhabitants; most Eskimos and Aleuts live in Alaska.

[michael_ital]

Again, the bottom line is, is that the cause of their present day status is DIRECTLY attributable to the white man. Blacks also. To this there is no debate.

And again, diminishing their culpability. A typically inheritant Yank trait.

But to suggest that there was no premeditated agenda to commit this genocide, a la' the Third Reich, therefore no culpability on the part of the US government, completely, and TOTally diminishes the impact of the final outcome, which is STILL being felt today.

Overall, some fact mixed with distortion.

[Grant]

These are just time-lines. The articles themselves are much longer.

I was born in 1943 and grew up during the period in question. My family was anti-Communist and pro civil rights. We thought civil rights were something the country had been working on for a long time. Communism was a foreign threat and the reason my father considered building a bomb shelter in the back yard. We didn't connect the two at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_C ... (1896-1954)


"The civil rights movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, both in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights it brought about and its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.

The American Civil Rights movement has been made up of many movements, though it most often refers to the struggles between 1945 and 1970 to end discrimination against African-Americans and to end racial segregation, especially in the U.S. South. This article focuses on an earlier phase of that particular struggle, using two United States Supreme Court decisions—Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which enshrined "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine, and Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) which overturned Plessy—as milestones. This was an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, achieved great success but left little lasting legacy, while others, such as the NAACP's legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved only modest results in its early years but gradually built to a key victory in Brown v. Board of Education.

After the Civil War, the United States expanded the legal rights of African-Americans. The Congress passed, and the states ratified, an amendment ending slavery in 1865—the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment only outlawed slavery; it did not provide citizenship and equal rights. In 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified by the states, offering African-Americans citizenship. Black persons born in the United States had equal protection under the laws of the Constitution and the 15th Amendment (1870), which provided the right to vote to all male citizens, regardless of race. During Reconstruction (1865-1877), Northern troops occupied the South and enforced, along with the governmentally established Freedmen's Bureau, these new constitutional amendments. Many blacks took prominent positions in society, including elected office.

Reconstruction ended following the Compromise of 1877 between Northern white elites and Southern white elites. The compromise called for the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South, giving Southern whites a free hand to reinstitute discriminatory practices, in exchange for deciding the contentious Presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, supported by Northern states, over his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden.

The Radical Republicans, who spearheaded Reconstruction, had attempted to eliminate both governmental and private discrimination by legislation. That effort was largely ended by the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), in which the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals or businesses."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_C ... 55-1968%29


"The African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) refers to reform movements in the United States aimed at abolishing racial discrimination of African Americans; this article covers the phase of the movement between 1954 and 1968, particularly in the South. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted roughly from 1966 to 1975, enlarged and gradually eclipsed the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority. Several scholars refer to the Civil Rights Movement as the Second Reconstruction, a name that alludes to the Reconstruction after the Civil War."

[Cilmiile]

Grant

Those historical facts are always susceptible to revision and re-interpretation.

The only difference between those who re-visit and minimize the White genocide against the Indian and the Holocaust revisionists is, the latter are thrown in jail for their troubles.

Look what happened to the great and respected historian Irving. He has been languishing in jail for many months because of his opinion.

[Cilmiile]

As to the point about the civil rights, I am glad to see that your family was on the right side of that great issue. Most Americans have great decency and sense of fairness. All the volunteers who were leaving the northern states and campaigning for civil rights were a mix of all americans(black, white, Jew). They went there unbidden.

But there is always great inertia in human affairs and I am very much doubt that were it not for the Federal government's active intervention and the promulgation of federal laws designed to prosecute hate crimes(most race murderers were let off by their fellow small town jurors), I dont think any progress would have been made on the race front.

And what forced the Federal hand was America's interests were being compromised abroad by the small-minded racism and discrimination against blacks. It was a propaganda issue fully exploited by Chinese and Soviet communists, latin American leftists(notably Fidel), Africans and Arabs and Vietnamese communists. It was becoming too embarassing for America

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

There is no chance that the Germans are going to embrace fascism again. Anyone who lives here and pay attention can figure that out.

European Muslims are not going to be exterminated. Obviously there are concerns about their ability to assimilate, but I would not go overboard.

[Padishah]

The Germans have pretty much been castrated, what with their grandparent's crimes, which they still pay for! We won't be expecting any German to grow balls and get onto the Zionists any time soon.

As for another Holocaust; the first one is under a cloud itself, so let's no jump the gun.