RE: Colonial heritage and shameless propaganda
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
I have no opinion on the question of genocide or not. However, I am sceptical about the alleged high death rate of Native Americans regarding "introduced diseases" and their alleged unilateral effects. It strikes me as odd that the European immigrants transmitted their "horribly contagious diseases" to the natives, but in return there is little mention that it must have been the same in reverse.
If one starts from the theory that hitherto unknown and never before touched peoples meet each other, then all of them must have been affected by unknown diseases and the number of deaths on the side of the immigrants must have been just as great, put in proportion.
I doubt the whole theory of contagion in its linear cause-effect manner. The human viriome, according to the theory of the biologists who study it, is considered crucial in human evolution.
If one realises that viruses have played the decisive role in the genetic evolution of life from the very beginning, then the fact that all organisms in the biosphere are more or less permeated by viruses is not surprising. Every millilitre of seawater contains 10 million viruses, with every lettuce leaf we take in an average of a billion viruses and even "clean" drinking water is teeming with these creatures. Viruses are the oldest building blocks of life.
It would now be completely illusory to believe that each of these viruses would trigger a specific disease; rather, our current understanding is increasingly moving in the direction that we must not understand viruses as individual agents, but always as components of highly complex microbial systems. In this sense, infectious diseases are not caused by a single virus, but are associated with certain shifts within this extremely complex microbiome, which we also call dysbiosis (incorrect composition).
In an over-fertilised meadow, where instead of a hundred different flowers, only dandelions thrive or overgrow everything else, it would be wrong to call the dandelion a "pathogen", because the actual disease factors lie in the dysbiosis resulting from the over-fertilisation and not in the resulting monoculture of dandelions. Transferred to micro-ecology, this means that the increased occurrence of certain viruses and bacteria is more a symptom of a disturbed system than its cause. Sorrel likes to grow on acidic soils, but the soil is not acidic because sorrel grows there. Just as in the external flora, the macro-ecology, it is the so-called indicator plants that show the state of the system, so the composition of the viruses and bacteria, the internal flora, gives us information about the general state of the human being, which is of course very individual for everyone; that is why the microbiomes of people are so highly individual.
There are about 40 trillion microbes living on our inner and outer body surfaces, to which must be added about ten times as many viruses. We do not even begin to understand most of the processes and interactions in this extremely complex ecosystem.
In a recently published study, the microbiome analysis of more than 9,000 people between the ages of 18 and 101 showed that those men and women whose intestinal flora had changed or individualised the most over the years were the healthiest and had the highest life expectancy. The microbiome of these people showed a very personal touch, so to speak.
Accordingly, the best protection against parasites and other infectious diseases is the individual structure of our microbiome. We speak of colonisation resistance when colonisation by foreign germs is prevented by our very "own" microbiome. Transferred to macroecology, this means that a natural ecosystem with high individual biodiversity, i.e. with "its own character", is much healthier and more robust against pathogens than, for example, a 10-hectare maize field where parasites spread much faster because the same conditions prevail everywhere.
source: https://martin-hirte.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Thomas-Hardtmuth-Das-Virom-des-Menschen.pdf
If one follows the theory that a varied diet favours such intestinal flora, as is assumed of hunter-gatherer cultures, which, in contrast to farmers or city dwellers, ate a richer and more varied diet, for example due to nomadism, migration through different zones with different plant growth and the resulting wealth in the consumption of different foods. Then one would have to ask oneself whether the nomadic and hunter culture of the prehistoric Indians was not superior to that of the arriving Europeans who, after months of deprivation of good food (on ships), must have been inferior to these "healthy people" in terms of their vitality and resistance. ... So I am skeptical about what the historynewsnetwork writes in the article you gave as a source.
Historiography is probably the least reliable "science" (I wouldn't even call it that).
Greetings!
I follow your same skepticism but I shared the article to denounce the outrageous and completely fictional figure of MILLIONS dead which only has emerged relatively recent.
The idea of smallpox infection has been debunked thoroughly about a century ago when the last epidemic took hold in the US, AFTER forced inoculation, and the doctor who debunked it was arrested and I believe imprisoned after he demonstrated that smallpox does not transmit from any contact with infected. Back to the topic of "genocide", if anyone is to be blamed for that it's the Natives themselves who had by that point eradicated countless tribes and which continued after the settlers arrived to systematically massacre each other, unlike any European conflicts to date, where the Natives would genocide everyone and engage in cannibalism, and this policy of genocide was carried out on the settlers as well, killing especially women and children and enslaving the men. The vast majority of attacks on Natives were as retaliation for murders and attacks on settlers who had nothing to do with the Natives.
Of course, that came across, I didn't go into it because I'm sceptical about sensational figures circulating on the net anyway. It has probably always been fashionable to use the "millions dead" to achieve a certain effect.
The image of the wise native, the bona fide and defenceless aboriginal is surely as distorted as that of the murderous primitive Indian who counted scalps. There will have been one as well as the other, what do I know about it. Everything I think I know I have read on my sofa. In fact, I don't think anything of using this subject as a hook for a private blog, I agree. In the end, I guess it's all click bait....