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TelMiles
In: London
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I was just 'debating' with someone about the British colonization of America. He's American and said "you British infected blankets with small pox to get rid of the native population." To which I replied: "says who?" - he couldn't answer.
I think I'm right though. Who said this happened? Surely the ones that did it wouldn't have written it down, which leaves the Native Americans...who were illiterate...so basically we have the enemies of the British...not exactly convincing. I also seem to remember that this is yet another myth from history.
It seems to be that American academia purposely denigrate the empire to detract people from the stuff their own nation has done. Am I right?
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Against all Gods.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It was featured on South Park which is good enough for me.
Actually I suppose it would take quite sophisticated epidemiological science to isolate the source of what was after all an epidemic disease and (or perhaps not) quite sophisticated bacteriological knowledge to carry the plot out. The AE position would be to track down the date of the first mention of the plot not the date first mentioned (if you see what I mean)...that would probably tell us the truth.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| He's American and said "you British infected blankets with small pox to get rid of the native population." To which I replied: "says who?" - he couldn't answer. |
I've heard this too, but read (perhaps on or via Ma'at) that it can only be traced to one bloke or one occasion; i.e. it does appear to have happened, but not as a 'campaign'.
The perpetrator(s) would only refrain from writing about it if it was a guilty secret but, from what I understand, there would be no qualms about it when the natives were viewed as soulless subhumans who didn't value and utilise God's bounty and were to make way for proper, God-fearing Christians.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| I've heard this too, but read (perhaps on or via Ma'at) that it can only be traced to one bloke or one occasion; i.e. it does appear to have happened, but not as a 'campaign'. |
The 'plot' sounds rather preposterous, it's supposed to have taken place in 1763 I think and the perpetrators were a couple of soldiers who took two blankets and a handkerchief from a smallpox hospital. During the preceding century Native Americans were being struck down by the disease and whole groups were wiped out, particularly small communities and islanders.
1721 was the year of the most severe epidemic but during the American Civil War in the 1770s smallpox returned; however, by this time innoculation was routinely carried out. [The situation is reflected in England - 1721 there was a smallpox epidemic in London and the royal family was persuaded into innoculating themselves, after the technique had been used on prisoners to prove its efficacy and innoculation became the norm by the mid 1770s.]
The story seems to accurately reflect the attitudes towards the 'natives' as you say but there's no evidence it took place.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Wonder why blankets entered into the tale. Flea-ridden? 'course the devastating effects of smallpox are reminiscent of the Black Death and the official explanation for the introduction of plague into Europe hinges on rats (slang for 'cowards') in amongst bales of material on board ships from the east. Just as us Europeans came from the east by sea. Ring of myth about it.
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TelMiles
In: London
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I think this is indeed a myth, as the same charge was levelled at the Jews during the middle ages.
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Against all Gods.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| TelMiles wrote: | | I think this is indeed a myth, as the same charge was levelled at the Jews during the middle ages. |
One of the biggest perpetrators of the "smallpox blanket" nonsense is the discredited "academic", Ward Churchill (who forged his own credentials, plagarized others' works, and even pretended to be Native American). Unfortunately, in the black hole that is modern American Academia, his "work" in *Ethnic Studies* (what the fuck???) proved to be extremely influential (the politically useful is ever all-pervasive). Churchill attributed the act to the U.S. government (by which, of course, he really means the Jews).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_misconduct_issues
Lord Jeffrey Amherst is often cited as the first man to employ Biological Warfare using the exact same technique. Which ought to make us suspicious again.
Of course, all this happened before the development of germ theory -- so I guess the white-devils must have imagined smallpox came from "magic blankets".
* * *
Personally, I am a huge skeptic of the death-by-disease accidental "genocide" of American Indians. I estimate their original numbers to have been miniscule. The tiny population that existed in North America "disappeared" through the most natural method of all: inter-marriage.
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