the essay to write today, "Did the treatment of the Native Americans constitute genocide according to the UN Convention on Genocide [Res. 280 A III]?"
the answer of course is yes, but that is the easy part...
it is not death that is the most horrifying part of genocide and mass murder and modern war, it is the immeasurable amount of human suffering and misery that occurs from starvation, disease, brutal violence, forced migration etc etc etc...
all I can say is that people can be pretty FUCKED up when they decide to be..
"
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."
