Lushington D. Brady: Let’s Have Some Real Truth-Telling

“Indigenous genocide” is an obvious historical lie

Every January, Australia is subjected to the same, dreary circus of whingeing about its colonial history. The most pervasive are that Australia was “invaded” (it wasn’t) and that a “genocide” was committed by the “invaders”. Wrong, and wrong. In fact, the founding documents of British Australia, Governor Phillip’s orders, explicitly stated otherwise.

You are to endeavour by every possible means to open an Intercourse with the Natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all Our Subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of Our Subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary Interruption in the exercise of their several occupations. It is our Will and Pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the Offence.

Yet, for all that they are obvious lies, the myths of “indigenous genocide” persist. We saw a fresh round of such fact-free whining with the recent coronation of King Charles III.

Yet the argument that Britain should pony up for its historical sins is based on a number of rickety assumptions.

One of these is that a substantial portion of the wealth of the UK, or the British Crown, derives from slavery or colonial exploitation. Famously, empire often cost more than it brought in. And, like the rest of northwest Europe, the UK was already wealthy before colonialism or the slave trade. Western Europe would have remained rich even in the absence of overseas adventurism. Germany, for example, was one of the world’s richest areas, long before it gained any colonies. It’s true that overseas resources were exploited; but this was not the sole source of Europe’s wealth. Far from it.

Similarly, the US was not only not “built by slavery”, it’s a fair argument that it would have been better off, economically and socially, if it had never imported the world’s oldest institution at all.

Even more questionable than the call for reparations are the claims of ‘genocide’ in the context of New World colonialism. Until a few years ago, only a tiny fringe of historians believed that European colonialism in the New World was ‘genocidal’. In the six-volume, 3,000+ page Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas (published 1996-2000) several dozen specialists saw fit to mention genocide precisely twice. In both of these instances, the scholars in question do so only to reiterate that it did not apply.

The reasons for not claiming a “genocide” in the New World are multiple. Firstly, slathering the word about like so much special sauce does nothing but diminish the heinousness of the real thing. More importantly, the prime motivator of genocide, that of eliminating entire populations, was rarely or never a deliberate or sustained policy.

The Spanish government, for example, went to great lengths to protect natives. In 1542, it passed the ‘New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians’. It also established self-governing Republicas de Indios, where Europeans were not allowed to own land. All of this was done with the purpose of increasing Indian population levels – and, by all accounts, it worked: native population levels began to recover soon after. Even when policies came closest to something we would recognise as ‘genocidal’, as during the American Trail of Tears debacle, context reveals a host of reasons why, even here, historians have been reluctant to use this term.

Nor were there any serious attempts to deliberately eliminate peoples, by means of such large-scale and purposeful massacres as occurred in the Nazi camps or in Rwanda.

Native casualty rates across the New World were too low to justify calling what happened a ‘genocide.’ In the United States, where the native population might have approached 2,000,000 individuals prior to Christopher Columbus’ arrival, widely-accepted tallies show that the total number of natives massacred by whites prior to 1848 amounted to less than 8,000 individuals. Since populations renew themselves every generation, the total number of natives who were born, lived, and died in the territory of the United States between 1500 and 1900 was likely over 10,000,000.No matter how you do the maths, the number of natives who died by massacre was far less than one per cent of the population. Clearly any incidents like this were appalling, but such killings fall short of genocide.

With such an embarrassment of facts to justify their claims, activists have resorted to lies and exaggeration. For instance, it’s claimed that Hispaniola, site of Columbus’ landing, had a population of 8 million — when England’s at the time was undeniably 2 million. The idea that a largely-forested island just over half the size of England had a population four times what was then the most agriculturally-advanced land on earth is self-evidently ludicrous.

Genetic studies suggest that Hispaniola’s population was in fact in the tens of thousands. The claim of David Stannard that “fifty Hiroshimas” was inflicted on Hispaniola’s population is, to put it kindly, absolute bullsh*t.

Even more embarrassingly, the major population centres of the Americas, Mexico — Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador — today remain inhabited by people who are almost entirely (80%) indigenous or mixed-race.

Still, it’s also undeniable that huge numbers did die in the New World. But most of them died before ever encountering a European. Put simply, European diseases spread far in advance of European settlers.

It is universally acknowledged (even by Stannard) that the vast majority of natives who did die after contact died of disease, rather than massacre or abuse. Most of these people died hundreds of miles from any European.

It’s also logically impossible that Europeans who for much of the period had no concept of germ theory could engage in so-called “germ warfare”. The only recorded instance of an attempt to deliberately spread smallpox occurred at Fort Pitt in 1763 — over the objections of the British commanders.

Rather than spreading smallpox on purpose, as soon as they did gain a modicum of control over this and other diseases, Europeans actually set about protecting native populations against them. The United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, and other New World governments spent the majority of the nineteenth century funding vaccination programmes – vaccination programmes which are seldom researched by modern historians, but which eventually reached hundreds of thousands of individuals. This saved far more native lives than Europeans are accused of massacring during the same century.

Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine in 1796. Jenner received a letter of thanks from the Chief of the Five Nations in 1807, for “driving the fatal enemy of [our] tribes from the Earth”. Thomas Jefferson, so often targeted by woke revisionists, sent the vaccine west with Louis and Clark, to promote vaccination amongst Indians. Andrew Jackson, hated today even more than Jefferson, is responsible for the Indian Vaccination Act of 1832. A doctor sent by the Spanish government reported vaccinating some 50,000 natives in Peru alone.

The myth of New World genocide is a novel take on European colonialism that almost no historian agreed with prior to 2010. Originally propagated by a handful of left-leaning academic radicals, it has recently moved into the mainstream, despite the fact that the evidence has barely changed. This crisis of historical understanding is, in turn, being taken advantage of by a handful of people, who stand to profit enormously from a sense of public shame based on these historical misconceptions.

Spectator Australia

And that’s the key to understanding the sudden mania for “genocide”: money. Reparations are big business.

Another motivator is a desperation to obscure historical truth. Unfairly blackening the names of white “colonisers” is only half of it.

If we’re to judge Europeans of hundreds of years ago by modern “progressive” standards, then indigenes aren’t going to emerge looking any better. Far worse, more often than not. One must ask if Aboriginal activists are so keen to “repatriate” and “rebury” Aboriginal remains so as to keep what secrets they may reveal about Australia’s Aboriginal past. Maori activists might also be embarrassed by the documented and very, very real genocide perpetrated in the Chatham Islands — and not by “colonisers”.

Lushington describes himself as Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. This article was first published HERE