We cannot determine the origin of the virus, that microscopic imitation of life, that perpetual pestilence that has plagued all life from the Fall. If one believes in the Bible, one calls it the invention of Satan. If one believes in evolution, it is simply a profound contradiction in the theory. Why would Life race beyond the enemy it had created on the way? Why would the rush to Life create such an enemy?

At the time of Columbus and the venture westward, in 1492, the average age of a European white man was about 40. Charles the V of France, for example, was described as “a wise old man” when he died at forty-three. (Perhaps the reason Columbus lived to be 55 was because he got out of Europe!) Europe was a diseased place. Kirkpatrick Sale devotes two chapters to Europe’s notion that the end of the world was near. See, The Conquest of Paradise(Knopf, 1991). The impetus for exploration was to a great extent based on fear, misery, and frustration. Europe was just breaking out of the choke-hold Islam had held it in for many centuries. (Europe may ever thank the Mongolian Khans for that little favor.)

The Black Death, both bubonic and pulmonary, was only one plague. There was also leprosy, ergotism, scurvy, chorea, smallppox, measles, diphtheria, typhus, tuberculosis, and influenza. And of course syphilis. There was also famine. The 1400’s brought famine to poor soils of the Iberian peninsula virtually every decade of the century before the 1480’s. Sale presents a terrible picture of Europe coming out of the Middle Ages. In his portrayal, the great age of exploration was essentially a desperate search for sustenance. Millions of people had died in Europe, and the sense of destiny was acute.

Whatever ills the white European brought with him, bodily, wheverever he went, can never be understood as an intent to depopulate other areas of the world. He was only trying to survive. He was sick, and desperate.

And strong-willed. Columbus, who fought physical illness for years, was one of the strongest, bravest, heroic men ever to leave Europe’s shores. But the first Europeans in America, the ones who’s accompanying pathogens did the most damage to American Indians, North and South American, had no idea of what they brought to the new lands. (Whole tribes died off before the Pilgrims ever arrived.)

Humanity is an infectious thing. Life forms themselves harbour the agents of their own distruction, the microbes–pathogens, viruses, bacteria, etc. (As Edgar Allan Poe once posited, “In the original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of all things, with the germ of their inevitable annihilation.” Eureka, A Prose Poem, (1848). So then, when considering large population mirgrations or intercontinental encounters, the proposition of “biological” intent becomes quite subjective, more of an surmizing interpretation than a substantial accusation. The intelligent, intentional use of biological weapons in warfare was rather insignificant in terms of global effect. It is rather the natural evolution of human life that produces the mass killers. always. Man’s intelligence can only be accused post mortem, after the effect of mass reductions of population. He can think in such terms only after it has already happened. The letters of Lord Jeffery Amherst Colonel Henry Bouquet (July, 1763) are so late in the European drama in the Americas that they are completely insignificant. As noted before, they do not constitute evidence of any effective program actually carried out. They represent the thought of biological warfare, exchanged between two men.

I’m afraid the message that the Europeans designed to rid the new continent of its original inhabitants is the stuff of liberalism, rather designed to spread hysteria among Indians, and raise anti-Americanism to a new level of mindless volume. Liberals can destroy any positive attitude among Indians that way. They can daunt any hopes of Indian progress that way. Hysteria is as effective a plague to progress as any pathogen.

Indian problems today have more to do with soda and chips than with Congressional policy. Indian challenges have to do with self-control more than government control. It is the deep-seated scourge of misinformation that cripples Indians country–lies about the very basic rules of health and behavior. Is this something that the white man spread to the Indians in blankets? Did ignorance and immorality come wrapped in wool?

Or do we have to reconsider the words of William Tecumsah Sherman about American Indians, written in 1867:

“They all have to be killed or maintained as a species of paupers.”

This is a call to war if there ever was one, and it is the most important call ever made to Indians since the wars were ended. The disease of indifference destroys us now, the pox of self-pity, the infection of inertia. Not alcohol or drugs. Not even diabetes kills us. Today, we die of self-inflicted wounds.

Facing a new, foreign life-style is not assimilating, it is surviving. A warrior can die only two ways, being killed, or killing himself. A survivor has to kill some pride. He has to accept new enemies and kill them. There will be no warriors if someone doesn’t survive.