Purposeful Genocide v. Disease

In “Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas”, Michael A. McDonnell and Dirk Moses pose a very interesting question that completely changed my perception of Lemkin’s study of genocide in the Americas: “what would Lemkin have made of the relationship between disease and genocide had he known what we now know about disease and demography?” (518). According to McDonnell and Moses “90% of many indigenous populations were wiped out by newly introduced European diseases within the first decades after contact” (518). They later sustain that in order for Lemkin to support his “centrality of intention to genocide” they would expect him to cite “instances of deliberate intention” on behalf of the Europeans to infect the indigenous population with disease. Certain scholars such as Katz claim that “there was nothing that could be done to save the hapless natives, vulnerable as they were to the new pathogens” (519). Although the disease brought into the Americas by the Europeans were not necessarily a form of “purposeful genocide,” McDonnell and Moses discuss that “diseases often struck in certain circumstances created by the European invaders, making its impact far greater that it would have been otherwise” and that “European action…radically inhibited population recovery after the ravaging of disease.” As a result, they believe that “Disease and ‘purposeful genocide’ cannot be separated so neatly” (519). 

After reading this, I couldn’t help but wonder why there is such a great attempt in the article to distinguish between “purposeful genocide” and Disease. I understand that purposeful genocide implies a planned action to extinguish a group, and the introduction of disease was most likely unplanned. However, the fact remains that Europeans purposefully invaded the Americas and inhabited regions which were free of disease prior to their arrival. The OED defines invasion as: “The action of invading a country or territory as an enemy; an entrance or incursion with armed force; a hostile inroad”. By invading the indigenous peoples land, the Europeans automatically assume hostile and ill driven intentions. If the Europeans would have arrived in the Americas and peacefully co-habited with the indigenous populations, and inadvertently the spread of disease would have struck, this would be a completely different discussion. However, purposeful or not, the introduction of disease in an area that did not anticipate or was prepared for its arrival and the fact that the Europeans made its impact far greater through “massacres, expropriation of land, and the like” instead of alivieating or allowing the indigenous population a fair opportunity to recover and then retaliate, seems to me evidence enough to support rather than weaken Lemkin’s argument that colonization in the Americas can be perceived as a sort genocide.