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The work of Thornton, Stannard, and other scholars has also been very important in fostering greater understanding of the various interrelated specific causes of this demographic collapse. This research provides a powerful refutation of the efforts of Gunter Lowy, Michael Medved, and other commentators to minimize the responsibility of European invaders and their descendants for the Indigenous Holocaust. Such efforts have usually involved narrowly focusing attention on the significance of diseases brought by Europeans and their African slaves in the decimation of the Indigenous people, and denying the invaders’ genocidal intentions.33 In contrast, Stannard has written.
It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called “virgin soil” populations of the Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent—a sad, but both inevitable and “unintended consequence” of human migration and progress… In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere’s native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.34