A couple of years ago I wrote the following in response to an L.A. TIMES article which described and endorsed the misleading nonsense being propagated as history in L.A. public schools.

The most ironic thing about this pseudo-history is that, though it comes from Latino activists, it is just another version of white people’s history. Think back to what you were taught in public schools about the history of the world -- That from the time of Columbus on, history consisted of the technologically superior white man overcoming immense odds to conquer large parts of the rest of the world. The Latino pseudo-history portrayed in the L.A. TIMES article is just another example of the same whites-conquer-primitive-darker-skinned- people garbage. The only difference is that instead of these conquests being spun as a good thing they are now spun as a bad thing. But the history is still misrepresented as just being a matter of white conquerors defeating primitive native peoples.

For the truth see WAR AND THE WORLD 1450-2000 by British historian Jeremy Black: In the vast majority of cases the victories were triumphs of whites and allied native peoples who had their own reasons for allying with the whites to overthrow the alien native empires that had conquered and savagely oppressed them. For example, remember how you were taught that Cortez and a very few white men with horses and guns overcame the vast Aztec empire. The truth is that Cortez, a very few white men and hundreds of thousands of native allies overcame the hated Aztec oppressors.

The fact is that before the whites ever came North America Indians were in a state of constant savage wars upon one another. And in this process of warfare and oppression the Aztecs were remarkable as being the cruelest and most savage of all. They were far worse than the whites who were just another group of (routinely rather than remarkably) barbarian conquerors.

Of course the eventual result of the Spanish conquests was Spanish rule in Central and South America. But Spanish rule, terrible as it sometimes was, was clearly preferable to the Aztecs who were hated because what they demanded from the other native peoples they had conquered was a tribute of upwards of 200,000 "slaves" each year. I put quote marks around "slaves" because the Aztecs then proceeded not to use them as slaves but to sacrifice them with hideous cruelty to satisfy the demands of the savage Aztec gods.

In contrast, the cruelty of Spanish rule was mitigated by the constant interventions of Spanish priests who were anxious to assure the safety of the native peoples whom the priests were converting to Christianity.

As to the lie about genocide against the Indians being perpetrated via smallpox, it is true that large numbers of native peoples did perish from smallpox. But this was not a matter of deliberate biological murder. In fact, Spaniards also died in large numbers. More Indians died simply because they did not have the partial immunities the Spaniards had developed after centuries of smallpox epidemics. The hideous death toll from smallpox was the inevitable and unintended result of the congruence of disease-bearing Spaniards and non-immune Indians.

The Spaniards would not have deliberately spread the disease, of which they were terrified. Inter alia they wanted the natives alive as slave laborers.

Note also that whites did not bring slavery to the Americas. Especially in the American southwest and northern Mexico, the constantly raiding and warring native peoples had practiced slavery for centuries before Cortez. What whites initiated was black slavery in the Americas. Ironically, this was a product of the priests’ concern for the native peoples. It was out of that concern that the priests had (heathen) blacks brought from Africa to serve as slaves.

This is what led centuries later to the one example I can identify of real deliberate biological warfare-genocide. The 18^th Century English general Lord Amherst distributed to the Indians blankets that had been used by smallpox victims. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of Indian deaths. This atrocity resulted from the fact that the British (American) colonists already had black slaves so that there was no reason not to practice genocide against Indians who were a source only of danger not profit.