In his book American Holocaust, David E. Stannard writes about the nature of life and society in the New World before the coming of Columbus, the Conquest that followed the arrival of Columbus, the attitude taken toward the Native Americans by Europeans after this, and the idea that what occurred should e classified as genocide. The period before the coming of Columbus is not completely peaceful, but it was a set way of life in which the Native Americans enjoyed their isolation from the rest of the world and attained a level of development as a result. After the arrival of Columbus, though, the people were exploited, suffered from diseases they had never seen before, died by the millions, and lost their land over a period of time until they were placed in the unfortunate position they remain in to this day.
Columbus and his men introduced diseases into the New World which killed thousands of Indians who were not immune to organisms that had long since ceased to have any adverse effects on the Europeans. Calling this genocide is to see the effect and treat it as a desired end. In truth, Columbus and other Europeans could not have known that this would be the result, even if Columbus had known that he was arriving in a completely New World and not in India as he thought he was. Stannard notes that there is a tragic irony in the fact that the greatest threat to the health of the Native Americans in the New World was the fact that they had such extraordinary good health when the European explorers arrived:
For in the tens of thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the earth's human populations, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were spared from contact with the cataclysms of disease that had wreaked such havoc on the Old World, from China to the Middle east, from the provinces of ancient Rome to the alleyways of medieval Paris (53).
There were some diseases in the New World before Columbus, and people did...