Disease deaths under colonial conditions constitute genocide by neglect.

Evidence

Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Parallel to UN Genocide Convention debates on conditions of life intended to bring about destruction — and to how the Holocaust is legally read versus the Americas. — connects to: Settler colonialism aims to terminate peoples’ existence, not individuals — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 17; European colonization triggered demographic collapse and forced removal that shattered existing Indigenous societies — The Social Consequences of Colonialism; Mass death from atrocity differs morally from ordinary, unavoidable death — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute…, 406 (+6 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 103

Broader Connections

• Mass death from atrocity differs morally from ordinary, unavoidable death #complicates (0.75) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 406
• Colonial life was structurally split between settler existence and colonized agony #expands (0.70)
• Centuries of oppression produce physiological violence in the colonized #expands (0.65) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 71