I see that Ben Shapiro has decided he is an expert on genocide and Indigenous peoples in the U.S.

A few thoughts on why he doesn't know what he's talking about (and also why although he pretends to care about history, he doesn't). https://bit.ly/3fGKy6N 

His opening move is the same old same old: all the Indians died from disease so it's ridiculous to talk about genocide.

(In fairness to Shapiro, I suppose, lots of Ph.D. historians say this too, and not all of them worship Trump).

Here's what he says: "The notion that the United States committed genocide against Native Americans is based on a false equivalence between disease spreading across the United States, decimating the Native American population -- which is not a genocide."

True Native Americans suffered enormously from multiple diseases as a result of U.S. expansion, which, of course, was long after Europeans first showed up, meaning even if you go along with the virgin soil epidemic thesis (which you shouldn't), it doesn't apply post-1776.

Why disease? It was because the U.S. took Native people's lands, often violently, threw them into death camps, made them pack up and march hundreds of miles, subjected them to trauma, impoverished them, made them starve. In other words, disease was a consequence of colonialism.

Also, emphasizing only disease fails to recognize that the U.S. as a matter of policy said that Indigenous people who resisted giving up their lands were subject to genocidal warfare and that such warfare often occurred.

Shapiro concedes that "the Trail of Tears" (he has no idea what he's talking about--there wasn't a single Trail of Tears, there were multiple trails of tears) was maybe ethnic cleansing and so a little bit bad.

It's a crime against humanity!

In the end, Shapiro's argument against genocide rests on a comparison to the Holocaust: "If you want to say the United States committed genocide against the Native Americans in the same way the Nazis committed genocide, that is just not accurate."

But no one is actually saying that U.S. genocide against Indigenous people was done in "the same way as the Nazis committed genocide." Every serious scholar of U.S. genocide of Indigenous people knows the process was different from the Holocaust.

Genocides occur in different ways. Colonial genocides, in particular, unfold unevenly over long periods of time, but that does not mean they are any less horrific or real.

But I don't think Shapiro cares about history at all. He finishes by saying even if there was genocide, I didn't do it, meaning quit bothering me with what actually happened and with having to take any responsibility for our current world which genocide helped create.