Let The Bodies Pile High

The colonial mindset behind pandemic policies

Boris Johnson said that covid was “nature’s way of dealing with old people.”

He wondered what the point of stopping the spread of the disease was when only old people were going to die.

He argued against protection measures and said “let the bodies pile high,” something denied at the time.

Johnson thought covid would be useful in clearing the infirm from hospital beds and reducing the backlog.

These were shocking statements. In a historical context, however, they were highly consistent with how the ruling class has viewed epidemics and pandemics – as useful tools to achieve policy goals when faced with inconvenient people. Especially an inconvenient resistance.

In 1763, British colonists were fighting the Shawnee and Mingo warrior tribes in Delaware, Ohio and suffering heavy losses. When hearing about a smallpox outbreak among the colonists, a British commander wondered:

“Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.”

Earlier that year colonist William Trent in his diaries provided a separate account of attempting to wage biological warfare against indigenous people. After luring tribal chiefs to discuss a peace deal Trent wrote that:

"We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the small pox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."

He invoiced the British military for the cost, describing that the items came from the smallpox hospital, meaning this particular attempt at bio warfare was explicitly signed off by British authorities.

Did it have the desired effect? In the spring and summer of 1763 a devastating smallpox outbreak began among the tribes of the Ohio valley, emptying villages and killing thousands.

Whether these attempts at biowarfare were behind the outbreak or not, the intent was clear. And even if the deliberate attempts weren’t the source of the outbreak, the colonists knew very well indigenous people had no immunity against smallpox. The diaries of colonists show that they understood clearly that contact with a sick person was the route of transmission. They would have known a cough in the face would be sufficient.

The same story played out further north. In the 1860s a smallpox epidemic in British Columbia was seized upon by colonisers to wipe out indigenous resistance and steal land.

Starting in Victoria on Vancouver Island in 1862, smallpox spread among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and into the First Nations of the Northwest Plateau.

While colonial authorities used quarantine and the recently developed smallpox vaccine among colonists and settlers, it was allowed to spread largely unhindered among indigenous peoples. Up to ninety percent percent of the indigenous population of British Columbia was killed, and the epidemic collapsed large segments of indigenous British Columbian society.

Historians have called it a genocide.

“The colonial authorities knew that not containing smallpox in Victoria would spread it throughout British Columbia. It was an act of genocide against Indigenous people (because) at that point in time they wanted to be able to claim those lands without having to compensate or recognize Indigenous title.”

Two years after the epidemic, a colonial administrator called Joseph Trutch re-mapped indigenous lands knowing their ability to resist these changes was now terminally weakened.

The consequences have rippled to the present day. The indigenous population is far smaller than it would otherwise be had the outbreak not happened, and the majority of British Columbia today is built on unceded land.

This was almost certainly not the first time colonists had used smallpox against First Nations people in Canada. There are accounts from the 18^th century of Ottawa First Nations being given gifts by French colonists (who they sometimes fought alongside against the British) that likely contained smallpox variola – the scabs and pus of people infected with smallpox.

"This smallpox was sold to them shut up in a showy tin box, with the strict injunction not to open the box on their way homeward. When they arrived at their village on the shores of Lake Michigan, the Indians opened the box only to find another box and then another inside. Inside they found nothing but mouldy particles in this last little box. Many inspected it, and shortly thereafter, smallpox broke out.”

The French would then come and sweep into the towns of their supposed allies.

Colonisers also targeted the aboriginal people of Australia.

In 1788, English colonists arrived in Sydney to set up the first European colony in Australia. On board the ships were bottles of smallpox variola matter. Within sixteen months of their arrival, up to 90% of the Aboriginal people living in and around Sydney were dead. Accounts from the time detail bodies bobbing around Sydney harbour, entire villages extinguished.

The diaries from the time are detailed. None of the colonists arriving on the ships had smallpox. Yet so soon after their arrival, many indigenous were dead. Aboriginal people suspect smallpox was deliberately introduced to decimate them. Historians believe this too, citing both the handful of years between the devastating outbreaks in North America and the outbreak in Australia, and the weak position of the colonialists.

“By early 1789 the colony faced huge difficulties, from the number of indigenous people opposing the settlers, problems with agriculture, and from the lack of marines' capability to defend the settlement, that deploying smallpox became a viable option as a means of defence….British officials probably spread smallpox as the only means left to defend the colony.”

Given the brutality of European colonists towards indigenous peoples wherever they were encountered, it is likely that many attempts were made to deliberately seed and spread smallpox over the centuries. The generalised brutality of colonists means they weren’t likely to be squeamish about administering viral death, especially if they knew they were immune.

The number of indigenous people that died in the Americas from viral disease after the arrival of colonisers may even have changed the climate and ushered in a little ice age.

As towns and cities were emptied and cultures obliterated amid an estimated 55 million indigenous dead, huge tracts of cultivated land turned back into forest which absorbed massive amounts of greenhouse gases, cooling the world.

That such an extreme amount of viral death caused by colonisers may have changed the global climate is a historical obscenity almost too incredible for me to properly process.

While today we might have better treatments, vaccines and knowledge of viral diseases than the colonisers of past centuries, the UK’s covid inquiry shows us that our leaders still retain the coloniser mindset.

We also saw this starkly in the failure to deliver the promised vaccines to the global south and formerly colonised countries. By September 2021, 65% of Brits had received two vaccine doses and more than 70% of Americans had received at least one, compared to just 1.4% of people in low-income countries.

Our world is not run by humanitarians.

It is run by people with an often deeply twisted view of life and death.

These people pick and choose who deserves to live and die based on a cruel, supremacist view of the world. They do not act to ensure the health, safety and security of all their citizens.

Our hierarchical system of extractive capitalism boosts these people. Rewards them as it always has done.

Research has shown a strong correlation between the mindset needed to succeed under capitalism and psychopathic behaviour. We live under capitalism. Is it any wonder the ones who rise to the top are people who exhibit psychopathic and sociopathic traits?

Sometimes good people get through. But they are the exception, not the rule.

And when you really sit with and internalise the fact that we’re ruled by people with an almost cartoonishly evil outlook on the world, other things start to make sense.

Why deep and lasting injustices remain.

Why right now devastating war is being waged on a civilian population, supported by our governments.

Why our entire global ecosystem is breaking down, yet our leaders continue to drill for more oil and gas.

Why a novel virus is left to spread unchecked around the world, our leaders casually allowing an infectious disease to become a leading cause of death for the first time in the antibiotic era.

We have to be far more discerning about those we vote for.

They no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt, if they ever did.

We have to assume ill intention before good intention.

We have to see the coloniser inside of them.

The pandemic has shown us who they are.

We’ve seen how easily our existence becomes expendable to them when the actions necessary to keep us safe clash with their ideological preferences.

The ruling class truly does believe in a eugenicist survival of the fittest world. This is no longer in doubt.

We should not accept this. And we shouldn’t continue to accept that we must settle for the least worst leadership options.

We’re running out of time for the kinds of compromises many of us have relied on to bring incremental change.

A greater political radicalism is now needed for our survival.