american-holocaust

NOTESPrologue1. The official American estimate for the number of people killed by the Hiroshimablast is less than 80,000, but the Japanese have long disputed this figureand the best current estimate ranges from at least 130,000 immediately followingthe bombing to about 200,000 total dead from the blast and its aftereffects withinfive years. See Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused bythe Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: ThePhysical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, translated by EiseiIshikawa and David L. Swain (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 363-69.2. See Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, "The Aboriginal Populationof Hispaniola" in Cook and Borah, Essays in Population History, Volume One:Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp.376-410.3. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of theAmerican Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,1973), p. 565. On the matter of comparative survivorship ratios, according torecent adjustments in the 1990 U.S. census the national ethnic breakdown is asfollows: whites--74.2 percent; blacks--12.5 percent; Hispanics--9.5 percent; Asiansand others-3.8 percent. Thus, since whites and blacks combined total 86.7 percentof the population, if all whites and blacks were killed, the survivorship ratiofor Americans would be significantly better than 1:10 (actually, about 1:7.5), comparedwith the estimated overall 1:20 survivorship ratio for the native peoples ofthe Americas.4. The cited observer is Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, from hisHistoria Natural y General de las Indias, quoted in Carl Orrwin Sauer, The EarlySpanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 252-53.5. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other(New York: Harper & Row, 1984).