Bio-warfare In Middle-earth

[William Cloud Hicklin]

The mind of pre-Enlightenment man would consider plague spreading by the air (often in conjunction with earthquakes or volcanoes), by sight, or by touch, but knew nothing of the actual method of transmission.

Why "pre-Enlightenment"? The alleged "Enlightenment"* had nothing to do with it; microbial pathogens weren't discovered until the Victorian age.

Europeans knew well enough what would happen if they gave blankets infected with small-pox to Native Americans.

Actually, they didn't; because what they thought they "knew" was that the Indians would become infected, and in that they were quite mistaken. Rather like Columbus and the Flat Earth this myth is impossible to kill; the story of widespread Evil Whites causing mass epidemics with their smallpox blankets grew out of a single, and entirely unsuccessful, incident, an attempt by Lord Amherst at the siege of Ft Duquesne in 1758. (The smallpox virus cannot survive outside a living host and thus cannot be transmitted via inanimate vectors)


------------------------
*I say "alleged 'Enlightenment'" because Voltaire and his fellow salon wankers contributed in real terms very little to human advancement; the Bloomsbury circle or Warhol Factory of 18th-century France. The REAL Enlightenment, the one in which the modern world was created, occurred in the 17th century and was led by men like Newton, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke.