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HISTORY - GENOCIDE - SLAVERY - THE
TRUTH ??
Every year, the US population celebrates Columbus Day. Yet Columbus was a mass-murderer, whose soldiers killed thousands of American Indians, and whose legacy was a continent-wide genocide against the original inhabitants of the Americas. So what does the celebrating of Columbus Day tell us about modern America?
By Peter Montague
Examining a nation's heroes may tell us something fundamental about that nation's goals and values. Christopher Columbus has been a genuine American hero since at least 1792, when the Society of St. Tammany in New York City first held a dinner to honour the man and his deeds.
From numerous of his letters and reports, we learn that his overarching goal was to seize wealth that belonged to others - even his own men - by whatever means necessary.
Columbus then installed himself as Governor of the Caribbean islands, with headquarters on Hispaniola (the large island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He described the People, the Arawaks (called by some the Tainos) this way:
"The people of this island and of all the other islands which I have found and seen, or have not seen, all go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they make for that purpose. They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrous timid... They are so artless and free with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having seen it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them."
After Columbus had surveyed the Caribbean region, he returned to Spain to prepare for an invasion of the Americas. From accounts of his second voyage, we can begin to understand what the New World represented to Columbus and his men - it offered them life without limits - unbridled freedom. Columbus took the title 'Admiral of the Ocean Sea' and proceeded to unleash a reign of terror unlike anything seen before or since. When he was finished, eight million Arawaks - virtually the entire native population of Hispaniola - had been exterminated by torture, murder, forced labour, starvation, disease and despair.
A Spanish missionary, Bartolome de las Casas, described first-hand how the Spaniards terrorised the natives. Las Casas gives numerous eyewitness accounts of repeated mass murder and routine sadistic torture. As Barry Lopez has accurately summarised it, "One day, in front of las Casas, the Spanish dismembered, beheaded, or raped 3,000 people. 'Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight,' he says, 'as no age can parallel... 'The Spanish cut off the legs of children who ran away from them. They killed people by pouring boiling soap down their throats. They made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half. They loosed dogs that 'devoured an Indian like a hog, at first sight, in less than a moment.' They used nursing infants for dog food." This was not occasional violence - it was a systematic, prolonged campaign of brutality and sadism, a policy of torture, mass murder, slavery and forced labour that continued for centuries. "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world," writes historian David E. Stannard.8 Eventually more than 100 million natives fell under European rule. Their extermination would follow. As the natives died out, they were replaced by slaves brought from Africa.
To cut a long and very grisly story short, Columbus established a pattern that held for five centuries - a "ruthless, angry search for wealth", as Barry Lopez describes it. "It set a tone in the Americas. The quest for personal possessions was to be, from the outset, a serious of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it - the slaves, the timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and later, arable land, coal, oil and iron ore - was never visible, in which an end to it had to meaning." Indeed, there was no end to it, no limit.
The British arrived in Jamestown in 1607. By 1610, the intentional extermination of the native population was well along. As David E. Stannard has written, "Hundreds of Indians were killed in skirmish after skirmish. Other hundreds were killed in successful plots of mass poisoning. They were hunted down by dogs, 'blood-hounds to draw after them, and Mastives [mastiffs] to seaze them.' Their canoes and fishing weirs were smashed their villages and agricultural fields burned to the ground. Indians peace offers were accepted by the English only until their prisoners were returned; then , having lulled the natives into false security, the colonists returned to the attack. It was the colonists' expressed desire that Indians be exterminated, rooted 'out from being longer a people
upon the face of the earth.' In a single raid, the settlers destroyed corn sufficient to feed four thousand people for a year. Starvation and the massacre of non-combatants was becoming the preferred British approach to dealing with the natives."12
In Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey extermination was officially promoted by a "scalp bounty" on dead Indians. "Indeed, in many areas it [murdering Indians ] became an outright business," writes historian Ward Churchill.13
Indians were defined as sub-humans, lower than animals. George Washington compared them to wolves, "beats of pery", and called for their total destruction.14 Andrew Jackson - whose portrait appears on the US $20 bill today - in 1814 "supervised the mutilation of 800 or more Cree Indians corpses the bodies of men, women and children that [his troops] had massacred - cutting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins."15
The English policy of extermination - another name for genocidene - grew more insistent as settlers pushed westward. In 1851 the Governor of California
officially called for the extermination of the Indians in his state.16 On March 14, 1863 the Rocky Mountain News in Denver ran an editorial titled, 'Exterminate Them.' On April 2, 1863 the Santa Fe New Mexican advocated "extermination of the Indians".17 In 1867 General William Tecumesh Sherman said, "We Must act with vindictive earnestness against the Lakotas [known to whites as the Sioux], even to their extermination, men, women and children."18
In 1891, Frank L. Baum (gentle author of The Wizard of Oz) wrote in the Aberdeen (Kansas) Saturday Pioneer that the army should "finish the job" by the total annihilation" of the few remaining Indians. The US did not follow through on Baum's macabre demand, however, for there really was no need. By then, the native population had been reduced to 2.5 per cent of its original numbers, and 97.5
per cent of the aboriginal land base had been expropriated and renamed the land of the free and the home of the brave. Hundred upon hundred of native tribes with unique languages, learning, customs and
cultures had simply been erased from the face of the Earth, most often without even the pretence of justice or law.
Today we can see the remnant cultural arrogance of Christopher Columbus and Captain John Smith shadowed in the cult of the 'global free market' which aims to eradicate indigatious cultures and traditions worldwide, to force all peoples to adopt the ways of the US. Global free trade is manifest destiny writ large.
But as Barry Lopez says, "This violent corruption needn't define us... We can say - yes, this happened, and we are ashamed. We repudiate the greed. We recognise and condemn the evil. And we see how the
harm has been perpetuated. But, five hundred years later, we could set limits on overselves for once. We could declare enough is enough. So it is always good to remember Columbus on his day, and to consider his legacy.
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