Jim,
I am well aware of the atrocities you cite and the
especial obnoxiousness of Columbus. But his voyage(s) were
at the front end of a long process. Those atrocities were
for establishing control of and dominating the local
populations, not for total extermination. Those sources
you cite also make it clear that Columbus was attempting to
use the native populations as slaves, and the atrocities
were at achieving sufficient domination to bring about that
result. When they began to die off because of disease,
this was an unintended and undesired effect that upset the
apple cart and forced the Spaniards to give gold to their
hated rivals, the Portuguese, in order to obtain African
slaves. These are hard facts and in no way mitigate the
awful behavior of Columbus and his underlings.
What triggered my response to Louis was the implicit
message that essentially every (or almost every) person who
left Europe for the Western Hemisphere did so with the
specific intent of exterminating all Indians. That remains
an utterly nonsensical idea, although it was, as I say,
merely implicit in Louis's remarks (if rather near the
surface). Indeed I maintain my position that most
immigrants were unaware of the lack of disease resistance
that so many Indians had, a lack that played a large role
in the deaths that occurred, although, again, there were
some who manipulated this after their arrival as with the
"smallpox blankets" case.
Indeed, to take the argument further it must be
noted that there were some who immigrated who did so with
the intent of trying to get along with the Indians and to
treat them fairly, William Penn and the Quakers being a
prominent example. One can laugh at the purchase of
Manhatten by the Dutch for wampum beads, but in fact wampum
beads were used by the East Coast tribes as a medium of
exchange for intertribal trade (plus there was no way of
knowing how valuable real estate in Manhatten would become
several centuries later, not that the behavior of the
Dutch was admirable overall). Unfortunately, even when
organized groups of colonists or immigrants started out
with such intentions and even behaviors, they were usually
succeeded sooner or later by others whose attitudes/actions
took a more aggressive and hostile form, even up to
including conscious (and often successful) efforts at
either removal or outright extermination.
I am well aware that there are many Indian tribes that
have been completely wiped out, both physically and
culturally, in some cases as the result of conscious effort
and design by European immigrants or their descendents.
Although generally there were fewer people involved, these
were in some sense more awful holocausts than what happened
to the Jews under Hitler because they were indeed fully
successful in their exterminating outcomes.
Barkley Rosser
On Wed, 9 Sep 1998 15:03:21 PST8PDT James Michael Craven
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Response: Jim C
>
> Barkley, with all due respect, if you think Louis' comments are
> "overdone" I would suggest that you read the works of Bartolome de
> Las Casas who was a contemporary of Columbus and eye-witness to many
> of the practices of the Spaniards. See: "The Spanish Colonie" and
> "Historia de las Indias" Newsweek magazine (July 15, 1991) magazine
> called him a "revisionist historian" which is interesting because de Las Casas was
> the FIRST historian (how to you revise when there is nothing before
> you to revise) to chronicle and detail Columbus' actities. For
> example:
> [The Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in
> two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up
> his bowels. The tore the babies from their mother's
> breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the
> rocks...They spitted the bodies of other babes, together
> with their mothers and all who were before them, on
> their swords.
> and:
> "... in this time, the greatest outrages and
> slaughterings of people were perpetrated, whole villages
> being depopulated...The Indians saw that without any
> offense on their part they were despoiled of their
> kingdoms, their lands and liberties and of their lives,
> their wives and homes. As they saw themselves each
> day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of
> the Spaniards, crushed to earth by horses, cut in pieces
> by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive
> and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures...[many
> surrendered to their fate, while the survivors]fled to
> the mountains to starve."
> and:
> "By massacres and murders...they have destroyed and
> devastated a kingdom more than a hundred leagues square,
> one of the happiest in the way of fertility and
> population in the world. This same tyrant {Alvarado]
> wrote that it was more populous than the kingdom of
> Mexico; and he told the truth. He and his brothers,
> together with the others, have killed more than four or
> five million people in fifteen or sixteen years, from
> the year 1525 until 1540; and they continue to kill and
> destroy those who are still left; and so they will kill
> the remainder."
>
> Those are just some samples of many many eye-witness accounts. With
> respect, this "a priorism" of sweeping away the possibility of
> intended bacterialogical warfare, wholesale slaughter etc on the
> basis of a syllogism assuming that it would not be "rational" to do
> so as they would be depriving themselves of a source of labor, works
> just like the Holocaust deniers who summarily and a priori assert
> that mass murder of so many Jews would have been technologically
> impossible and/or not "rational" as Jews were a source of slave labor
> desperately needed. This kind of a priorism, so common in economics
> and other disciplines, and employed in lieu of concrete scholarship
> and research in a given area or on a particular subject, not only
> leads to tautologies or contrived syllogisms, it is also very
> offensive to those who do serious research in these areas and/or are
> the descendants of those victims being summarily dismissed with "It
> just couldn't have happened that way..."
>
> Jim Craven
>
>
>
> On 9 Sep 98 at 17:00, Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
>
> > Louis,
> > Oh, I probably shouldn't get into this, but I do think
> > this is overdone. It would seem that you imply that most
> > European immigrants to the Western Hemisphere were fully
> > (or at least partly) aware when they got on a boat to come
> > here that they were carrying diseases which the Native
> > American Indian population did not possess resistance to.
> > I find this highly unlikely. There was an awful lot of
> > very unfortunate accident in what happened.
> > Of course there were instances of conscious spreading
> > of disease with overt genocidal motives, the famous giving
> > of smallpox-ridden blankets being the most notorious such
> > example. And plenty of European colonizing leaders engaged
> > in genocidal acts in many other ways.
> > I think the sign of the incongruity here is that
> > indeed the Spanish would just as soon not have had the
> > Indians of the Caribbean die off. What was the benefit to
> > them? None. They had to pay Portuguese slave traders to
> > bring in African slaves who had sufficient disease
> > resistance. And of course there were areas where there was
> > either a sufficiently large Indian population base and/or
> > rate of intermarriage with the colonists so that many
> > people of Indian ancestry survived, if sometimes with their
> > cultures no longer intact, Mexico being the prime example.
> > There is no question for me that the net effect of
> > what has happened to Indians has been genocidal. But a
> > significant portion of this was pretty unconscious and
> > essentially accidental, if "convenient" for the invaders.
> > Barkley Rosser
> > On Wed, 09 Sep 1998 13:29:42 -0400 Louis Proyect
> > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > > When the subject of how Indians died first came up on PEN-L, many people
> > > argued that it was an accident. The invaders did not know that they would
> > > cause the death of millions of Indians from diseases like smallpox,
> > > measles, etc. Ward Churchill's "A Little Matter of Genocide" puts this
> > > argument into the trashcan where it belongs. It is one thing to argue that
> > > Columbus had no idea that the pigs he brought over with him would cause an
> > > influenza epidemic among the Taino, it is another thing when the causal
> > > relationship between invasion and disease has been well-established. If
> > > there was an ounce of humanity among the colonists, they might have said
> > > something like "As Christians we understand that God loves all mankind. Our
> > > poor brothers are dying when we are in their midst.. Let us remain in Europe
> > > until a cure is found for the epidemics."
> > >
> > > Get real.
> > >
> > > The "Christians" saw the disease as a weapon against the infidel and used
> > > it in the same way that Hitler used the gas chambers. It was a weapon of
> > > genocide. A Jesuit wrote in 1570: "Our Lord having chastised it with six
> > > years of famine and death, which has brought it about that there is very
> > > much less [native] population than usual."
> > >
> > > The colonists also understood that there was a relationship between the
> > > conditions that indigenous peoples were kept in and their susceptibility to
> > > disease. Slave-labor, deliberately induced famines, population transfers
> > > all had the effect of reducing one's immune system. The death of Indians in
> > > these conditions were just as "accidental" as the deaths of Jews at
> > > Auschwitz from tuberculosis or pneumonia. The colonists even understood
> > > that conditions had to be meliorated slightly in order to preserve Indians
> > > for the slave-labor brigades. Pedro de Alvardo desperately needed a native
> > > labor force to process his quota of gold for the Crown in 1533 so he
> > > suspended work in the mines until a measles epidemic could wind down. He
> > > wrote: "Because measles has struck the Indians I order those who hold
> > > encomiendas and repartimientos [categories of slave labor], on punishment
> > > of forfeiting them ... to care for and cure their charges without engaging
> > > them in any activity, FOR EXPERIENCE HAS SHOWN in other similar epidemics
> > > that much territory has been depopulate."
> > >
> > > This is equivalent to Eichmann calling off work for a day or so, so as to
> > > allow the workers at Auschwitz to regain some strength in order to finish
> > > up some work on making Nazi boots.
> > >
> > > Churchill says:
> > >
> > > "Absolution from genocidal intent has always been retroactively bestowed on
> > > the early invaders, their own myriad statements to the contrary
> > > notwithstanding, by virtue of their lacking any genuine 'scientific
> > > knowledge' of microbes and epidemiology, understandings unavailable until
> > > the late nineteenth century. Such reasoning is obfuscatory at best. I, for
> > > one, being virtually illiterate in both ballistics and chemistry, have
> > > never acquired a proper scientific understanding of how a .357 magnum
> > > handgun actually works. Were I to take such a weapon and fire it pointblank
> > > at someone, I doubt very much that the argument of my very real scientific
> > > ignorance would stand me in especially good stead at my subsequent murder
> > > trial. All that would be required in the mind of the prosecution, judge,
> > > jury, and appeals courts would be that I had an average common-sense
> > > understanding of the cause and effect involved with what I did. On this
> > > basis they would all find me to be criminally culpable, and quite properly so."
> > >
> > > Louis Proyect
> > >
> > > (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
> > >
> >
> > --
> > Rosser Jr, John Barkley
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> >
>
> James Craven
> Dept. of Economics,Clark College
> 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA. 98663
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Tel: (360) 992-2283 Fax: 992-2863
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards Indians; their land and
> property shall never be taken from them without their consent."
> (Northwest Ordinance, 1787, Ratified by Congress 1789)
>
> Those who take the most from the table,
> teach contentment.
> Those for whom the taxes are destined,
> demand sacrifice.
> Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry,
> of wonderful times to come.
> Those who lead the country into the abyss,
> call ruling difficult,
> for ordinary folk.
> (Bertolt Brecht)
>
> *My Employer has no association with My Private and Protected Opinion*
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:97] Re: Re: Indigenous peoples and death by "accidental"
Rosser Jr, John Barkley Thu, 10 Sep 1998 17:32:59 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
