In 2004, the University of California published the final volume of a compendium of Columbus-era documents. Its general editor Geoffrey Symcox leaves little room for ambivalence when he says: "This is not your grandfather's Columbus. While giving the brilliant mariner his due, the collection portrays Columbus as an unrelenting social climber and self-promoter who stopped at nothing to advance his ambitions.
"The fact that Columbus brought slavery, enormous exploitation or devastating diseases to the Americas used to be seen as a minor detail - if it was recognised at all - in light of his role as the great bringer of white man's civilisation to the benighted idolatrous American continent. But to historians today this information is very important. It changes our whole view of the enterprise."
But does it?
In Columbus Day: A Clash Of Myth And History, journalist Norman Solomon discusses how historians who deal with recorded evidence are frequently depicted as "politically correct" revisionists while the general populace is manipulated into holding onto myths that brazenly applaud inconceivable acts of violence of men against fellow humans.
For those of us who are willing to ask how it becomes possible to manipulate the population of a country into accepting atrocity, the answer is not hard to find.
The combined or singular deployment of the media, the entertainment industry, mainstream education or any other agency can achieve the desired result of convincing people that wars can be just and strikes can be surgical, as long as it is the US that is doing it.
Never has this process been as blatant and overt as in recent years when the time has come for the US to legitimise the idea of global domination.
A Department of Defence report titled Joint Vision 2020 calls for the US military to be capable of "full-spectrum dominance" of the entire planet.
That means total domination and control of all land, sea, airspace and information.
That's a lot of control.
How might this become accepted as "policy" and remain unquestioned by almost an entire population?
The one word key to that is myths. The explanation is that the myths the US is built upon have paved the way for the perpetuation of all manner of violations. Among the first of these is that of Christopher Columbus.
In a speech in 1989, George HW Bush proclaimed: "Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a new world but also set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith."
Never mind that the monumental feats mainly comprised part butchery, part exploitation and the largest part betrayal of host populations of the "new world."
In 1500, Columbus wrote to a friend: "A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls. Those from nine to 10 (years old) are now in demand."
Such original "monumental feats" as were accomplished by US heroes and role models were somewhat primitive.
Local inhabitants who resisted Columbus and his crew had their ears or nose cut off, were attacked by dogs, skewered with pikes and shot.
Reprisals were so severe that many of the natives committed mass suicide and women began practising abortions in order not to leave children enslaved.
The population of Haiti at the time of Columbus's arrival was between 1.5 million and three million. Sixty years later, every single native had been murdered.
Today "perseverance and faith" allow the US to accomplish much more and with far greater impunity. The US continues to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan with 2,000lb bombs in civilian areas and purge Pakistan via drone attacks on weddings.
Neither case is of isolated whimsy. It was and remains policy.
In A People's History of the United States, celebrated historian Howard Zinn describes how Arawak men and women emerged from their villages to greet their guests with food, water and gifts when Columbus landed at the Bahamas.
But Columbus wanted something else.
"Gold is most excellent. Gold constitutes treasure and he who has it does all he wants in the world and can even lift souls up to paradise," he wrote to the king and queen of Spain in 1503.
Rather than gold, however, Columbus only found slaves when he arrived on his second visit with 17 ships and over 1,200 men.
Ravaging various Caribbean islands, Columbus took natives as captives as he sailed. Of these he picked 500 of the best specimens and shipped them back to Spain.
Two hundred of these died en route, while the survivors were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town where they landed.
Columbus needed more than mere slaves to sell and Zinn's account informs us that "desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, (he) had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold.
"In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons 14 years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months.
"When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
"The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs and were killed."
As a young man, Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas had participated in the conquest of Cuba and owned a plantation where natives worked as slaves before he found his conscience and gave it up.
His first-person accounts reveal that the Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.
"They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke or cut an individual's head from his body or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes.
"They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers' breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting: 'Wriggle, you little perisher.' They slaughtered anyone on their path"
In a letter to the Spanish court dated February 15 1492, Columbus presented his version of full-spectrum dominance "to conquer the world, spread the Christian faith and regain the Holy Land and the Temple Mount."
With this radical ideology, Las Casas records: "They spared no-one, erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burned them alive 13 at a time, in honour of our saviour and the 12 apostles."
Author and journalist Chris Hedges believes that glorification of Columbus's atrocities is one of several myths that sustain the illusions that justify the imperial visions of the US.
He says: "It's really easy to build a Holocaust museum that condemns Germans. It's another issue to build a museum that confronts our own genocide, the genocide that was perpetrated by our own ancestors towards Native Americans or towards African-Americans."
Historical revisionism and amnesia are critical for nation-building, says Paul Woodward, author of the blog War In Context.
"Every nation is subject to its own particular form of historical amnesia. Likewise, imperial powers have their own grandiose revisionist tendencies. Yet there is another form of historical denial particular to recently invented nations whose myth-making efforts are inextricably bound together with the process of the nation's birth.
"Whereas older nations are by and large populated by people whose ancestral roots penetrated that land well before it took on the clear definition of a nation state, the majority of the people in an invented nation, such as the United States or Israel, have ancestry that inevitably leads elsewhere.
"National security requires that the past be erased."
Robert Jensen teaches at the University of Texas. In an essay where he justifies his decision to not celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday, he says: "Imagine that Germany won World War II and that a nazi regime endured for some decades, eventually giving way to a more liberal state with a softer version of German-supremacist ideology.
"Imagine that a century later Germans celebrated a holiday offering a whitewashed version of German/Jewish history that ignored that Holocaust and the deep anti-semitism of the culture.
"Imagine that the holiday provided a welcomed time for families and friends to gather and enjoy food and conversation. What would we say about such a holiday? Would we not question the distortions woven into such a celebration? Would we not demand a more accurate historical account? Would we not, in fact, denounce such a holiday as grotesque?"
Of course we would.
Morning Star - 13.10.09
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