As a result of the voyage of Columbus, they found much more, a whole "New World" inhabited by numerous peoples. Having conquered these peoples with lightning speed, the Europeans began to mercilessly exploit the natural and human resources of the continent they had captured. It is from this moment that a breakthrough begins, which by the end of the 19th century made the Euro-American civilization dominant over the rest of the peoples of the planet.
The remarkable Marxist geographer James Blout, in his pioneering study The Colonial Model of the World, paints a broad picture of early capitalist production in colonial South America and shows its key importance for the rise of European capitalism. It is necessary to briefly summarize his findings.
Precious metals
Thanks to the conquest of America, by 1640 the Europeans received from there at least 180 tons of gold and 17 thousand tons of silver. This is the official data. In fact, these figures can be safely multiplied by two, taking into account poor customs accounting and widespread smuggling. The huge influx of precious metals led to a sharp expansion of the sphere of monetary circulation necessary for the formation of capitalism. But, more importantly, the gold and silver that fell on them allowed European entrepreneurs to pay higher prices for goods and labor and thereby seize the dominant heights in international trade and production, pushing back their competitors - a group of non-European proto-bourgeoisie, especially in the Mediterranean region. Leaving aside for the time being the role of genocide in the extraction of precious metals, as well as other forms of capitalist economy in Columbian America, it is necessary to note the important argument of Blaut that the process of mining these metals and the economic activity necessary to ensure it were profitable.
Plantations
In the 15-16 centuries. commercial and feudal sugar production was developed throughout the Mediterranean as well as in West and East Africa, although honey was still preferred in Northern Europe due to its lower cost. Even then, the sugar industry was an important part of the proto-capitalist sector in the Mediterranean economy. Then, throughout the 16th century, there is a process of rapid development of sugar plantations in America, which replaces and displaces sugar production in the Mediterranean. Thus, taking advantage of the two traditional benefits of colonialism - "free" land and cheap labor - the European proto-capitalists eliminate their competitors with their feudal and semi-feudal production. No other industry, Blout concludes, was as important to the development of capitalism before the 19th century as the sugar plantations in Columbian America. And the data he cites is really amazing.
For example, in 1600 Brazil exported 30,000 tons of sugar with a selling price of £ 2 million. That's roughly double the value of all British exports that year. Recall that it is Britain and its commercial wool production that Eurocentric historians (i.e. 99% of all historians) consider the main engine of capitalist development in the 17th century. In the same year, per capita income in Brazil (excluding the Indians, of course) was higher than in Britain, which only became equal to Brazil later. By the end of the 16th century, the rate of capitalist accumulation on Brazilian plantations was so high that it allowed production to double every 2 years. At the beginning of the 17th century, Dutch capitalists, who controlled a significant part of the sugar business in Brazil, carried out calculations that showed that the annual profit rate in this industry was 56%, and in monetary terms, almost 1 million pounds sterling (a fantastic amount at the time). Moreover, this profit was even higher at the end of the 16th century, when the cost of production, including the purchase of slaves, was only one-fifth of the income from the sale of sugar.
Sugar plantations in America were central to the rise of the early capitalist economy in Europe. But besides sugar, there was also tobacco, there were spices, dyes, there was a huge fishing industry in Newfoundland and other parts of the East Coast of North America. All this was also part of the capitalist development of Europe. The slave trade was also extremely profitable. According to Blaut's calculations, by the end of the 16th century, up to 1 million people worked in the colonial economy of the Western Hemisphere, about half of whom were employed in capitalist production. In the 1570s, the huge mining town of Potosi in the Andes had a population of 120,000, more than at the time in European cities such as Paris, Rome or Madrid.
Finally, about fifty new species of agricultural plants, cultivated by the agrarian genius of the peoples of the "New World", such as potatoes, corn, tomatoes, a number of varieties of pepper, cocoa for the production of chocolate, a number of legumes, peanuts, sunflowers, etc., fell into the hands of the Europeans. - potatoes and corn became cheap substitutes for bread for the European masses, saving millions from devastating crop failures, allowing Europe to double food production in fifty years from 1492 and thus provide one of the basic conditions for creating a market for wage labor for capitalist production.
So, thanks to the works of Blaut and a number of other radical historians, the key role of early European colonialism in the development of capitalism and its "centering" (centratedness - neologism by J. Blaut - AB) begins to emerge in Europe, and not in other regions of world proto-capitalist development. … Vast territories, cheap slave labor of enslaved peoples, plundering of the natural resources of the Americas gave the European proto-bourgeoisie a decisive superiority over its competitors in the international economic system of the 16-17 centuries, allowed it to rapidly accelerate the already existing tendencies of capitalist production and accumulation and, thus, to initiate the process of social -political transformation of feudal Europe into a bourgeois society. As the famous Caribbean Marxist historian S. R. L. James, "the slave trade and slavery became the economic basis of the French Revolution … Almost all industries that developed in France in the 18th century were based on the production of goods for the coast of Guinea or for America." (James, 47-48).
At the heart of this fateful turn in world history was the genocide of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. This genocide was not only the first in the history of capitalism, not only stands at its origins, it is both the largest in terms of the number of victims and the longest extermination of peoples and ethnic groups, which continues to this day.
"I have become death, Destroyer of worlds."
(Bhagavad-gita)
Robert Oppenheimer remembered these lines at the sight of the first atomic explosion. With much more right, the ominous words of an ancient Sanskrit poem could be remembered by the people who were on the ships Ninya, Pinta and Santa Maria, when 450 years before the Explosion, on the same dark early morning, they noticed a fire on the leeward side of the island, later named after the Saint Savior - San Salvador.
26 days after the test of a nuclear device in the New Mexico desert, a bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed at least 130,000 people, almost all of them civilians. In just 21 years after the landing of Columbus on the islands of the Caribbean, the largest of them, renamed by the Admiral in Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), has lost almost all of its indigenous population - about 8 million people killed, died from disease, hunger, slave labor and despair. The devastating power of this Spanish "nuclear bomb" on Hispaniola was equivalent to more than 50 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. And that was just the beginning.
So, with a comparison of the first and "most monstrous in size and consequences of genocide in world history" with the practice of genocides in the 20th century begins his book "American Holocaust" (1992), the historian from the University of Hawaii, David Stanard, and in this historical perspective is, in my view, the special significance of his work, as well as the significance of the subsequent book by Ward Churchill "The Minor Issue of Genocide" (1997) and a number of other studies of recent years. In these works, the destruction of the indigenous population of the Americas by Europeans and Latinos appears not only as the most massive and long-lasting (up to the present day) genocide in world history, but also as an organic part of Euro-American civilization from the late Middle Ages to modern Western imperialism.
Stanard begins his book by describing the astounding wealth and diversity of human life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage. He then leads the reader along the historical and geographical route of genocide: from the extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America to the north and destruction of the Indians in Florida, Virginia and New England and, finally, through the Great Prairies and the Southwest to California. and on the Pacific coast of the Northwest. The following part of my article is based primarily on Stanard's book, while the second part, the genocide in North America, uses Churchill's work.
Who was the victim of the most massive genocide in world history?
Human society, destroyed by the Europeans in the Caribbean, was in all respects higher than their own, if the measure of development is to take the proximity to the ideal of a communist society. It would be more accurate to say that, thanks to a rare combination of natural conditions, the Tainos (or Arawaks) lived in a communist society. Not in the way the European Marx imagined him, but nevertheless communist. The inhabitants of the Greater Antilles have reached a high level in regulating their relationship with the natural world. They learned to receive from nature, everything they needed, not depleting, but cultivating and transforming it. They had huge aqua farms, in each of which they raised up to a thousand large sea turtles (equivalent to 100 head of cattle). They literally "collected" small fish in the sea, using plant substances that paralyzed them. Their agriculture exceeded European levels and was based on a three-tier planting system that uses combinations of different types of plants to create a favorable soil and climatic regime. Their dwellings, spacious, clean and bright, would be the envy of the European masses.
American geographer Karl Sauer comes to this conclusion:
"The tropical idyll we find in the descriptions of Columbus and Peter Martyr was mostly true." About Tainos (Arawak): “These people did not need anything. They cared for their plants, were skilled fishermen, canoeists and swimmers. They built attractive dwellings and kept them clean. Aesthetically, they expressed themselves in the tree. free time to practice ball games, dance and music. They lived in peace and friendship. " (Stanard, 51).
But Columbus, the typical European of the 15th and 16th centuries, had a different view of "good society." October 12, 1492, the day of "Contact", he wrote in his diary:
"These people walk in what their mother gave birth to, but they are good-natured … they can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith. They will make good and skillful servants "(my detente - AB).
On that day, representatives of the two continents met for the first time on an island called Guanahani by the locals. In the early morning, under the tall pine trees on the sandy shore, a crowd of curious Tainos gathered. They watched as a strange boat with a fish-like hull and bearded strangers in it swam to the shore and buried itself in the sand. The bearded men came out of it and pulled it higher, away from the foam of the surf. Now they were facing each other. The newcomers were dark and black-haired, shaggy heads, overgrown beards, many of their faces were pitted with smallpox - one of 60-70 deadly diseases that they will bring to the Western Hemisphere. They gave off a heavy smell. In Europe, the 15th century did not wash. At a temperature of 30-35 degrees Celsius, the aliens were dressed from head to toe, metal armor hung over their clothes. In their hands they held long thin knives, daggers and sticks sparkling in the sun.
In the logbook, Columbus often notes the striking beauty of the islands and their inhabitants - friendly, happy, peaceful. And two days after the first contact, an ominous entry appears in the journal: "50 soldiers are enough to conquer them all and force them to do whatever we want." "The locals let us go where we want and give us whatever we ask of them." Most of all, the Europeans were surprised by the generosity of this people, incomprehensible to them. And this is not surprising. Columbus and his comrades sailed to these islands from the real hell, which was at that time Europe. They were the real spooks (and in many respects the waste) of the European hell, over which the bloody dawn of primitive capitalist accumulation arose. It is necessary to briefly tell about this place.
Hell called "Europe"
In hell Europe was a fierce class war, frequent epidemics of smallpox, cholera and plague devastated cities, and death from hunger even more often mowed down the population. But even in prosperous years, according to the Spanish historian of the 16th century, "the rich ate and ate to the bone, while thousands of hungry eyes looked eagerly at their gargantuan dinners." So precarious was the existence of the masses that even in the 17th century, every "average" increase in the price of wheat or millet in France killed an equal or twice as large percentage of the population as the loss of the United States in the Civil War. Centuries after Columbus's voyage, the city ditches of Europe still served as a public toilet, the entrails of slaughtered animals and the remains of carcasses thrown to rot in the streets. A special problem in London was the so-called. "holes for the poor" - "large, deep, open pits, where the corpses of the deceased were piled up, in a row, layer by layer. Only when the pit was filled to the brim, it was covered with earth." One contemporary wrote: "How disgusting is the stench that comes from these pits filled with corpses, especially in the heat and after the rain." Slightly better was the smell emanating from living Europeans, most of whom were born and died without being washed. Almost every one of them bore traces of smallpox and other deforming diseases, which left their victims half-blind, covered with pockmarks, scabs, rotting chronic ulcers, lame, etc. The average life expectancy did not reach 30 years. Half of the children died before they reached 10.
A criminal could lie in wait for you around every corner. One of the most popular robbery tricks was to throw a stone out of the window on the victim's head and then search her, and one of the holiday entertainment was to burn a dozen or two cats alive. In the years of famine, the cities of Europe were rocked by riots. And the largest class war of that era, or rather a series of wars under the general name of the Peasants, claimed more than 100,000 lives. The fate of the rural population was not the best. The classic description of French peasants of the 17th century, left by Labruiere and confirmed by modern historians, summarizes the existence of this most numerous class of feudal Europe:
"sullen animals, males and females scattered across the countryside, filthy and deathly pale, scorched by the sun, chained to the ground, which they dig and shovel with invincible tenacity; faces, and they really are people. At night they return to their lairs, where they live on black bread, water and roots."
And what Lawrence Stone wrote about a typical English village can be attributed to the rest of Europe at that time:
"It was a place full of hatred and anger, the only thing that binds its inhabitants was episodes of mass hysteria, which for a time united the majority in order to torture and burn the local witch." In England and the Continent, there were cities in which up to a third of the population was accused of witchcraft, and where 10 out of every one hundred townspeople were executed on this charge in just one year. At the end of the 16th and 17th centuries, more than 3300 people were executed for "Satanism" in one of the regions of peaceful Switzerland. In the tiny village of Wiesensteig, 63 "witches" were burned in one year. In Obermarchthal, with a population of 700, 54 people died at the stake in three years.
Poverty was so central to European society that in the 17th century the French language had a whole palette of words (about 20) to denote all its gradations and shades. The Academy's dictionary explained the meaning of the term dans un etat d'indigence absolue in this way: “one who had no food or necessary clothing or a roof over his head before, but who now said goodbye to several rumpled cooking bowls and blankets, which were the main property working families.
Slavery flourished in Christian Europe. The Church welcomed and encouraged him, was itself the largest slave trader; I will speak at the end of this essay about the importance of her policy in this area for understanding the genocide in America. In the 14-15th centuries, most of the slaves came from Eastern Europe, especially Romania (history repeats itself in our time). Little girls were especially appreciated. From a letter from a slave trader to a client interested in this product: “When the ships arrive from Romania, there must be girls there, but keep in mind that little slaves are just as dear as adults; none is worth less than 50-60 florins. " Historian John Boswell notes that "10 to 20 percent of women sold in Seville in the 15th century were pregnant or had babies, and these unborn children and babies were usually delivered to the buyer with the woman at no additional cost."
The rich had their own problems. They craved gold and silver to satisfy their exotic goods habits, habits acquired since the first crusades, i.e. the first colonial expeditions of Europeans. Silks, spices, fine cotton, drugs and medicines, perfume and jewelry all required a lot of money. So gold became for Europeans, in the words of one Venetian, "the veins of all state life … its mind and soul … its essence and its very life." But the supply of precious metals from Africa and the Middle East was unreliable. In addition, the wars in Eastern Europe have devastated the European treasury. It was necessary to find a new, reliable and preferably cheaper source of gold.
What to add to this? As can be seen from the above, gross violence was the norm in European life. But at times it took on a particularly pathological character and, as it were, foreshadowed what awaited the unsuspecting inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In addition to the everyday scenes of witch hunts and bonfires, in 1476 in Milan a man was torn to pieces by a mob in Milan, and then his tormentors ate them. In Paris and Lyons, Huguenots were killed and cut into pieces, which were then openly sold on the streets. Other outbreaks of sophisticated torture, murder, and ritual cannibalism were not unusual.
Finally, while Columbus was looking for money in Europe for his naval adventures, the Inquisition was raging in Spain. There and elsewhere in Europe, suspected deviations from Christianity were tortured and executed in every manner that the ingenious imaginations of Europeans could muster. Some were hanged, burned at bonfires, boiled in a cauldron or hung on a rack. Others were crushed, their heads chopped off, their skin ripped off alive, drowned and quartered.
Such was the world that the former slave trader Christopher Columbus and his sailors left astern in August 1492. They were the typical inhabitants of this world, its deadly bacilli, whose killing power was soon to be tested by the millions of human beings who lived on the other side of the Atlantic.
Numbers
"When the white lords came to our land, they brought fear and wilting of flowers. They disfigured and destroyed the flower of other peoples… Marauders by day, criminals by night, murderers of the world." Mayan book Chilam Balam.
Stanard and Churchill devote many pages to describing the conspiracy of the Euro-American scientific establishment to hide the true population of the American continent in the pre-Columbian era. At the head of this conspiracy was and continues to be the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. And Ward Churchill also tells in detail about the resistance that the American Zionist scholars, who specialize in the so-called strategic area for the ideology of modern imperialism. "Holocaust", ie of the Nazi genocide against European Jews, they render attempts by progressive historians to establish the actual scale and world-historical significance of the genocide of the native inhabitants of America at the hands of "Western civilization". We will look at the last question in the second part of this article on the genocide in North America. As for the flagship of semi-official American science, the Smithsonian Institute until very recently promoted as "scientific" estimates of the size of the pre-Columbian population, made in the 19th and early 20th centuries by racist anthropologists such as James Mooney, according to which no more than 1 100,000 people. Only in the post-war period, the use of agricultural analysis methods made it possible to establish that the population density there was an order of magnitude higher, and that as early as the 17th century, for example, on the islet of Martha's Vinyard, now a resort place of the richest and most influential Euro-Americans, 3 thousand Indians lived. By the middle of the 60s. the estimate of the indigenous population north of the Rio Grande had risen to a minimum of 12.5 million by the start of the invasion of the European colonialists. Only in the Great Lakes region by 1492 lived up to 3, 8 million, and in the Mississippi basin and the main tributaries - up to 5, 25. In the 80s. new studies have shown that the population of pre-Columbian North America could have reached 18.5 million, and the entire hemisphere - 112 million (Dobins). Based on these studies, Cherokee demographer Russell Thornton made calculations to determine how many people actually lived, and could not, in North America. His conclusion: at least 9-12.5 million. Recently, many historians have taken as the norm the average between the calculations of Dobins and Thornton, i.e. 15 million as the most likely approximate number of North American Natives. In other words, the population of this continent was about fifteen times higher than what the Smithsonian Institution claimed back in the 1980s, and seven and a half times what it is willing to admit today. Moreover, calculations close to those carried out by Dobins and Thornton were already known in the middle of the 19th century, but they were ignored as ideologically unacceptable, contradicting the central myth of the conquerors about the allegedly "pristine", "desert" continent, which was just waiting for them to populate it …
Based on modern data, we can say that when on October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus descended on one of the islands of the continent, soon called the "New World," its population ranged from 100 to 145 million people (Standard). Two centuries later, it dropped by 90%. To this day, the most "fortunate" of the peoples of both Americas that once existed have retained no more than 5% of their former population. In terms of its size and duration (up to the present day), the genocide of the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere has no parallel in world history.
So in Hispaniola, where about 8 million Tainos flourished until 1492, by 1570 there were only two miserable villages of the indigenous inhabitants of the island, about which 80 years ago Columbus wrote that "there are no better and more affectionate people in the world."
Some statistics by area.
In 75 years - from the appearance of the first Europeans in 1519 to 1594 - the population in Central Mexico, the most densely populated region of the American continent, declined by 95%, from 25 million to barely 1 million 300 thousand people.
In the 60 years since the arrival of the Spaniards, the population of Western Nicaragua has declined by 99%, from more than 1 million to less than 10 thousand people.
In western and central Honduras, 95% of the indigenous population was killed in half a century. In Cordoba, near the Gulf of Mexico, 97% in a little more than a century. In the neighboring province of Jalapa, 97% of the population was also destroyed: from 180 thousand in 1520 to 5 thousand in 1626. And so - everywhere in Mexico and Central America. The arrival of the Europeans meant the lightning-fast and almost complete disappearance of the indigenous population, who lived and flourished there for many millennia.
On the eve of the European invasion of Peru and Chile, from 9 to 14 million people lived in the homeland of the Incas … Long before the end of the century, no more than 1 million inhabitants remained in Peru. And after a few years, only half of that. 94% of the population of the Andes was destroyed, from 8, 5 to 13, 5 million people.
Brazil was perhaps the most populated region of the Americas. According to the first Portuguese governor, Tome de Souza, the reserves of the indigenous population here were inexhaustible "even if we butchered them in a slaughterhouse." He was wrong. Already 20 years after the founding of the colony in 1549, epidemics and slave labor on plantations brought the peoples of Brazil to the brink of extinction.
By the end of the 16th century, about 200 thousand Spaniards had moved to both "Indies". To Mexico, Central America and further south. By the same time, from 60 to 80 million of the indigenous inhabitants of these regions were destroyed.
Columbian genocidal methods
Here we see striking parallels with the methods of the Nazis. Already in the second expedition of Columbus (1493), the Spaniards used an analogue of Hitler's Sonderkommando to enslave and destroy the local population. Parties of Spanish thugs with dogs trained to kill a person, instruments of torture, gallows and shackles organized regular punitive expeditions with indispensable mass executions. But it is important to emphasize the following. The connection between this early capitalist genocide and the Nazi genocide lay deeper. The Tainos people, who inhabited the Greater Antilles and were completely exterminated for several decades, fell victim to not "medieval" atrocities, not Christian fanaticism, and not even the pathological greed of European invaders. Both that, and another, and the third led to genocide only when organized by the new economic rationality. The entire population of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and other islands was registered as private property, which was supposed to bring profit. This methodological account of the huge population scattered over the world's largest islands by a handful of Europeans who have just emerged from the Middle Ages is most striking.
Columbus was the first to use mass hanging
From Spanish accountants in armor and with a cross, a direct thread stretches to the "rubber" genocide in the "Belgian" Congo, which killed 10 million Africans, and to the Nazi system of slave labor for destruction.
Columbus ordered all residents over the age of 14 to hand over to the Spaniards a thimble of golden sand or 25 pounds of cotton every three months (in areas where there was no gold). Those who fulfilled this quota were hung around their necks with a copper token indicating the date of receipt of the last tribute. The token gave its owner the right to three months of life. Those caught without this token or with expired ones were cut off the hands of both hands, hung them around the victim's neck and sent her to die in her village. Columbus, who had previously been involved in the slave trade along the western coast of Africa, apparently adopted this form of execution from the Arab slave traders. During the governorship of Columbus, in Hispaniola alone, up to 10 thousand Indians were killed in this way. It was almost impossible to meet the established quota. Locals had to give up growing food and all other activities in order to dig for gold. Hunger began. Weakened and demoralized, they became easy prey for diseases brought in by the Spaniards. Such as the influenza carried by pigs from the Canary Islands, which were brought to Hispaniola by the second expedition of Columbus. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Tainos died in this first pandemic of the American genocide. An eyewitness describes the huge piles of Hispaniola residents who died from the flu, who had no one to bury. The Indians tried to run wherever they looked: across the entire island, to the mountains, even to other islands. But there was no salvation anywhere. Mothers killed their children before killing themselves. Whole villages resorted to mass suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs or taking poison. But even more death was in the hands of the Spaniards.
In addition to atrocities, which at least could be explained by the cannibalistic rationality of systematic profit, the genocide on Attila, and then on the continent, included seemingly irrational, unjustified forms of violence on a massive scale and pathological, sadistic forms. Contemporary Columbus sources describe how Spanish colonists hanged, roasted on skewers, and burned Indians at the stake. Children were cut into pieces to feed the dogs. And this despite the fact that at first the Tainos did not show practically any resistance to the Spaniards. “The Spaniards were betting who could cut a man in two with one blow or cut his head off, or they ripped open their stomachs. mothers and everyone who stood before them. More zeal could not be demanded from any SS man on the Eastern Front, Ward Churchill rightly notes. We add that the Spaniards have established a rule that for one killed Christian, they will kill one hundred Indians. The Nazis didn't have to invent anything. They only had to copy.
Cuban Lidice 16th century
The testimonies of the Spaniards of that era about their sadism are truly incalculable. In one frequently cited episode in Cuba, a Spanish unit of about 100 soldiers halted on the banks of a river and, finding whetstones in it, sharpened their swords against them. Wanting to test their severity, according to an eyewitness to this event, they pounced on a group of men, women, children and old people (apparently specially driven for this) sitting on the shore, who looked in fear at the Spaniards and their horses, and began to rip up their bellies, chop and cut until they were all killed. Then they entered a large house nearby and did the same there, killing everyone they found there. Streams of blood flowed from the house, as if a herd of cows had been slaughtered there. To see the terrible wounds of the dead and dying was a terrible sight.
This massacre began in the village of Zukayo, whose inhabitants had recently prepared a dinner of cassava, fruit and fish for the conquistadors. From there, it spread throughout the area. No one knows how many Indians were killed by the Spaniards in this outburst of sadism until their bloodlust dulled, but Las Casas reckons it is well over 20,000.
The Spaniards took pleasure in inventing sophisticated cruelty and torture. They built a gallows high enough for the hanged man to touch the ground with his toes to avoid suffocation, and thus hanged thirteen Indians, one by one, in honor of Christ the Savior and his apostles. While the Indians were still alive, the Spaniards tested the sharpness and strength of their swords on them, opening their chests with one blow so that the insides were visible, and there were those who did worse things. Then, straw was wrapped around their excised bodies and burned alive. One soldier caught two children, two years old, stabbed their throats with a dagger and threw them into the abyss.
If these descriptions sound familiar to those who have heard of the massacres in Mai Lai, Song Mai, and other Vietnamese villages, this similarity is further enhanced by the term "appeasement" the Spanish used to describe their terror. But as horrific as the massacre in Vietnam may be, it cannot be compared in scale to what happened five hundred years ago on the island of Hispaniola alone. By the time Columbus arrived in 1492, the island had a population of 8 million. Four years later, between a third and a half of that number perished and were destroyed. And after 1496 the rate of destruction increased even more.
Slave work
Unlike British America, where genocide had as its immediate goal the physical destruction of the indigenous population in order to conquer "living space", genocide in Central and South America was a by-product of the brutal economic exploitation of Indians. Massacres and torture were not uncommon, but they served as an instrument of terror to subdue and "pacify" the indigenous population. The inhabitants of America were regarded as tens of millions of free laborers of natural slaves for the extraction of gold and silver. There were so many of them that the rational economic method for the Spaniards was not the reproduction of the labor force of their slaves, but their replacement. The Indians were killed with backbreaking work, and then replaced with a fresh batch of slaves.
From the highlands of the Andes, they were driven to coca plantations in the lowlands of the tropical forest, where their organism, unusual for such a climate, became an easy prey for deadly diseases. Such as "uta", from which the nose, mouth and throat rotted and died an agonizing death. The mortality rate on these plantations was so high (up to 50% in five months) that even the Corona worried, issuing a decree limiting the production of coca. Like all decrees of this kind, he remained on paper, for, as a contemporary wrote, "on the coca plantations there is one disease that is more terrible than all others. This is the unlimited greed of the Spaniards."
But it was even worse to get into the silver mines. The workers were lowered to a depth of 250 meters with a sack of fried maize for a week-long shift. In addition to backbreaking work, landslides, poor ventilation and the violence of overseers, Indian miners breathed poisonous fumes of arsenic, mercury, etc. "If 20 healthy Indians descend into the mine on Monday, only half can climb out of it crippled on Sunday," wrote one contemporary. Stanard calculates that the average lifespan of coca pickers and Indian miners in the early period of the genocide was no more than three or four months, i.e. about the same as at the synthetic rubber factory in Auschwitz in 1943.
Hernan Cortez tortures Cuautemoc to find out where the Aztecs hid the gold
After the massacre in the Aztec capital Tenochtetlan, Cortez declared Central Mexico "New Spain" and established a colonial regime based on slave labor there. This is how a contemporary describes the methods of "appeasement" (hence "appeasement" as Washington's official policy during the Vietnam War) and enslavement of Indians to work in the mines.
“Numerous testimonies of numerous witnesses tell of how the Indians are led in columns to the mines. They are chained to each other with neck shackles.
Pits with stakes on which the Indians were strung
Those who fall are cut off their heads. They talk about children who are locked in houses and burned, and who are stabbed to death if they walk too slowly. It is common practice to cut off women's breasts and tie heavy weights to their legs before dropping them into a lake or lagoon. They talk about babies torn from their mothers, killed and used as road signs. Fugitive or "wandering" Indians are cut off their limbs and sent to their villages, having severed hands and noses hanging around their necks. They talk about "pregnant women, children and old people who are caught as much as possible" and thrown into special pits, at the bottom of which sharp stakes are dug and "they are left there until the pit is full." And a lot, a lot more. " (Stanard, 82-83)
Indians are burned in houses
As a result, of the approximately 25 million inhabitants who inhabited the Mexican kingdom at the time of the arrival of the conquistadors, by 1595 only 1.3 million remained alive. The rest were mostly tortured to death in the mines and plantations of "New Spain".
In the Andes, where Pizarro's gangs were wielding swords and whips, by the end of the 16th century the population had dropped from 14 million to less than 1 million. The reasons were the same as in Mexico and Central America. As a Spaniard in Peru wrote in 1539, “The Indians here are completely destroyed and are perishing … It is praying with a cross to be given food for God's sake. But [the soldiers] kill all the lamas for nothing more than for making candles … The Indians are not left with anything for sowing, and since they have no livestock and they have nowhere to take it, they can only starve to death. " (Churchill, 103)
The psychological aspect of genocide
The latest historians of the American genocide are beginning to pay more and more attention to its psychological aspect, the role of depression and stress in the destruction of tens and hundreds of peoples and ethnic groups. And here I see a number of parallels with the current situation of the peoples of the former Soviet Union.
Chronicles of genocide have preserved numerous testimonies of the mental "dislocation" of the indigenous population of America. The cultural war, which the European conquerors waged for centuries against the cultures of the peoples they enslaved with the open intention of their destruction, had monstrous consequences on the psyche of the indigenous population of the New World. Responses to this "psychic attack" ranged from alcoholism to chronic depression, mass infanticide and suicide, and more often people just lay down and died. The side effects of mental damage were a sharp drop in the birth rate and a rise in infant mortality. Even if disease, hunger, hard labor and murder did not lead to the complete destruction of the indigenous collective, the low birth rate and infant mortality sooner and later led to this. The Spaniards noticed a sharp drop in the number of children and at times tried to get the Indians to have children.
Kirpatrick Sale summarized the Tainos' reaction to his genocide:
"Las Casas, like others, expresses the opinion that what struck most of all in the strange white people from the big ships was not their violence, not even their greed and strange attitude towards property, but rather their coldness, their spiritual callousness, lack of love in them ". (Kirkpatrick Sale. The Conquest of Paradise. P. 151.)
In general, reading the history of imperialist genocide on all continents - from Hispaniola, Andes and California to Equatorial Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China and Tasmania - you begin to understand differently literature like Wells' War of the Worlds or Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, not to mention Hollywood alien invasions. Do these nightmares of Euro-American science fiction lead their origin from the horrors of the past suppressed in the "collective unconscious"? Are they intended to suppress feelings of guilt (or, conversely, to prepare for new genocides) by portraying themselves as a victim of "aliens" who were exterminated by your ancestors from Columbus to Churchill, Hitler and Bushes?
Demonization of the victim
The genocide in America also had its own propaganda support, its own "black PR", strikingly similar to that used by the Euro-American imperialists to "demonize" their future enemy in the eyes of their population, to impart an aura of justice to war and plunder.
On January 16, 1493, three days after the killing of two Tainos during the trade, Columbus turned his ships on a return course to Europe. In his journal, he described the natives killed by the Spaniards and their people as "the evil inhabitants of the island of Kariba who eat people." As proved by modern anthropologians, this was a pure invention, but it formed the basis for a kind of classification of the population of the Antilles, and then the entire New World, which became a guide to genocide. Those who welcomed and submitted to the colonialists were considered "affectionate Tainos". The same natives who resisted or were simply killed by the Spaniards fell under the rubric of savage cannibals who deserve whatever the colonialists were able to inflict on them. (In particular, in the log journal of November 4 and 23, 1492, we find such creations of the dark medieval imagination of Columbus: these "fierce savages" have "eyes in the middle of their foreheads" they slit the throat and castrate. ")
"These islands are inhabited by the Cannibals, a wild, rebellious race that feeds on human flesh. They are correctly called anthropophages. They wage constant wars against affectionate and timid Indians for their bodies; these are their trophies, what they hunt. They ruthlessly destroy and terrorize Indians ".
This description of Coma, one of the participants in Columbus's second expedition, says much more about Europeans than about the inhabitants of the Caribbean. The Spaniards dehumanized in advance people whom they had never seen, but who were to become their victims. And this is not a distant story; it reads like today's newspaper.
"Wild and rebellious race" are the keywords of Western imperialism, from Columbus to Bush. "Wild" - because it does not want to be a slave to a "civilized" invader. The Soviet communists were also named among the "wild" "enemies of civilization". From Columbus, who in 1493 invented Caribbean cannibals with an eye on his forehead and dog noses, there is a direct thread to Reichsführer Himmler, who, at a meeting of SS leaders in mid-1942, explained the specifics of the war on the Eastern Front:
"In all previous campaigns, Germany's enemies had enough common sense and decency to yield to superior power, thanks to their" long-standing and civilized … Western European sophistication. "In the Battle of France, enemy units surrendered as soon as warned that" further resistance was pointless. " Of course, "we SS men" came to Russia without illusions, but until the last winter too many Germans did not realize that "Russian commissars and die-hard Bolsheviks were filled with a cruel will to power and animal stubbornness that makes them fight to the end and has nothing in common with human logic or duty … but is an instinct inherent in all animals. " bordering on “cannibalism.” This is a “war of annihilation” between “gross matter, the primitive mass centuries-Untermensch, led by commissars "and" Germans … "(Arno J. Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 281.)
In fact, and in strict accordance with the principle of ideological inversion, it was not the indigenous inhabitants of the New World who were engaged in cannibalism, but their conquerors. Columbus' second expedition brought to the Caribbean a large consignment of Mastiffs and Greyhounds trained to kill people and eat their entrails. Very soon the Spaniards began to feed their dogs with human flesh. Live children were considered a special delicacy. The colonialists allowed the dogs to gnaw them alive, often in the presence of their parents.
Dogs eat Indians
Spaniard feeding the hounds with the children of the Indians
Modern historians come to believe that in the Caribbean there was a whole network of "butcher shops" where the bodies of the Indians were sold as dog food. Like everything else in the legacy of Columbus, cannibalism developed on the mainland. A letter from one of the conquerors of the Inca empire has survived, in which he writes: “… when I returned from Cartagena, I met a Portuguese named Rohe Martin. On the porch of his house there were parts of the hacked Indians to feed his dogs, as if they were wild animals …”(Stanard, 88)
In turn, the Spaniards often had to eat their dogs, fed with human flesh, when, in search of gold and slaves, they fell into a difficult situation and suffered from hunger. This is one of the dark ironies of this genocide.
Why?
Churchill asks how to explain the fact that a group of human beings, even such as the Spaniards of the Columbus era, collectively obsessed with the thirst for wealth and prestige, could for a long time display such boundless ferocity, such transcendent inhumanity towards other people. ? The same question was posed earlier by Stanard, who traced in detail the ideological roots of genocide in America from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. "Who are these people whose minds and souls were behind the genocides of Muslims, Africans, Indians, Jews, Gypsies and other religious, racial and ethnic groups? Who are they who continue to commit massacres today?" What kind of people could commit these heinous crimes? Christians, Stanard replies, and invites the reader to become familiar with the antiquity views of European Christians on gender, race and war. He discovers that by the end of the Middle Ages, European culture had prepared all the necessary prerequisites for a four-hundred-year genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the New World.
Stanard pays special attention to the Christian imperative of suppressing "fleshly desires", i.e. the Church-instilled repressive attitude towards sexuality in European culture. In particular, he establishes a genetic link between the genocide in the New World and the pan-European waves of terror against the "witches", in which some modern researchers see the carriers of a matriarchal pagan ideology, popular among the masses and threatening the power of the Church and the feudal elite.
Stanard also emphasizes the European origins of the concept of race and skin color.
The Church has always supported the slave trade, although in the early Middle Ages, in principle, it was forbidden to keep Christians in slavery. Indeed, for the Church, only a Christian was a man in the full sense of the word. The "infidels" could become human only by adopting Christianity, and this gave them the right to freedom. But in the 14th century, an ominous change takes place in the politics of the Church. As the volume of the slave trade in the Mediterranean increased, so did the profits from it. But these incomes were threatened by a loophole left by the churchmen for the sake of strengthening the ideology of Christian exclusivity. Earlier ideological motives came into conflict with the material interests of the Christian ruling classes. And so in 1366 the prelates of Florence authorized the import and sale of "unfaithful" slaves, explaining that by "unfaithful" they meant "all slaves of an unfaithful origin, even if by the time of their import they had become Catholics", and that "unfaithful by origin "simply means" of the land and of the race of the unbelievers. " Thus, the Church changed the principle that justifies slavery from religious to ethnic, which was an important step towards the genocides of modern times, based on unchanging racial and ethnic characteristics (Armenian, Jewish, Gypsy, Slavic and others).
European racial "science" did not lag behind religion either. The specificity of European feudalism was the requirement for the genetic exclusivity of the nobility. In Spain, the concept of "purity of blood", limpieza de sangra, became central to the late 15th and throughout the 16th century. Nobility could not be achieved by either wealth or merit. The origins of "racial science" lie in the genealogical research of the time, which was carried out by an army of specialists in the verification of bloodlines.
Of particular importance was the theory of "separate and unequal origin" put forward by the famous Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus by 1520. According to this theory, Africans, Indians and other non-Christian "colored" peoples did not descend from Adam and Eve, but from other and inferior ancestors. Paracelsus' ideas became widespread in Europe on the eve of the European invasion of Mexico and South America. These ideas were an early expression of the so-called. the theory of "polygenesis", which became an indispensable part of the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century. But even before the publication of the writings of Paracelsus, similar ideological justifications for genocide appeared in Spain (1512) and Scotland (1519). The Spaniard Bernardo de Mesa (later Bishop of Cuba) and the Scotsman Johann Major came to the same conclusion that the indigenous inhabitants of the New World were a special race that God intended to be the slaves of European Christians. The height of theological disputes of Spanish intellectuals on the subject of whether the Indians are people or apes falls in the middle of the 16th century, when millions of inhabitants of Central and South America died from terrible epidemics, atrocious massacres and hard labor.
The official historian of the "Indies" Fernandez de Ovieda did not deny the atrocities against the Indians and described "innumerable cruel deaths, incalculable like stars." But he considered it acceptable, for "to use gunpowder against the Gentiles is to smoke incense for the Lord." And in response to the pleas of Las Casas to spare the inhabitants of America, theologian Juan de Sepúlveda said: "How can you doubt that nations so uncivilized, so barbaric and corrupted by so many sins and perversions were justly conquered." He quoted Aristotle, who wrote in his Politics, that some people are "slaves by nature" and "must be driven out like wild beasts in order to make them live right." To which Las Casas replied: "Let's forget about Aristotle, because, fortunately, we have the covenant of Christ: Love your neighbor as yourself." (But even Las Casas, the most passionate and humane European protector of the Indians, felt compelled to admit that they are "possibly complete barbarians").
But if among the church intelligentsia opinions on the nature of the native inhabitants of America could diverge, among the European masses on this score complete unanimity reigned. 15 years before the great debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda, the Spanish observer wrote that the "common people" everywhere consider the sages to be those who are convinced that American Indians are not people, but "a special, third kind of animals between man and ape and were created God to serve man better. " (Stanard, 211).
Thus, in the early 16th century, a racist apology of colonialism and Suprematism was formed, which in the hands of the Euro-American ruling classes will serve as an excuse ("defense of civilization") for subsequent genocides (and what will come?). It is not surprising, therefore, that on the basis of his research, Stanard puts forward the thesis of a deep ideological connection between the Spanish and Anglo-Saxon genocide of the peoples of America and the Nazi genocide of Jews, Roma and Slavs. European colonialists, white settlers and Nazis all had the same ideological roots. And that ideology, Stanard adds, remains alive today. It was on this that the US interventions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East were based.
List of used literature
1. J. M. Blaut. The Colonizer's Model of the World. Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New Yourk: The Giulford Press, 1993.
2. Ward Churchill. A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and the Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.
3. C. L. R. James. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989.
4. Arno J. Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
5. David Stannard. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993.
