| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Sound of Trumpet" |
| Date: |
07 Oct 2006 11:57:47 AM |
| Object: |
How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm
Genocide
What happened on La Isla Espanola in significant ways has no precedent
in world history. Until the gold strike in the island's mountains in
1499, which made Columbus a rich man and was the first vindication of
the whole Indies business, there was no gold found in significant
quantities. Instead of chopping off endless hands, a new variant of a
Castilian traditional system was imposed in response to a revolt by
Columbus' men, who wanted land and slaves for themselves. It quickly
evolved into the "encomienda" system. It was slavery in everything
but the name. The natives were given to Spanish "care" and taught
good Christian principles while they were being worked to death, if
they were not beheaded on a whim.
For all of Columbus' rhetoric, conversion apparently was never
implemented on Espanola, except when they began enslaving the natives
in the "encomienda" program. That is a rich irony, as Columbus
immediately began calling himself the "Christ-bearer," although his
efforts did not convert any natives.[25] "Death-bearer" would have
been more apt. The gold strike of 1499 was when Columbus finally hit
pay dirt. While the natives lasted, there was finally a genuine gold
rush on Espanola, the first of many in the New World.
Columbus' passion for gold was more than mere greed. He invested it
with supernatural, divine, qualities. A few years before he died he
wrote,
"Gold is the most precious of all commodities; gold constitutes
treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in the world, as
also the means of rescuing souls from purgatory, and restoring them to
the enjoyment of paradise."[26]
Columbus thought that gold was the ticket to heaven. Apparently, he
never heard the words: "You can't take it with you."
Columbus eventually fell out of favor with the Crown, and Francisco de
Bobadilla and Nicol=E1s de Ovando succeeded Columbus as the governor of
Espanola in 1500 and 1501. The devastation of Espanola continued
unabated, and Ovando was even more ruthless than Columbus. The mines
were being worked furiously, and natives were dying at an incredible
rate. In 1503, the island's southeastern and southwestern regions had
not been completely conquered. Presiding over the southwestern region,
known as Xaragu=E1, was Anacaona, the highly respected widow of
Caonab=F3, the cacique who received the gift of those shiny manacles.
In 1503, Ovando went with 360 soldiers to Xaragu=E1 for the stated
purpose of improving relations with the Taino. Anacaona graciously
welcomed Ovando and his men, housing and feeding them. All the
region's caciques were summoned to welcome the Spaniards. The
natives were either amazingly forgiving, or naive. During that
celebration, at a sign from Ovando, his soldiers fell upon their
unsuspecting hosts. They slaughtered everybody in sadistic fashion -
cutting children's legs off, etc. After enough people had been
killed to satisfy the Spanish bloodlust, the soldiers herded the
remaining caciques into the royal hut and set it ablaze, burning them
to death. What Anacaona must have felt, after the deceitful capture of
her husband years before, can only be imagined. Ovando had some warped
sense of honor. Instead of disemboweling or burning Anacaona alive,
they hanged her.[27] Eighty-four caciques (nearly all the region's
leadership) died in the massacre, and that region was swiftly
conquered. The next year the southeastern region of the island was
"pacified" using standard Spanish brutality, and there was not much
resistance from the fast-dwindling native population, although in their
twilight years a native named Enrique eventually created a native
stronghold in the mountains that held out for years, and they easily
defeated the Spanish attacks while demonstrating vastly greater
humanity than the Spaniards.
The dogs the Spaniards brought were large, strong breeds such as
mastiffs and greyhounds, trained to kill. Dogs had been used in
European warfare clear back to the ancient Romans, Greeks and Persians,
which is where the phrase "let loose the dogs of war" came from.
In Europe, the warfare was against armored opponents, and the dogs
often wore armor themselves. In the Caribbean, where the people were
naked, and in the New World in general where warfare was practically
unknown in the European sense (large battles of extermination), the
dogs were murderously effective. The invaders would let loose the dogs
and they would easily kill and maim the terrorized people.
Infants' bodies are soft, and were quite a tasty treat for the dogs,
so the Spaniards regularly fed infants to their dogs, alive, and at
times while the horrorstricken parents watched.[28] The Spaniards had
contests to see who could cut a living person in half with one stroke
of the sword. They would test the sharpness of their blades by
beheading the nearest handy native.[29]
During the Western Hemisphere's rape during the next century, natives
often became nothing more than dog food. An Inca conquistador
described a dog food storage technique:
"=2E..when I came from Cartagena, I saw a Portuguese named Roque
Mart=EDn, who had the quarters of Indians hanging on a porch to feed his
dogs with, as if they were wild beasts..."[30]
There were butcher shops throughout the Caribbean region during the
years of conquest, where Indian bodies were sold as dog food.[31] One
practice, used on the Guanches as another prelude to New World events,
was known as the monter=EDa infernal, the infernal chase, or manhunt.
Instead of hunting foxes, the conquistadors would hunt natives with
their dogs in a jaunty outing. The dogs feasted on their hapless prey.
The monter=EDa infernal became a favorite pastime of many
conquistadors, such as Hernando de Soto. Another event to pass the
time and provide entertainment was to pit a naked native, sometimes
armed with a stick, against a dog. It was reminiscent of the Roman
Coliseum. The dogs killed their human prey by disemboweling them,
although jugular attack was also used, sometimes leading to
decapitation. The natives came to fear being thrown to the dogs more
than any other fate.[32]
For various reasons, the New World's natives had few domesticated
animals. The llama of South America was the New World's largest
domesticated animal. Parrots, turkeys, ducks, guinea pigs and a small
dog the Aztecs raised for food were about the only other domesticated
animals in the New World. There were no domestic herds of cattle,
horses, goats, sheep or pigs for the Spaniards to slaughter. The
natives were largely vegetarian, especially those not living near the
oceans. The Spaniards took herds of European pigs with them as a
cafeteria on the hoof, as Hernando de Soto did in southeastern North
America. Those were exceptions, not the rule. When the Spaniards
invaded and plundered the native people, the most available dog food
was human flesh. Those dogs had been trained to kill human beings, and
there were already instances in Europe of feeding the enemy to the dogs
of war.
Ironically, the other animals the Spaniards took along for food were
the dogs themselves. When the Spaniards found themselves starving in
uninhabited territory while looking for natives to plunder, the dogs
became the food of last resort. No historian has yet made this point
(that I am aware of), but as the Spaniards made many unsubstantiated
accusations of native cannibalism, they ate human-fed dogs.
As those acts became known and were seized upon by Spain's European
rivals for propaganda purposes, the term "Black Legend" came into
being to dismiss such events as mere propaganda. The events were used
to score propaganda points, but that did not make them less true. As
David Stannard and others have made the case, the Spanish genocidal
temperament was far from unique. The English and their political
descendants, the Americans, had attitudes every bit as genocidal as the
Spanish. They just had fewer opportunities for slaughter.[33]
To Spanish credit, there were some people who lamented the slaughter,
the priest Bartolom=E9 Las Casas most prominent among them. He was the
chief critic and most prominent witness of the Spanish atrocities. Las
Casas and people like him were an extreme minority in Spain, although
his and other Dominican efforts affected Spanish royalty, which
resulted in some laws of limited effect, such as the Laws of Burgos in
1512 (which also spawned the insane, legalistic Requerimiento). Las
Casas' attitude hinted at the Spanish attitude towards the natives:
the Spanish generally saw them as human beings (when not using them for
dog food), although of an "inferior" race and culture. At least on
paper sometimes, the Spanish wanted to civilize the natives and turn
them into "good Christians," whatever that may mean. The English,
on the other hand, generally felt the natives were subhuman. There is
no record of a native advocate among the English, one who remotely
approached the effort of Las Casas, who became known as the "Apostle
of the Indians."
Las Casas is the primary chronicler of the Caribbean's devastation. He
came to the Caribbean in 1502 as a conqueror. He lived in Cuba with
his own Indian slaves. He was prosperous. He had a breakthrough of
conscience in 1514 that was a long time in coming, but when it did, he
gave away his Indians and dedicated the rest of his life to the
natives' welfare, becoming their most outspoken advocate among the
Europeans. He wrote a number of tracts and books, and no account of
what happened in the Caribbean is complete without some of Las Casas'
descriptions of what he saw.
One event that Las Casas witnessed is recorded in his A Short Account
of the Destruction of the Indies, the classic, polemic account of how
the Spaniards treated the natives. A cacique named Hatuey escaped the
butchery on Espanola and fled to Cuba after the 1503 massacre at
Xaragu=E1, taking his people with him. In 1511, the Spaniards were
looking for new lands to plunder after Espanola had been devastated,
and they invaded Cuba. Diego Vel=E1zquez, one of Ovando's captains at
the Xaragu=E1 massacre, led the first invasion of Cuba, partly because
they knew Hatuey and his people fled there. Vel=E1zquez became Cuba's
governor.
When Hatuey heard the Spaniards were coming, he gathered his people,
telling them that the Spaniards had a god, and they would kill to get
their hands on it. The Spanish god was a basket of gold jewelry.
Hatuey and his people honored the Spanish god with a dance. Hatuey
said that the only safety from the Spanish was not having their god
around, so they threw the jewelry into the nearest river.
That strategy did not save them. After fleeing across Cuba, Hatuey was
captured by Vel=E1zquez and his men, while his people were slaughtered
and enslaved. Las Casas was a Dominican priest and witnessed a
Franciscan brother doing his duty at Hatuey's execution. Hatuey was
tied to a stake, to be burned alive in the Christian style. The
Franciscan tried converting Hatuey as he stood there, tied to the
stake. If Hatuey converted to Christianity, they would merely have
executed him with a sword, and the Franciscan would have "saved"
one more soul. The priest told him about heaven and hell, of eternal
rest or damnation, depending on the choice Hatuey took. Hatuey
carefully considered the priest's words. He asked the priest if
Christians went to heaven. When the priest said that the good ones
did, Hatuey replied that he would rather go to hell than be around
those monstrous Christians.[34] Then the flames took him.
Multitudes died in the subhuman mine conditions. During the early
1500s, the Spaniards were faced with a new problem: it was becoming
difficult to find enough natives to do the work. In 1496, when the
tribute system was still in place, Columbus' brother Bartolom=E9, the
acting governor while Columbus returned to Spain, apparently surveyed
the population to get an idea of how much tribute would pour in. The
count tallied 1.1 million people. That was just counting the adults,
in the region the Spaniards controlled at that time, which came after
two years of severe population decline from violence, starvation,
disease, etc.[35] In 1508, the count tallied 60,000 people. By 1535,
the original inhabitants of La Isla Espanola were virtually extinct,
and were completely extinct a generation later. The Taino were
completely exterminated throughout the entire Caribbean long before the
year 1600.
Today, there is a revival of the Taino people, and there are stories
and some evidence of some mixed-blood survival in mountainous pockets
in the Greater Antilles, and survivors who fled to South America, but
by 1600 the Taino were extinct for practical purposes in the Caribbean.
Today's prevailing estimate is that they numbered somewhere between
two to three million in 1492, but they may have numbered more than ten
million. It is history's only complete extermination of millions of
people. There is nothing to compare it to. Some of the Old
Testament's Jewish battles of extermination are quite bloody, but the
complete extermination of millions of people is unique. The 1500 years
of Taino inhabitation of the Caribbean was plenty of time to have
populated the islands with numbers in the millions, and with the
perfect climate, nearly zero violence, zero epidemic disease, superior
agriculture and other benefits that Europe did not remotely enjoy, to
number less than millions would be surprising.
The pre-European-contact headcount on La Isla Espanola and the entire
Western Hemisphere is a matter of fierce academic controversy. The
notion of the Western Hemisphere as a primeval wilderness waiting to be
tamed is a fantasy. With archeology coming into its own during the
past fifty years, today's evidence is that people have been living in
the Western Hemisphere possibly as long as they have in Europe. North
and South America comprise about sixteen million square miles, only
slightly less than Asia, which has more than seventeen million square
miles. People have been living in the New World for tens of thousands
of years. There are even speculations today that people might have
migrated to Asia and Europe from North America long ago.[36] Although
that speculation is definitely on science's fringe, it is debatable.
Whatever the case may be, it is obvious that the "primeval
wilderness" myths were partly self-serving lies invented by Europeans
to make the New World's rape look more benign. Americans are not alone
with those delusions. South Africa is another "settler-state"
(where the Europeans invaded and stayed) that conjured similar myths to
soothe their national conscience. The pre-invasion head count is
consequently probably underestimated, perhaps severely so, in all
"settler states."
The Western Hemisphere's natives were reverent towards nature,
whereas Europeans were afraid of it, and the European goal (so obvious
even today in the Western mentality) was to conquer and subjugate
it.[37] Although the natives rarely raped the land as the Europeans
did, it is illogical to think they did not have many children, and
increased their population.
There is plenty of evidence for a New World population in 1492 of 100
million people. There is speculation it could have been higher.
Today, mainstream estimates of ninety million can be found, which is
naturally a piece of sophisticated guesswork.[38] It is estimated that
Europe had about 80 million people in 1500 AD, and Asia somewhere
around 300 million, with a margin of error of 10 to 25% because there
was no census anywhere in the world.[39] The surface area of the
Western Hemisphere is about four times that of Europe. One early,
authoritative "scientific" estimate, which is regrettably still
influential today, by Alfred Kroeber of the University of California at
Berkeley in 1939, estimated slightly more than eight million people for
the entire Western Hemisphere in 1492. The British Isles alone had
nearly five million in 1492. Spain's population was about eight
million in 1492, or a population equivalent to (in Kroeber's
estimate) the entire Western Hemisphere's, which had land just as
inhabitable or more, people living at about the same level of
technology, and often more so, for a preposterous population density
about fifty times greater than the New World's. One reason for such
a low estimate was the now-discredited notion that the natives migrated
to the New World only a few thousand years ago, an estimate that was
upheld for generations by attacking any scientist who found evidence
suggesting otherwise. A more likely estimate now is 40,000 years, and
nobody in academia is arguing for less than 13,000 years ago.[40]
To Kroeber's credit, he stated that his estimate was based on many
guesses, and suggested that detailed scientific work be undertaken.
The challenge was accepted by scholars who also taught at Berkeley,
most notably Carl Sauer, Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah. They used a
multidisciplinary scientific methodology to arrive at better estimates,
first by doing intensive work on a selected area, for instance, and
extrapolating it. The numbers the "Berkeley School" generated were
startling: eight million for Espanola alone and twenty-five million for
Central Mexico, leading Borah to conclude the population of the Western
Hemisphere was more than one hundred million. Based on the higher
estimates, the decline of the New World population in the 16th century
was by about seventy million people, perhaps more.[41] The main side
effect of the Spanish gold rush that lasted for a hundred years was the
extermination of about 90% of the Western Hemisphere's population.
The new estimates sparked intense scholarly debate, which has been
raging for many years now.[42] There is no good reason for believing
that the Western Hemisphere's population was orders of magnitude less
dense than the other continents in 1492. There are credible arguments
for it being more densely populated than other parts of the world: no
epidemic disease, no mass warfare, superior agriculture[43], and
idyllic climates and environs for significant parts of the Hemisphere.
All early chroniclers of the New World's invasion remarked on how
thickly populated the lands were.
The Caribbean natives lived in a state Columbus described as Edenic
during his first voyage. They did not need clothes, food grew the
year-round with crops and environment far superior to Europe's, the
ocean was bountiful, epidemic disease was unknown and many of them did
not know what a weapon was. According to Las Casas and others, no
Spaniard ever witnessed two Tainos fighting each other. If Espanola
only had the population density of the hellhole that was England in
1500, with its poor climate, rampant disease, starvation and violence,
it would have had more than a million people.
David Stannard, author of the devastating American Holocaust, uses the
high end estimates in his book, but for good reason: he has authored
the most sophisticated existing pre-contact population estimate for the
Hawaiian islands.[44] Stannard makes the impressive and nearly
unchallenged case that the Hawaiian islanders may have numbered about a
million people before Captain Cook "discovered" them. That
challenges the conventional wisdom that has put the population at a few
hundred thousand at most. Hawaii has less than one-quarter of
Espanola's land, with similar climactic conditions.
Las Casas made the estimate of three million people on Espanola prior
to Columbus, as have other scholars. This essay will use two million
for argument's sake (a million is widely accepted by today's
scholarship[45]), something Stannard would call conservative.
The depopulation to 60,000 people by 1508 was a 97% depopulation in
fifteen years. That might seem an unparalleled holocaust, but a 95%
depopulation ratio is the standard for the world's natives after
contacting the filthy, disease-ridden Europeans.[46] The major
culprits were the disease epidemics that swept through the natives like
wildfire. Across the planet, the cultures that had been isolated from
the Asia/Europe/Africa pathogens had a disastrous time when first
exposed to them, whether they lived in Iceland, Australia, the South
Pacific, Hawaii, or the New World. The Spaniards obviously killed many
thousands of natives, and ended up working and starving thousands
(millions?) more to death (or the one-two-three whammy of starvation
and overwork leading to susceptibility to disease), but nobody is
suggesting that the Spaniards killed two million people on Espanola
with their swords.
There are numerous accounts of the psychological dislocation that the
natives manifested. Imposing one culture on top of another, with the
expressed purpose of eliminating it, as the Spanish priests did for
centuries, takes a tremendous psychic toll. The native responses
varied from drunkenness to chronic depression to infanticide to suicide
to simply lying down and dying.[47] Two side effects of those
psychological dislocations were a collapsing birth rate and high infant
mortality rate. Even if disease, starvation, overwork and murder did
not eliminate the natives, the low numbers of surviving infants may
have done the job.[48] The Spaniards noticed the collapsing infant
survival rates, and at times attempted to force the natives to have
children.
Kirkpatrick Sale summarized the native puzzlement toward their
exterminators:
"It is said, by Las Casas among others, that what perplexed the
Tainos of Espanola most about the strange white people from the large
ships was not their violence, not even their greed, nor in fact their
peculiar attitudes toward property, but rather their coldness, their
hardness, their lack of love."[49]
The Bahamas, where Columbus first made landfall in the Western
Hemisphere,[50] was the home of perhaps a half million happy people.
They became extinct within a few years.[51] Similar decimation
happened to the entire Caribbean region.
As the natives died by the millions, the slave stock had to be
replenished, and the Spaniards raided further and further away, which
eventually took them to the mainland. One more important source of
slaves to mine the gold and work the plantations was exploited: Africa.
As the natives became extinct, the Spaniards and Portuguese began
importing Africans to the Caribbean. The African slave trade is
another dark chapter in world history. The European-African-American
slave trade killed many millions of million people, perhaps reaching as
high as 30 to 60 million people.[52] For what it is worth, Columbus,
who worked in the African slave trade in Europe, and who helped
initiate what became the encomienda policy on Espanola, and was a
primary architect of the Caribbean genocide, was not directly
responsible for bringing African slaves to the Caribbean.
In Columbus' log of his first voyage, the primary accounts of the
second voyage, or Columbus' and others' accounts of his other voyages,
the mentality of the conquerors was striking.[53] Columbus specialized
in kidnapping natives as interpreters as he explored the coastlines in
and around the Caribbean. Capturing women for his men to use as sex
slaves was typical behavior, when his men were candid enough to admit
it (Columbus was writing to the queen, after all). Getting rich
quickly (and/or famous) was the preoccupation of all of them.
The accounts were disquieting when describing the native flora and
fauna in one section, as Cuneo did, then casually describing killing
more than twenty natives with crossbows and firearms from their ships,
as a prelude to "trading" with them.[54] Columbus made it a policy not
to allow his men to leave the ships unchaperoned, because they robbed
and raped with abandon when left on their own.
The Spaniards were quick to suspect their "hosts" were plotting against
them. Then they would then launch a "preemptive" strike against the
natives, slaughtering hundreds or thousands of them. What betrayed the
fact that there was likely no plot was that the Spaniards' preemptive
strikes nearly always caught the natives by surprise. The natives were
shocked and totally unprepared for the Spanish violence that was
unleashed against them. Nearly 100% of the time, there was no trap
about to be sprung. As with Columbus' fanciful interpretations of
Taino gestures, the Spaniards concluded from native gestures what they
wanted to find, and justifying a surprise attack on their "hosts"
seemed a Spanish penchant.[55]
In no instance that I have seen or heard of, did anybody in Spain ever
question the conquest's propriety. It was a universally held concept
that conquering the Western Hemisphere was a God-given right. Not even
sympathetic historians, such as Las Casas and Cieza de Le=F3n,
questioned if conquering the natives was justified. For Las Casas, who
was a great admirer of Columbus, the conquest was bringing the light of
Christianity. Las Casas came the closest to asking that Spain bring
its ships home, but never quite went that far. For soldier-historian
Cieza de Le=F3n, conquest was merely what he did for a living. Although
Cieza de Le=F3n lamented the awesome destruction that the Spanish
invasion inflicted on the native populations, the question of whether
the Spaniards should have even come across the Atlantic was never given
consideration. It is a revealing commentary that nobody ever asked if
invading the New World was "right." The only debate was whether it
could have been done more gently. Such an assumption can be seen
throughout history's imperial cultures, including the United States.
Much has been made of Columbus over the centuries. Sailor-historians
have worshipped Columbus as one of history's great navigators, and
have engaged in senseless debates regarding where Columbus first landed
in the New World.[56] Others have extolled his renaissance virtues.
During the 19th-century, there was an attempt to make Columbus a saint.
There has also been plenty of vilification, particularly lately.
If it were not Columbus, it would have been another European. Columbus
was little better or worse than his contemporaries, as far as his
regard for the human beings he exterminated. The awesome bloodshed of
the first century of conquest was a standard "frontier" situation.
The people who manned the voyages to the New World during the years of
discovery were not the best and brightest Europe had to offer.
Soldiers of fortune and "gentleman adventurers" would not make an
enlightened first contact with the natives, and the men of the cloth
often made things worse. Many of the New World's early "settlers"
had clipped ears and noses, denoting criminal status in Europe.
After the mercenary elements of European society secured the frontier,
then came the "settlers," also not from European society's premier
ranks. Although they did not usually inflict the bloodshed of the
"frontier" warriors and conquistadors, they finished wiping out the
native people and their cultures as they made their homes on native
lands and fleshed out the system of exploitation. They became
participants in the system and found people below them in society's
hierarchy. Having natives to exploit moved them up one notch.
What happened on Espanola is a phenomenon seen many times during the
research for this site. The resources (natives and land) seemed so
limitless and abundant that few thought of the consequences of their
depredations. While everybody was trying to get rich by mining gold
and turning the Caribbean into one big plantation, the natives and
local environments were devastated. Hardly anybody bothered to
extrapolate the trends to see where they would lead until it was too
late. By 1517, the gold had been mined and the Espanolan natives were
about one percent of their pre-contact population. Nearly the entire
Caribbean had been depopulated by then. The priests, led by Las Casas,
campaigned to have African slaves brought in to do the plantation work,
as they had proven heartier than natives in the mines, and there were
few natives left.
By 1518, the priests' campaign succeeded, and the official policy was
to have African slaves replace the native slaves. The few remaining
natives were to be freed and moved into villages to live somewhat as
they had before Columbus arrived. The plan might have worked to rescue
the Caribbean natives from the brink of extinction, but fate had
another card to play. European diseases had already killed countless
natives, but 1518 saw the first recorded epidemic of smallpox in the
New World. It wiped out more than half of the remaining natives on
Espanola, quickly driving them to extinction. Thus ends the story of
the happy people who greeted Columbus.
Around 1990, I as began to study these areas, I believed that the
black-skinned people of today's Caribbean were indigenous people, some
kind of equatorial New World natives. I had no idea that they were all
originally from Africa. The complete genocide of the original
Caribbean inhabitants was never emphasized in my schooling.
Columbus made four voyages to the New World. He eventually suspected
that those islands were not off of Asia, but that he had discovered a
new continent.[57] He was shipwrecked on his fourth voyage, and the
natives of Jamaica fed the surviving crewmembers for a year, while
Columbus' men had a mutiny and not only killed each other, but natives.
For all his adventures, Columbus died in bed in 1506, in Spain,
surrounded by his family, friends and his seven servants, a man made
rich from the New World's plunder.
There is more to Columbus' story than this essay tells. He spent one
return voyage to Spain in chains (not really as a prisoner, but in a
display of self-pity). He was the first to realize that native
genocide would be bad for Spain in the end, as dead slaves cannot do
any work.
What this essay presents is not controversial to those who have studied
Columbus. Today, most Americans have some passing acquaintance with
the real story. That Columbus initiated the genocide of the natives is
not really debated, even by his admirers. Washington Irving published
a mammoth and hugely popular biography of Columbus in 1828, where he
invented, among other myths, the story of Columbus proving that the
world was not flat. There is something significant about a novelist
writing the first major American work on Columbus.
With most good propaganda, most frequent are the lies of omission, not
commission. Nevertheless, some historians deride the work of Sale and
Stannard as "ideological." Las Casas entered the political arena
and Sauer taught at Berkeley. Some scholars make the case that the New
World was not as pristine as "revisionist" scholars would have
people believe.[58] The point made throughout this site's essays is
that we know little for sure.
With all the uncertainty, there is some warranted confidence regarding
what may have happened. People lived in the Western Hemisphere in
large numbers. They altered the landscape somewhat, and could destroy
their environment to where it no longer sustained them, as how the
Mayans had a population collapse that ended their "classic" phase a
thousand years ago. Yet, compared to what the Europeans did to their
land, the Western Hemisphere generally was pristine. We can never come
close to knowing what it was really like before Columbus showed up,
partly because the Europeans actively destroyed the culture they
invaded.
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
07 Oct 2006 01:06:38 PM |
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On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:57:47 -0700, Sound of Trumpet wrote:
How The New World Learned To Love Jesus
You're not even reading what you post anymore are you?
--
Mark K. Bilbo
--------------------------------------------------
"As hip as it is for outsiders to blame New Orleans
for everything bad that happened during and after
Hurricane Katrina, the truth is that the people
who lived here were much more prepared for a big
storm than the federal government that promised
us flood protection." [Jarvis DeBerry]
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V180525DC
"Everything New Orleans"
http://www.nola.com
.
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| User: "Lisbeth Andersson" |
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| Title: Re: How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
07 Oct 2006 12:30:44 PM |
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"Mark K. Bilbo" <gmail@com.mkbilbo> wrote in
news:NNGdnVAMjuHDO7rYnZ2dnUVZ_tOdnZ2d@giganews.com:
On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:57:47 -0700, Sound of Trumpet wrote:
How The New World Learned To Love Jesus
You're not even reading what you post anymore are you?
Anymore?
One reason I haven't killfiled him yet is because I'm waiting for him
to post one on Elroys articles.
Lisbeth.
----
The day I don't learn anything new is the day I die.
*What we know is not nearly as interesting as *how we know it.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
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| User: "Kurt Nicklas" |
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| Title: Re: How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
07 Oct 2006 02:50:14 PM |
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Mark K. Bilbo wrote:
On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:57:47 -0700, Sound of Trumpet wrote:
How The New World Learned To Love Jesus
You're not even reading what you post anymore are you?
And yet YOU are reading what he posts, Blibo.
Interesting...
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| User: "Lucifer" |
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| Title: Re: How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
07 Oct 2006 01:19:15 PM |
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Mark K. Bilbo wrote:
On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:57:47 -0700, Sound of Trumpet wrote:
How The New World Learned To Love Jesus
You're not even reading what you post anymore are you?
I think that the strumpeter has been forged again, a great improvement
over his usual wrong notes
--
Lucifer, EAC Librarian of Dark Tomes of Excessive Evil and General
Purpose Igor
"Don't worry, I won't bite.......hard"
--
Mark K. Bilbo
--------------------------------------------------
"As hip as it is for outsiders to blame New Orleans
for everything bad that happened during and after
Hurricane Katrina, the truth is that the people
who lived here were much more prepared for a big
storm than the federal government that promised
us flood protection." [Jarvis DeBerry]
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V180525DC
"Everything New Orleans"
http://www.nola.com
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| User: "T Guy" |
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| Title: Re: How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
09 Oct 2006 12:05:21 PM |
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Lucifer wrote:
I think that the strumpeter has been forged again, a great improvement
over his usual wrong notes
(T Guy):
I posted to much the same effect in Strumpet's 'THERE IS NO GOD AND YOU
KNOW IT' (Caps lock by Strumpet, I hasten to add) in
rec.arts.sf.written. He appears to have seen the light at last.
T G
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
07 Oct 2006 02:22:29 PM |
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On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 06:19:15 -0700, Lucifer wrote:
Mark K. Bilbo wrote:
On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:57:47 -0700, Sound of Trumpet wrote:
How The New World Learned To Love Jesus
You're not even reading what you post anymore are you?
I think that the strumpeter has been forged again, a great improvement
over his usual wrong notes
I think you're right...
--
Mark K. Bilbo
--------------------------------------------------
"As hip as it is for outsiders to blame New Orleans
for everything bad that happened during and after
Hurricane Katrina, the truth is that the people
who lived here were much more prepared for a big
storm than the federal government that promised
us flood protection." [Jarvis DeBerry]
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V180525DC
"Everything New Orleans"
http://www.nola.com
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| User: "JPG me @privacy.net" |
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| Title: Re: How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
07 Oct 2006 01:31:30 PM |
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On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 08:06:38 -0500, "Mark K. Bilbo"
<gmail@com.mkbilbo> wrote:
On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:57:47 -0700, Sound of Trumpet wrote:
How The New World Learned To Love Jesus
You're not even reading what you post anymore are you?
Did Martinez ever read his cut'n'pastes? BTW, I'm sure this Strumpet
character is Raymond's latest sock.
JPG
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| User: "Christopher A. Lee" |
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| Title: Re: How The New World Learned To Love Jesus |
07 Oct 2006 07:06:46 PM |
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On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 08:06:38 -0500, "Mark K. Bilbo"
<gmail@com.mkbilbo> wrote:
On Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:57:47 -0700, Sound of Trumpet wrote:
How The New World Learned To Love Jesus
You're not even reading what you post anymore are you?
Did it ever?
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