_Christopher Columbus, and the vast pogrom he initiated._

[Guest ultimauw@hotmail.com]

Just a couple of many sites detailing Colon's (Columbus's) murderous

rampage

 

http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v9/9.11/1columbus.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~jkdowell/id3.html

 

And here's the full article from http://www.hartford-hwp.com/Taino/docs/columbus.html

 

Christopher Columbus' reputation has not survived the scrutiny of

history, and today we know that he was no more the discoverer of

America than Pocahontas was the discoverer of Great Britain. Native

Americans had built great civilizations with many millions of people

long before Columbus wandered lost into the Caribbean.

 

Columbus' voyage has even less meaning for North Americans than for

South Americans because Columbus never set foot on our continent, nor

did he open it to European trade. Scandinavian Vikings already had

settlements here in the eleventh century, and British fisherman

probably fished the shores of Canada for decades before Columbus. The

first European explorer to thoroughly document his visit to North

America was the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, who sailed for

England's King Henry VII and became known by his anglicized name, John

Cabot. Caboto arrived in 1497 and claimed North America for the

English sovereign while Columbus was still searching for India in the

Caribbean. After three voyages to America and more than a decade of

study, Columbus still believed that Cuba was a part of the continent

of Asia, South America was only an island, and the coast of Central

America was close to the Ganges River.

 

Unable to celebrate Columbus' exploration as a great discovery, some

apologists now want to commemorate it as the great "cultural

encounter." Under this interpretation, Columbus becomes a sensitive

genius thinking beyond his time in the passionate pursuit of knowledge

and understanding. The historical record refutes this, too.

 

Contrary to popular legend, Columbus did not prove that the world was

round; educated people had known that for centuries. The Egyptian-

Greek scientist Erastosthenes, working for Alexandria and Aswan,

already had measured the circumference and diameter of the world in

the third century B.C. Arab scientists had developed a whole

discipline of geography and measurement, and in the tenth century

A.D., Al Maqdisi described the earth with 360 degrees of longitude and

180 degrees of latitude. The Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai

still has an icon - painted 500 years before Columbus - which shows

Jesus ruling over a spherical earth. Nevertheless, Americans have

embroidered many such legends around Columbus, and he has become part

of a secular mythology for schoolchildren. Autumn would hardly be

complete in any elementary school without construction-paper replicas

of the three cute ships that Columbus sailed to America, or without

drawings of Queen Isabella pawning her jewels to finance Columbus'

trip.

 

This myth of the pawned jewels obscures the true and more sinister

story of how Columbus financed his trip. The Spanish monarch invested

in his excursion, but only on the condition that Columbus would repay

this investment with profit by bringing back gold, spices, and other

tribute from Asia. This pressing need to repay his debt underlies the

frantic tone of Columbus' diaries as he raced from one Caribbean

island to the next, stealing anything of value.

 

After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India

or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in

the one important commodity he had found in ample supply - human

lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola,

crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and sent them to Spain,

where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold

as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands

from wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors

tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.

 

Because Columbus captured more Indian slaves than he could transport

to Spain in his small ships, he put them to work in mines and

plantations which he, his family and followers created throughout the

Caribbean. His marauding band hunted Indians for sport and profit -

beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies

as food for their hunting dogs. Within four years of Columbus' arrival

on Hispaniola, his men had killed or exported one-third of the

original Indian population of 300,000. Within another 50 years, the

Taino people had been made extinct [editor's note: the old assumption

that the Taino became extinct is now open to serious question] - the

first casualties of the holocaust of American Indians. The plantation

owners then turned to the American mainland and to Africa for new

slaves to follow the tragic path of the Taino.

 

This was the great cultural encounter initiated by Christopher

Columbus. This is the event we celebrate each year on Columbus Day.

The United States honors only two men with federal holidays bearing

their names. In January we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther

King, Jr., who struggled to lift the blinders of racial prejudice and

to cut the remaining bonds of slavery in America. In October, we honor

Christopher Columbus, who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched

one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history.