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Offline Deborah

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HAPPY Slave-Trader, Indian-Slaugtherer DAY
« on: October 09, 2006, 07:47:57 PM »
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE INDIANS
by Howard Zinn
[Howard Zinn is an author and lecturer. His most noted work, from which this selection is excerpted, is A People's History of the United States.]

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

"They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote:

"As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts." The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold?

The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities."

Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

The chief source-and, on many matters the only source of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quoted at length:

"Endless testimonies . . . prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives.... But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then.... The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians..."

Las Casas tells how the Spaniards "grew more conceited every day" and after a while refused to walk any distance. They "rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry" or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings."

Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."

The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports. "they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could tun for help." He describes their work in the mines:

"... mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them; and when water invades the mines, the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by scooping up pansful of water and throwing it up outside....

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.

Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides . . . they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . . . and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated.... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write...."

When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...."

Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas--even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?) is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure--there is no bloodshed-and Columbus Day is a celebration.

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

Howard Zinn, "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress," A People's History of the United States http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/ ... lesHx.html.

I'm in favor of forced cannibalism. If people had to eat what they killed, there'd be less wars.
- Abbie Hoffman
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Offline Deborah

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State of Emergency
« Reply #1 on: October 09, 2006, 08:09:32 PM »
Columbus lives on. Is Buchanan's goal to rile up the White Supremicists?

AlterNet
October 9, 2006
Racist Screed Is Flying Off the Shelves
By Alexander Zaitchik, Intelligence Report

Since the start of his latest book tour, Patrick Buchanan has appeared on just about every major television and cable network in the country, often more than once. He's been on NBC's "Today" show, the three most watched news programs on FOX, CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight," HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," and countless radio programs. During one four-day period in late August, the author was welcomed on no less than five NBC-affiliated programs. Together, these appearances have made Buchanan's new book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, a runaway bestseller.
 :scared:
The three-time presidential candidate is no stranger to the major media, being personally acquainted with many of those who interviewed him. A veteran columnist with the Creators Syndicate and an analyst for MSNBC, Buchanan was a founding member of three prime-time network or cable channel talk shows and has written for many of the nation's major newspapers and magazines. That might explain the kid-gloves treatment he got from virtually all his interviewers, most of whom did not seem to have read or understood the book they were helping to publicize.

In fact, the book reflects racial views that have now veered to the extreme. White America is changing color, Buchanan argues -- "one of the greatest tragedies in human history." The Mexican government is involved in a plot to take over the Southwestern United States, and parts of this country already look like the "Third World." The segregated South wasn't all bad "culturally" -- blacks and whites were united, after all. America, despite what its founders wrote, was a nation formed not on the basis of creed but rather a homogenous ethnic culture. To put it plainly, State of Emergency is a white nationalist tract. The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling. As Buchanan helpfully explained to John King, who was interviewing him in one of his several CNN appearances: "We gotta get into race and ethnic questions."

State of Emergency unapologetically reflects Buchanan's insistence on the centrality of race to the United States and its culture. "This idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by 'blood or birth or soil' but by 'ideals' that must be taught and learned ... is demonstrably false," Buchanan writes in the book.

Simply put, America is not a nation of ideas. It is a nation of people -- white people. Buchanan is especially overt in making this case when he endorses the view of his late mentor and editor Sam Francis, that American and European civilizations could never have been created without the "genetic endowments" of whites. He goes on to describe discussions of race as "the Great Taboo"; to ignore the role of race, he adds, is "like not telling one's doctor of a recurring pain that could kill you."

None of this seems to bother Buchanan's cheerleaders.

"Congratulations on the response to your book," said Lou Dobbs, the CNN anchorman who has made a profession of attacking illegal immigration in story after story after story, as he introduced his old CNN colleague. Dobbs then offered up his own view that President Bush was carrying on an "outright war" against middle-class Americans by allowing illegal immigration. Wrapping up the interview, Dobbs concluded: "The book is State of Emergency. It's No. 3 on the best-selling list. ... I'm going to repeat it one more time. The book is State of Emergency. Pat Buchanan, always good to talk to you. ... [Y]ou've got a lot of readers, so keep it rolling."

Dobbs isn't the only one helping Buchanan keep his book rolling.

James Edwards, a former volunteer in Buchanan's 2000 presidential campaign and current host of the Memphis AM radio show "The Political Cesspool," did his part, too. But this show was no mainstream broadcast. It has featured an array of past and present Klansmen and neo-Nazis, a veritable "Who's Who" of the radical right. In an exultant E-mail sent out by the radio show after Buchanan was featured, long-time white supremacist Winston Smith celebrated.

"Don't ever let anyone tell you that this broadcast doesn't matter, my friends," he wrote, "because when the likes of Pat Buchanan agrees to be on your program, he does so only after his people have researched the program and decided it's in their interest."

State of Emergency is not the first book to reflect Buchanan's racialist philosophy. In 2002, Buchanan's The Death of the West warned white Christendom against a looming demographic tipping point. (The book's message so energized former Klan leader David Duke that Duke fantasized on his own radio show last year about winning the presidency with Buchanan as his running mate.) It was in that book -- edited by Francis, chief ideologue of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens -- that Buchanan first began using the explicit language of white nationalism. In his footnotes to The Death of the West, the former Nixon speechwriter even cited the late William Pierce, author of the race-war novel The Turner Diaries (the blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing) and the founder of America's then-leading neo-Nazi group, to back up his own arguments.

Once again, to make his case in State of Emergency, Buchanan relies on a trove of extreme-right sources. His urgent call for thwarting the "invasion" of non-European immigrants leans heavily on material written by hate group members or postings on hate sites, with citations to nearly every sector of the hate movement, from neo-Nazis to neo-Confederates. He cites the work of white supremacist James Lubinskas; Edward Rubinstein, of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute; Clyde Wilson, a board member of the racist and secessionist League of the South; and Wayne Lutton, a veteran immigrant- and gay-hater. Buchanan also quotes Lutton's anti-immigrant hate journal The Social Contract.

Buchanan is equally schooled in hate from abroad, mentioning work of British white supremacist Derek Turner published in the American hate journal The Occidental Quarterly, which argues "the civilization and free governments that whites have created" will collapse as they become a minority. And Buchanan knows the oldies-but-goodies, quoting English politician Enoch Powell approvingly at the beginning of his final chapter. Powell was dumped by the Tory leadership in 1968 for claiming that non-white immigration would cause "rivers of blood" to flow in Britain; he has been a white nationalist icon ever since. (In the book, Buchanan claims Powell was essentially correct in his analysis of the problem, but that his "Rivers of Blood" speech was taken out of its original context and distorted.)

Buchanan is especially enamored of his deceased friend Sam Francis, the white supremacist who was fired in 1995 by The Washington Times for breaking the "race taboo" and went on to a 10-year career editing the Citizens Informer, a bimonthly newsletter put out by the Council of Conservative Citizens, which grew out of the segregationist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and '60s. Far more than Buchanan's friend and editor, Francis was his mentor. Buchanan knows Francis' racist oeuvre inside and out, citing some seven Francis pieces. Buchanan's basic argument in State of Emergency -- America should be a white country and dark-skinned immigrants threaten it -- was made by Francis for years.

Now, through his old friend Buchanan, Francis continues to be heard from beyond the grave.

Patrick Buchanan: In His Own Words

Excerpts from State of Emergency, The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America:

"Our ancestors were not paralyzed by guilt. Confident in their culture and civilization, they believed in their superiority over what Kipling had called the 'lesser breeds without the law.'"

"Was not Western civilization vastly superior to the indigenous civilizations it encountered and crushed, from the Aztecs and Incas in the Americas to the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist civilizations from Africa to the Far East?"

"Against the will of the vast majority of Americans, America is being transformed ... we are witness to one of the greatest tragedies in human history."

"Though the South remained segregated [before the Civil Rights movement], culturally, we were one."

"California is becoming -- indeed, has become -- a Third World state."

"Thus the world's finest five-star hotel, the United States of America, becomes the flophouse for the planet."

"Since Americans of European descent -- unlike Germans -- are not into sackcloth-and-ashes, but take immense pride in their ancestor's achievements and bridle at reverse discrimination, it is hard to see a happy future of peace and reconciliation [if white guilt continues]."

"This idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by 'blood or birth or soil' but by 'ideals' that must be taught and learned ... is demonstrably false."

"America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built."

"A new border war has begun with the first signs of an 'intifada' to retake control of the Southwest."
Alexander Zaitchik is a staff writer at the Intelligence Report, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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Offline Deborah

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HAPPY Slave-Trader, Indian-Slaugtherer DAY
« Reply #2 on: October 09, 2006, 11:02:34 PM »
What Buchanan and other White Nationalists (aka supremacists) refuse to acknowledge is that the wealth of this nation was created with the blood, sweat, and tears of people of color, along with their economically opppressed white working class brothers.

Is this why the government is spending billions of dollars putting up a "fence" on the border? Is it more about their color of skin?

Look what these lovely "Patriots" are up to.
http://www.borderfenceproject.com/
Look at this pathetic fence. Like illegals couldn't scale that lickety split. This looks more like corporate welfare. Busy work for easy money.
http://www.house.gov/hunter/fence.htm

BTW, what do the powers that be, of a country that no longer has a use for their labor force, do with all those disposable leeches?

Which segways nicely into..... a new book written by Dem Senator Byron Dorgan of N Dakota, "Take This Job and Ship It". Colbert interviewed him tonight. 10/4 originally.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDnnIS87a-w&eurl=

Said he was tired of corporations sending jobs oversees  where they pay 20-30 cents an hr to have their goods produced, sell them in the US for a premium, then channel all the profit to the Caymens to avoid taxes.

Me too. My only criticism of the book is, we don't need more people to 'identify the problems', we need solutions, and someone who has the balls to step up to the plate and force corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. I guess that's what politicians do to vent their frustration... write  books about the things they know they can't change.
Colbert, in his best devil's advocate said, well.... when there's no jobs, perhaps US workers will be willing to work for .33/hr.  And, if there aren't any jobs in the US, won't immigrants stop coming?

Quotes from the book:
Corporations use our roads to transport merchandise. Their children and employees are educated in American schools. They want their interests protected by our courts and armies at home and abroad. More and more, they just don't want to pay for it. These days, tax avoidance is the entitlement program for the wealthy and their corporations.

Structuring a business so that it can avoid paying U.S. taxes, outsourcing the labor, and hypocritically taking advantage of the U.S. marketplace by selling here can hardly be considered patriotic. That's a corporation that wants all of the benefits and none of the responsibilities that come with U.S. citizenship.

We bail out companies who have long abandoned any sense of American citizenship. We shower the great instigator - Wal-Mart - with tax breaks, then, when their workers can't make ends meet, we foot the bill for food stamps. Hidden in the seams of the economy is a welfare system for the richest corporations, and that ought to make your blood boil.

If the $5.15 minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest-paid workers in the country would make $23.03 an hour.
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Offline Anonymous

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HAPPY Slave-Trader, Indian-Slaugtherer DAY
« Reply #3 on: October 11, 2006, 04:27:57 AM »
Fuck all this stupid noise.  Howard Zinn is a whiny asshole, I've met him and told him to fuck off.  He smiled politely and farted.

Judging historical figures by today's standards of ethics and morality is an excercise in futility and self-congratulatory smugness.


Get off your self-righteous indignation and thank the white man for lifting you out of your state of savagery.
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