Organization: Media Beat
  Email: Norman Solomon 
  Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1998 09:15:04 -0700 (PDT)
  Title: "Media Beat": Columbus Day
 
  TEXT:
 
  [This column first appeared in October 1995.]
 
  COLUMBUS DAY: A CLASH OF MYTH AND HISTORY
 
  By Norman Solomon
 
 
       Columbus Day is a national holiday. But it's also a good
  time to confront the mythology about the heroic explorer who
  "discovered" America.
 
       Journalism should provide facts and help us to uncover
  truths. Yet, when it comes to Christopher Columbus, many
  reporters and pundits hold on dearly to myths. Meanwhile,
  historians who deal in documentation are often denigrated as
  "politically correct" revisionists.
 
       Columbus had convinced Spain's king and queen to finance his
  1492 westward journey to Asia on the grounds that great riches,
  especially gold, would be found there. The navigator never made
  it to Asia. Instead, he reached the Americas: the Bahamas, then
  Cuba and Haiti.
 
       In the revealing log that Columbus kept during his voyage,
  he described how the friendly Arawak Indians first greeted his
  ships: "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 would make fine servants... With 50 men we
  could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
 
       Columbus embarked on a frenzied hunt for imaginary gold
  fields, using Indian captives: "As soon as I arrived in the
  Indies, on the first island which I found, I took some natives by
  force in order that they might learn and might give me
  information of whatever there is in these parts."
 
       In exchange for bringing back riches to Spain's monarchs,
  Columbus had been promised 10 percent of all profits and
  governorship of the land he seized.
 
       After establishing a fort on Haiti called "Navidad"
  (Christmas), Columbus returned to Spain -- with many Indian
  prisoners dying aboard ship -- to give a glowing report to the
  royalty in Madrid about what he'd found in the New World.
 
       Columbus' second expedition was granted 17 ships and 1,200
  men in pursuit of gold (which was sparse) and potential slaves
  (who were plentiful). The result was a holocaust against the
  native population -- as the Spaniards pillaged the Caribbean,
  island by island.
 
       In 1495, Indians were shipped to Spain as slaves, many dying
  en route. "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity," Columbus
  later wrote, "go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
 
       But far more Indians were enslaved in their homelands to
  harvest gold from bits of dust found in streams. Columbus' men
  ordered everyone over age 13 in a province of Haiti to bring in a
  quota of gold; Indians who failed had their hands cut off and

  were left to bleed to death.
 
       The war against the native population included hangings and
  burnings. Mass suicides followed. Historians estimate that half
  of the Indians on Haiti -- as many as 125,000 people -- were dead
  within a few years. Virtually all were dead within two
  generations.
 
       Today, media voices that boom the loudest in defense of
  Columbus are often the most ignorant. "I don't give a hoot if he
  gave some Indians a disease that they didn't have immunity
  against," Rush Limbaugh has crowed. Limbaugh once asserted that
  "Columbus saved the Indians from themselves."
 
       History tells a different story. The most important document
  of the era is the multivolume "History of the Indies" by
  Bartolome de las Casas, a Spanish priest involved in the conquest
  of Cuba. After owning a plantation with Indian slaves, Las Casas
  had a change of heart and began recording what he'd witnessed.
 
       He described a cooperative Indian society in a bountiful
  land, a generally peaceful culture that occasionally went to war
  with other tribes. Yet there'd been no subjugation of the kind
  brought by Columbus.
 
       Writing in the early 1500s, Las Casas detailed how Indian
  people were basically worked to death -- "depopulated" -- with
  men in gold mines and women in the fields.
 
       Las Casas witnessed Spaniards -- driven by "insatiable
  greed" -- "killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the
  native peoples" with "the strangest and most varied new methods
  of cruelty." The systematic violence was aimed at preventing
  "Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings."
 
       The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens
  and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness
  of their blades," wrote Las Casas. "My eyes have seen these acts
  so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write."
 
       This bloody history might make modern readers tremble -- if
  they had access to it instead of just mythology.
 
       It's true that Columbus was a gifted navigator, personally
  brave and tenacious. But his enterprise -- as historian Howard
  Zinn documents in "A People's History of the United States" --
  was infused with racism and greed.
 
  _______________________________________________
 
  Norman Solomon is co-author of "Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the
  Curtain of Mainstream News" and author of "The Trouble With
  Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh."
 

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Link to: California's Modern Indian War