Columbus day:A clash of myth and hi

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 warm 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.

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