This past week Americans everywhere celebrated a long weekend in the name of Democracy but at the expense of indigenous people everywhere when they took up BBQ's & coolers in the name of that most perplexing of lost, gold hungry & homicidal Christian maniacs Christopher Columbus. While most Americans are usually far removed from the real reason behind an excuse for an extra day off, it might behoove us well to take a closer look at the man for which they credit the “discovery” of an already discovered land.

While honesty regarding history has never been one of the average American's strong points, the fact that we label a Hitler or Saddam as crazed madmen but tend to look the other way when it comes to 'one of our own' reveals a complicity & simple mindedness that is in direct contrast with the image of the steadfast purveyors of democracy & freedom we imagine ourselves to be. This occurs mostly because American textbooks are systematically restricted from presenting an honest picture of those who we need to imagine as heroic in order to uphold that foolish presumption that we are God's chosen people when in fact we are not & most of these “heroes” acted out of personal interest & nothing more.

What follows is an honest account of what really happened when Columbus arrived based on the accounts of those who were actually there:

From Columbus' log (October 1492):

“They (the Arawaks) 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 out of cane…. They would make fine servants ….With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

So wrote this man who “discovered” America, a land already populated with a people “who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing,” Howard Zinn wrote in his now classic “A People's History of the United States.”



America is celebrating over 500 years of subjugating the 'savage' whose lack of social graces, i.e. not being ashamed of his/her own body, having no use for currency, technology or religion, was so offensive to the more 'civilized' Europeans that they just had to kill them. After enslaving them of course & stealing their land in search of that commodity more precious than human life: gold.

Columbus promised his financiers in Spain, the king & queen, gold & spices & riches beyond imagining. What he found was a people so pure & innocent, absent of the materialistic blood lust for position & power that can only be born of a people drunk with religion & the lack of reason such an escapist mentality requires.

Zinn writes of the first post of Spanish sailors left on Haiti who were killed by the Arawaks : “they had roamed the islands in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.” Who are the savages here & who are the civilized?

According to the first hand accounts of Bartolome de Las Casas who as a young priest participated in the conquest of Cuba, “Endless testimonies ….. prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives . . . . . But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle, and destroy……..(Columbus was) so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians….”



Las Casas goes on to describe how the Spaniards “grew more conceited every day” and 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.” (Zinn)

The cruelty & inhumanity grew to the point where the Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and 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.”

As slaves for Columbus, who tried desperately to find all the gold he could to send back to Spain to please his King & Queen, families were separated as men were sent to work in mines while the women were 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.”

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 . . . . . . “

Those who did not perish in their homeland were shipped off to Spain by the hundreds to be sold as slaves. Of the first 500 to be shipped, only 300 made it, the other 200 dying in route.

“By the year 1515, there were perhaps 50,000 Indians left. By 1550, there were 500. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.” (Zinn)

What kind of a country knowingly celebrates the arrival of a greedy, incompetent sailor & the complete destruction of an indigenous people which cannot be called anything other than genocide?

Today we are decrying the slaughtering of untold innocents in Sudan (from afar of course) & we regret the “mishandling “ by the Clinton administration of the Rwanda affair but we will allow the recognition & celebration of a national holiday in the name of the exact same kind of mass murderer because without his “discovery” we wouldn't be able today to shop til we drop or drive the SUV of our choice?

By any measure the American people need to wake up & realize they have been duped. They have been mislead by the media & the education/indoctrination system into believing that what benefits the most powerful in America benefits themselves as if we are all one big happy family & that any day now the richest 1% are going to see fit to let us in on their party & begin paying a livable wage & stop sending off our children to fight their wars.

Historical whitewash is just one aspect of this great big lie they tell in order to make us feel like there is actually such a thing as a free country we call America. When in fact this is no more a democracy we live in than say Communist China. Here we are giving the illusion of freedom of choice. But when the same interests control all our choices what you really have is not a democracy but a kakistocracy.

Wake up America. Or you might be the next casualty in the name of progress.