My First Post-Where are we going,where have we been-The Indies to Falluja

[chlamor]

The following comes from A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542):
"The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian and who have gone there to extirpate those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth is by unjustly waging cruel and bloody wars. Then, when they have slain all those who fought for their lives or to escape the tortures they would have to endure, that is to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and young men (since the Spaniards usually spare only the women and children, who are subjected to the hardest and bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or beast), they enslave any survivors."
<snip>
"From that time onward the Indians began to seek ways to throw the Christians out of their lands. They took up arms, but their weapons were very weak and of little service in offense and still less in defense. (Because of this, the wars of the Indians against each other are little more than games played by children.) And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house."
<snip>
"Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold."

And with a historical leap we come to the postmodern world of technocrats and well manicured savagery. One of the many spokesmen of the New World imperialists, Michael Ledeen, sings the age old song of the "civilizing" mission. He states:
"Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission."

The savages are no longer sitting on a pot of gold, but live atop the modern man's most precious resource-Oil. The vicious alchemists of Empire have turned gold to black and sent their minions to do their bidding. Once again, massacres throughout Iraq.The history of conquest brought up to date. From Manuel Valenzuela we are reminded of who fights and who dies. He states:

"Ten-thousand years of history and still Iraqi civilization remains, from the rubble of Ur to the flattened city of Fallujah, from Babylon to Baghdad, brought down only to rise again, occupied only to brutally resist and expel a long list of invaders. Into this has the American Establishment sent its lower castes to fight a war without just cause, without moral high ground and without purpose, transforming innocence into wickedness and souls at peace into minds at war. Based on lies, deceptions, manipulations and the all-powerful profit motive, where addiction to the Almighty Dollar and his sister greed control and blind, America’s rural and urban children turned warriors are being sacrificed and slaughtered, gunned down and blown to pieces, all for a Corporatist Crusade intent on usurping and extracting Iraqi oil, conquering strategic lands and pilfering America’s treasure."

  And then there is the Iraqi girl,hands soaked in her dead father's blood, whose little brother does not yet understand that his childhood has just come to an end. Fearing for their lives, US soldiers killed the parents in the front seat of the family car. Demons will likely haunt their nights. Stuff happens. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, bless their souls, will sleep well tonight. 

[imenja]

1. I dislike the parallel

other than both the US and the Spanish have built empires. The Sixteenth and Twenty-first century are very different worlds. I dislike the easy reliance on the Black Legend as an example of colonial devastation, when the Spanish were the empire that most incorporated indigenous peoples into their society. At the end of the colonial period, 60% of land under Spanish control remained in Indian hands. That clearly was not the case in the former English colonies. Las Casas was an important critic of the Conquest, but his work was intended to alert to the Crown to the encomenderos mistreatment of Indians. He was successful in promoting the passage of laws that curbed the behavior of Spaniards, but it also spawned the Black Legend that Northern Europeans have long relied on to assert their own superiority. The continual reference to the Spanish conquest as THE example of colonial abuses reflects how successful Northern Europeans were in inculcating the black legend. It's evident in nearly every textbook on early North American history.

The conquest was not ultimately carried out for gold. There actually was little gold found in Spanish America. The wealth came from silver. More importantly, religion and honor, reflected in the triad of "God, Gold, and Glory," were every bit as important to the Spanish as wealth. The secular and sacred were not separate conceptions in the sixteenth-century mind. Today, we see wealth and religion as oppositional.

Ours is an empire that spreads it secular religion of "democracy" and corporate capitalism. If we are going to compare empires, why not the English in America or the French, Dutch, or British in Africa? Or perhaps our own imperial control of Latin America throughout much of the twentieth century?

[peace4all]

2. I was under the impression that the Spanish were merciless

and quite cruel in their treatment of the Native Americans.
That is what I have read in various accounts. It's been a long time so I can't recite details for you. Have you read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee?

[imenja]

3. that is the Black Legend

and you are taught that in school, because we as Americans feel a need to prove our own superiority over the rest of the world.
I teach college level Latin American history, so I do know a little about this. The Spanish did not treat Indians humanely by any modern standard, but they did concern themselves with their welfare. They converted Indians to Christianity and established a whole series of legal protections for them. Indians were able to petition through courts, and did so very frequently. The Spanish considered themselves entirely superior to the Indians, but they also saw themselves as their protectors. They believed their role in the New World was to win souls for God. There is no question that Indians in Spanish America had far more protections than in the English or Portuguese colonies. They were juridically and economically part of colonial society. Americans defined Indians as completely outside of the polity. Remember, the Spanish depended on Indians for their labor force. Their reaction to the widespread deaths from smallpox was one of great alarm. Unlike the Puritan Jonathan Winthrop, the Spanish did not see Indian deaths as a sign that God was clearing the land of heathen to make room for his chosen people, Englishmen.

The Spaniards certainly mistreated Indians, but the English and Portuguese were worse.

I may have read the Wounded Knee book many years ago. I don't remember it well.

[chlamor]

4. The Spanish were merciless

Here's more:
"The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian and who have gone there to extirpate those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth is by unjustly waging cruel and bloody wars. Then, when they have slain all those who fought for their lives or to escape the tortures they would have to endure, that is to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and young men (since the Spaniards usually spare only the women and children, who are subjected to the hardest and bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or beast), they enslave any survivors..."

Of course it is not THE example just one of many. It would take an eternity to document this. I think the parallels are quite accurate though certainly not unique to these specific situations. And yes these are very different times but the motives and rationalizations are similar. Columbus was indeed seeking gold and when little could be found he was suspicious that the source was being kept from him. The words of Columbus: "Gold constitutes treasure and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world. He has the means of restoring souls to the enjoyment of paradise."

There was little "wealth" gained from the excursions of any sort. My point is the' World of Conquest' in historical context.
If you haven't already read De las Casas' diary, it is rather macabre.
With the hopes for a more peaceful world...

[Roland99]

5. And we were merciless in Falluja

Sarajevo on the Euphrates
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040426&s=jamail

Stories from Falluja (women and children murdered)
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1861.shtml

Firebombing Falluja
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6772

Napalm/Phosphor bombs
http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3410

Fight To Survive
this site is the mouthpiece for a group of soldiers who are fighting in a war they oppose for a president they didn't elect while the petrochemical complex turns the blood of their fallen comrades into oil
http://www.ftssoldier.blogspot.com/

[chlamor]

6. How the US Murdered a City

You are correct. As more stories come out from the aftermath we will bear witness to an indescribable horror. These are war crimes by any standard.


How The U.S. Murdered a City 


Fallujah: The Truth at Last 

Doctor Salam Ismael took aid to Fallujah last month. This is a report of his visit.

IT WAS the smell that first hit me, a smell that is difficult to describe, and one that will never leave me. It was the smell of death. Hundreds of corpses were decomposing in the houses, gardens and streets of Fallujah. Bodies were rotting where they had fallen-bodies of men, women and children, many half-eaten by wild dogs. 

A wave of hate had wiped out two-thirds of the town, destroying houses and mosques,schools and clinics. This was the terrible and frightening power of the US military assault.
<snip>
But in most of the houses, the bodies were of civilians. Many were dressed in housecoats, many of the women were not veiled-meaning there were no men other than family members in the house. There were no weapons, no spent cartridges. 

It became clear to us that we were witnessing the aftermath of a massacre, the cold-blooded butchery of helpless and defenceless civilians. 

Nobody knows how many died. The occupation forces are now bulldozing the neighbourhoods to cover up their crime. What happened in Fallujah was an act of barbarity. The whole world must be told the truth.
To read the entire article go to-In todays listings:
www.informationclearinghouse.info

[imenja]

7. I have read Las Casas

but you need to understand the context in which he wrote. Obviously I have read it or I would not have recognized him from your first post, when you did not site him by name. Las Casas exaggerated many abuses and mistakenly attributed deaths from diseases to cruelty. He provides an important perspective on the conquest, but it is one of many accounts. You should take no single document at face value, as complete truth. This is certainly not to justify Spanish treatment of Indians, but merciless is not an appropriate adjective. Moreover, Las Casas' protests resulted in passage of the New Laws of 1542 that banned Indian enslavement and set criteria for how encomenderos should treat Indians. A text from the early colonial years, even if you want to argue that Las Casas was entirely accurate, does not provide an assessment of the following three hundred years. I suggest you consult any of the textbooks on Colonial Latin American history (Berkholder and Johnson; Lockhart and Schwartz, or Brown) for an overview. There are also hundreds of very fine monographs on Spanish-Indian relations in the colonial period.

You are also incorrect that little wealth was gained from Spanish colonization. They became the wealthiest of the European empires because of the discovery of silver. That, of course, resulted from the conquests of Cortez, Pizzaro, and others, rather than directly from Colombus' voyages to the Caribbean, where there was no silver or gold.

The key point to keep in mind about wealth is that the separation between wealth and religion, between the secular and the sacred, that is part of the modern worldview did not exist in the sixteenth-century. The Spanish certainly did seek wealth, but wealth was a means of establishing honor, and it was, for them, a byproduct of spreading Christianity. Today, we understand these concepts separately. In the sixteenth-century, they were linked rather than seen as contradictory. It was a pre-capitalist world. People did not think the way we do today.

You need to recognize that when you perpetrate the black legend, as you have here, you are continuing a tradition of proclaiming English and American cultural superiority. That ethnocentrism is simply not justified by the historical record. The Spanish treated Indians infinitely better than the English did. One clear demonstration of that is that Latin America is today populated by many millions of peoples of full or partial indigenous decent, while we in the US annihilated most of the Indian population.

If your point is that the United States is creating an empire that seeks to take the world's resources for itself, that's fine. It would seem rather obvious. It is not, however, necessary to repeat
exaggerated myths about Spanish colonialism to make that point.

[chlamor]

8. Colonialism-All bad forms

Hope you will read this as I had to nod off last night. Like your post and I suspect we are in agreement on most of what we are considering. Totally agree about that the form of colonialism and slavery practiced in the US was the most brutal. Many speak/write about the details, Harry Belafonte for one. The fact that in the US you had to speak only the masters tongue would be only one example.
I would contend that your point about separation between wealth and religion is only partially true. Yes, some saw attainment of wealth as their pathway to heaven, others were simply greedy, others wanted the raw materials for commerce and/or empire. Religion was, as always, also used to manipulate the 'rabble'.
The Spanish acquired virtually no wealth from Columbus's (sp?) excursions, the wealth accumulated was from those other voyages which you pointed out. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.
Believe me I am not perpetuating any myth nor hold any about whose form of colonialism was most brutal. You will find through my postings over time that I have no illusions or dispositions to think that there is English or American cultural superiority, quite the contrary in my view. The forms of colonialism practiced by the Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, Dutch, etc. were all brutal.

[imenja]

9. okay, that's cool

As a scholar of Latin American history, I'm sensitive to the black legend since I see it perpetrated so often. Students come into my classes with similar ideas, because that is what they've been taught in school. I realize you don't mean to perpetrate a notion of superiority, but the widespread assumptions about the Spanish conquest are the result of centuries of propaganda by the British and other Northern Europeans.

Colonialism is all bad, I agree. And today it is far worse, because we know it to be wrong. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans believed they were pursuing God's work. The twentieth century saw a repudiation of the very notion of Empire, except now the US seeks to build it's own empire anyway. At the beginning of the twentieth century, politicians during T Roosevelt's presidency denounced the very notion of empire. Now the neo-cons explicitly argue that the US has an obligation to exert its hegemonic dominance, and even embrace the word empire itself.

I disagree on the point about slavery being worse in the US. It was bad everywhere, in different ways, but that's another subject.

By the way, Welcome to DU! :hi: