Whose World is this? Round or Flat - They Don't Care, They Want it All: Columbus Day is a Celebration of Mass Murder and White Global Domination of Non-White People
/An excerpt from the book, "Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust. Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism" by Dr. John Henrik Clarke. A&B Publishers. Available [HERE]
Introduction
The Voyages of Columbus Mark a starting point of world capitalism and the beginning of European colonial domination of the world. That is what the ruling powers want everyone to celebrate.
But it hasn’t gone down like that. The oppressed people have a different view. Throughout the past year there have been debates and confrontations whenever the ruling powers have tried to celebrate Columbus and their system--in Spain, the United States and throughout the Western Hemisphere. In the
Dominican Republic recently the media reported that soldiers shot into a crowd of anti-Columbus demonstrators and killed at least two people. In Peru, the growing Maoist people's war reveals an important truth: the world system that emerged since Columbus is under assault; its days are numbered.
The proletariat and oppressed peoples have nothing to celebrate on October 12. The Columbus anniversary is a celebration of mass murder, slavery, and conquest. More: it exalts the continuing oppression of billions of people today. Columbus is something only oppressors (or fools) could celebrate. This article was first published in the Revolutionary Worker a year ago. It sketches the true history of this so-called "first encounter".
It is said that the Columbus voyage was the "first encounter” between the "New World and the Old World.” This is contrary to all known information.
Travelers from the great African empire of Mali in the 1300s reported that the king of Mali told them of two expeditions with hundreds of boats sent from Africa west into the great ocean. Some evidence suggests that there may have been periods of ancient trade from to Brazil . There is physical evidence of a settlement in dating back to the year 1000. And by the time of Columbus himself, it had become routine for English fishermen to travel across the Atlantic to fish the outer banks where they often caught sight of the mainland to the west.
Altogether the historical record suggests as many as twenty contacts and sightings before Columbus. Why then is the Columbus voyage considered “first”? Because, for the modern ruling classes, the important point is not the actual Contact between peoples--it is the world-historic growth of capitalism in Europe made possible by the plunder of the Americas. And that did not start before Columbus."
The above quotes are selected to illustrate the fact that Christopher Columbus discovered absolutely nothing, that he was an adventurer, an opportunist and a willful murderer and a liar and that what he set in motion was the basis of Western capitalism and exploitation of both Africans and Indigenous Americans who had committed no crimes against European people and did not know of European intention to Conquer and enslave them. Both the Africans and the Indigenous Americans befriended the Europeans at first, only to be rewarded by enslavement. They did not protect themselves from the Europeans because they did not believe there was a need to. The literature exposing Christopher Columbus and the protracted crimes he set in motion is massive and still growing. Today former Columbus cheerleaders have discarded the word ”discovery” and are now using the word “encounter.." They too are aware of the fact that Christopher Columbus discovered absolutely nothing. He was a man of ahievement, tragic and dubious though the achievement may be. A capsule summary of Mike Ely’s article is as follows:
“The U. S. imperialists love Columbus. They have named cities, counties, towns, rivers, colleges, parks, streets and even their capital after him. And now they are organizing a global celebration. Yet, to the people, the facts are plain: Columbus was a thief, an invader, an organizer of rape of Indian women, a slave trader, a reactionary religious fanatic, and the personal director of a campaign for mass murder of defenseless peoples. The bourgeoisie hides these truths as they insist on celebrating him. They say, "Why can’t we celebrate him for his seamanship and his daring?" Columbus was utterly lost when he arrived on the beaches of the Bahamas. Until he died, he swore that he had landed in the eastern shore of Asia (which in reality is half a world awayl) On his second voyage, he had his crew sign papers that declared that if they told anyone the island of Cuba was not the mainland of China, he would have their tongues cut out. Any reading of his diaries reveals that he was filled, not with a lofty courage or adventurous curiosity, but only the most extreme craving to plunder and enslave unarmed people. They say, "Why can't we judge Columbus by the standards of his time, not of ours?" This is a revealing argument. We can ask whose “standards” of 1492. is the measuring rod. The Taino people? The African people? The peasant rebels of Spain? Or the conquistadors themselves?
The modern imperialists even adopt a sly ”multicultural” cover saying, "Why can't we celebrate all the cultures that come together to make America today? Can’t we use this celebration to heal the wounds from the past?" And the answer is that this view refuses to distinguish between oppressor and oppressed- the Spanish conquistador and subjugated Indian are not just two “heritages" to be celebrated. Why should such wounds be ”healed" when this celebration glorifies capitalist oppression that continuesm-when the legacy of that past is stamped on every event and social relationship. ”
The controversy around Christopher Columbus, his alleged discovery and what his encounter with the Indigenous Americans set in motion has prompted Pope Iohn Paul Ill to bring some peace in moderation to the Salvadorians. In a speech in Santo Domingo he has asked the Indians and the Africans to forgive their captors and their enslavers. The following excerpt is from the Daily Challenge:
”SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic-Pope John Paul Tuesday pleaded with all native Indians of the Americas and African Americans to forgive the White man for 500 years of injustices and offenses.
The pope also said there was no doubt European colonizers had inflicted 'enormous suffering’ on native Indians because they were not able to see them as children of the same God. 'In the name of Jesus Christ and as pastor of the church, I ask you to forgive those who have offended you,' the pope said in a message to the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples.
'Forgive all those who during these 500 years have been the cause of pain and suffering for your ancestors and for yourselves,' the pope said in a nine-page message to Indians.
His message came one day after thousands of Indians throughout the hemisphere marked the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America with bitter protests against the European invaders.
African American groups have also boycotted commemorations of Columbus, saying his arrival began the destruction of native cultures and led to the African slave trade. The pope, however, has praised Columbus, saying his discovery led to the introduction of Christianity in the New World. In distinguishing between colonization and evangelization the pope has condemned past and present injustices against indigenous people while defending the church’s work on their behalf over the centuries.”
What the pope seems to have forgotten (if he cared to think about it at all) is a concept of Christianity created by Europeans for Europeans and that this Christianity is now a handmaiden of European conquest and expansion throughout the world. Dr. ben Jochannan has said, ”Religion is the deification of a people's culture.” By extension I have also added religion is the deification of a people's politics and power intent. I wonder will the pope ever be willing to ask the Jews to forgive the German or European Holocaust? This was a crime committed in Europe by Europeans against European people. In size and scope it was small in comparison to the great holocausts in history. The holocausts against the African Americans and the Indigenous Americans mistakenly called Indians was more than a hundred times worse than the European Holocaust that we know so much about. Father Lawrence Lucas, who belongs to the same church as the pope, has reminded us that before there can be forgiveness there must first be repentance. Has the pope called on the criminals who destroyed and enslaved African Americans and Indigenous Americans in the millions to repent? Once he calls on them to repent I believe that some of us will consider forgiving some of them. Until there is some show of repentance on the part of our enemy we will wear our desire for revenge like a badge of honor.
The pope concludes his message in the following manner:
On the last full day of his trip to the Dominican Republic, the pope met separately with representatives of Indians and African Americans in the Vatican’s embassy here and gave them two written messages for all their peoples throughout the Americas.
In his message to Indians of all tribes, the pope said the church could not forget the “enormous sufferings inflicted on the people of this continent during the era of conquest and colonization.”
He said the abuses committed by the European Christian colonizers were due to the "lack of love in those people who were unable to see the indigenous as brothers and sons of the same God."
In a separate message to African Americans he condemned as a "shameful trade” the African slavery which followed the discovery of the New World and said the Christians responsible had betrayed their faith.
The pope again defended the work of early missionaries from the accusations that they were partners in colonization as the cross and the sword marched together. "What other motives if not preaching the ideas of the gospel spurred the missionaries to denounce the injustices committed against the Indians at the time of the conquest? ” he asked.
He assured them the church was well aware of “the alienation that weighs on you, the injustices you suffer, the serious difficulties you have in defending your lands and your rights, the frequent lack of respect for your customs and traditions.”
He promised them that the church would raise its voice in condemnation whenever their human dignity was violated. In his message to African Americans the pope denounced the "very grave injustice committed against the Black populations of the African continent, who were violently uprooted from their lands, their culture and their traditions and taken as slaves to America.”
He called the slave trade "an enormous crime" and “an ignoble commerce.”
“These men and women were victims of a shameful trade, which was carried out by people who were baptized but did not live according to the principles of their faith,” he said:
"How can one forget the enormous sufferings inflicted on populations deported from the African continent, in contempt of the most basic human rights?"
“How can one forget the human lives cut down by slavery? There is a need to confess, in all truth and humility, this sin of man against man,” the pope said.
The pope said he was addressing his message to Indians of all tribes from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America.
Like most religious people, the pope is idealistic but not realistic. I think he would benefit from reading Father de las Casas’ books, The Disruption of the Indies and The Tears of the Indians. I would also refer him to Eric Williams’ From Columbus to Castro and Documents on West Indian History. After reading these books, he might understand why most of us, both African Americans and Indigenous Americans lack the capacity to “forgive” or forget the monumental crimes committed against our people.
In this short book I am referring to what Christopher Columbus set in motion. In his period, he set in motion an act of criminality that influences our very life today. He laid the basis for Western racism, misconceptions about people and extensive use of organized religions as a rationale for the enslavement of people. It’s a reoccurring event in history and it told us as nothing has told us before-that history is never old, everything that ever happened continues to happen. What we are dealing with now is more than the second rise of Europe we're dealing with the rise of a concept that has taken hold of the mind of most of the World. People throughout the world are now fighting to get away from that concept and most of the world are now prisoners to that concept.
We’re dealing with the reason certain things looked as though they were going to succeed and did not succeed. We're actually dealing with the reason the African Independence Explosion did not culminate in independence for Caribbean states, it achieved independence in name only, ” flag independence.” However in terms of actual economic independence they are more dependent now than they were at the height of colonialism. It set in motion the exposure of the fact that once you are oppressed and once certain information is kept from you, you begin to experience some confusion about what independence consists of. The African Holocaust that Christopher Columbus helped set in motion is both historical and current. We need to carefully examine its initial impact in order to understand its reverberations. There is a need to look at the world before Columbus. Let's examine the world of Columbus’ day and look at his impact on the Americas. Let’s look at the world he did not discover. What he actually did--and he should be credited for this-he set in motion the exploitation of two continents for European domination. He never set foot on North America or South America. He set in motion an attitude that is still with us; a concept called ”divine/ White right and something else called "manifest destiny."
The assumption was--because European had the ships and the basic technology-they had the right to go into other people’s country and exploit their mineral resources, take their women and rape them at will. They did all of this in the name of a God that they said was merciful and kind. All of them, including the Arabs, used western-oriented religions... which made their God ungodly.
Now, the role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless. There is no exception; Islam was as guilty as all the rest of them. The role of religion in this matter is so shameful that no matter how you look at it, the picture is negative. All of them did more harm than good.
Now let’s look at the world from 1400 to 1600 before they come to what is called the New World which was not “new” at all. During the Crusades the Europeans had exploited each other to the point where Europe was about to explode within itself. The Catholic church in its need for funds to build these massive cathedrals and to support parasitic priests had begun to fleece the people to the point where the faithful began to have some serious questions about the role of the Church. The Church in its desire to get still more money from the people, created something called purgatory., Now when you died you didn't go directly to heaven you went to purgatory. Your family and friends had to ransom you from purgatory. The more money you gave the priest the harder and quicker he prayed to get grandma and uncle from purgatory into heaven.
It was a religious con game played on the people of Europe. They were beginning to discover this game to a point and, out of anger, Europe was about to explode within itself. Then a fortunate incident would happen. An off-beat, beatnik, hermit named Peter came across Europe saying that the infidel Arabs were barring Europeans from visiting the Holy places, observing the Holy Grail and visiting the place of the Crucifixion. Michael Bradley in his book, Holy Grail Across the Atlantic, has proven that there was no Holy Grail in the first place and it wasn’t lost in the second place and it wasn’t where they thought it was in the third place.
The pope saw a reason he could use to cut down on all of this anger against the Church. The propaganda swept through Europe that they had to move across Europe in a crusade to rescue this mythological Holy Grail that wasn’t lost in the first place. Now they started to march, moving across Europe, to the rescue. However, in the movement across Europe, they forgot the pent-up anger against the Church. This gave the Church a new lease on life which would last until the rise of Martin Luther who would then challenge the Church again and lay the basis of Protestant Reformation. There were many crusades and many reasons for people going on crusades, none of which had anything to do with religion or God.
The way the story is presented to you in school, you think it has something to do with holiness. It has something to do with European power and Europe rising from the Dark Ages; it has something to do with Europe's search for something outside of Europe to eat; something to do with European emotionalism venting itself on people outside of Europe and something to do with Europe trying to find a scapegoat for its own anger. Europe was trying to deflect the fact of its own enslavement of other Europeans. They would call it feudalism but it was an enslavement. It was European enslavement of other Europeans.
The Crusaders won all the battles in Cecil B. De Mille's movies; he gave them victories, but, in many cases, in real history, they got the hell beaten out of them. These well-dressed lords took with them common/ ordinary people to do their work and their laundry...these common/ ordinary people saw these lords with their tails being beaten and on their knees begging for mercy before the alleged ”infidel” Arabs. They began to understand that these men who owned land and controlled their lives were less than God. In the meantime back in Europe, some of the young lords had given up a privilege that the old lords were hanging onto, the privilege of first night.
If you lived on the lord’s land and you married, he had the privilege of spending the first night with your wife. Some of the young lords had conceded that the poor critter should at least have that privilege. Now when the old lords came back into Europe there was a semblance of human recognition for the serf (the White slave) on the plantation. This semblance of human recognition would lead to more demands. It would lead to a fight against child labor. While it didn’t lead to the banishment of prostitution it would lead to workhouses and places where they could at least put people out of sight.
Europe had lost one-third of its population through famine and plagues. On the eve of 1400 AD, this is the sight you see in Europe...far less in creature comforts than anything in Africa and Asia. They were engaged in tribal warfare in Europe as they are engaged in genocidal conflict right now...only in Europe you don't call it tribal warfare. You will not deal with the fact that not only what is happening in Russia today is tribal warfare it is partly race war.
You forgot the millions of Asians who went into Europe and didn’t go home. Asian men who came without women and didn’t go home to satisfy that biological necessity. Indeed, if it is a necessity all the time...that’s another lecture. l think we’ve overdone that assumption. What is always a biological pleasure is not always a biological necessity. Let’s at least concede that much.)
These Europeans intermingled with these Asians to create a European ethnic entity that is still in Europe. Europe was still hungry and awakening. While it was awakening, it began to pay some attention to the new light in Europe, Spain. Spain was then dominated by Africans, Arabs and Berbers. This combination of Africans, Arabs, Berbers and Jewish financial managers known as Grandees were totally in control of Spain, parts of France and Portugal where the Africans and Arabs had lost power in 1240 AD. However, in 1415 the Portuguese got up enough nerve to attack a small place on the coast of Northwest Africa (present-day Morocco). It was a place called Ceuta. As battles go, it wasn't much of a battle, and as places go it wasn’t much of a place. I’ve visited the place and some say it’s about the size of Central Park. I've walked all over it; it’s not as big as Central Park.
The Battle of Ceuta was a turning point. After 711 A.D. When Iebel Tarik, an African general, or Tarikh ben Zaid, led an army into Spain. Spain had been under the domination of Africans, Berbers, and Arabs. Europe had lived in fear of what they referred to as the ”infidel” Arabs in the Mediterranean. Europe, being blocked from the trade in the Mediterranean cringed and it was the Arab that drove this European into the so-called Middle Ages by destroying the European market in the Mediterranean.
The Battle of Ceuta asserted the European and subsequently they began to claim access to the Mediterranean. By 1455, arguments between the Arab and the African over puritanical approaches to women and Islam had weakened the African/ Arab hold on Spain in the Mediterranean.
When the African joins a religion, he is a puritan Within that religion. Other people join a religion and use it for their best interests. But when the African joins it, he takes it for its purest form. I have said before that we African people will out-Pope the Pope and we out-Mohamet Mohamet in matters pertaining to both religion and political ideology.
Spain and Portugal would now approach the pope and the pope would say to them, "You two good Catholic nations stop fighting among yourselves. You are both authorized to reduce to servitude all infidel people.” You should read Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery. A lot of people think it’s an old chestnut. This book written over forty years ago, is still current and relevant in its information. Brion David, a scholar at Cornell University wrote a book called Slavery and Western Civilization. That book is three times larger and says less. The forgotten character has not been taken into consideration -I'm still on my way to Christopher Columbus--Prince Henry the Navigator. Prince Henry got hold of a cache of maps which were mostly made by Jewish gold dealers who had been dealing in the Western Sudan and the coast of West Africa. The Western Sudan is comprised of the nations in Inner West Africa as opposed to the coastal nations of West Africa. Europe is beginning to see the shape of certain parts of Africa; they are no longer guessing on all of it. Prince Henry, now with these maps, begins to open up a school for chart-making and map-making to let the European know something about the other parts of the world.
l recently appraised a book that called Prince Henry the inititor of the slave trade … which is inaccurate. He did set European maritime skills in motion. Using the maritime information the
Africans and the Arabs had preserved at the University of Salamanca [Spain], Europe would now go back to sea; it had previously forgotten longitude and latitude. In other words, when they put a ship out to sea, they Wouldn't know which way to turn it; they didn’t know east from west.
That challenge from Mediterranean Africans the challenge of the Moors, tha: challenge of the Arabs had driven Europe into the Middle Ages and had dulled the senses of Europe to the fact that they lived now in fear. Prince Henry -while called the Navigator-- didn't navigate anything and there is no evidence that he ever Went to sea. The main thing Prince Henry did was to introduce Europe to maritime information. The European in turn used the maritime information coming out of China (then the leading maritime nation of the world) to go out to sea again and to get rid of some of the old wives' tales about the sea. Some of the tales were that if you go so far the sea drops off; the World was flat, not round.
The European had begun to make up his mind...all the hunger, all the famine now.. that he had ships and guns, the European didn’t care what shape the world was in. Round or flat. He wants it all. Round or flat. Sometimes African people approach European power brokers with the assumption that Europeans are going to give us back things that they had already taken from us. They took it from you; you've got to take it back.
There is some indication that a little known sailor, Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus) attended one of Prince Henry’s schools of chart-making. There he learned the basis of maritime skills. We have no evidence that he had, or ever had, any command. This gets us into a mystery about Columbus.
Michael Bradley, in a- new work called The Columbus Conspiracy, found so much dirt under the name Columbus...he maintains that there were two Columbus's. No one man could have been capable of that much dirt according to Bradley. This includes seven illegitimate children. When he is faced with the different children that were born and the women, he couldn’t have moved that fast from one to the other. If he sired one over here, he couldn’t have gotten to another place fast enough to bring another one into the world. We have to deal with another date neglected in history, 14182. Ships land off the coast of what is now Ghana, earlier the Gold Coast. They insist now on building permanent fortifications. Portuguese ships had been coming along that coast since 1438. They would take a few slaves out of the country (1442). T he Portuguese king, seeing Africans so well dressed and seeing them bringing presents, assumed that they were visiting royalty and in turn gave them presents and sent them home; the idea of enslavement had not reached his mind
The important thing about this trip when they forced their way into Ghana and an African King, King Ansa, differed with them and told them, “lf We saw each other infrequently, maybe we could maintain our friendship. Too much familiarity would erode our friendship.” He was beginning to see what could happen. Then in the beautiful last lines of his speech he said, "The sea is forever pushing against the land and the land with equal obstinance is forever pushing against the sea.” life understood what could happen. But those Portuguese who could not sell him the Bible~story, forced that gun-story on him. They forced their way in and they built Elmina Castle, the first of the great slave forts along the coast of Ghana. lf 36 of the 42. slave fortresses are in Ghana, this tells you that Ghana was the headquarters of the slave trade. I mention this because there is some evidence to indicate that Christopher Columnbus was a part of this expedition. He says in his diary, "As man and boy, l sailed up and down the Guinea Coast for twenty-three years.” What was he doing up and down the coast of West Africa for twenty-three years? He was in the early Portuguese slave trade. This is Christopher Columbus. Now 1et’s go to 1492.
In 1492 things happened other than the alleged "discovery" that was not a discovery at all. l..et's deal with two African events that helped to set certain things in motion. In 1492 Spain was whitening up through the marriage of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. They began now to expel the Moors, the Africans and the Arabs. If they expelled the Jews- and they did - that means that they did not consider the Jews to be white.
Most of the jews were Sephardic. The same descendants of these Sephardic jews are second-class citizens in Israel right now... though they are the majority of the population. Not a single field officer in the Israeli army is a Sephardic, even though they are the majority in the army. That army is dominated by Whites and the same is true of the Russian Army. You’ve got millions of Asians in Russia. l’m showing you the white face is white. Left or right, no matter what they say they believe, religiously or politically they play the race game. You have over thirty million Moslems in Russia. Russia has declared itself an atheist nation. Christopher Columbus in this early voyage would set a holocaust for hemispheres in motion.
Expulsion of the Africans and Arabs from Spain would also set into motion the Inquisition. One of the slickest games in history was when certain Spaniards would tell certain people, especially the Grandees (the money managers of Spain, mostly Sephardic jews), “Give me your money, or go to the gallows.” Many Jews converted to Catholicism. They practiced Catholicism by day and Judaism by night. They were called. the marronos or the "silent jews.”
Some of their descendants still live and are practicing both religions. The best known of their descendants is Fidel Castro. There's a good book on it published in France- there hasn't been an English translation about Fidel Castro and his family, tracing his family back to the marranos. He will go through the motions of being Catholic, even now playing that wise game.
This expulsion will do Spain more harm than good because the Grandees-who were brought into Spain by the Africans and the Arabs- were doing a pretty good job of managing Spain's money. Spain has never had a strong economic system since they expelled the Grandees; they killed the goose that laid the golden egg. I can say across the board (maybe with the exception of Cuba): show me a Spanish speaking country and I will show you a sloppily economically- run country... any place in the world. Does anybody know a well-run country? They never got themselves together.
Another event would happen within Inner West Africa, the Western Sudan. The Emperor of the Songhai Ernpire, Sonni Ali, would be killed corning home from a minor war in the South. He drowned when his horse became entangled in underbrush, crossing a minor stream. Now the great independent states in Africa are beginning to fall. These states are not coastal states; these are inner West African states. These states could have rescued West African states and saved them from the slave trade. They would go on to the heights of grandeur in the in midst of the slave trade and in spite of the slave trade.
Christopher Columbus in 1492 set out for a new world. Let's ask some questions. This man has had no command position; he has not even been a petty officer. How then did this obscure sailor become Admiral of the Ocean Seas for the Spanish Navy? Who is behind this? Why is it that Christopher Coluinbus sailed from Spain the same week the Spanish expelled the jews? Who exactly was Christopher Colurnbus? Was he sailing out ahead of the Expulsion?
Michael Bradley and others have now located those who financed the ships. They were all jewish bankers who were told, "Give me your money, or give me your life." They were the chief translators on the boat. He was to go to Asia. Why didn’t he go to Asia? Sailing up and down the Guinea Coast (West Africa), he had discovered -from African sailors who had already gone to the New World -W there was a possibility of gold in another direction. I suspect that Columbus turned his ships in another direction. He also “discovered” that there was a current in the sea. If you pick it up at a certain time of year, it will push you almost straight into the Caribbean Islands. That current took him there. This is why ships were lost coming back, because if you come back too soon the current reverses itself once every six months. That’s why he ended up in Portugal on his way back.
Once he got there - and you should read Eric Williams’ Documents of West Indian History. This is the most underrated Caribbean scholar. Most people underrate him maybe because they didn't like the way he ran Trinidad and Tobago. l don’t know how he ran Trinidad. I know he was a damn good researcher, one of the finest of the Caribbean researchers. I knew him at Howard, as a professor of Political Science. He was a brilliant man and he had a big ego. He was a very brilliant scholar, ego notwithstanding. Documents of West Indian History was only one of the four volumes he had compiled. He goes through Christopher Columbus’ diary, the best analysis of Christopher Columbus' diary that I've ever seen. When Columbus saw these Indigenous Americans (mistakenly called Indians), he said in his monologue, ”I wonder why they’re bringing such small amounts of gold? I wonder where the mines are? They'll be easier to conquer than I thought they would be."
He would write a letter to Queen Isabella saying, “From this area I can send you as many slaves as you can accommodate." He never thought of partnership; in his mind it was enslavement from the very beginning. His intentions were not good. He would kill off his own labor supply. He would kill some of the people who could have helped him find the gold. For the documentation on this, I wish someone would read Father Bartolomeo de las Casas’ work, the Devastation of the Indies. It's a small book and you could read it in one evening or less.
Father de las Casas is called the first historian of the New World. He wrote it all down. Christopher Columbus would go to him after the third voyage and the rapid disappearance of the Indians. He would go and ask for an increase in the African slave trade allegedly to save the soul of the Indians. When the pope would send Commissions to various islands sometimes not one Indian would be alive, but the African endured. If the African endured and the Indian perished it had nothing to do with the fact that one was braver than the other. It had to do with the structure of their societies.
The Indians had a monolithic society and the African came out of a pluralistic society, many societies functioning side by side. The Indian came out of a monolithic society which was tightly woven. While they existed side by side with the other societies, they did not give the other societies the same integration or recognition. Sometimes they waged relentless war against the neighboring society.
However, now the aborigine is rapidly disappearing. Father de las Casas said that from twelve to twenty-five million people were killed. We’re just talking about the Caribbean Islands alone. We’re not talking about South America, although he alludes to Mexico and South America; but his main concentration is on the Caribbean Islands.
Christopher Columbus would go from one place to the other. He "thought" Cuba was Japan. He was sent to the East Indies and would end up in the "West Indies.” He told his sailors to sign a document that they were in the East Indies and if they didn’t sign, he would cut their tongue out. Ivan Van Sertima has done an informative and concise chapter on this in his book, They Came Before Columbus. When we look at this man and what he has set in motion, he set in motion the increase in the African slave trade. The British had not entered the slave trade at first because the British had some difficulty with the Catholic Church. However, once the British decided to establish a church of their own and if you’re of British extraction and belong to the Church of England you have to live with the fact that here's a church whose foundation was the hot sexual passions of Henry VIII. If anybody wants to prove otherwise, I’ll hear them.
Henry VIII wanted to cut off one wife’s head and wanted to marry another one. He wanted all these wives; he wanted justification. He wanted a church that would back him up in all his skullduggery, including his thievery, his raid on the Church treasury. So he created the kind of church that would give him what he wanted: the Church of England. 'Throughout his career he defended the Church as so sacred; it was sacred to him because it let him do what he wanted to do. He referred to the Church as though it were synonymous with the State. The Queen whose head he cut off was the only one that gave him a child that survived. That child was Elizabeth 1. Someone called her the (alleged) Virgin Queen of England. We won't discuss that any further. They showed her a ledger of what could be made in the slave trade after she had refused to go into the business and finally she went into the business. One of the ships was her personal property, the good ship "Jesus" commanded by Captain John Hawkins. Britain came into the slave trade and made it a business, a dirty business, but a business. They are well organized gangsters with territory.
The British sailed up the Gambia River and took ten miles on each side. That's the little facsimile nation that is called The Gambia, right now; it was never a viable nation in the true sense. They would spread their slaveholding further West. They would push the Portuguese out of the West African slave trade.
What about the World Christopher Columbus set in motion? He set in motion Western racism. He set in motion the colonization not only of history, but also the information about history. All of the fight over curricula was set in motion because Christopher Columbus and others set in motion a concept of divine White right/ manifest destiny. The assumption that the people of Europe had rights over other people. It set in motion another bogus concept of a "chosen" people by God.
If God chooses one people over another people, then God is a bigot. You cannot say this is also a God of love. God is kind, God is no respecter of kith and kin and say, "God chose me to do something.” Then while people are choosing, inasmuch as all “chosen” people “chose” themselves, why in the hell don’t you choose yourself to be free?
Why Won’t you make a choice and say, “We are too proud to live in slums." Why don’t you understand what went wrong with the world Christopher Columbus did not discover? Why can’t we understand how other people rose from the bottom and recovered what belonged to them?
Chapter 1. The Nature of the Gathering Storm
In this year of the Quincentenary of Christopher Columbus' alleged "discovery" of the Caribbean islands and the Americas, collectively called the New World, there is a need not only to reexamine the myth of Columbus but the broader myth of Europe and its people and the consequences of their expansion beyond their shores in the 15th and the 16th century., This event needs an explanation over and above the fact of their expansion.
As a classroom teacher, I have referred to the years between 1400 and 1600 as the Christopher Columbus Era. I know full well that this era started before Columbus was born. This was a point
in history when Europeans freed themselves from the lethargy of the Middle Ages, the aftermath of the Crusades and the famines and plagues that had taken one-third of the population of Europe. It is also the period when Europeans freed themselves from almost a thousand-year fear of Islam and what they referred to as the Infidel Arabs who had been controlling the Mediterranean and its trade routes since the decline of the Roman 'Empire in the middle of the 7th century. The renewal of European nationalism, the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the expulsion of the Arabs, Moors and the jews from Spain in 1492. and the introduction of the slave trade gave Europe a new economic lease on life. Europeans had to create a rationale and a series of myths to justify their new position and what they intended to extract from non-European people.
Some of the myths set in motion by what I have referred to as the Columbus Era still plague the world today. With the Atlantic Slave Trade the Europeans had set in motion a holocaust for African people that is still active in some form on the 500th year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ alleged ”discovery." They had also set in motion an era of protracted genocide against non-European people that continues, with its many dimensions, in every place in the World where there is European influence over non-European people.
At this point there is a need to call attention to Michael Bradley's work, The Iceman Inheritance, that deals very frankly with the rise and expansion of European racism and the book by Frances Cress Welsing, The Isis Papers, that deals more specifically with the origins of White racism and how it affects African people.
There weren’t enough soldiers in Europe to take over the continent of Africa, India, the Caribbean Islands and both South and North America. The greatest achievement of the Europeans was the conquest of the mind of their victims through a series of myths that could bear re-examining in order to understand the deeper meaning of the Christopher Columbus Era and its reverberations for today.
1. The myth of a people waiting in darkness for another people to bring them the light. In most countries where the Europeans invaded or influenced they put out the light of local civilizations and culture and destroyed civilizations, civilizations that were old before Europeans were born.
2. The myth of a people without a legitimate God. Europeans made no serious attempt to understand the religious cultures of non-European people Wherever they went in the world. If their god concept was not in agreement with the Europeans, then the Europeans assured them that they had no god worthy of Worship. (In photo right, celebrate Columbus day by playing genocidal video games or drone out watching cable.)
3. The myth of the primitive and the aborigine. Here we have a misinterpretation of two words that originally meant "first" or the original. European interpretation was derogatory and downgrading, and it still is. In many ways the Europeans were saying to non-European people that they did not have the right to choose a god or a culture different from that of the Europeans. (In photo Iranian President Ahmadinejad at the UN on 9/25/12 - perhaps the next vitims of white empire.)
4. The myth of the invader and conqueror as civilizer. Generally speaking, no people ever spread any civilization anywhere or at anytime in human history through invasion and conquest. The invader and the conqueror spreads his way of life at the expense of his victims. They generally destroy civilization in the name of civilization.
In this initial expansion, the Europeans not only colonized history, they colonized information about history. The most disastrous of all their colonizations was the colonization of the image of God. They denied the conquered people the right to see God through their own imagination or to address God in a word that came from their own language. Every effort was made to wipe from their memory how they ruled a state and how they related to their spirituality before the coming of the Europeans. Most of the people of the world were forced to forget that over half of human history was over before anyone knew that a European was in the world. Non-Europeans, especially in Nile Valley civilizations, had laid the basis for the spirituality that would later be converted into the major religions of the world. They had also developed the thought pattern that would later be developed into the philosophical thought of the world. All of this had happened outside of Europe before Europeans had names, durable shoes or houses with windows.
In order to understand Christopher Columbus, the African Holocaust and the protracted era of genocide set in motion by the Christopher Columbus Era, we must re-examine the year 1492 and give it a significance over and above what happened in Europe.
At this point, it is essential that we look back in order to look forward with more understanding. Too many times it is assumed that African history began with the slave trade. There were a thousand years of independent state formation and state management in Inner West Africa called the Western Sudan before the slave trade. This period of independent African political and cultural activity needs to be reviewed in order to understand, at least in part, what West Africa lost in the slave trade. Professor Van Sertima has said that African history has been locked into a 500-year room. I have extended this by saying that African history has been locked behind a slavery curtain. It is necessary to look at West African history before and after the slave trade in order to understand how and why the slave trade occurred and why African people, more than any other people in the world, were its main victims. The Africans were open-minded and politically naive in their relationship with non-African people, especially the European. So they did not know the intentions and the temperament of the Europeans then and they do not know it now.
