You’re listening to an excerpt from a new book authored by me, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and my co-author, Stephen Vittoria. Written in the spirit of the legendary historian Howard Zinn, the big title, Murder Incorporated. This is an excerpt from the chapter “The Murderers of the World Arrive in the Americas.”
“There was no more glaring distortion in the history learned by generations of Americans—in textbooks, in schools, in the popular culture—than in the story of Christopher Columbus.”
– Howard Zinn.
They came from feverish, fetid cities and sewers of a repressive Spain, driven by dreams of avarice. Poor, young, maddened as hatters they were, for their homes, their villages, and the rapidly vacated prison cells held no promise. Their cohorts to the west would later leave the crowded, loud, vaporous, and unjust realm of British princes, with mirages of money, gold, land, and wealth swimming in their diseased retinas. They left the cold, clammy, rainy shores of home to enter what must have seemed paradise; the balmy, sunlit shores of Turtle Island.
They each and all met beings of a rare and unblemished beauty, sun-kissed men, women and children living in virtual gardens of a kind of Eden, resplendent with health, vitality, and love of their lands, their gods, their cities; and even those storm-tossed, haggard, smelly, fish-colored strangers, for though they spoke in strange tongues and wore rough, ragged, stinking tunics, and had metals they had never seen before, were they not people? Were they not also human?
What does one do when one sees people in hunger, in distress, ill, and perhaps a bit mad? What’s the worst that can happen? People help people, yes, even strangers with thick tongues speaking gibberish. This, the peoples of the lands that would one day become the Americas, did. They tended wounds. They fed the hungry. They taught the stupid fellow beings how to farm and how to listen to the land that was the mother of us all.
How could they know that this was the worst thing they could do? How could they know that this sick, feverish people would repay their kindness with genocide? How could they know that these blue-eyed god-men, greedy people, would turn on the hands that fed them? And not just bite them, but slice them from their attached sinews and bone, bind them in chains, rape their daughters and mothers, corrupt their sons, burn their villages to ash, and wipe them from the face of their mother. Wipe them from existence.
From these sailors, these shipmates, these explorers, would come a Holocaust of epic and ungodly proportions. For the peoples of Turtle Island—the Aztec, the Maya, and a million other clans, bands, and tribes—had nurtured a ravenous beast which would leap at their throats, destroy their lives and dreams, and wreak unholy havoc and terror on the world under the guise of liberty.
The world would be transformed by the loving kindness of the people we have come to call “Indians.” For in welcoming these foreign peoples into their homes, they opened the door to almost total destruction. This story, the end of their world, marked the emergence in the brief span of five centuries, of one of the most ruthless and voracious empires this earth has ever seen.
Why should you destroy us? It would be nice to think that things could have evolved differently in the Americas. Some historians blissfully write a kind of “hope history,” as in “What if Columbus did this,” or “What if da Gama did this?” These are mere mind games, word plays of wasted time, for things happened as they did because, regrettably, the forces launching those ships across the surging seas were powerful and deep. For truth be told, neither Spain, England, France, nor Holland were nice places, for the simple fact that much of Europe was a cesspool of disease, of class and religious conflict, of social and official violence—that is to say, it was a place ripe for leaving.
When written accounts were published about a land of honey, of endless spring, of sweet-flowing waters, imagine the psychological forces drawing on such people to this new, fresh, clean land. Oppressed at home under a rapacious nobility, threatened with the sulfurous fires of hell by a venal sacerdotal class hungry for indulgences, the seaward route to this new Eden must have seemed like a great escape. Millions of Europeans would be drawn to this New Europe, a place where every dream could be made reality—if only those pesky Indians weren’t in the way. This is not to suggest that the Southern Europeans had an identical view as their Western colleagues, for the Spanish saw these teeming lands as a place rich in slaves, while their brethren of England wanted the land, with the Natives preferably gone.
Where they united in view and action was the ruthless extermination of Indians by hook or starvation, and if all else failed, by Christianity. When the Spanish hit the Indies, they burned through those societies like a hurricane of fire, while villages perished by the lethality of the disease they imported. Cities once vibrant with life, commerce, and culture became charnel houses of bone. When the Spanish encountered Indigenous people, they chained them, reciting the cruel Requerimiento to people who hadn’t the faintest notion of what they were saying or even its intent, and enslaving them; sent them into the mines for gold or silver.
The document read to them had the following message: “I certify to you that with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make slaves of them, and as such, shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command. And we shall take your goods and shall do all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.”
On Sunday, 14 October 1492, Cristóbal Colón, aka Christopher Columbus, wrote in his diaries, El Diario de Cristóbal Colón, the following passage that clearly underscores the burgeoning European motives of hegemony and conquest. From the outset, slavery was also in the air. Columbus’s observance is an obvious harbinger of the transatlantic slave trade lurking on the horizon. After the obligatory salutation in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Cristóbal Colón speaks from the heart: “The people here are simple in warlike matters, as your Highnesses will see by those seven which I have ordered to be taken and carried to Spain in order to learn our language and return, unless your Highnesses should choose to have them all transported to Castile or held captive in the island. I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.”
The Spaniards wanted the Natives alive, if only to work for them as gold slaves. The English wanted their land, period. They had little use for living Natives, and yet even this is a bit of an exaggeration. For as historian David Stannard informs us, the numbers of people left dead in the wake of the Spanish gold hunger is, to say the least, staggering. This brief paragraph should more than suffice. By the time the 16th century had ended, perhaps two hundred thousand Spaniards had moved their lives to the Indies, to Mexico, to Central America, and points further to South. In contrast, by that time, somewhere between sixty million and eighty million Natives from these lands were dead. Even then, the carnage was not over.
Somewhere between sixty million and eighty million Natives dead; extinguished, slaughtered, liquidated. That’s how these Americas came to be. They are the bones upon which this beast was fed and raised. This was the Europeans’ response to those who succored their sick and starving, wet and cold voyagers from the sea. Many Americans are aware of the name Pocahontas; recognizable if only because the name was used in a popular Disney film, which tells the story of a beautiful Indian maiden who saves the life of a white guy. There is, in fact, a basis to this tale, but as in most American Disney-fied history, much is left out.
There was a maiden named Pocahontas and she did save the life of John Smith. What American history books usually exclude is the reply given by her father, Wahunsenacawh, who lived between 1547 and 1619, known to the whites as Powhatan. When Smith threatened him about a year after his life was spared, the father of Pocahontas responded to Smith’s threat thus: “Why should you take by force that from us which you can have by love? Why should you destroy us who have provided you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and fly into the woods, and then you must consequently famish by wronging your friends. What is that cause of your jealousy? You see us unarmed and willing to supply your wants if you come in a friendly manner and not with swords and guns as to invade an enemy.
I am not so simple as not to know it is better to eat good meat, lie well, and sleep quietly with my women and children; to laugh and be merry with the English, and being their friend to have copper, hatchets, and whatever else I want, than fly from all to lie cold in the woods, feed upon acorns, roots, and such trash, and to be so hunted that I cannot rest, eat, or sleep. In such circumstances, my men must watch, and if a twig should but break, all would cry out, ‘Here comes Captain Smith!’ And so, in this miserable manner to end my miserable life, therefore, exhort you to peaceable counsels. And above all, I insist that the guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy and uneasiness, be removed and sent away.”
And what instead was sent away? The dozens of clans, tribes, and nations of the Powhatan Confederacy, a united force of more than thirty such peoples covering hundreds of miles in area. “We fed you,” the tribes exclaimed in a thousand or a half-million tongues. “We broke bread with you or smoked the pipe. How could you be so evil towards us?” By the time comprehension dawned on them, it was too late. So many of the people had perished, and too many Europeans were flooding these shores North and South.
This is an excerpt from the chapter “The Murderers of the World Arrive in the Americas” from a new book, Murder Incorporated, authored by me, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and my co-author Stephen Vittoria.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
