By William A. Cook
When beliefs morph into truth, regardless of the realities of time and place,
the non-initiated become fodder for those with the zeal and power to enforce
their will. Thus the great discoverer of the Americas “fantasized that he had
located--- or had come close to—the site of the paradise into which Jehovah had
placed Adam and Eve” ( Ned Hopkins, CTA Action, 1992). The “Christ-bearer,”
baptized in his unquestioned faith, utilized his birth name to justify his
actions, reasoning that God gave license to him as His servant. Perhaps, as we
bear down on the anniversary of Columbus’ achievements, we might consider how it
has been possible for a Medieval world of unbridled superstition, intolerance,
and religious myopia to envelop the advanced civilizations of western culture at
the beginning of the 21st century.
The irony of this review that watches Columbus sail from the ports of Spain
as the Spanish Crown expelled or slaughtered the Jews and Muslims in 1492,
empowered by their Christian faith, resides in the realty that the west and the
Muslim world of the 21st century clings still to the superstitions that gave
rise ultimately to the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, as David
Stannard notes in his work, The American Holocaust. If Columbus precipitated an
invasion of the western powers into the “new” hemisphere, what Hopkins claims
“…resulted in the largest exchange of people, animals, and plants that the
planet has ever seen…,” it also resulted in the near extermination of an entire
race and multiple cultures. The justification for this invasion found expression
in the authority of the Roman Catholic faith to bring salvation to the “savages”
and civilization to the primitives who lagged behind the advances of European
cultures.
What mindset allows such darkness to blind what the eyes can see? Before
Columbus an estimated 10-18 million people lived and loved in what we now call
the United States. The Hopi and Zuni cultures thrived in the south west for an
estimated 4000 years before the Spanish arrived. In the east the Algonquian,
Iroquoian, and Muskogee peoples existed as far back as 10,000 years. The
Iroquois formed a confederacy with five other tribes in the late 15th century
that lasted long enough that Benjamin Franklin could visit its assembly and
learn from it. These “savages” had a constitution and a code to guide behavior
that included a prohibition of blood revenge, a social compact communitarian in
nature, communal land, and hunters that provided for the community not for
themselves. “There were no mendicants or paupers among them” (French Jesuit
1657) and “… the Chiefs are generally the poorest among them … obliged to give
to others” (Dutch missionary). It might be said that these “savages” were taught
“to think for them selves but to act for others.” What a novel thought for the
“civilized” beasts that invaded this continent from Europe.
Whether we observe the Spaniards in central and south America or the Puritans
in New England, we find a Eurocentric racist mindset cobbled with an
imperialistic belief in their own superiority given vitality by their religious
tenets that they are the chosen of God, redeemed by His Son and hence destined
for everlasting life in the presence of God Almighty. Indeed the western mind
has been bathed in such moral epistemology since medieval times and sustained by
historians and politicians who defend colonialism by conquest as a God given
duty. “The colonialist … reaches the point of no longer being able to imagine a
time occurring without him. His irruption into the history of the colonized
people is deified, transformed into absolute necessity,” as Frantz Fanon puts
it.
All that is needed to sustain such a mindset is obliteration of the peoples
being subjugated, to transform them from people to “savages” or barbarians,
primitives without souls, without culture or intelligence, irrelevant
“cockroaches” to be discarded, driven from the land, or killed. Thus do we
witness the civilized European inflict their beliefs on the natives through
acceptance of the “requerimiento” that ordered them to accept the truth of
Christianity and allegiance to the Spanish Crown or suffer torture or death. Or
in the case of the Puritans as they moved against the Pequot people, face
extermination as Godless minions of Satan.
Then, strangely enough, as Edward Said remarked, the “Settler group adorns
itself with the mantle of the victim: the European homeland of the colonists—or
the metropolitan European power that politically controls the settlement area—is
portrayed as the oppressor, while the European settlers depict themselves as
valiant seekers of justice and freedom, struggling to gain their deserved
independence on the land that they “discovered” or that is theirs by holy
right.” (as quoted by Stannard).
Perhaps Columbus and the Puritans might be excused for their actions since
they were raised in a world that knew the truth of God’s word from the dominant
religious and political forces of their times. As a consequence they found
license to slaughter at will in the name of their God. “[The Spaniards] took
babies from their mother’s breasts, grabbing them by the feet and smashing their
heads against rocks … They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch
the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in
honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. … Then, straw was wrapped
around their torn bodies and they were burned alive” (Bartolome de Las Casas).
Such is the power of myth in the medieval mind. What one believes justifies all.
So Columbus and the Conquistadors mercilessly plundered and ravaged a people and
their land.
Such dependence on myth to establish belief that drives the actions of a
state to destroy another is surely the product of by gone times, times where
superstition, prejudice, racism festered like some infection embedded in the
heart and mind, the toxic atmosphere that propelled Columbus and the Puritans.
Today, in our advanced DNA omniscience, in a world driven by globalization,
prodded by ideologies of democracy, equality, liberty and the realization that
we humans can bring these virtues to the entire world, surely such myths no
longer exist.
How explain then America’s proclivity to torture under our most Christian of
Presidents? Did he not send his forces to Iraq at God’s behest to bring the
infidels the “gift” of God’s freedom and liberty in the manner of King Ferdinand
of Spain who enlisted his servant Columbus to bring “souls to God” on his
behalf? Didn’t our president’s advisor, Dick Cheney, justify “extraordinary
interrogation techniques” to bring the recalcitrant to the truth, or die? How
like the “requerimiento” that offered the Native life or death in the name of
God Almighty.
What differentiates the slaughter of the natives by bloody massacres that
wiped out whole tribes, as the Conquistadores swept across the south west or the
Puritan massacre of the Pequots, in the fiery hell they designed for those God
helped them destroy, from the razing of Fallujah by the American forces as they
leveled the city to the ground and in the process scorched and seared the
residents in the unforgiving fire of white phosphorus? What has changed since
Medieval times? What progress is discernible but the technology of death? The
racist mindset clamped on the brain by arrogance of belief in white superiority
remains firmly in place justifying what the soul knows in its silence to be
merciless slaughter that needs no God to trumpet its evil.
How similar the incantations of the righteous “settlers” arriving from a
foreign land to lay claim to the homes of an indigenous people, people bought
and brought to Israel by American dollars, defying law and logic in the process,
condemning those who have lived on the land for centuries as invaders or
usurpers of their God given rights as proclaimed in an ancient book of dubious
authenticity but useful for purposes of theft. How strange that civilized people
throughout the world witness this ludicrous behavior as rational, finding
confrontation of truth and international law uncomfortable and so allow the
robbery to continue.
Not even the barbaric behavior of these demented souls that find favor with
their G-d when they club to death an old shepherd or mob children in the streets
on the way to school or burn Palestinian homes or throw the residents of an
apartment into the streets and take their home for themselves or, as soldiers in
the IDF, glorify their G-d by killing defenseless and innocent women and
children in Gaza, can nudge the indifferent people of the world to scream to the
heavens that some sick stupidity is loose in this ancient land that is
senselessly claimed to be the holiest piece of real estate on the
planet.
Benny Morris, the most prolific of Israeli historians, in an interview in
Ha’aretz contends that the annihilation of the Native Americans was unavoidable.
“The great American democracy could not have been achieved without the
extermination of the Indians. There are cases in which the general and final
good justifies difficult and cruel deeds that are carried out in the course of
history.” Dr. Adi Ophir, in commenting on this interview notes: “Morris seems to
know what the general and final good is: the good of the Americans, of course.
He knows that this good justifies partial evil. In other words, under specific
circumstances, Morris believes that it is possible to justify genocide. In the
case of the Indians, it is the existence of the American nation. In the case of
the Palestinians, it is the existence of the Jewish state.” (“Genocide Hides
Behind Expulsion,” Adi Ophir, 1-16-2004). How convenient an argument to give
credibility to the genocide in Palestine, especially since the declaration of
the American state occurred 289 years after the arrival of Columbus. But logic
does not play a role here; superstition does.
Consider the logic of the new Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, as he
castigated the world leaders at the UN two weeks ago for allowing a holocaust
denier to address their assembly. “Shame on you,” he yelled, lifting his
covenant with the God of Abraham high above the podium to prove that the land of
Palestine belongs by historical right to the Jews, “Shame on you” for not
accepting the fact that G-d gave this land to the Jews, as though their belief
in what is now known to be fiction must be used to justify the decimation of the
Palestinians. “If as archeology suggests, the sagas of the patriarchs and the
Exodus were legends, compiled in later periods, and if there is no convincing
evidence of a unified invasion of Canaan under Joshua, what are we to make of
the Israelites’ claims for ancient nationhood?” (The Bible Unearthed,
Finkelstein and Silberman, 98).How ironic that the “real” descendents of the
people of ancient Judea are the people of Palestine who centuries ago converted
to the Christian or Muslim faiths, not the Ashkenazi European Jews like
Netanyahu who have no Semitic blood connection to the land but only an
acceptance by conversion to the Jewish faith (Shlomo Sand, When and How the
Jewish People Was Invented). What a convenient way to justify theft of another’s
home and land.
How can we pretend that the United States and its “only friend” in the
mid-east have the right to impose their beliefs on other states? Have these
modern day colonists not, as Fanon said, deified their own being and justified
their actions as the will of their imagined God as though no other God exists or
no belief in a different divinity can be conceived? How can we pretend that
flechette bombs, depleted uranium weapons, dimes, white phosphorus, bunker
buster bombs, cluster bombs and all the machinery of modern war designed to
decimate thousands of people, to inflict heretofore unseen wounds on mind and
body, can in any rational way be justified as civilized or humane? Perhaps, like
Columbus and his Conquistadores, we should forgo the luxury of technological
prowess and return to the shield and sword so the full carnage we inflict might
be visible to all of us as the screams of the baby and the mother sink deep into
our hearts and the blood splatters over our face and we must face what we have
wrought.
The Palestine Chronicles