the US continued setting off nuclear explosions--1032 or more detonations to date. (pg. 90)

Twenty-one days after the first atomic test in the desert, the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima was leveled by nuclear blast--at least 130,000 died from that single explosion.

Just twenty-one years after Columbus first landed in the Caribbean, nearly 8,000,000 people Columbus called “Indians” had been killed by violence, disease and despair: that is the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas…and it was only the beginning of the Spanish and English conquest and slaughter of the inhabitants of the New World. (pg. 101)

By the end of the 16th century, there were 200,000 Spaniards living in the Indies, Mexico, Central America, and further south. Somewhere between 60,000,000 and 80,000,000 natives of those lands were dead…more carnage followed. (pg. 105)

Pocahontas did save the life of John Smith. Her father, Powhatan, later asked Smith “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? …[I] exhort you to peaceable councils; and, above all, I insist that the guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy and uneasiness, be removed and sent away.” (pg. 105)

Both Spanish and English conquerors, settler-colonialists noted how beautiful and clean-smelling were the cities of the New World (Tenochtitlan was as large as Manhattan today, with 350,000 people); and how naïve, sweet, accepting, physically beautiful and healthy were these “Indians” they had “discovered.”   Columbus's deficits as a navigator were less important than the skills he had acquired in his earlier career as a kidnapper and trader of African slaves.

“In the space of days, hundreds of Lakota would be set upon by US Hotchkiss guns (more cannon than gun) and their “miserable” existences soon ended. When the smoke cleared, over two-thirds of the dead were Lakota women and children. Wounded Knee would mark the bookend of the last chapter of so-called Indian wars. It would be the harbinger of a century of such bloodletting that the world would regard it as an era of nightmare…

“But long before Verdun, before Dachau, Treblinka, Manchuria, Nagasaki, or Hiroshima were massacres like Wounded Knee for five centuries, blessed by priests and promoted by politicians.  The tormentors, genocidaires, rapists, and torturers were Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Danish. They were Europeans sent by a crucified Jew to vanquish paradise and bring Hell to this green earth. They purified this new space with fire, blood, dung, and bones, and called it holy before the Lord. Of the people they met, who once radiated beauty and health like demigods in a terrestrial heaven [according to the European invaders written accounts], they left a bare remnant, less than one half of one percent. Their job done, they celebrated the death of estimated 100,000,000 people by pronouncing them savages, and praising Christopher Columbus--the “discoverer.” (pg. 129)