Hmm. What I’ve read on de las Casas suggests otherwise-- that he did encourage the importation of black slaves, firstly to spare the natives, and secondly because he thought black slave would be heartier. As I understand, he brought his own black slaves with him when he came, seven of them, IIRC.
Perhaps it was “painful” for him, just as I’m sure some Nazi guards found it painful to put Jews in the gas chambers. Nevertheless, it happened.
No historical figure is “all good” or “all bad.” Even those we consider to be good men had fatal flaws. I do not blame or judge de las Casas for his faults, nor do I excuse them. He was a man of his times just as Columbus was-- he just held one opinion which we modern folk agree with, but that opinion was not shared by many at that time. We should not laud him for that opinion any more than we should condemn him for his support of black slavery.
Yeah. I know. But, as I said, just because a few voices were raised in opposition, are we to assume that cruelty and inhumanity were not the norm at the time? A few exceptions do not prove anything. There were people who objected to the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the Holocaust, various and sundry genocidal campaigns around the world, and the slaughter of the Native Americans in the United States. Nevertheless, these things happened, on a wide scale because they were tacitly approved of by the majority.
I love to do that.
And this refutes my position that the idealogy of racial inferiority was rampant at the time how? My statements were that Columbus was a man of his times, no crueler or more “evil” than the next fellow, and that we cannot expect him to “rise above” his culture and espouse 20th century values.
By our moral standards, Columbus was a monster. By the standards of his day, he was an opportunistic bastard. He lived in an environment which denoted brown people as non-human, and he treated them as such. Make of it what you will. I, personally, don’t buy the “But the natives are a slightly different color, that makes it okay” excuse, and tend to indict the society as a whole for using it.
Sorry if you took that badly - I wasn’t meaning to make an assumption, and I should have used a better word. I meant that it’s not enough to simply talk about Columbus’ actions in terms of the general trend of seeing indigenous people as less human than Europeans, as that is part of a larger trend, used to justify the colonization and domination of many nations.
I didn’t intend to say it wasn’t a ‘rampant’ attitude - but given that it was a stance taken by Europeans (and eventually Americans - Jefferson, Clavijero), justifying their right to power because of the lacks of the other, it was amorphous - initially in the conquest it was indigenous people that lacked humanity, then it became criollos and mestizos, then it became blacks people, etc…until Mier turned the tables on the Europeans and los poetas civicas like Bello and Olmedo turned the ‘faults’ of America into proof of their right to power.
Well, of people in power - in Madrid, in Paris, in London; there were 20-odd editions of Cabeza de Vaca’s book (if I remember right), but literacy was still a privilege of the elite and powerful.
Of course. They were the only ones who mattered. Peasants, for purposes of deciding policy, didn’t exist. They had virtually no voice. Due to their political invisibility, it’s doubtful the nobility cared one whit what the peasants thought. As long as they weren’t rebelling, peasants pretty much occupied their own world.
You’re right about the attitudes which accompany colonialization. It’s difficult to exploit those with which we identify, so dehumanization is essential to colonialism.
I didn’t mention Loewen’s book as a history textbook, per se. I just thought it would be useful in explaining why Columbus (and others) are regarded with such awe in secondary-level history classes. Its discussion of the outside political influences on history classes is pretty interesting, too.
> I learned in school that Columbus was a great man and treated the natives
> kindly (although not with equality) and yadda yadda.
Did you really? I graduated from high school in 1970 and I don’t remember the treatment of Columbus being that good (and there was certainly nothing avant guard about my high school’s textbooks.) There was nothing about the atrocities he committed, but neither was there any praise of his attitude to American Indians. He was just described as being an important explorer.
Watching people being loud and obnoxious and watching an event with staged combat moves in which no one gets hurt is quite different than watching someone be burned alive, or having their guts cut out in front of them. Even cock fighting, which most people deplore, is not as bloody and brutal as bear-baiting was.
My point is that it was a different age. Vast differences exist between the modern outlook and that of Columbus’ time.
I’m just sayin’ that those who would show up at public executions and enslave foreigners are not necessarily more representative of their culture than those who duke it out on talk shows and watch simulated violence. Which is basically what this thread is about.
Do you think that those who went to executions and bear-baitings were in the minority? Why would you think so, when almost everything from that era seems to indicate otherwise?
The Church wholly supported public executions because it was supposed to scare others into behaving.
It was one of the few forms of public entertainment available to the peasantry, so was vastly well attended.
There was no public outcry against the cruelty of such things, or at least, so little that it’s barely worth mentioning.
People took small children to view such events. It was thought to be edifying. (Few parents today would take their children to a place where people were dying in horribly bloody ways.)
Bull baiting was such a popular sport that a couple of specific breeds of dogs sprang from it: bulldogs and pitbulls.
It was a bloody and violent time, and life was certainly “nasty, brutish and short” for the majority of people.