COLUMBUS & WESTERN CIVILIZATION, by H. Zinn

[Baba Ahmed]

http://www.indians.org/welker/columbu1.htm

'Christopher Columbus is a symbol, not of man, but of imperialism.... Imperialism and Colonialism are not something that happened decades ago or generations ago, but they are still happening now with the exploitation of people.... The kind of thing that took place long ago in which peopl were dispossessed from their land and forced out of subsistence economies and into market economies -- those processes are still happening today."

John Mohawk, Seneca 1992.

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Columbus Day will soon be observed. This piece is presented to again remind us that to know where we "fell" to who and how is useful for us in standing again, as an Afrikan People. As Howard Zinn, Ph.D, writes from a different point of view for our view is slightly different, yet his is relative:

".... To me, the Columbus story is important for what it tells us about ourselves, about out time, about the decisions we make for our country, for the next century (he wrote this in early 1990s).

"Why this great controversy today about Columbus and the celebration of the quincentennial? Why the indignation of native Americans and others about the glorification of that conqueror? Why the heated defense of Columbus by others? The intensity of the debae can only be because it is not about 1492, it is about 1992.

We can get a clue to this if we look back a hundred years to 1892, the year of the quadricentennial. There wer great celebrations in Chicago and New York. In New York there were five days of parades, fireworks, military marches, naval pageants, a million visitors to the city, a memorial statue unveiled at a corner of Central Park, now to be known as Columbus Circle. A celebratory meeting took place at Carnegie Hall, addressed by Chauncey DePew.

You might not know the name of Chauncey DePew, unless you recently looked at Gustavus Myers' classic work, A History of the Great American Fortune. In that book, Chauncey DePew is described as the front man for Cornelius Vanderbilt and his New York Central railroad. ...(He) traveled to Albany, the capital of New York State, with satchels of money and free railroad passes for members of the New York State Legislature, and came away with subsidies and land grants for the New York Central.

DePew saw the Columbus festivities as a celebration of wealth and prosperity--you might say 'marks the wealth and the civilzation of a great people...it marks the things that belong to their comfort and their ease, their pleasure and their luxuries...and their power.'

We might know that at that time he said this, there was much suffering among the working poor of America, huddled in the city slums, their children sick and undernourished. The plight of people who worked on the land---which at this time was a considerable part of the population--was desperate, leading to the anger of the Farmers' Alliances and the rise of the People's (Populist) Party. And the following year, 1893 was a year of economic crisis and widespread misery....

"So to celebrate Columbus was to be patriotic. To doubt was unpatriotic. And what did 'patriotism' mean to DePew? It meant the glorification of expansion and conquest--which Columbus represented and which America represented. It was just six years after his speech that the United States, expelling Spain from Cuba, began its own long occupation (sporadically military, continuously political and economic) of Cuba, took Puerto Rico and Hawaii, and began its bloody war against the Filipinos to take over their country.

That 'patriotism' which was tied to the celebration of Columbus and the celebration of conquest, was reinforced in the Second Worlk War by the emergence of the United States as the superpower, all the old European empires now in decline. At that time, Henry Luce, the powerful president-maker and multimillionaire, owner ot Time, Life, and Fortune... wrote that the twentieth century was turning into 'American Century,' in which the United States would have its way in the world.

George Bush, accepting the presidential nomination in 1988, said: 'This has been called the American Century because in it we were the dominant force of good in the world.... Now we are on the verge of a new century, and what country's name will it bear? I say it will be another American Century.'

What arrogance! That the twenty-first century, when we should be getting away from the murderous jingoism of the century, should already be anticipated as an American centruy, or as any one nation's century. Bush must think of himself as a new Columbus, 'discovery' and planting his nation's flag oa a new world, because he called for a U.S. colony on the moon early in the next century. And forecast a mission to Mars in the year 2019.

The 'patriotism' that Chauncey DePew invoked in celebrating Columbus was profoundly tied to the notion of inferiority of the conquered peoples. Columbus; attacks on Indians were justified by the status as sub-humans. The taking of Texas and much of Mexico by the United States just before the Civil War was done with the same racist rationale. Sam Houston the first governor of Texas, proclaimed: 'The Anglo-Saxon race must pervade the whole sourthern extremity of this vast continent. The Mexicans are no better than the Indians and I see no reasons why we should not take their land.'

At the start of the twentieth century, the violence of the new American expansionism into the Caribbean and the Pacific was accepted because we were dealing with lesser beings.

In the year 1900, Chauncey DePew, now a U.S. Senator, spoke again in Carnegie Hall, this time to support Theodore Roosevelt's candidacy for vice-president. Celebra the conquest of the Philippines as a beginning of the American penetration of China and more, he proclaimed: 'The guns of Dewey in Manila Bay were heard across ASia and Africa, they echoed through the palace at Peking and brought to the Oriental mind a new potent force among western nations. We, in common with the countries of Europe, are striving to enter the limitless markets of the east.... These people respect nothing but power. I believe the Phillipppines will be enormous markets and sources of wealth.'

Theodore Roosevelt.... In his book The Strenuous Live, ... wrote: 'Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion...that the barbarians recede or are conquered...is due soley to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct.'

[Baba Ahmed]

Baba note: Zinn's article is 16 typewritten pages. Ea page has 30 more of less lines, ona 8.5"x11.5" pg. And yet very little is written about Black people. Not enuff for one half pg. Chancellor Williams observed that as much as European purport to b "objective & fair" when studying their works much of what they don't say reveals their perspective. On that note, lets continue:
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'Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion...that the barbarians reced or are conquered...is due soley to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct.'

"The official historian of the Indies in the early sixteenth century, Fernandes de Oviedo, did not deny what was done to natives by the conquistadors. He described 'innumerable cruel deaths as countless as the stars.' But this was acceptable, because 'to use gunpowder against pagans is to offer incense to the Lord.'

(One is reminded of President McKinley's decision to send the army and navy to take the Philippines, saying it was the duty of the United States to 'Christianize and civilize' the Filipinos.)...."

In the 1500s a Spanish theologian Juan Gines de Sapulveda wrote a, "...philosophical defense of the Spanish treatment of the Indians. Hequoted Aristotle, who wrote in his Politics that some people were 'slaves by nature,' who 'would be hunted down like wild beasts in order to bring them to the correct way of life.'

"The dehumanization of the 'enemy' has been a necessary accompaniment to wars of conquest. It is easier to explain atrocities if they are committed against infidels, or people of an inferio race. Slavery and racial segregation in the United States, and European imperialism in Asia and Africa, were justified in this way.

The bombings in Vietnamese villages by the United States, the search and destroy missions, the Mai Lai massacre, were all made palatable to their perpetrators by the idea that the victims were not human. They were 'gooks' or 'communists,' and deserved what they received.

In the Gulf War, the dehumanization of the Iragis consisted of not recognizing their existence. We were not bombing women, children, not bombing and shelling ordinary Iraqi young men in the act of flight and surrender. We were acting against a Hitler-like monster, Saddam Hussein, although the people we were killing were the Iraqi victims of this monster. When General Colin Powell asked about Iraqi causalities he said that was 'really not a matter I am terribly interested in.'

The celebrations of Columbus are declared to be celebrations not just of his maritime exploits but of 'progress,' of his arrival in the Bahamas as the beginning of that much-praised five hundred years of 'Western civilization.' But those concepts need to be re-examined. When Gandhi was once asked what he thought about Western civilization, he replied: 'It's a good idea.'

We were not told of the human cost of this great industrial progress: how the huge production of cotton came from the labor of black slaves; how the textile industry was built up by the labor of young girls who went into the mills at twelve and died at twenty-five; how the railroads were constructed by Irish and Chinese immigrants who were literally worked to death, in the heat of summer and cold of winter; how working people, immigrants and native born, had to go out on strike and win the eight-hour day; how the children of the working-class, in the slums of the city, had to drink polluted water, and how they died early of malnutrition and disease. All this in the name of 'progress.'
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Baba note: there is little need to keep quoting horrors of white folk done to others who're named and us who's seldom named. The theme of this post is to remind our folk that, not only are all European holidays syrupy poison for us to celebrate but also specifically to alert us to be involved in study, actions and teaching for our liberation for Columbus was a main actor in our Atlantic Slave Trade Horrors, Genocide.

Christopher Columbus (Cristio Colon) continued against our people the cruelty, exploitation, greed, enslavenment, violence, rape, murder and worse that aren't peculiar to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its happening today.

We and our children are advised to be continually committed to reclaiming our right minds and do n right actions to contribute as Alutua Continua!!!

Uhuru Sasa!
Thanks, Kwame.

[OsunkoyaIfayomi]

Asante for this material.