Sunday, April 12, 2015

Savegry of Columbus


As the Spaniards went with their war dogs hunting down Indian men and women, it happened that a sick Indian woman who could not escape from the dogs, sought to avoid being torn apart by them, in this fashion: she took a cord and tied her year-old child to her leg, and then she hanged herself from a beam. But the dogs came and tore the child apart; before the creature expired, however, a friar baptized it.

Armed with the latest weaponry and armoured mastiffs trained to rip people apart, the Spanish tortured, maimed, raped, slaughtered, and burned the inhabitants in search of gold. Bartolomé de Las Casas, an eyewitness who eventually became a Dominican friar and fought for the Indians’ rights.

It was an orgy of looting and butchery, faithfully recorded by eyewitnesses. The accounts are too graphic to quote, but they detail the widespread massacres, including of children, dashing out their brains, and even feeding them to the armoured attack dogs. This senseless savagery was described as “pacification”.

When Americans think of Columbus Day, they think about the celebration of a man who sailed the ocean blue in 1492. They think he was courageous, inspirational, and extremely influential to our beginnings here in the Western World. However, Americans like to focus on the good things and ignore the bad things. What he and his fellow Spaniards did to the natives of the West Indies, including depopulating, destroying, and suppressing the peoples, is largely forgotten to this day. Furthermore, the counts of Spanish tyranny and conquest were largely ignored by the rulers of the kingdoms from which these explorers hailed from.For these reasons, the publishing of The Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de Las Casas was extremely important to revealing the truth about the events of the colonizers in the West Indies.

http://www.amazon.com/A-Brief-Account-Destruction-Indies/dp/9562916081

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