Posted on 10/11/2010 3:55:41 PM PDT by Libloather
The mixed legacy of 1492
By James Carroll
October 11, 2010
IT IS commonly observed that 1492, in addition to being the year of Christopher Columbus, was also the year of the Jews — their expulsion from Spain by the same Ferdinand and Isabella who sponsored the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. But the overlap of events (actually, Columbus set sail in the very week of the banishment) has historic significance, for it was in Iberia that ancient Christian anti-Judaism had recently morphed into genetic anti-Semitism — the idea that Jews are contemptible not because of their religion, but because of their “blood impurity.’’ This notion of a group’s innate biological inferiority tragically gripped the European imagination just as the encounter with the New World occurred. It was a decisive factor in the creation of modern racism that determined so much of what came in the wake of Christopher Columbus. Contempt for Jews was practice for contempt for aboriginal peoples.
The racist myth of European superiority still shapes the story of the colonial conquest — starting with how the Caribs, Mayans, and Aztecs are remembered as never having had a chance against Spanish steel and gun powder. But it wasn’t technological genius that led to the dominance of the newcomers, nor was it their courageous soldiering, intellectual heritage, or moral superiority — much less the favor of God.
By far, the most decisive factor in the quick establishment of European control was the accident of disease. The immune systems of Western Hemisphere indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by pathogens that accompanied the Europeans, with the result that populations of so-called Amerindians were almost instantly decimated. The population of Mexico, to take one example, fell from 25 million in 1517, when Europeans first came there, to 1.5 million a century later.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Sadly it was completely unavoidable.
You’re right, I had forgotten about that. It has been the gift that keeps on giving.
And it was about 500 years before docs developed antibiotics to get rid of the stuff......pretty good pay back.
“To which I would add that hunting the domesticable animals into oblivion seriously retarded agro-urban development and condemned many tribes to permanent seasonal nomadism.”
Yes. But bear in mind that New World beasts and “native” Americans were not coeval. Humans came over here fully prepared to hunt everything to death. The animals had not enough time to evolve defenses. Back in the Old World, there was time to breed (though not deliberately, of course) animals to our liking over the course of millenia.
By the time the Spanish came west, they had already been under muslim rule for hundreds of years. I hypothesize that muslim germs and dna invaded the the natives, and thus, they became ill, stupid, and ruthless.
So perhaps the mexicans invading our country have this muslim dna.
Maybe the conquistadors were actually muslims, and just pretended to be catholic, so they could point the finger and say look how ruthless Christians are.
Go on Amazon and buy all of Barry Fell’s books.
Chris was just a johnny-come-lately.
Let’s get this straight and clear: the “native Americans” were cultural losers who got thrown out of Asia because they were some combination of losers, , antisocial, inadequate, socially caustic or retarded. Indians were (are) freaks.
So we should feel guilty? We who were not even alive then?
Should we just therefore open our Southern Border to the descendents of those very peoples, as historic justice?
If you think so you are the same as Obama. A fascist with historic justice as his calling card, the calling card of every fascist in modern history, including Hitler and Mussolini.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html
Many folks don’t know that many mesoamerican groups fought WITH the Spaniards because groups like the Aztecs were not this peace-loving people, but were conquers themselves, and treated those people like 4th class citizens.
This James Carroll character really is the epitome of the guilt-ridden, self-loathing white liberal. And he doesn’t mind throwing around a lot of historical inaccuracies while wallowing in his white guilt.
Maybe they picked it up from Mermaids on their trip home.
Polynesians may not have had a lot of technology but they knew the sea. I’ve seen photos of maps they made out of reeds and grass that show detailed wave and wind patterns as well as islands.
As I understand it, people with expert knowledge of the sea can tell if they’re approaching an unseen island by the behavior of swells.
Thanks for the history. Very interesting.
I would hesitate to call slaves that were involuntarily relocated from their old masters in Africa to their new masters in the new world as “migrants”. Perhaps others can tell me if it is true, but weren't most of those “migrants” used to replace slave labor that died in the plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean?
He’s a bitter liberal with an axe to grind, that’s for sure.
Amazing how much work she puts into avoiding the conclusion that Europeans were cultually and genetically superior.
Heck, a darwinian should be eager to embrace the superior genetics of the Europeans. It was gained at the cost of millions of lives lost to diseases.
Let’s not judge his crews too harshly for demeaning themselves with the female savages. They had been at sea a long time. Who knows? Maybe they fell in love.
“Many Indians did die from disease, but still the Europeans fought and defeated armies of many time their number due to the superiority of their weapons and their horses, and both the men and horses were usually armored.”
Not to mention the fact that the Europeans even got over there in the first place. A fact that seems these days to be overlooked, given the controversy over what it means to say the Americas were “discovered” in 1492. A controversy which obscures the fact that, no matter what killed the natives and no matter whether or not the Europeans fared well in battle, the only reason any of it happened is that the Europeans did what New Worlders never did: they navigated the Atlantic.
That's true, and Cortez found many allies against Montezuma and the Aztecs among the surrounding tribes who were tired of supplying thousands of their members for the Aztecs' periodic human sacrifices. I've read that 10,000 were sacrificed to celebrate Montezuma's ascension to power.
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