american-holocaust

98 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTuntrue, or at least are exaggerations; and, second, that the cruelties ofother European nations against the native peoples of the Americas werejust as condemnable. 3The first of these charges has now largely fallen into disuse as historianafter historian has shown not only that Las Casas's reports were remarkablyaccurate (and often, in quantitative terms, even underestimates) butthat they were supported by a host of other independent observers who,like Las Casas, spent a good deal of time in the Caribbean, Mexico, andCentral and South America during the sixteenth century. 4 It is the secondof the complaints by Black Legend advocates that remains worthy of consideration-thatis, as one supporter of this view puts it, that "the Spaniardswere no more and no less human, and no more and no less humane"than were other Europeans at that time. 5 Of particular concern to thosewho hold this position is the behavior of the British and, later, the Americans.To be sure, on occasion this line of Spanish defense has been stretchedto the point of absurdity. One historian, for example, has suggested quiteseriously that-apart from their murderous treatment of the Indians-theSpaniards' public torture and burning of Jews and other alleged hereticsand heathens was simply "pageantry," comparable, albeit on a differentlevel, to American Fourth of July celebrations. 6 But the larger argumentthat the Spanish were not unique in their murderous depredations-thatothers of European ancestry were of equally genocidal temperament-is,we shall see, both responsible and correct.IIDuring the latter half of the sixteenth century, while the Spanish and Portuguesewere busy "pacifying" the indigenous peoples in Mexico and onto the south (with additional forays up into Florida and Virginia), theEnglish were preoccupied with their own pacification of the Irish. Fromthe vantage point of the present it may seem absurd that the English ofthis time were accusing anyone of savagery or barbarism. After all, thiswas a society in which a third of the people lived at the bare margin ofsubsistence, a society in which conditions of health and sanitation were soappalling that it was rare for an individual to survive into his or her midthirties.7 As for the superior qualities of the English cast of mind, in theclosing years of the sixteenth century (the era that British historians ofphilosophy call the dawn of the Age of Reason) the courts of Essex Countyalone brought in about 650 indictments for more than 1500 witchcraftrelatedcrimes. And this, says the historian who has studied the subjectmost closely, "was only the projecting surface of far more widespread suspicions."8Still, Britain's people considered themselves the most civilized on earth,and before long they would nod approvingly as Oliver Cromwell declared/