american-holocaust

190 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTfor what happened in the aftermath of Columbus's voyages to the NewWorld, is the balance and nature of intra-European trade. In England andnorthwestern Europe generally, legislative and other efforts during this timediscouraged the export of raw materials, such as wool in the case of England,and encouraged the export of manufactured goods. Thus, by thedose of the fifteenth century, Britain was exporting 50,000 bolts of dothannually, rising to more than two and a half times that figure within thenext five decades. Spain and Portugal, at the same time, remained exportersof raw materials (wool, iron ore, salt, oil, and other items) and importersof textiles, hardwares, and other manufactured products. The Iberiannations, with their backward and inflexible economic systems, wererapidly becoming economic dependencies of the expanding-if themselvesstill impoverished-early capitalist states of northwest Europe. 124This, then, was the Old World on the eve of Columbus's departure in1492. For almost half a millennium Christians had been launching hideouslydestructive holy wars and massive enslavement campaigns againstexternal enemies they viewed as carnal demons and described as infidelsallin an effort to recapture the Holy Land, and all of which, it now seemedto many, effectively had come to naught. During those same long centuriesthey had further expressed their ruthless intolerance of all persons andthings that were non-Christian by conducting pogroms against the Jewswho lived among them and whom they regarded as the embodiment ofAntichrist-imposing torture, exile, and mass destruction on those whorefused to succumb to evangelical persuasion. These great efforts, too, appearedto have largely failed. Hundreds of thousands of openly practicingJews remained in the Europeans' midst, and even those who had convertedwere suspected of being the Devil's agents and spies, treacherously boringfrom within.Dominated by a theocratic culture and world view that for a thousandyears and more had been obsessed with things sensual and sexual, and haddemonstrated its obsession in the only way its priesthood permitted-byintense and violent sensual and sexual repression and "purification"-thereligious mood of Christendom's people at this moment was near the boilingpoint. At its head the Church was mired in corruption, while the ranksbelow were dispirited and increasingly disillusioned. These are the sorts ofconditions that, given the proper spark, lend themselves to what anthropologistsand historians describe as "millenarian" rebellion and upheaval,or "revitalization movements." 125 In point of fact, this historical moment,seen in retrospect, was the inception of the Reformation, which means thatit truly was nothing less than the eve of a massive revolution. And whenfinally that revolution did explode, Catholic would kill Protestant andProtestant would kill Catholic with the same zeal and ferocity that theircommon Christian ancestors had reserved for Muslims and Jews."Don't let them live any longer, the evil-doers who turn us away from