american-holocaust

200 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTests, and with golden people living in Eden. He was also a man with sufficientintolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave orbelieve as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing suchpeople simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secularpersonification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culturehad wrought. As such, the fact that he launched a campaign of horrificviolence against the natives of Hispaniola is not something that shouldsurprise anyone. Indeed, it would be surprising if he had not inauguratedsuch carnage.But why did the firestorm of violence turn openly genocidal, and whydid it continue for so long? Why did it take the grotesque forms that itdid? Why was it morally justified in the terms that it was? And why, andin what ways, were the later British and American genocide campaignsdifferent from those of the Spanish-if at least equally destructive in thelong run? The answers to all these questions must be sought in the constantinterplay of Western ideologies and material realities, beginning withthe initial Spanish quest for gold and for glory, proceeding from there toevolving concepts of race along with traditional notions of divine providenceand sin, and then back again to the hunger and thirst for wealthand for power, sought down different paths by different European peopleson the different American continents of the north and of the south.IIColumbus drove a hard bargain with his royal patrons. Not only did hedemand a substantial share of whatever treasure he might bring back fromhis journey across the Atlantic horizon, he also required of them, as henoted in the prologue to the journal of his first voyage, "that henceforth Imight call myself Don and be Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroyand Perpetual Governor of all the islands and mainland that I shoulddiscover and win." 15 Since he thought he was sailing to China and India,these were not meager titles, were he to succeed in gaining them. For Columbus,like the conquistadors to follow, was driven by various forces inhis quest to discover and conquer, but during this era when individualismwas sharply ascendant in European culture, few if any motives were moreimportant than what in Spanish is called el afan de honra-"an anxiety, ahunger for glory and for recognition," is the way one historian puts it. 16To Columbus, the Genoese ex-slave trader and would-be holy Crusader,returning to Spain with slaves and with gold and witlt tales of innumerableheathens waiting to be converted was the surest way to achievesuch fame. Thus, within hours of landfall on the first inhabited island heencountered in the Caribbean, Columbus seized and carried off six nativepeople who, he said, "ought to be good servants .... [and] would easilybe made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no